Steven Engelhardt

This post marks the tenth lost hour in two days due to the highly addictive Flash game Desktop Tower Defense.

So it looks like the Crosstown Expressway may be rising, zombie-like, from the dead.

I live within about 1.5 miles from the western edge of the proposed expressway, so I have a personal interest in this proposal. However, as I have no particularly deep or insightful thoughts about it, I’ll summarize my views with “I support it, with reservations.”

Update 2007-02-22 10:14AM: Today I read this quote:

[Chicago Mayor Richard M.] Daley favors a two-lane, truck-only “freeway” — with a mass transit line down the middle — built on a platform to avoid displacing hundreds of homes and businesses in the Cicero Avenue corridor.

If that’s the final proposal, I rescind my earlier support. The freeway should be accessible by cars.

If you see this post, the move to my new web hosting provider was successful.

Last month, my wife and I vacationed to California. Here are some pictures from that vacation:

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Home Depot, the world’s third-largest retailer by sales, announced a big change: Mr. Nardelli was leaving the company, taking an exit package valued at about $210 million, including $20 million in cash severance.

Lublin, Joann S., Ann Zimmerman, and Chad Terhune. Behind Nardelli’s Abrupt Exit [$]. The Wall Street Journal 2007 Jan 4: A1.

Home Depot’s share price fell 8% during Mr. Nardelli['s] tenure, which began in December 2000. The company is locked in a fierce battle with Lowe’s, which boasts newer, brighter stores and a better image with many shoppers. Lowe’s stock has risen 188% in the past six years.

Ibid.

Mr. Nardelli moved to cut back on higher-paid full-time employees with experience as plumbers or handymen, and to rely more on part-time workers with less experience answering home-improvement questions from customers. Frequently, Mr. Nardelli found himself fending off questions about deteriorating customer service and about whether cost-cutting was the cause of that.

Ibid.

[As part of his exit package negotiation,] Mr. Nardelli submitted a one-page list of perks he was willing to drop, including personal use of the six corporate jets…

Ibid.

…guaranteed $3 million annual bonus… [emphasis mine]

Ibid.

Much of [Mr. Nardelli's compensation] package is due to the rich employment contract he negotiated with the Home Depot board before leaving General Electric Co., where he was one of three finalists to succeed Jack Welch. Mr. Welch convinced his board to give all three finalists large batches of stock options, telling board members they would have to make good on only one man’s options, one director says. Upon leaving GE, the board was told, the two runners-up likely would use those awards to negotiate pay at their next jobs — which is exactly what Mr. Nardelli and James McNerney, who is now CEO of Boeing, did.

Ibid.

“Some defenders of CEO pay argue that CEOs are rewarded for increasing the stock or the overall value of the company, but judging by today’s market reaction, Mr. Nardelli’s contribution to raising Home Depot’s stock value consists of quitting and receiving hundreds of millions of dollars to do so,” [said Barney Frank (D., Mass.), chairman designate of House Financial Services Committee]

Ibid.

Due to a tragic loss of data, along with incessant spam problems, I have disabled all comments on my blog.

Update 2007-01-16 9:54AM: I have reenabled comments, but all previous comments were lost. Yet another case study in the importance of backups.

Before Christmas, I was spending far too much time playing Diablo 2. Since Christmas, my free time has been consumed by:

• Learning piano on my new Yamaha DGX-220
• Playing SubSpace/Continuum
• Playing my PSP

By the way, LocoRoco for the PSP is awesome.

Via Barry Ritholtz’s blog The Big Picture I ran across the following fascinating article from the Federal Reserve: Recent Changes in U.S. Family Finances: Evidence from the 2001 and 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances.

My preferred airfare search engine, especially for international flights, is ITA Software’s Fare Shopping Engine. The month-long search is especially useful if your dates are flexible.

I’ve also heard good things about QIXO.

Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) opened his 1830 novel Paul Clifford with this infamous sentence:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

To honor this noxious piece of writing, the San Jose State University invented the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest in which contestants must “compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.” Here are some of my favorite entries from the 2006 contest results:

She looked at her hands and saw the desiccated skin hanging in Shar-Pei wrinkles, confetti-like freckles, and those dry, dry cuticles–even her “Fatale Crimson” nail color had faded in the relentless sun to the color of old sirloin–and she vowed if she ever got out of the Sahara alive, she’d never buy polish on sale at Walgreen’s again.

Christin Keck, Kent, OH

The cold, cynical wind molested the auburn tresses of the fair damsel clinging to the steel of the rail trestle, from which vantage point she could see that it was a long way down to where she would land if she fell, which, given the velocity she would attain and the unfriendly pavement leering up at her, added to soft tissue’s low tolerance for sudden impacts, would be a very bad thing.

Pat Hricko, Nicholson, PA

“Send a message back to Command Central on Earth and ask for their advice, which we will be able receive immediately even at this great distance, thanks to the ingenious manipulation of coherent radiation through a Bose-Einstein condensate and the bizarre influence of the Aspect effect, which enables us to impart identical properties to remotely separated photons,” Captain Buzz told the feathered Vjorkog at the comms desk, “and tell them our life-pod is going to explode in eight seconds.”

Christopher Backeberg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

As Johann looked out across the verdant Iowa River valley, and beyond to the low hills capped by the massive refrigerator manufacturing plant, he reminisced on the history of the great enterprise from its early days, when he and three other young men, all of differing backgrounds, had only their dream of bringing refrigeration to America’s heartland to sustain them, to the present day, where they had become the Midwest’s foremost group of refrigerator magnates.

Dick Davis, Circle Pines, MN