Motley Fool: The Buffet Test, Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) -
ROIC = Net operating profit after taxes / Invested capital
This one-size-fits-all calculation cuts out many of the legal accounting tricks (such as excessive debt) that managers use to boost earnings numbers, and provides you with an apples-to-apples way to evaluate businesses, even across industries. The higher the ROIC, the more efficiently the company uses capital.
Ultimately, we’re looking for companies that can invest their money at rates that are higher than the cost of capital, which for most businesses are from 8% to 12%. Ideally, we want to see ROIC greater than 12%, at minimum. We’re also seeking a history of increasing returns, or at least steady returns, which indicate that the company’s moat can withstand competitors’ assaults.
Great article about judging yourself on your output rather than on your stress level.
Worry isn’t work. Being stressed out isn’t work. Anxiety isn’t work. Entertaining a sense of impending doom isn’t work. Incessant internal verbal punishment isn’t work. Indulging the great unknown fear in your own mind isn’t work. Hating yourself isn’t work.
Work is the manifestation of value, and anyone who tells you that a person whose mind is 50% occupied with anxiety is more likely to manifest value is a person who isn’t manifesting much.
It’s OK to take care of yourself. To take time to exercise. By all accounts, exercise improves brain function. It’s OK to eat well, and to slow down enough to eat consciously and appreciate the food. Proper nutrition improves brain function as well. Go on vacation. Meditate. Take a break each week for an hour to see a therapist, or a movie, or stop in a church, if that’s your practice. Sit quietly on your porch in the evening and reflect. Chaining yourself to your desk is no more correlated to productivity than mental self-annihilation.
Shot this beautiful Lockheed 18-56 Lodestar at a local airshow and assumed it to be a Learstar executive transport. Upon further investigation, apparently it started with the RAF in 1941 as an L-414 Hudson and was converted in 1955 to a Loadstar. It’s now owned by Ironworker Supply Inc., of Westlake Village, CA.
After some serious tinkering, I was finally able to get my original Mac Plus (cira 1986) to surf the web natively. No cheating, no terminal emulation. Just a real web browser running in System 6 accessing the live internet.
Here’s what the System 6 Heaven webpage looks like on the Plus:
That’s not just a text file! It’s actually MacWWW, an early web browser (circa 1992) that can run on System 6. For comparison, here is the same webpage in Safari 5:
How did I do it?
Well, it was a little tricky since the Mac Plus and System 6 were built before the web, web browsers, home Ethernet LANs and always-on broadband Internet connections were common place (or in some cases even invented). Macs of that time communicated using AppleTalk over LocalTalk networks, both of which are obsolete and no longer even supported by contemporary Mac OS X.
First, I acquired a Quadra 700 for the lab (circa 1992), sort of the Mac Pro of it’s day, since it has ports that support both LocalTalk and Ethernet (using a proprietary Apple AAUI adapter, yes another trip to eBay) and can run System 7. After getting it working on both the modern Ethernet LAN and the vintage LocalTalk network with the Plus on it, the next step was to bridge the two networks using Apple’s (now freely available) LocalTalk Bridge software (the trick being to remember it will always use your printer port for LocalTalk!).
With that in place and working, I could now use AppleTalk file sharing across both networks to easily move all the vintage software around that I needed on the respective systems. It also occurred to me that I should back all this up, given the age of the hard drives and floppy disks, so after exploring open source alternatives like FreeNAS (and learning the vagaries of which versions of AppleTalk are supported by which OSes), I resorted to bringing up a virtual Windows NT 4 Server (cira 1994) with Services for Macintosh. It gave me quite the chuckle that I had to use a Microsoft product to pull this off.
Lastly, I made a clean System 6 install on the Mac Plus and added MacTCP but still needed to get TCP/IP routed over LocalTalk and the bridge on the Quadra. For that, I found IPNetRouter and these instructions which quite frankly required some serious trial and error (the trick there being while you set the bridging machine address as the gateway on the LocalTalk devices, you have to use a real DNS server address).
After some patient tinkering, and many disappointing pings on the Mac Plus, I got it working and fired up MacWWW to find a webpage with no graphics, JavaScript, CSS, Flash, embedded media, or just about any modern element we take for granted. You see the results in the pictures above.
Why did I do it?
Just to see if I could I suppose.
Both my Mac Plus and the early web played an important part in my life and the beginning of my career. I can still recall when NCSA Mosaic was first installed in the university computer lab—after just being told during orientation that most of us would work in jobs that hadn’t been invented yet (which has held true for me). And aside from a brief (and shameful) period during the late 90’s, I’ve always had a Mac.
I had wanted to do this for some time, but it wasn’t until my recent focus on some other vintage technology projects that I got serious. My next task is to get a solid SSH client working on the vintage machines (perhaps for retro Twitter), as well as virtualizing each of them in emulators on my modern systems (so they can live in perpetuity).
Anyone up for a game of Bolo?
Wondering what Twitter might have looked like a few decades ago? Maybe seeking a nostalgic way to get your news headlines? It’s easy to go retro with today’s tools—in this case the Terminal app in Mac OS X and TTYtter, a command line Twitter client written in Perl.
First install and authorize TTYtter as per the instructions on the website (it’s really much simpler than it appears when reading the directions, took maybe 5 minutes including authorization with the Twitter mothership). If you are looking for just news headlines, you might want to setup another Twitter profile to follow just breaking news sources, as TTYtter doesn’t yet support lists.
Then find and install a nice retro font, like the free Teletype 1945-1985 by E.V. Norat II. Next, In Mac OS Terminal, go to Preferences to create a new skin, specifying the new font and a pleasant vintage paper-like color for the background. Play with these settings until you get it to look just how you like.
Finally, open a new shell using the skin you created and run TTYtter for a retro Twitter newswire! Let me know if you can figure out how to add authentic sound effects. Enjoy!
“I’ve heard it said that every day you need half an hour of quiet time for yourself, or your Self, unless you’re incredibly busy and stressed, in which case you need an hour. I promise you, it is there. Fight tooth and nail to find time, to make it. It is our true wealth, this moment, this hour, this day.” — Anne Lamott, Time lost and found
As a historic owner of QuickTime Pro, I’ve been dismayed at how capabilities keep getting removed or obfuscated from the latest releases of QuickTime Player and the confusing iMovie 09. To make the simple edit of rotating the image of a video (I held the camera at 90 degrees), I has to right-click the video in iPhoto and choose Show File to reveal the .MOV file in the finder. Then right-click the video and choose Open With and QuickTime Player 7 (to avoid the stripped down latest QuickTime release), then select Movie Properties from the Window menu. Finally, clicking on the Video Track presented me with the options to Flip or Rotate the video (as depicted above).
Great application to let a toddler bang away at the computer and produce interesting shapes and sounds. Since my guess is you’ll want to use this on an older Mac, you can download older versions here.
Found this nifty action hidden in Mac OS Automator to watermark PDF documents. Start your workflow with Ask for Finder Items, then choose Watermark PDF Documents. You then select the image file to use as the watermark and control the layer, offset, scale, angle and opacity settings. The rest is up to you, noting you can add actions to encrypt the PDF or edit the metadata among other things. Great way to avoid the full version of Acrobat or other 3rd party solutions.
It seems in each era of life, certain friendships stand out as being especially close for that particular period. During my junior high years, that was Ben Tanner (far left) with whom I shared passions for aviation, computers and amateur radio (and shall we say a certain propensity for school hijinks).
When I moved away to New Orleans for high school, we maintained a New Years tradition in which I took advantage of the time zone difference to welcome him into the next year 2 hours in advance. As high school turned in to college, we lost touch but in a pleasantly unpredictable way reunited when we both found ourselves back in California following college.
It was then I learned one of those life lessons you don’t soon forget. He relocated to Colorado to get married and pursue a firefighting career, and we had a falling out. I felt strongly at the time and chose not to attend his wedding. He was killed in a car accident not long after that, and our relationship was forever locked in that divide.
That was 10 years ago this Independence Day.
Here is an except for the Denver Post article which covered the accident:
Holiday’s highway toll reaches 7 EMT dies in crash caused by out-of-control semi
July 4, 2000
An emergency medical technician was killed on his way to work Monday in a wreck on Interstate 25. Benjamin Tanner, 26, of Westminster was the latest to die on Colorado highways over the Fourth of July holiday. With about 24 hours to go, the holiday toll stood at seven - two fewer than last year.
Troopers said Tanner was southbound on I-25 near East 152nd Avenue in Adams County about 9 a.m. when a northbound semi went out of control, colliding with a northbound car and pushing it across the median, where it rolled and hit Tanner’s car.
A medical problem might have caused the truck driver to lose control of his rig, Trooper Rod Campbell said.
The truck driver, Stanley Matsinger, 58, of Alvarado, Texas, and the driver of the other car, Jon Howell, 25, of Longmont were admitted to Denver Health Medical Center in fair condition.
Tanner had worked for Action Care Ambulance for two months and previously worked for another ambulance company. He and his wife would have celebrated their first anniversary next week.
“He was really highly motivated and working hard to get into paramedic school to finish his paramedic training,” said Tom Tkach, chief paramedic for Action Care.
I was also able to retrieve his obituary:
Benjamin David Tanner
Certified EMT, 25
Benjamin David “Ben” Tanner of Longmont, a certified emergency medical technician, died July 3 of injuries sustained in an auto accident. He was 25.
Services were July 7 at St. John’s Catholic Church in Loveland. Interment was in Resthaven Memory Gardens in Fort Collins.
He was born June 12, 1975, in Chesterfield, Mo. He was on high school cross-country and track teams in Thousand Oaks, Calif.
He was a member of St. Paschal Catholic Church in Thousand Oaks. He studied fire science technology at Moorpark and Oxnard colleges toward a firefighting career. He was a certified EMT in California and Colorado. He also held a student pilot certificate.
On July 17, 1999, he married Trisha Leigh Smith in Evergreen.
He worked for Action Care Ambulance in Englewood and was a volunteer EMT with Northglenn Ambulance and the Pleasant View fire station.
His interests included fishing, computers, flying, animals and music.
He is survived by his wife; his parents, David and Anne; two sisters, Emma, Brea, Calif., and Barbara, Los Angeles; two brothers, John “J.T.” and Daniel, both of Brea; and his grandmothers, Mary Frederiksen and Eleanor, both of St. Charles, Mo.
Contributions may be made to the Ben Tanner Family Memorial Fund, c/o Commerce Bank of Aurora, 15305 E. Colfax Ave., Aurora, CO 80011, Attention: M. Toggle.
I often think of Ben when I see our old school or pass his family’s old house, and hope his widow and family have gone on to thrive in the past decade. I now make it a practice to never let those type of disputes carry on long with people close to me—it’s my tribute to him and a life lesson I hope to convey. I won’t forget you Ben.
“When printed books first became popular, thanks to Gutenberg’s press, you saw this great expansion of eloquence and experimentation. All of which came out of the fact that here was a technology that encouraged people to read deeply, with great concentration and focus. And as we move to the new technology of the screen … it has a very different effect, an almost opposite effect, and you will see a retreat from the sophistication and eloquence that characterized the printed page.” — Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic, quoted in the story How E-Books Will Change Reading And Writing : NPR (via obsoletethebook)
The Los Angeles Convention Center. While I was there to learn about technology, I was most impressed with the enormous and stirring naturalization ceremony underway. It was a keen reminder of how desirable our nation remains, despite its challenges. It also brought to mind the experience of my forbears over a century ago.
We miss you.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle
Discovered that the Bloomberg TV stream available on the web carries Charlie Rose. A nice resource for those of us without cable.