As 2015 ends, I wanted to share one of my absolute all time favorite thought provoking interactions.

Two baby fish are swimming along together.
An adult fish swims by and says "Hi Kids!  How's the water today?" and goes on by.
A little while later one baby fish turns to the other and says "What the hell was he talking about?"

If you would ever like to have a coffee/tea/water/soda/whiskey/beer/cocktail with me and talk about the fishes, then let me know.

Cheers, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Holidays to you and your families!

Another bucket list item to mark off:
Having COMPLETE FEAR instilled in me by baby car seat installation instructions on a Saturday night.

All this wordy wordiness of verbosity essentially boils down to two steps:

1. ALWAYS use NEVER in ALL CAPS for MAXIMUM fear mongering. 
2. If you don't follow the instructions + you are a bad driver and/or you collide with another bad driver you might kill your child.

Oh, and by the way, the car seat company will have no interest in bearing any sort of responsibility for your lack of ability to follow instructions, or your general incompetence, or your laziness, because they did their best to teach you everything you need to know in these six pages of warnings.  
And that's pretty much the way it should be.  #kthxbye
​
#carSeatLady
​

If I were to walk up to you and say "I started with 1 customer and after 4 iterations, I ended up with 81."
You might say "I don't get it.  It doesn't make any sense to me.  How am I supposed to understand how you got there?"

Okay, that response is completely reasonable.

So instead, let's say I start with 1 person.  And that one person brings in 10 people.  Do you understand that? - yes.
And then of those 10 people, 3 people come back to use my product.  So now I have 1 person that led to 3.  Do you understand that? - yes.

And then of those 3 people, each of them brings in 10 new people AGAIN.  Do you understand that? - yes.
And so that gets me 30 (3 x 10) new people.  Does that make sense?  -yes.
And then from those 30 people, 3 out of every 10 will return.  That means 9 (3 x 3) people will return.
Does that make sense? - yes.  
After building from the previous run, that's how I went from 1 to 9.

Now those 9 returning patrons will each bring in 10 new people.  
9 x 10 = 90 new people.  Does that make sense? - yes.
Again, of those 90 people, 3 out of every 10 will come back to use my product.  So 3 x 9 = 27 people.  
Does that make sense? - yes.  
Again, building from the previous run, that's how I went from 1 to 27.

You probably get the pattern now, and so for the final iteration, those 27 people bring in 10 new people each gets me the formula of 27 x 10, which = 270.  Does that make sense? - yes.
And finally 3 out of every 10 (3/10 = 30%) of the 270 gets me 81 (3 x 27 = 81, or in other words 30% of 270 = 81) returning customers.  
I hate to sound like an ass, but this is maybe 2nd grade math.

And so now when I say "I started with 1 customer and after 4 iterations, I ended up with 81."
Does that make sense?" :)

​
p.s. for those of you who just want the numbers and don't care for all the unnecessary words:
1 x 10 = 10
if 30% return, then = 3.
3 x 10 = 30
if 30% return, then = 9.
9 x 10 = 90
if 30% return, then = 27.
27 x 10 = 270
if 30% return, then = 81.
Therefore I started with 1, and after 4 iterations, I ended up with 81.

A couple of articles came out recently.

techinsider.io

carbuzz.com

Admittedly, as of this post I haven't read these articles yet, but if I stick just to the facts, as near as I can do simple math:
2020 is 5yrs away.  And Tesla has already been making cars for ~5yrs.  So Porsche will be a decade late to the all-electric supercar game?  That's pathetic!!!

But it is a hot damn impressive looking vehicle.  The implementation and design of the suicide doors is stunningly beautiful!
I can't wait to see what the production car is like... as long as they get it done.

Pop quiz, hotshot: How does a blogger celebrate a major milestone in blogging?

Answer: He blogs about it.

So it's been a full year now of blogging now.  Twelve full months of blogging I have!
I think I can rightfully call myself a blogger, as somewhat common as that might sound in 2015.  It's not mind blowing numbers of page views or posts, and I'm not a celebrity blogger by any means, and it doesn't generate any cash whatsoever, but it's a solid base by which to build a long term work of art, IMHO.  My goal for one year was to create a steady stream of content in short writing projects to basically get the shit rattling around in my head out.  A good friend of mine described it once as an exercise in "exorcising demons".

The numbers break down like this:
Dec. 2014: 5
Jan. 2015: 5
Feb. 2015: 4
Mar. 2015: 7
Apr. 2015: 7
May. 2015: 7
Jun. 2015: 6
July. 2015: 6
Aug 2015: 4
Sep. 2015: 4
Oct. 2015: 5
Nov. 2015: 4
TOTAL POSTS IN 12mo: 64
Average number of posts per month: 5.3333

"It's says here  <<looking at his resume>>  that you were 'crushing it' from 2010 to 2013 and then
​crushing it again in 2015.  What happened in 2014?"
"Oh, I took a break from crushing it, but I picked it right back up in 2015."

(That last interaction was very, very roughly, blatantly stolen excerpt of dialogue from an episode of Silicon Valley.  One of these days I will have to put pen to paper and write out how my life so closely resembled season 1 and season 2 of the show.)