Brian @ Wongside

Verse 2:

A fool finds no pleasure in understanding
but delights in airing his own opinions.

This reminds me of those people in my life who are slow to listen and quick to speak. They interrupt and fail to hear me out, jumping to erroneous conclusions. It’s really frustrating, and good to know that Proverbs addresses such people.

Verse 11:

The wealth of the rich is their fortified city;
they imagine it an unscalable wall.

The following verses don’t expose this as folly, but I think it’s safe to assume that this is the implied conclusion. By the very fact that the word “imagine” is the operative word, I think it’s clear that wealth really isn’t a “fortified city” or an “unscalable wall”.  I think we’ve all learned this lesson with the collapse of the economy.

Verse 13:

He who answers before listening—
that is his folly and his shame.

Another way to phrase verse 2.

Verse 22:

He who finds a wife finds what is good
and receives favor from the LORD.

Another reminder of the blessing of being married! I think it’s interesting how many times I’ve read this phrase, or something similar in Proverbs. But I’ve never read anything about the blessing of owning a house, or a car, or a boat, or stuff in general. The emphasis is almost never on material “stuff,” but it continues to emphasize the blessing of having a wife. Indeed, I’m blessed to have Charlene.

Bummer. I’m so stinking far behind, it’s not even funny. I’ll have an update from Proverbs 18 tonight. I promise.

I’m not quite sure what happened the last week or so, but I completely missed Proverbs 5-12. I read them of course; I just never got around to posting about them here. Totally my bad. I guess they weren’t as interesting to me as the rest of the book has been. I think the first part is mostly about personifying Wisdom and Folly as well as warnings against the adulteress. Good warnings to be sure, but much harder to summarize or boil down into one or two verses.

They definitely weren’t the one or two liners found throughout the rest of the book.

In any case, I’m back on tomorrow with Proverbs 13. Likely, I’ll be off the horse for a few days after that because of the weekend. Weekends are always hard to post on. I have no idea why. I guess I just get busy with other things.

Intel has a really great high-level overview of what it takes to make an Intel processor. If you’ve ever wondered, here are the pages and the pictures to help you out.

Here’s an interesting article on why HD Video Downloads don’t look so great. Apparently, “hi-def” isn’t a really well regulated or defined measure of video quality. When you have bit rates that range from 1.5-40 megabits per second, it’s easy to see why there’s a range in quality.

I’m blessed to have a wife who has lots of great ideas. She comes up with all sorts of creative ideas to solve problems. Some of them are websites; some are actual physical inventions; some are hybrids of both; some are neither. But the point is that she has a lot of ideas.

The problem with having a lot of ideas is finding that someone else has “stolen” your idea. Or that someone has already executed on your idea. Or even being afraid of someone “stealing” your idea. For this reason, I have often tell Charlene that the value of an idea pales in comparison with the value of being able to execute on that idea. Based on this article, I think Tech Crunch agrees with me. The title of the article is actually posed as a question rather than a definitive statement. But I think the question is rather rhetorical.

Based on the evidence given, it’s abundantly clear that the answer is yes, execution is more important that vision. I think this paragraph sums it up nicely:

Napster changed the music world, but it was iTunes that profited off of it. Google was one of the last companies in the Internet bubble to try their hand at building a search engine—and was laughed out of some VCs’ offices as a result. Palm pioneered the smart phone, not Blackberry. And Friendster was the social network pioneer before Mark Zuckerberg even entered college.

Fortunately for her, Charlene married one of the least visionary guys around. I may lack the vision and creativity needed to come up with ideas, but I’ve got an abundance of practicality and ability to execute. I’ll make it happen. It seems to be just one of the ways that God, in His sovereignty, brings two people with different gifts together in a synergistic relationship where they can really complement each other.

For that reason, I’d say Charlene and I make a pretty good pair.

We use Outlook for our e-mail and calendaring at work. If you use it, you might be happy to know that there’s a way to prevent recipients of your e-mail from hitting the “Reply to All” and “Forward” buttons if they’re Outlook users. The best thing is that you’re not running code on their machine so there’s no need to worry about being called a malicious hacker. It just works.

We’re all one step closer to having the kind of control we’d like to have over our e-mails. Of course, the caveat is that this does not work for other mail clients including Gmail. Bummer.

As a follow up to my post on Whole Foods and organic food yesterday as well as my article in the Wall Street Journal, I bring you this anecdote:

After my interview with Katy McLaughlin from the WSJ, I was curious as to whether I could find Prime Beef at other establishments. The first place that came to mind was Whole Foods Market. They’re known for their expensive, locally grown, organic food. I figured if I could find an expensive cut of meet like Prime anywhere, it would be there.

So that Saturday I went to Whole Foods and I talked to the butcher. I don’t know if they keep their “second string” butchers on duty on Saturdays, or what was going on, but this guy and his compatriot did not know their meat.  The conversation went something like this:

Me: Hello, I was wondering what grade your meat is.

Butcher 1: What grade?

Me: Yeah, like the USDA grade?

Butcher 1: What do you mean?

Me: Like, Select, Choice, Prime?

Butcher 1: Select Choice or Prime? Hmm…not sure. (Notice he thought “Select Choice” was one kind of meat, not two.)

*Calls to other butcher

Butcher 1: Hey, what USDA grade is our beef? Select Choice or Prime?

*Butcher 2 walks over.

Butcher 2: Well, you have to look at it.

Me: You have to look at it?  What do you mean?

Butcher 2: Well, it’s all based on marbling, so you just have to look at it.

*He picks up a piece of Ribeye (my favorite).

Butcher 2: See, this looks like a piece of Choice. Look at all that marbling.

Me: Oh…uh-huh. (What the heck is he talking about?)

*Butcher 2 picks up another piece of meat.

Butcher 2: And see, this piece looks more like Select.

Me: Got it. Do you ever get Prime?

Butcher 2: Yeah, it depends on what is shipped to us.

*Points to another piece of meat.

Butcher 2: But this piece looks like Prime.

Me: Oh really?

Butcher 2: Yeah. See, we usually only carry Select, Choice and Prime.

Me: Ahh…I see. So if it’s not here, can I special order it?

Butcher 2: Yeah, of course!

Me: OK. Thanks for your time. Bye

I walked away shaking my head. In case you don’t know why, I’d suggest reading my prior post from when I found the Prime beef. It details all the differences.  First of all, I can’t believe the first butcher didn’t know what USDA meat grades were. Unless he’s not from here, which I’d say is highly unlikely, he really can’t call himself a butcher if he doesn’t know about USDA grades.

Second, one can’t just “tell” what USDA grade a piece of meat is. It’s professionally graded by official USDA meat graders. Their job is to look at a beef carcass and determine what grade the entire cow is. It’s not on a steak by steak basis. The entire animal is graded.

Third, unless you’re a maker of processed meat, the only grades of meat available to you are Select, Choice and Prime. Below that, you have Utility, Cutter, and Canner. As this USDA page indicates:

Utility, Cutter, and Canner grades are seldom, if ever, sold at retail but are used instead to make ground beef and processed products.

In other words, it’s inane to claim that you usually have Select, Choice, and Prime if you’re a (theoretically) upscale butcher like Whole Foods. That would be like a geometry teacher claiming “We only cover polygons with more than 3 sides in this class.” Of course you do! Because if a “shape” had less than 3 sides, it wouldn’t be a polygon. Ridiculous!

In any case, I hope you get two takeaways from this:

1. A good laugh. It was pretty funny to me.
2. A lesson that you need to have a good butcher, and a good relationship with said butcher. Beware of butchers who will sell you a $25 ribeye or a $35 filet mignon and have no idea what grade it is.

All you Whole Paycheck Whole Foods  and organic junkies take note: organic food is no better for you than ordinary food. People are spending $48 billion a year to buy organic food that provides no significant difference in nutritional value from any other food. (I’ll refrain from claiming that they’re wasting $48 billion a year because if they didn’t buy organic, they’d still have to spend money on regular food. But given that organic food can cost double what non-organic would, I think it’s fair to say that at least $24 billion is wasted.)

Anyways, I’ve never been a huge believer in buying organic. I’m a pretty thrifty consumer, so I’ll pretty much buy whatever gives me the best value. Usually, that’s not organic food. Historically, if there was an organic piece of food that was on sale for the same price as regular food, I’d buy the organic because of the perceived health benefits (everyone told me it was better), but with this report, I might not even do that any more but for the fact that I know I’d be getting something on the cheap.

This is a good reason not to eat ground beef for a while. There’s been an outbreak of salmonella in Colorado related to ground beef. Apparently, 825,769 lbs were recalled. Yay for steak!