korean grocery, 9.22

I’m back in the admittedly flat and boring OS9 right now, for reasons I can’t quite explain to myself. Maybe it’s the comfort of the application menu in the upper right corner, where I can hide any window I want immediately. Maybe it’s the speed of the interface—I’m on a 400Mhz G3, and I notice a slight lag while it figures out what to do. Maybe it’s the way OSX writes three files for every one it works on (iPhoto comes to mind here).

Maybe I’m just getting old; I don’t know. I’ve made almost a ten-year investment in the interface I use every day, and it’s not going to be easy to switch.

Jen and I went to the Korean grocery store this weekend and bought an entire meal’s worth of vegetables, about a pound of sliced rib-eye steak, and assorted other items, and walked out $13 lighter. There is a certain sense of culture shock walking through that store—from the mingled conversations in several different languages to the mind-boggling assortment of exotic fruit, vegetables, and spices, to the old-world butcher and fish market in back—you feel as if you might be strolling through a market in Seoul or even Tokyo.

What happens when you spend all the money you make on opening new stores so that you can make even more money to open more stores? You start knocking down the old ones to make newer ones. Suggestion: Make decent food, train your employees to treat customers better, pay them more than minimum wage, and rebuild the expectations of your client base.

Nate sent this thought along in response to an email I sent about a cartoon that has some people upset:

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war to whip the citizenry into a political fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.

Julius Caesar, 101 – 44 BC