Author: Tim Jarrett

Mergers no cure for Enron/Andersen nightmare

Infoworld: Troubled Andersen close to finding a buyer. Bad news for Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. What are they hoping to get out of this, anyway? “Economies of scale?” I like the random quotation from Larry Lipsher of Lipsher Accountancy Corp, based in China: “The larger and larger the accounting firms get, the more they’re going to come up with the sort of esoteric tripe that caused things like this.” A-yup.
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Welcome aboard, George

Welcome to my friend George, who is just starting his blog. George, welcome to the blogging life. It’s more fun and more engrossing than you think.

Confession: I found George’s blog by looking at my referral logs. OK, so I’m happy with my writing again and looking at my referers. But I’m not obsessive about it. I’m only obsessive about my news page on Radio.
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Other people’s water, and new readers

Just finished a gig with the Sloan E-52s for admitted MBAs at a lunch at MIT Sloan. I sing harmony with the soloist on one of the songs, REM’s “Superman,” and I got a chance today to do something I’ve always wanted to do. There’s a section in the song where the soloist is by himself for four measures while I lay out after hitting a couple high notes in a row. Today, after the second high note I leaned over to the table to my left, asked “Is anyone drinking this?”, took a big sip, and got back in time to make my next entrance. Look on the soloist’s face: Priceless.

After the gig, I had my first face to face meeting with a new reader to whom I’m not related. One of the admits introduced himself and said he found my site while searching for weblogs by Sloan students. (As far as I know, I’m the only one.) He’s a Seattleite who’s “99.9% sure” he’ll be at Sloan in the fall. He’s also introduced his fiancée to blogging, but his own blog is currently in design paralysis and he hasn’t written anything yet. Well, here’s your public push: Get writing! A weblog isn’t a weblog without content!!

You can avoid Congress, but not the civil service

New York Times: Landscapes Under Siege. The administrative review board for the Interior Department has halted oil exploration in Utah’s Dome Plateau, and “suggested that the bureau had ‘capriciously’ ignored environmental reviews mandated by federal law.” The editorial concludes:

Nobody expects the administration to retreat from its basic theology that aggressive exploration of the public domain is necessary to achieve independence from the energy-producing nations of the Persian Gulf. Perhaps, though, as part of the larger debate over a national energy strategy, the Senate will force the administration to proceed with much greater care.

Yeah, somehow I doubt that the administration that doesn’t even invite the Democratic leadership of Congress to national security meetings will pay much heed to the Senate. I think that the best chance we have for protection against the strong-arm anti-environmental tactics of the Bush administration is the civil servants who have to carry out the policy. Based on this action, they have shown they can do the job.
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Feeling like death warmed over

I’m in pretty bad shape this morning for no apparent reason. I didn’t sleep at all last night, I couldn’t breathe well this morning, and I think I’m feverish. So naturally I decided to go to school. After all, what fun is being sick if you can’t get anyone else sick with you? 🙁

It’s been a rough morning otherwise too. On the way to the T, I saw the wings of a pigeon, feathers intact but separated from their owner, lying on the sidewalk. And I got a lovely email from an old college friend tipping me off about one of our stranger classmates’ arrest record. The story gave me another visual I didn’t really need. Unfortunate kid, this Ilya. He was all of 14 when he started at Virginia, and apparently had a few screws loose….
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And here I thought it would be “The Waste Land”

The Illuminated Donkey: “The Warblog of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Hysterically funny, though somewhat slanted at political blogs. (Also the meter is not quite as catchy as the original.) A sample:

Let us blog, towards certain well-examined URL’s,
The banner ad unfurls,
The caustic digs at less-than-sharp writers,
Punches are thrown as by heavyweight fighters,
Links that lead to endless arguments
And caterwauling laments
But here we raise an overwhelming question…
How to appear in refer logs?
Let us link to A-list blogs.

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