Another morning at home

The time is about 7.15AM. The hubby, bless him, has just held the daily cup of joe under my nose, bringing me back to life.

Me (groggily): gmmmmphhhnn

Hubby (cheery morning person tone): Good Morning, honey.

He disappears in the direction of the sleeping dog, flea medication in hand. A few minutes later...

Hubby (still cheery): Well, the good news is I won't get fleas.

Life at Google, A Vignette

So we're sitting around, you know, like old married people do and the hubby starts sniggering. At which point, of course, I have to ask. And he told me this...

If you're a Googler and come across a broken toilet at the Googleplex, what do you do?

(think about it for a second. I promise there's a very Googley answer to this. Imagine Final Jeopardy music in the background...)

You file a ticket. Just like you do for bugs, or for tech support. You get a follow-up email when the problem is fixed, which tells you the ticket has been closed. AND, because Googlers have precise minds, someone filed a sub-ticket to "...clean up the floor.."

What to expect when you're expecting a blog revival

Did I say I haven't been writing all year? Sadly, it is true. I have not put together a meaningful thought piece in all that time. I have, however, discovered Twitter.

Microblogging has its uses. It forces you to be concise and precise. You have to fit the thought into 140 characters. Because you have so little room, you have to express yourself clearly or run the risk of not being understood, or worse, misunderstood. But the best part is that it disciplines your writing. No more blogging half-formed thoughts or quick questions or random status updates or links. Looking through stuff I've posted in the past; I'm shocked to see how much of it really belongs on Twitter.

So I've made a change to this blog. The sidebar of this blog will now also list my recent Twitter updates. Given how frequently I've been posting there and/or sharing articles, there should be at least one update every day.

I will also be trying to post longer pieces regularly. While I work on getting into that discipline, no promises on update frequency. I fully expect there will be much attempted "writing" that will be simply thrown away. However, hopefully, something good will come out of it.

It has been a while

In fact, it has been almost a year. Life's been busy, that's not new. But the writing bug went away for a while. It took a sabbatical. While it was gone, I've been reading (see sidebars) and listening to music and tinkering with ideas and traveling a little bit and in general, living life. And it's been good: wind in your hair, dance in the rain, kind of good.

The bug appears to be back. Regular service will now resume. Let me leave you today with a poem that seems particularly apt.

Covering Two Years

This nothingness that feeds upon itself:
Pencils that turn to water in the hand,
Parts of a sentence, hanging in the air,
Thoughts breaking in the mind like glass,
Blank sheets of paper that reflect the world
Whitened the world that I was silenced by.

There were two years of that. Slowly,
Whatever splits, dissevers, cuts, cracks, ravels, or divides
To bring me to that diet of corrossion, burned
And flickered to its terminal. - Now in an older hand
I write my name. Now with a voice grown unfamiliar,
I speak to silences of altered rooms,
Shaken by knowledge of recurrence and return.

-- Weldon Kees

I like the guy

Note from the White House blog.

Excerpt: One point I want to make is that all of us are going to have responsibilities to get this economy moving again. And when I saw an article today indicating that Wall Street bankers had given themselves $20 billion worth of bonuses -- the same amount of bonuses as they gave themselves in 2004 -- at a time when most of these institutions were teetering on collapse and they are asking for taxpayers to help sustain them, and when taxpayers find themselves in the difficult position that if they don't provide help that the entire system could come down on top of our heads -- that is the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful.

Video clip du jour

Once every long, long while, the travesty called reality TV comes up with a gem like this. First saw this video clips a few months ago, and my mind keeps wandering back to it.

Welshman Sings Opera; Impresses Simon Cowell

O.B.A.M.A!!!

Tonight is for celebration. Reflection, and (hopefully) further posts after the euphoria dies down. Which will be tomorrow.

Interesante trabajo por mes

Yo soy estudio un poco de espanol. Todays' title is just words strung together, over time grammar will make an appearance.

One of my b-school professors, Rafael La Porta, has just published a paper on third world economic activity. The authors ask: Will the informal sector drive third world economic growth? There are three main schools of thought in this field.

• The Romantic view. If you've read De Soto's book (The Mystery of Capital), you know this argument. Essentially, adherents contend that the informal sector is very productive, and are held back by regulation, lack of access to finance and lack of secure property rights. 
• The Parasite view. The main proponent of this view is the McKinsey Global Institute. In essence, they claim that informal firms have to stay small to avoid detection, since they're illegal. Therefore, they will never gain sufficient scale to produce efficiently. However, they have a cost advantage that they can and do use to undercut official firms in prices. In short, informal firms hurt growth due to lack of scale and because they take away share from formal firms.
• The Dual view. This is the traditional development economics view. Adherents contend that productive entrepreneurs find it worth their time and effort to pay taxes and bear the burden of regulation, since being legal is more profitable to them. Informal firms, however, stay small because the payoff will not be large for them. Essentially, informal firms are so because they consist of low-quality assets managed by low-ability managers. These firms are not in direct competition with formal firms, and will die off as each sector develops economically.

Having laid out the essential points about each school, La Porta and Schleifer present comparative analyses of data collected on formal and informal firms. Their data covers a range of factors affecting both types of firms, from regulation to taxation to corruption. They also gather data on human capital at each type of firm, and look at productivity in each sector. 

To find out more, the conference version of the paper is here.

In addition to being a well-written and cogent argument, this was presented at the Brookings conference. I don't know intricate details of academia and academic publishing, but presenting at Brookings has got to be a major achievement. Congrats, Rafael!