Four (or Five!) Reasons Why

…Halloween is the Best Holiday

Mr. List — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:55:07 +0000

1. It’s a great excuse to eat lots of candy. There’s candy at work, there’s candy at friends’ houses, there’s candy when you’re shopping, and there’s candy conveniently found in your children’s Trick or Treat bags.

2. You get to wear a costume, and it doesn’t matter if it’s bizarre, strange, funny, weird or home-made. It’s an excuse to indulge your creativity or your fantasies once a year.

3. Great parties. When people wear costumes, they also adopt different personas. Wearing a Superman costume, you’re strong, bold and confident as opposed to your real life persona of being weak, meek and mild-mannered. Slip on a French maid’s costume, and suddenly you’re a sex kitten as opposed to a cat that lies around the house all day.

4. For Canadians, it’s the last major holiday before Christmas. For Americans, it’s a great warm-up for U.S. Thanksgiving.

For more thoughts on Halloween, check out What White People Like.

Technorati Tags: hallowe’en

….Don’t Buy Bad Wine

Mr. List — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:00:58 +0000

1. If you’re looking to save a few bucks, buy less expensive beer rather than cheaper wine. If cool, cheap beer isn’t significantly worse than premium beer. But with few exceptions, the difference between cheap wine and even reasonably price wine is huge. And there’s nothing worse than opening bad bottle of wine.

2. At all costs, avoid buying wine named after animals (e.g. Bee, Black Horse) or with labels with animals on them. With no exceptions, animal themes = terrible wine because it has more to do with marketing, especially to women, than selling good wine.

3. Making wine takes years, and it’s as much an art as science. It’s a shame that all that work goes into making a bad bottle of wine. So, buying a bad bottle only encourages the production of more bad wine.

4. Life’s short so enjoy when you can, and there are fewer pleasures in life than a good bottle of wine.

Technorati Tags: PCWorld

….To Buy Yahoo Stock

Mr. List — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 15:26:38 +0000

We’re been delinquent recently with 4RW. We promise to be better behaved.

To make it up to you, here’s a post from Fortune Magazine’s Adam Lashinsky on “Five Reasons to Buy Yahoo”.

Technorati Tags: yahoo

….You Shouldn’t Make Your Own Wine

Mr. List — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:20:21 +0000

1. Making wine is as much a science as an art; more than just growing grapes and then letting Mother Nature do her thing. Most hobbyists think the process is more simpler than it really is so somewhere along the line things go awry.

2. It’s a lot easier to go to the local wine store and pick up a few bottles made by professional wine makers. This streamlined process compares with people who spend hours/weeks making wine, and then have to wait months/years before they can drink it. It sounds like an awful lot of work to save a few bucks.

3. While giving someone home-made preserves or jam is seen as a nice gesture, giving someone a bottle of home-made wine just means you were too cheap to go out and buy a good bottle of wine. Yeah, you get points for the whole DYI thing but it’s one thing to drink the stuff yourself without forcing it on your friends.

4. Home-made wine is never as good as people like to think. You can fool yourself into believing you made a damn fine Chardonnay but if you had to be honest, it’s inferior to anything you could buy. And the problem is no one is going to tell you otherwise because they’re too polite to hurt your feelings.

For more information on home-made wine, including why it doesn’t turn out right, check out this FAQ. If you insist on making home-made wine, here’s a video on how to make it from store-bought juice.

Technorati Tags: wine

….Going to Conferences is Necessary

Mr. List — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 11:00:00 +0000

1. As much as our lives are becoming increasingly digital (e-mail, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), there’s still a psychological and physical need to get together with real people (as opposed to avatars and virtual world personas).

2. When economic conditions become more difficult, networking and building personal relationships become even more important. Even if you’ve met someone only once, it makes a huge difference when you’re trying to do business.

3. Even during panels or workshops that are boring you to tears, there are still opportunities to learn about new ideas, cool products and interesting people.

4. It’s healthy to get out of the office once in awhile. Many people live inside their inboxes or Web browsers so it’s a good idea to break out of the box (and office) to socialize, talk the talk and walk the walk.

….Providing References is Useless

Mr. List — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 11:00:00 +0000

1. When someone asks you to provide personal references, it’s not like you’re going to provide them with people who are going to say bad things about you. If you’re smart, you’ll pick people who are going to say wonderful things about you.

2. Who knows if personal references are authentic or valid. For all anyone knows, they could be someone’s friends or relatives who have been put up to be a personal reference.

3. If a decision - hiring for a job, renting an apartment, etc. - hinges on checking someone’s personal references, then you haven’t done your work properly/asked the right questions of the applicant. At the most, personal references should be used if you’ve got suspicions that you want to confirm as opposed to the final stamp of approval.

4. Facebook and Google have replaced personal references. If you really want to check someone out, Google them to see what comes up, or check them on Facebook. You can quickly get an idea about someone quicker and more definitive than calling a personal reference.

….Everyone Loves Betas

Mr. List — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:50:40 +0000

1. Although it’s probably not the case, there’s a sense of exclusiveness surrounding a beta based on the notion that not everyone will be able to try it out. This “scarcity” makes betas attractive because many people want to be seen as being early-adopters or into something that could be awesome before the masses arrive. Think about the people who may have been the first to use Google now that Google is the world’s dominate search engine.

2. There may not be such thing as a free lunch but the idea of being able to try a new online service at no cost is irresistible to many people. The only “cost” involved is your time but given it doesn’t take that much time to get a pretty good handle on what a Web service offers, it’s not that big of an investment.
3. You never know what you’re going to get, which is an exciting proposition. Although you may have an idea about what an online service does, you don’t really find out until you sign up for the beta and get access. You could be totally blown away or terribly disappointed but you’ll never know until you give the service a whirl.

4. There’s no lack of betas. If could play with new betas every day of the year and never run out of new things to try. It’s great for people who love trying out new things, as well as tech blogs such as TechCrunch and Mashable, which spit out beta reviews like nobody’s business.

Technorati Tags: beta

….You Shouldn’t Use Google Chrome

Mr. List — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:47:47 +0000

1. Google is taking over the Internet by unveiling an ever-increasing number of useful and interesting services. It’s bad enough that GMail, YouTube, Blogger, Picasa, search and Google Earth are pretty much ubiquitous; now Google wants you to access all these services through its own browser.

2. Chrome will give Internet users more choice when it comes to browsers but it could also badly would Firefox, which has been valiantly battling Microsoft’s Internet Explorer over the past few years. Firefox now has nearly 20% of the browser market but who knows what will happen now that Chrome is on the scene. Firefox also makes a major chunk of its revenue from a referral deal with Google so if Chrome starts to pull traffic away, Firefox will suffer financially as well.

3. Chrome currently has no add-ons or extensions - the little widgets available as part of Firefox and Flock that let you personalize and customize your browser. Instead, Chrome is a no-frills browser, which is fine if you always pick vanilla ice cream when visiting a Baskin-Robbins.

4. Chrome doesn’t integrate other Google services right now. If you’re going to surrender to all things Google, then Google might as well go all the way by making it easy to access YouTube, Picasa, Blogger and GMail in one-click within Chrome. Instead, Chrome is a stand-alone entity, at least until Google responds to consumer “feedback”.

5. It’s just a browser. For all the talk about the browser being the new operating system at a time when cloud computing is becoming more popular, Chrome - at least for the time being - is a browser that isn’t strikingly different from Firefox, IE, Flock, Safari, Opera, etc. Yeah, I know there are some interesting bells and whistles such as the Omnibox but for most Web users, Chrome is just a browser.

Technorati Tags: chrome, Firefox, Google

….September is the Saddest Month

Mr. List — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:19:56 +0000

1. Summer is pretty much over, even though officially it continues until Sept. 23. Unofficially, you know summer has come and gone when the kids go back to school.

2. The lazy days of summer are over. It means instead of every day feeling like a Thursday, you’re more aware that Monday is Monday, which means you have to go to work. There’s more traffic on the road as people return from vacation and cottages, which means the stress-free commute to work is over. And, slowly but surely, the days start getting shorter with the sun rising later and setting earlier.

3. You have to start wearing different clothes. Pretty soon, the shorts and t-shirts are no longer appropriate. Before long, you start reaching for sweatshirts, sweaters and jeans. And, apparently, you’re not allowed to wear white after Labor Day!

4. You know the cold weather is just around the corner. Sure, there will be balmy days in September and October but they’re just teasing you because pretty soonthe temperature is going to drop like a stone.

….Open Bars Are a Bad Idea

Mr. List — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:48:23 +0000

1. They encourage people to drink far too much. As a rule, people love the concept of free so when there’s an open bar with free booze, most people can’t resist. It’s the same theory that applies to buffets.

2. They encourage wastage and spillage. Since you’re not paying for your drinks, it’s okay if you put down your glass and then forget where you put it. All you have to do is simply get another drink. There’s no economic pain involved so people get lazy.

3. Open bars are expensive. Since people tend to drink a lot more than normal AND they stopping worrying about having to get yet another drink if they can’t find the one they had, open bars can get really expensive. Meanwhile, bartenders tend to be overly-generous in the drinks they pour because the host, who wants to impress his friends and family, is footing the bill and the people being served aren’t going to complain about getting a wine glass filled to the brim.

4. The alcohol served tends not to be top quality. That just makes sense because an open bar is an expensive proposition anyway so why compound your economic pain by providing premium beers, good wine and top-quality liquor. As a result, you’re served run-of-the-mill alcohol. Of course, no one complains because it’s free. But wouldn’t it make more sense to drink better as opposed to drinking more?