Shrug The Movie

Thanks to Tyler Cowen for passing along word of Atlas Shrugged the Movie.

Fun Facts from the previous link:

  • First draft of Part 1’s (of 3 ??!!) script completed and rated 8/10 in ‘philosophical fidelity to the novel’.
  • Angelina Jolie is interested in playing, “the greatest female character in all of literature”, Dagny Taggert.
  • “…everybody has been waiting breathlessly for an Atlas Shrugged movie since 1973…”

All this brings up a good question – did I even finish the book? Hmmm. I’m pretty sure I read the last chapter.

T-80 and Counting

Hit a fairly big roadblock today. I’m sure there’s a number of workarounds. I’m guessing this difficulty is a hint that I need to think about the mechanics of the project differently. I very well could be building it the hard way – and the roadblock is telling me that.

Katie Couric Steals Bloggers Pen

“They pulled me out of the auditorium and told me that they’d become aware of the fact that I had a blog, they said, ‘We don’t want you to participate.'”

Wow.

Big Media just keeps giving us reasons to ignore them.

UPDATE: and, according to this New York Times article on the event, we are ignoring them quite happily:

“… few people thought they could find a way to be home at 5:30 in the evening…”

More at MNSpeak.

Way Off Target

I caught the same article Dave did this morning at the CP Blotter and didn’t think anything of it.

Thankfully, Dave did a little poking around and found the “three of every four dollars in profit” is not on all of Target profit, but rather on the 15% increase in profits in a single quarter.

What does that mean in numbers? Hypothetically. Let’s say a company has a year’s profit of just under a $1 million ($998,675 to be exact), 15% quarterly profit increase might look something like this:
Q1 – $200,000
Q2 – $230,000
Q3 – $264,500
Q4 – $304,175

Now let’s compare the two numbers;
(City Pages) 75% of Q1 to Q4 profits: $749,006
(Business Week) 75% of Q3 to Q4 increase: $29,756

That’s a discrepancy of $719,250.

That’s not just a big difference – that’s bad, deceptive, and misleading journalism.

BTW – if you want to crunch the actual numbers yourself, here’s Targets 8K filing. If you’re wondering, Target’s 2006Q1 earnings were $886 million.

T-82 and Counting

Back from a week’s vacation, tanned, rested, and ready. A lot has happened, and this morning I put a few more wheels in motion. Lots of smaller things that have been sitting on the To Do list for way too long.

The road construction outside the home office is mostly over – enough so I’m contemplating moving the office out of doors.

As part of today’s productivity purge, I’ve kicked off a new project. One I’ve been tossing around for far too long – and like the things above, on the To Do List for far too long.

That said, this project has an arbitrary 82-day deadline. Tick. Tock.

Here’s what I’m happy to share about the project at this point: it’s a Ruby-on-Rails app and one of the major goals is to test the recurring themes of the Work Better blog.

More will be revealed as the deadline draws near.

Maybe My Star Tribune Subscription Is Paying For Itself

Came back from vacation with 2 Sunday papers on my doorstep. Inspiring a real good conversation Sunday afternoon with my sister, Kari. She’s just that bit younger than me that newspapers don’t exist in her world. She doesn’t read them and she was nice enough to listen to me vent.

As always, the writing in the Strib isn’t fantastic – I even read this week’s cover story (laws destroying local meth production encouraged importation from Mexico), though not much more. If the stories don’t read like simplistic editorial they read like thinly veiled advertisements – wrapped in obvious advertisements.

For all the effort it takes to publish and deliver the paper to me on a weekly basis – sure seems like it’d have a much higher cover price than $1.75 – (it costs me that to move the paper from the front step to the recycling bin).

What if the Strib wasn’t 99.9% ad subsidized? Would I pay $10-20 / week to have the Star Tribune delivered with amazing writing? Writing you’d pick up on a Wednesday to re-read, or continue reading. Writing that provided complexity, calls to action, analysis, and recognized that the newspaper itself is simply one piece of my information resources.

As I’m imagining this world where the Minneapolis Star Tribune is more like the Harvard Business Review, Kari picks up a stack of coupons Jen clipped earlier.

$0.55 here, $0.60 there, another $0.20, eventually enough to cover the paltry cover price.

Is this all I should be expecting from the Strib? Cause, even the St. Anthony Bulletin‘s writer makes the police log an entertaining read…and that’s a free paper…free like public radio is free.