In today’s “direct mail databases are broken” category, the Huffington Post has a short piece titled “California Man Receives Credit Card Offer Addressed to ‘Palestinian Bomber’”  Of course, the person who received this (Sami Habbas) has been a US citizen since the age of 3 and served in the US Army.  When he called JP Morgan Chase about it, he was greeted with “Yes, Mr. Bomber, what can we do for you?”  I guess the call center “judgment filter” is broken also.

I just IMed a colleague who recently completed a Herculean task.  I asked him how it felt to be done.  He responded “About like a fish feels as he passes through the shark’s teeth on its way to the digestive tract.”  Meditate on that for a while.  Wait – is that a metaphor or a simile?  Where is Amy when I need her?

I just noticed that the price of crude oil topped $67 a barrel.  When the fuck did that happen?

In the early 1980’s, my first programming job (when I was in high school and a freshman/sophomore in college) was for a software company in Dallas called Petcom Systems.  I was the first non-founder programmer (it was started by a husband and wife team) and I wrote “Oil and Gas Economic Analysis Software” (called PCEconomics) and a Well Log Analysis Program (called PCLog).  I also worked on their Oil and Gas Accounting Product (PCAccounting) which was my first intimate exposure to the thrills of accounting software  I got paid $10 / hour plus 5% of revenue for the software I wrote, which turned out to be a suitably large number for an 18 year old in 1983 and 1984.  I watched Petcom grow from the four of us (husband, wife, me, secretary) to 20 people as they rode the early 1980’s oil boom.

In the spring and summer of 1985 the price of oil fell apart.  Petcom’s phones stopped ringing.  50% of their customers went out of business as their cost structures had expanded under the assumption that the price of oil would stay at its artificial high.  By the end of the year, Petcom was back down to about four people.  Two years later they had transitioned their products (essentially repurposing their accounting software) to be “point of sale for CD / video stores.” Ironically, Petcom’s primary competitor was another Dallas-based company – a small public company called David P. Cook & Associates that morphed into Blockbuster.

No one expected any of this (when I went to college, I was naive enough to believe people when they said “the real estate and oil economy of Dallas will keep it going forward forever”), and I had my first “boom and bust cycle” experience.

This is going to end badly.

I’m on an airplane for the first time in the last few weeks (from Anchorage to San Francisco).  My choices are limited, so I decided to fly on Untied.  The plane smells like it needs a shower (nope – that’s not me).  The next time you are on an airplane, open up the cover to the food tray and take a good look – yuck.

I don’t have to deal with this shit.  If I had a kid, he’d sound like Oskar in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: “Succostash my cocker spaniel, you fudging crevasse-hole dipshiitake!”  Or maybe my non-existent son (or daughter) would regularly say “Hey Dad – go shit in a fucking hat.”

Thanks Steve.  And Dad – thanks for teaching me how to swear like a Texan.

For the last few days, I’ve been puzzled that “Stewardesses Stripped” was the most popular link on my blog according to MyBlogLog.  This was from a post I did in May on a clever calendar from some United Airlines stewardesses.  So – for the hell of it – I did a Google search on Stewardesses Stripped.   Voila – I’m number 1.  I’m number 3 on Yahoo and number 5 on MSN (c’mon MSN – get with it!) 

How bizarre.  It’s especially ironic since my only reaction to this morning’s Denver Post article titled “Aim is leverage, not to close United” concerning the United Airlines flight attendants new “CHAOS” (Create Havoc Around Our System) intermittent walkout system was “these people are so stupid” (see my earlier reference to Atlas Shrugged (Cliffs Notes)).

Michael Parekh pointed me to an awesome 10 minute movie of how the United States came together. 

Scott Moody sent this article about The Martun restaurant in Kaohsiung as an add-on to my post about the best toilets in this world.  Even I found this a little hard to swallow.

The Paris Hilton Carl’s Jr. ad has gotten plenty of play this month.  But the much better ad is Accolo’s Paris Hilton Spoof Ad.