Two words: Vegas Baby!

Bride Resurfaces, Admits Faking Abduction
More than 600 people had been invited to the wedding bash, and it was to feature 14 bridesmaids and 14 groomsmen.

I'd run away too.

Ka-Boom

Mystery of German exploding toads

Really pissed that I didn't think of it first

Talk To Aliens
Our intergalactic transmission system is similar in concept to what is used to communicate with planetary probes: a transmitter feeding a large (10.5-foot-diameter) parabolic dish antenna...
...our system provides the maximum allowable power under FCC Title 47, Part 15, Section 15.247.
The transmission signal, itself, is a frequency-modulated carrier operating at 2.43211 GHz. This frequency was carefully chosen as it is in an RF band commonly used on earth.

In other words, it's an old obsolete satellite dish, hooked up to the transmitter from a 2.4GHz cordless phone system. For the privelege of using this, they'll charge you $3.99 per minute, or $19.95 to send a 1000 word email.

Brilliant! Nothing like finding new ways to separate fools from their money.

You can't make this stuff up

I suppose, technically, it could be considered a weapon...

It's been a tired and sick week here at Chez BTC. After returning from New York on Tuesday, I have been suffering from a bad cold that may have turned into an ear infection. At least that's the way my right ear feels at the moment.

But it's Saturday, so unless things develop into a real emergency that would justify an ER visit, I'll have to wait until Monday and then fight for a space among all the other people who have been forced to put off seeing a doctor since Friday afternoon.

It would be much easier if I were a cat.

My vet, as it so happens, keeps weekend hours. Open every Saturday and Sunday, for most of the day. True, not every one of the vets on staff is there on any given day. They set and adjust their schedules by individual needs and desires. But there's always a full staff who can handle routine stuff and always at least one surgeon on call during the day.

So why is BelowTheCat getting this exemplary service but I can't find it for myself?

I must confess that I've been rather underwhelmed by the last two Star Wars flicks. However, this is hysterical and takes me back to my high school and college days, when I used to really love the franchise:

http://darthside.blogspot.com/

Just a couple of hours ago, Bloomberg trotted out one of their usual crew of analysts or fund managers to comment on the (then) upcoming Microsoft earnings release. I must admit, I was listening only with half an ear, but one of the comments I heard really made me mad.

He commented that according to his checks, many companies out there were still using servers that were about three years old, and that he expects a serious pickup in the server business because current computers are much more powerful, and thus companies need to take advantage of the additional productivity that is possible with the newer ones.

I wonder if this guy ever even talks to purchasers of this technology.

The reason so many servers are getting older is that they were quite capable of doing the job then, and for the most part still are capable of doing it today.

Does he think that companies really have lots more employees hitting their servers with requests? If so, please explain how this is possible in the context of rather lukewarm job growth? Does he think that there are a lot of new, high-demand applications out there that didn't exist a few years ago? If so, please name them and show me sales figures that justify your belief that these will have pushed companies to buy substantial numbers of new servers.

The fact is, we're in a technological lull right now. Few companies need to upgrade servers because there's very little new software to justify the new hardware. What's touted as "new" is mostly just minor modifications.

These days I can't upgrade a server without showing a real impact to the user experience. Sometimes I can -- as is the case with applications related to compliance. More often than not, I can't. The CFO isn't interested in hearing that I can improve response time by a millisecond or two.

What makes me mad is that this guy is actually investing other people's money, and he clearly fails to grasp the reality of the markets that the companies he is invested in have to sell into.

Stop talking to company managements. Talk to their customers. And get a clue.

In today's New York Times, economist Alan Kreuger looks at some research into why bubbles can happen, and what changes might help avoid them in the future.

Sadly, he falls into the trap that bedevils most economists. He expects people to ultimately be rational. At the very least, he expects "knowledgable investors" to be rational. This assumption is -- at the very least -- a hugely irrational one.

Billy Ray Valentine -- as played by Eddie Murphy in Trading Places -- had a better understanding of the markets than most of these economists do. From the moment he was asked to make his first trade, he instinctively understood that the issue wasn't a rational evaluation of the value of pork bellies, rather it was that there was a guy on the opposite side of the trade who wanted some extra money to get his kid a toy for Christmas.

The solution highlighted in the article is simply "more disclosure." the idea being that if more information were available to more investors about what various participants were doing, the bubbles would tend not to inflate.

Maybe. Perhaps a little bit more information in quarterly reports would help. But I doubt it.

Those quarterly reports still won't tell you about the toy that the fund manager wants to buy his kid (or himself) for Christmas. It won't explain away the "irrational" investor who will look at a 99.3% gain on a trade, but hold on for another uptick to give himself "bragging rights" on a double. It won't tell you about the guy who is more concerned about beating his benchmark than he is about anything, and who is willing to make an outsized bet to accomplish it.

Ultimately, the whole notion that markets are efficient is deeply flawed. There are millions of participants, some big, some small, and every one of them has a hidden, irrational concern or two. Unless we are somehow able to get into the minds of every one of those investors and aggregate the sum of their irrational concerns, we will never have sufficient information to have truly efficient markets and bubbles will remain an occasional fact of life. The market at any moment in time will perfectly reflect all these irrational thoughts, but will provide limited clues about how those irrational, emotional thoughts may change in a minute or two.

Billy Ray Valentine understood that.

I don't normally comment on political matters, but a discussion with a "progressive" relative this past weekend got me thinking.

First, it's become obvious that we are increasingly caught in between two reactionary groups.

On Today's Minyanville Gazette (subscription required), Scott Reamer asks the question of why record amounts of cash on corporate balance sheets has not yet yielded a significant increase in capital spending. He notes that capex growth this year could be as low as 1%, rather than the 7% number thrown around by economists just a few weeks ago.

He suggests that there is simply less tolerance for risk out there. As he states, investors have increased their time preferences, and corporate managers have responded by sitting on more cash.

I believe that this only partly answers the question. Just a few years ago it would have been suggested that the riskiest thing to do was to stand still and not invest available cash in new technologies and capital equipment. I believe that one of the most substantial changes that has taken place in recent years is that such logic has been reversed. Companies now increasingly believe that spending money on unproven or possibly unnecessary projects is riskier than sitting on the cash and waiting for some future events to determine the best way to spend it.

I have spent much of my career on the "buy" side of capital expenditures (primarily technology) and have seen this change in action.

At my most recent full-time employer, the regular questions were always "Do we need to spend this money? and "What will we get for it that will really help our bottom line?" Those are questions that were not being asked five and ten years ago, when it was presumed that capital spending was somehow always necessary. That company is still mostly using four and five year old computers; nobody could justify plans to upgrade them to anything newer until the cost of replacement got to be less than the cost of ongoing repairs. They are still using a rather antiquated and archaic sales and customer service software system; again because nobody could demonstrate that $3m for a full-blown customized Siebel (SEBL) implementation would provide a decent ROI.

Look around the economy and you can see few major sectors that would really benefit from large capital expenditures. Does General Motors really need more capital equipment with which to build SUVs that are selling at a loss? Do the airlines need more aircraft with which to fly passengers around the company at a loss? Do the telecoms need more fiber, or more switches, or more anything, to supplement the huge oversupply that already exists? And does anybody really believe that they need to upgrade from their three year old PCs to newer ones, or from their three year old enterprise software to the "latest and greatest" version, now with multiligual grammer checkers and other equally important "features?"

The answer in all too many cases is a resounding "No!" Here and there, companies see new features and new capabilities that can pay for the cost of purchasing and implementing them. But more often than not they see a lot of bells and whistles with the liklihood of minimal or negative ROI.

In 1933, during the Great Depression, Charles Kettering of General Motors stated that "I believe business will come back when we get some products that people want to buy." The same is true of capex today. Absent new technologies or capabilites with potentially high returns on investment, most businesses are sitting back and waiting.

We will emerge from this capex lull when something comes along to make current capabilities obsolete. As technology tends to be disruptive rather than evolutionary, it is impossible to know when that might be or what technology will jump-start things again.

I believe mainstream economists, Wall Street and even many of the capital-supplying companies themselves fail to grasp this change in reality. They are still working from the playbook that says "Companies with cash will find an excuse to spend it." But the playbook for most companies has changed. It is part of the reason I remain long-term bearish on most technology-related equities, and to some degree on the economy overall.

Pieces like this are why I subscribe to Minyanville. Well worth subscribing, and reading:

The New Media Revolution Won’t Be Televised! But It Will Be Centrally Served.

It is Passover in the BTC household. This is the first Passover since my father passed and I made the trek to New York to celebrate with my cousins and other relatives.

As is our custom, we deviated substantially from much of the written text for the Seder and also added various readings, commentaries and discussions of our own.

One of the core readings is called Dayeynu, a phrase that is usually translated somewhat formally as "It would have sufficed us." It is a reading of thanksgiving, in which the various acts of God in leading the Israelites out of Egypt are enumerated one at a time and after naming each act we respond with the phrase Dayeynu -- essentially saying "that alone would have been enough."

Prior to reading Dayeynu, we all stopped for a few minutes to give any personal thanks we had on our minds. I could only think to note my thanks for 39 Passovers with my father prior to this one.

However, later in the evening, it occured to me that there was a bit of a personal Dayeynu buried in the events of the past year.

While my father lay in the hospital, I had sent a brief note to my closest friends and relatives. Or so I thought. In fact, the note went out to a much wider list.

The outpouring of support was beyond my wildest expectations. Not only that, but I made a few new friends as a result of the communication that followed.

So with all that in mind let me pass along my personal Dayeynu for this year:

Had I had only my family during the difficult days of September and we had not been joined by our closest relatives.

Dayeynu.

And had we been joined only by my closest relatives, but my oldest and best friends had not joined in supporting me and my family.

Dayeynu.

And had my best friends joined us, but no other friends had been able to lend their support, their ears and their hearts to us at that time.

Dayeynu.

And had all our family and friends joined and supported us, but we had received no support from other acquaitences, neighbors and correspondents.

Dayeynu.

And had we received support from all the people we did, but I did not find any new friends among them.

Dayeynu.

I can feel particularly grateful this year, because not only did I receive the support of virtually all the friends and family I knew, but also from many, many individuals who in other circumstances might not have known of the events in my life. And, beyond that, I have found new friends among the many who chose to respond.

Thank you all.

-btc

A good friend has recently opined that the software business is likely to continue to be spotty. I agree. The nature of the business has changed since the late 90s and is much harder to predict. Thus we get quarters like the last one where Siebel (SEBL) had to warn, while SAP (SAP) continued to do well.

One of the reasons for this change is that the nature of software spending has changed. Four years ago, most software spending decisions still remained with the CIO or VP of IT, perhaps in consultation with business unit managers. Today, even routine upgrades are often a matter of corporate strategy, and often the executive management is unimpressed with the need for pouring more and more money at the stuff. At a recent employer, even regular license upgrades for Microsoft products were put off, because the CFO calculated that the ongoing payments to keep the licenses going were going to cost more than just re-licensing from scratch some years down the road when an upgrade was needed. Of course, many companies are simply choosing to just skip entire upgrade cycles too.

Another real problem is that managing sales has become a lot more difficult in this environment. My friend suggested that the problem was that Siebel's sales force isn’t aware of the new hoops and hurdles to be cleared, and therefore doesn’t push hard enough. While that may be true in any given company and in any given quarter, it’s really not the problem at most companies, especially well-run ones like Siebel.

I was just refered to this site, featuring "Seda Club."

The cartoons are pretty funny too...

In my career, I've fired more useless consultants than I can remember. And my (very) brief career as a big-five consultant ended rather catastrophically because apparently my manager, VP and partner were all shocked that I actually believed part of my responsibility was to give the client the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

So I find Jeff Matthews' comments this morning quite appropriate:
http://jeffmatthewsisnotmakingthisup.blogspot.com/2005/04/bearingpoints-new-slogan-we-cant.html

I was somewhat surprised at Intel's somewhat stronger than expected earnings this week. While I didn't expect a bad quarter, and was in fact leaning slightly to the long side on the stock, I didn't expect that much.

Worth noting that Intel is conservative in its guidance, and suggestive that things won't last indefinitely.

Even more suggestive of this is the fact that inventories and recievables are up as well, despite relatively flat revenues. And of course, they note that part of the reason for their great margins is that they were able to sell "previously written-down inventories."

This inventory game is one that Intel has always played, even a decade ago when I worked there. It's become more pronounced in recent years though, a process I believe is attributable to Craig Barrett's greater tolerance of such things. (Andy Grove, for better or worse, was intolerant of just about everything...)

The game is simple. Crank out as much product as you can, which in a fixed-cost business like semiconductors means you end up with a lower average cost per product.

Sell only that product that can be sold at the desired price, which keeps margins high. Report the difference between the (low) cost of production and the (high) cost of sales as the "margin." Ignore the fact that you didn't really sell all the inventory at that price, and some of it is still sitting around.

A quarter or two later, write down the value of the unsold inventory to some number well below the cost of production in a "one time adjustment." Sell the inventory cheap. Your margin represents the amount of cash you're able to bring in less the cost of goods still on the books. Since that cost was written down to an arbitrarily low number, margin still looks good.

The write-down amount, which would represent a real impact to margins if included, is excused by the company and its fans on Wall Street as being "irrelevant." After all, the company did say it was a "one time" problem, right? Even though they do this repeatedly. Few bother to go back, add back the cost of the writedown and try to figure out the real margins.

In short, it is clear to me that the "margin" reported by Intel really isn't. It's an accounting obfuscation that fails to actually capture the difference between the real cost of goods and the real value of the products created in the marketplace.

There is another thing going on at Intel though, and it has clearly thrown off some of our thinking lately. The growth is all in Asia. To some degree this is US end-demand that is being satisfied by Asian product manufacturers, but to some degree it is local demand. Virtually all my contacts in the end-demand world are in the US and Europe. Clearly, I need to adjust my thinking and analysis to include more feedback from and observations of Asian players.

Bill Fleckenstein surmises that some of the Asian demand is merely channel stuffing. He may be right, but at this point I don't have any real way to know. Anybody with thoughts on the matter would be welcome.

Intel has been a nice bet this week, up almost 5% since our entry three days ago. But I have little long-term conviction about the name and will likely sell before the weekend.

In a word: Powerpoint.

Just came across this site today, and have to echo some of the contents, especially this quote from Scott McNeally:

We had 12.9 gigabytes of (Microsoft) PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought, 'What a huge waste of corporate productivity.' So we banned it. And we've had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned PowerPoint. Now, I would argue that every company in the world, if they would just ban PowerPoint, would see their earnings skyrocket. Employees would stand around going, 'What do I do? Guess I've got to go to work.

Obviously, Sun's decline since that statement was made has conclusively proven that banning Powerpoint is not, in and of itself, the key to corporate profitability. However, my own experience echoes his.

Early in my project management career I was leading a team of about eight people. Our meetings, and even email exchanges, were a disaster, with everything explained using a long -- often full color -- PowerPoint presentation. I got a huge increase in productivity when I had it pulled off every computer in the group, except for one "public access" workstation that individuals could use if they needed to do something "special" like making presentations for management. I also told everybody that they'd have to get up and present their status reports (or whatever) from memory. All of a sudden our meeting were functional and to the point again.

I would have liked to have tossed Excel as well, since it really had no relevance to anybody other than myself and one project administrator who was tracking the budget. Unfortunately, many of our users summarized requirements in spreadsheets, so this turned out to be impossible.

On subsequent projects I banned everything except simple text emails, and Word for formal and final documents.

Those who must use PowerPoint in their work might want to consider Paul Kedrosky's sage advice on the matter: Cut the number of slides in half and reverse the order! While he is speaking mostly to entrepreneurs, my experience is that his advice applies to most presentations.

Simpler, to my mind, is always better.

I just received my invitation to the annual Exemplary Leadership in Management Award dinner at UCLA's Anderson School.

More interesting than the dinner though, was the list of previous recipients:

2003: Kent Kresa, Chairman, Northrop Grumman Corporation
2002: Eli Broad, Chairman, SunAmerica, Inc.
2000: William H. Gross ('71), Chief Investment Officer, Founding and Managing Director, Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO)
1999: Craig R. Barrett, President and Chief Executive Officer, Intel Corporation
1998: Michael D. Eisner, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, The Walt Disney Company
1997: Robert A. Swanson, Retired Chief Executive Officer, Genentech, Inc. and Chairman, K & E Management. Ltd.
1996: Scott G. McNealy, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Sun Microsystems
1995: Jill Barad, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mattel, Inc.
1994: Herbert D. Kelleher, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Southwest Airlines
1992: Richard M. Rosenberg, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, BankAmerica Corporation
1991: Donald R. Beall, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Rockwell
1990: H. Ross Perot, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, The Perot Group
1989: John Sculley, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Apple Computer, Inc.

I note that many of the listed executives would most likely not find themselves candidates for any such award today. Sculley, after a superb career at Pepsi, presided over the beginning of the Apple's precipitous decline which was only remedied by the return of Steve Jobs in the late 90s. Perot was a visionary in founding and growing EDS, but later fell on his sword as a gadfly GM board member and failed to ever achieve the same kind of success in his other ventures. Shortly after receiving her award, Barad became Mattel CEO and nearly drove the company to bankruptcy before being unceremoniously removed by the board of directors. Scott McNeally presided over the founding and fantastic growth of Sun, then over a fanstatic collapse and loss of shareholder value. Eisner, of course, has recently retired from Disney after a decade of underperformance and frequent calls for his removal by dissident board members. Barrett will retire from Intel this year, where his early successes as Technology Manager, Vice President and COO are overshadowed by a very spotty tenure as CEO.

I have spent much of the morning wondering about why supposedly exemplary and clearly successful leaders can often fail. While I don't have the answers, I have some observations that I believe will be useful in evaluating other companies and other leaders.

I've gotten some feedback, and will make some changes effective immediately:

First, it's a major pain to write as the "royal we" all the time, and apparently it's not all that fun to read either. There are a couple of other people who write here occasionally, but going forward they'll just post with different user ID's.

Second, I've been told that some pieces run too long. I'll make an effort to keep comments brief and to the point, though some of the topics I expect to address will probably resist my best intentions.

We've been a bit slow and off topic this past week. A week long-hiatus followed by a week of doing our taxes has left little time to follow much news or to comment on it.

We expect to be back to normal in the coming weeks.

In a brief article on today's Realmoney, Jim Cramer begins his thesis with the following incredible statement: Consider the cases of Tibco Software (TIBX:Nasdaq) and Emulex (ELX:NYSE) , two storage software companies...

The argument he was making is somewhat tangential to the sentence above, so we won't critique it. What is remarkable here is that Jim is by any measure an informed and professional investor, who has owned and commented on both of these stocks in the past. Yet it is clear from this one brief comment that he doesn't even know what they do!

For the record. Tibco (who we have had dealings with in a previous life) is primarily in the business of data integration. Certainly that has implications to storage, primarily in that their software generally depends on a robust data management and storage solution being in place. But they are by no means a "storage software company."

Emulex is not even a software company. Yes, they provide lots of storage related hardware items, mostly focused on Storage Area Networks (SANS). But any software offerings are incidental, designed to support their primary hardware business.

Now, we don't want to knock Jim too much. We've made lots of money off him in the past and probably will in the future. But if he doesn't really understand what he's investing in, then how many people really do? And if most people don't even understand what they're investing in, how likely are we to have anything approximating an accurate valuation for the tech companies we follow?

We expect the infrastructure and storage software business will do well over the coming years. But it's tough for us to invest in companies that even five years after the tech crash are still being moved by people who don't understand them or how they fit into the overall technology value chain. So we continue to wait for many opportunities we expect to develop, but remain extremely cautious.

In January, we moved to a new residence. Shortly thereafter we attempted to register to vote. We were unable to. The reason is that the registrar did not have our address on file.

It seems that approximately 3-4 years ago, the property that we now live in was redeveloped. Previously it was a traditional apartment building, now it is a collection of townhomes/lofts.

When the property was redeveloped, the owner decided to change the addressing scheme. The previous building had a single street address, with unit designations for each apartment. (For example, not using the real address: 1234 Elm St., Units A-H).

Today it is 1234, 1236, 1238, etc.

The county and registrar of voters were not properly notified, and the only address they had on file was the original one. "1234"

As a result, our attempt to register at "1242 Elm" failed. Two months of investigation resulted and just today we received a voter's registration card. In the meantime we used a relative's address down the street to register and vote during the March Los Angeles city election.

What's amazing about this, is that this development of 15 units has been here for almost four years. During that period, only one tenant -- the one whose address matches the address of the original building -- would have been able to register to vote.

Granted, a couple of the residents only live here part-time and probably vote elsewhere. The previous resident in our place was a foreign national and probaby was not eligible to vote. Still there were at least 15 people living here during the last presidential election who were eligible to vote but would not have been able to because they could not have registered at their home addresses.

The property manager -- who was also the developer -- has never had a complaint until I mentioned it to him. Apparently none of the residents noticed, none of them complained, none of them cared.

That says more about why our government is screwed up than anything else we can think of.

We note that the Infinity moron cited in our earlier piece claims that "people are emotionally involved with local radio."

Maybe they once were. Certainly I once was.

But that was back when individuals were free to express their personalities on local radio. Growing up in New York over 20 years ago, WNEW and WPLJ wer the big rock stations. And you knew the people who worked there. Carol Miller was the Springsteen fan, Dave Hermann (whose daughter went to high school with me) had his own unique morning personality and classical rock mix, Scott Muni was the "old sage" of Rock and Roll Radio, others had their own personalities and played the music that "fit." If you wanted to listen to something else, you switched the station. In any event, you look at the lineups from those days and you see a list of people with definitive musical tastes of their own, who you could get emotionally invoved with. Or ignore completely if they didn't resonate with you. Your choice.

We noted this morning's headline in The New York Times, highlighting the rise of satellite radio. What stood out in this was the moronic statement by the head of Infinity Broadcasting claiming that satellite was not a viable option, because "At the end of the day, people want to hear what's going on in their local market."

We wonder where this guy has been for the past 30 years, while cable TV has proved over and over that people generally want exactly the opposite thing.

Let's state our opinion clearly: The only reason we still have a significant amount of "local content" or a substantial number of "local stations" on either radio or TV is because the FCC -- under pressure from the local stations and their advertisers -- continues to insist on shoving it down our throats, despite our obvious lack of interest.

• Going away and not checking email or phone messages for a week was a great thing to do. The world did not come to an end, nor did our business. We will have to do it more often.
• Our firewall is "pinged" from various IP addresses in various parts of the world consistently. Recent logs show as many as 20 nefarious pings every day, some going after apparently random and unused ports, some appear to be denial of service attacks of some kind, though it is unclear why anybody would direct such attacks at what is apparently a home computer.

  While we support Cody's effort, linked below, we also believe it is no longer reasonable for anybody -- even the most casual user -- to run any kind of broadband connection without a hardware firewall/router of some kind in addition to internet security/firewall software on every computer. Unfortunate, but true.

• The outpouring of grief and platitudes for the Pope is understandable. In a world of technocrats, bureaucrats and hypocrites claiming to be "leaders," a guy like the Pope stood out, regardless of whether one agreed with him. Reagan was much the same way. Hard not to respect and feel the loss of somebody who believes in something and who really leads, when the compares in today's world are so weak.
• In that regard, we are also amused that Larry Flynt would wish Jerry Falwell a recovery and good health.
• It's nice to come home to somebody warm and furry.
• While digital cameras are clearly a "must have" item right now, it's also obvious that manufacturers are more than capable of meeting demand. We've been shopping for a new point-and-shoot after losing one in the snow, and it's quite clear that the manufacturers are stepping over each other to out-price and out-feature each other. Additional consolidation and a shrinking in margins can be expected. Among others we'd expect HP to seek a joint venture in cameras which would allow them to retain a powerful link with their printer division, but take them out of the camera business itself.

Cody Willard, whose blog we read regularly, posted this item last week. It's worth reading and acting on:

http://thecodyblog.blogspot.com/2005/03/lets-do-something-about-spyware-adware.html

As noted below, we were away last week, enjoying some phenomenal skiing at Alta and Snowbird Utah, where the snow simply would not stop falling for several days, and the resultant mess (road closures, avalanche danger, interlodge travel restrictions) made for a longer time away than anticipated.

However, even with this, we had the opportunity to think a bit about technology, and to consider how much it really benefits productivity.

Thursday -- the day after the storms finally broke and we got some sun -- a group of our friends joined us for skiing. We usually ski some pretty extreme stuff and equip ourselves appropriately. In recent years we have added cellphones to our equipment list, because they are clearly useful in emergencies if coverage is available. (Ski mountains often have spotty to non-existent cell coverages.)

[Incidentally, we think that in a real ski-hill emergency, the most useful item is likely to be a simple signal whistle. Its sound will carry a much longer distance than a human voice and there isn't a ski patroller on the planet who won't investigate one.]

Our friends showed up with little of the really useful equipment that we regularly carry, but did bring their cellphones and were willing and ready to talk, at every opportunity. Not long into the morning, one of our friends recieved a call from another friend of hers, informing her that another group had finally arrived and were skiing. They made plans to try to connect later in the day on the opposite side of the mountain. Our friend then assured us that once she and her friends got together, they'd call us to try to re-connect and ski the afternoon.

We reluctantly turned on our cellphones, which are usually left off unless they are needed. Vacations, to us, are a time when the world should just have to deal with our absence.

The results were predictable. An endless stream of phone interruptions and changes of meeting point, which ultimately resulted in nobody meeting anybody at any point during the day. The existence of the cellphones gave everybody a sense of connectedness that allowed them to forgo any sort of planning or discipline. But with no plan and no willingness to make one, all the communications in the world could not bring everybody together.

The following day we announced to our friends that we would be leaving our phones off. If they wanted to meet us, we'd be at Alf's Restaurant (best fries on the mountain!) at 1:30, after the lunch crush. Want to ski the afternoon with us? Be there.

From the reaction, you would think we had just accused the pope of being a child molester. How could we "isolate" ourselves this way? How could be be so "disconnected?" How could we be so arrogant?

We held our ground. We would be skiing fast and hard and weren't going to be bothered with answering the phones. We would have lunch at Alf's as usual and anybody who wanted to ski with us could either go out with us right now, meet us there at the usual time or deal with the needle-in-a-haystack odds of finding us on one of the lifts.

All our friends showed up. We didn't make or answer a single call. We all had a much better day because we were able to do what we were there for -- ski -- rather than spend half the day on the phone trying to coordinate meetings. Nobody had to adjust their schedule much to make the meeting either. With a whole morning sto ski around, everybody had plenty of opportunities to go where they wanted to and still be at the meeting point at the right time.

Sorry for the lack of entries recently. A laptop crisis made it impossible to post from where I was in the mountains of Utah. Several days of snow, closed roads, high avalanche danger and extreme bottomless powder skiing left me too tired to really watch the news much or to collect my thoughts about it.

This week, it's back to reality.