a musing julius…

its been exactly one year (okay, i’m off a day) since i returned from a vacation in florida and jumped on a treadmill. i ran 5.5 miles that day. it took me an hour exactly, because the treadmills downstairs only let you run for 60 minutes. the sweat stung my eyes, my feet were bloody from my shoes, my legs burned, my lungs gasped and my heart pounded out of my chest. i cried that day. it was an awakening. i felt dead and alive at the same time. it dulled the pain i felt. it fueled my anger. it motivated me to become better at something, anything, whatever.

but returning home this day was different than a year ago. i didn’t feel bad running 5.5 miles, and i did it in a much quicker time, but i didn’t feel better. the pain from a year ago comes back, and a realization floods me that a year ago, running to dull the pain had one side effect; it made me run from the reasons i felt the way i did. i blamed everything and everyone for the pain i felt, but didn’t blame myself. today, i thought long and hard, and realized i’m the reason for the way i feel.

much like a year ago i started the long and slow drive run to making myself physically “better,” today, i start the long and slow process of taking responsibility for my emotions and actions. my mom thinks its about time. i know others that agree with her.

flying through the sky would be a pretty sweet skill to have. walking through walls, bending steel rods, or being invisible, also equally sweet.

but most of these skills, as cool as they are, just don’t cut it for me. i’ve always wondered what superhuman powers would be awesomest (well, i probably stopped wondering when i was 12) but either way, these “ordinary” powers just would cut it for me, personally. so i’ve created my top list of eventually superpowers that i’d like.

• instant temperature hands:i hate when i’m at work and i’m halfway done through my perfect cup of coffee when an ad-hoc meeting drags me away from my forgotton cup, and i come back to learn the coffee is cold. bam, my instant heating hands would be able to reheat food or beverage to an exact temperature as determined by the kelvin scale. all i do is think the digit, and point. also works for cooling warm beer left too close to the grill. pros: hot coffee, ice removal, cold beer. cons: potential catastrophic ice age while cheering for sports teams.
• hands that hum when you rub them together: one of my favorite powers ever, i’d just love to have hands that hum at roughly 60-70 decibels when i rub them together gently. just imagine the party gags. pros: hands that hum when you run them together. cons: awkward moments caused by rubbing my hands together
• speaking with animals: yeah, this would be sweet. i could speak with pigeons, or tigers, or squirrelees
• water into wine: jesus knew how to threw a party. this would work out for me too.

thinking of all these makes me want all of them. just imagine, a dude who can speak with animals, turn water into wine, instantly heat soup from 20 feet away, and can create a humming noise when rubbing his hands together…

oh yeah…

so i went to the tigers game today, and going to today’s game prompted me to think about another one of those things that annoys me about spectators during baseball games: bird-of-prey vision which allows them to call balls and strikes from over 400 feet away, regardless of alcohol consumed in the last 3 hours.

so today, sitting row 10 in section 139 of comerica park (roughly 100 feet past 3rd base) i wasn’t surprised to sit behind two dudes, who happened to have such vision, and also a magical ability to BEND LIGHT. from where we were sitting, all one can tell is the height at which the pitch was when it crosses the plate. even then, the ball is so ridiculously small, i don’t even understand how they can even begin to say, “that pitch was close”

no, listen, you have no idea how close it is. arguing about balls and strikes as a spectator is like randomly walking into a hospital and telling the patients the doctors there are morons and they should listen to you instead. you’re 200 feet away. you’re not even allowed to do that typical male whistle when they’re typically disgusted, but don’t want to express it verbally. you know, the bomb dropping sound condensed into half a second, paired with a head shake.

its even worse when people are in the upper deck, behind home plate. its as if the elevation and the fact that you can “see” the entire field also gives you the ability to see through the umpire obstructing your view of home plate. or the ability to bend light.

sometime ago, in the not too distant past, i remember a time where my mother would call me “plumpy.” this was her way of saying i needed to watch my weight. it may not have been the friendliest or nicest word but it was what she said.

imagine my amazement when i learned that plumpy is not a word. its not even close to a word. plump; that’s a word. plumpy; not a word. i was amazed. a word i was so familiar with not only as a pre-adult, but even to this day, was just not even a word.

makes me think of all the other words that we use on a daily basis that aren’t actually words. i can’t think of any specific examples…but at least i know that something cannot be “plumpy”

although i wish it could.

one of my favorite things about detroit in the summer is the woodward. the woodward is a fancy restaurant kiddy corner to my building. i’ve never actually been there, but i always enjoy the atmosphere, and here’s why…

during the evening, the patio at the woodward has a jazz band outside, playing a great mix of songs that i don’t recognize, but bring me in to a state of awesomeness. see, i can open the window in my apartment and listen to this jazz band play while chilling on my couch with a hot cup of tea. some nights, they’re playing so hard, i don’t even have to open the window.

there’s something about live music that i truly do enjoy (even if i wouldn’t go to see a concert multiple times) and sometimes for me, i’d rather experience the local venue (or sit in the comfort of my couch) and just listen to some great jazz from a group of guys that may or may not have ever played together.

surprisingly, i can get that experience without walking out the door. it’s pretty neat.

no, i didn’t buy an iPhone 3G, but i watched as those crazy enough to stand in line with their current iPhones at somerset, struggled to get theirs. i imagine a WallE type of scene where the earth on monday will be littered with useless “regular” iPhones (which until friday was still dubbed “the” iPhone)

seriously though, i’m writing about the new coldplay album. it has rocked my world. upon arriving in germany for the month long work epic in june, both violet hill and viva la vida were played repeatedly. while struggling personally in germany, i found the song violet hill inspirational (and after this crazy weekend, it helped me even more.)

i’m not a music critic, and can’t come close. i rarely listen to an entire album (unless it’s pink floyd) and will often just listen to the same song that i love repeatedly.

anyway, i just like these two songs. they make me happy in a time where focusing on friends, family and work is really ALL i need. seriously. maybe.

my buddy hari has been a mentor and friend of mine forever.  he was my freshman year resident assistant at northwestern. he took me to my first college party on garnett st. in evanston with jwade and grover. he recruited me to come work for ford. he watched over me and introduced me to the people i consider my strongest networking connections. he introduced me to derek, my best friend in detroit on the first day i moved from chicago. i visited him in china a year ago, and this week he’s in detroit.

we met over drinks tonight at the motor city brewing works with derek, talked about life over the past year and discussed where he’s been.

hari has done everything, been everywhere. he worked for ford’s cio. he worked in shanghai and nanjing china for a year. he spent 4 months travelling on one of those round the world tickets and flew to nepal, india, dubai, south africa, tanzania, all of europe, and countless other places. he can make friends wherever he goes, never lacks self-confidence and considers the world is in the palm of his hands. he was accepted to every business school he applied to, harvard, stanford, princeton, northwestern, penn, mit, to name a few and chose stanford. he works for a company that hires just a handful of summer business school interns a year from all over the country. apple, google, microsoft, and a host of others were companies he turned down. i wouldn’t refuse any of them given the opportunity.

talking with hari for 15 minutes is enough to entice anyone to drop what their doing and leave their life for something better. i’d argue hari has connections (or can get them) at every company in the fortune 500. he asked me tonight to come to the bay area and just spend one week with him, during which he’ll introduce me to anyone i need to know to start or join a company doing whatever i want to do.

his outlook on life, and relationships, and business, and politics is so different and so intelligent. he can logically argue through each and every point, reference data and cite articles and authors with numerical statistics to back his argument. his skills are unprecedented in my view. he argued with the ceo of amd about their business model. tomorrow he’ll likely tell the ceo of delphi they’re doing something wrong. he told the cio of ford his dream was to become an astronaut.

most of all, hari is just something i want to be. what i think many of us want to be. he does what many of us just dream or talk about. he’s been places and done things many of us can only imagine. he methodically plans his moves and knows when and where to make it. in the game of life, he just knows how to get things done and do what he wants to do.

talking to him tonight just gave me new found energy to make myself better. the last time i felt like this was last year august when i took up running. i’m not quite sure what i’ll do with hari’s motivation this time, but i think studying is in my future.

tomorrow, we celebrate part ii of the hari / detroit crew reunion.

i use a specific urinal at work. there, i said it.

it’s mine. i always use it. never have i walked in and not used it. in fact, i’m sure if someone else was using it when i walked in, i’d probably hide in a stall until it was free, then i’d jump out and reclaim it as my own. luckily this hasn’t happened to date.

strangely, this urinal doesn’t fit my formula for choosing a urinal, but its the one i always go to. i guess i don’t eat my own dog food. but whatever. imagine my shock and awe when i arrived to find my urinal out of order. idly covered in a plastic bag, indicating that it was not only to be avoided, but any attempts to use it would yield unpleasant “backsplatter,” the bane of many business professionals wearing light colored slacks.

i stood for many moments and thought this is what life is like: your favorite urinal covered by an out of order sign.

i didn’t like it. they better fix that damn thing soon.

obama’s energy plan is comprehensive, far reaching, impressive and expensive. while i do not believe all of it can be implemented given the methods by which he intends to fund them, i feel very strongly about one of his points: investing in cellulosic ethanol.

i believe i’ve written about this and my buddy naim has thoughts on this as well. being that obama is from the corn power house of illinois, supporting cellulosic ethanol should have shivers running up and down the backs of corn farmers producing corn for the purpose of fermenting up some ethanol and collecting the governments dime. i don’t want to rehash this discussion here again, but man, if obama delivers on cellulosic ethanol, we’d be golden. here’s why:

1) its more energy efficient than corn-starch based sources of ethanol. switchgrass and corn stover are great sources of cellulose material. switchgrass even more so than corn stover, but if we keep doing what we do with corn, and go back just to farming it as a food source, we’ll have LOTS of corn stover, and we won’t be wasting land that could goto growing other foods for export to countries that desperately need it.

2) cellulosic ethanol sources (mainly switchgrass) remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than corn starch-based sources. this would also support obama’s plan to reduce CO2 emissions and reestablish (or just potentially establish) some u.s. leadership in climate change and carbon neutrality. planting a whole lot of switchgrass along major water ways and in land which is not traditionally used for harvesting food crop can decrease erosion, prevent flooding (which is a major issue in obama’s home state right now), reduce CO2 from the air, and utilize resources once thought unusable.

most importantly…

3) it shows that obama is willing to sacrifice the huge benefits of one group of people, for the benefit of all people. more amazingly is that it is just the typical democratic target: rich people and rich companies. instead it’s just farmers, sure they might be rich farmers, but in general, it’s his constituency. his own party supporters. anyway, i think obama is intelligent enough to admit that corn-starch based sources are energy inefficient, and he’s ready to tell corn farmers in his home state, and the rest of the u.s. that growing corn for the sake of collecting the government subsidy and creating ethanol is no longer the way to go. just think, a polititian, that is ready and willing and able to make a change like that. investing in corn as a feedstock, using the leftover corn stover for some cellulosic ethanol production, but taking the majority from switchgrass? potentially stopping the use of corn starch to produce ethanol? i hope he can do it. perhaps, “yes, he can”?

amazing. incredible.

to me, that’s change.

and as another aside, this article really inspired me. i hope obama can define a new era in american history. that would be awesome.

never in my life, have i felt more angry about a political idea than obama’s recent remarks about raising corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards to 50 mpg by 2027. normally politicians ideas don’t rile me up, but this one got to me. full disclosure: i work for an american automaker. i do not write on their behalf, and in no way are my views intended to reflect the views of my employer or any other automaker.

one part of his energy plan is to raise CAFE standards. force automakers into producing vehicles that average 50mpg. so for each heavy duty truck that works on a farm or construction site, or a large sedan doing taxi work in manhattan that gets 20 miles per gallon another will have to be built that gets 80mpg. while i do not oppose the recent increase in CAFE standards to 35 mpg by 2020, the jump to 50mpg in 7 years later is unrealistic given current and potentially future technology, and shows a misunderstanding of how the car buying public makes its decisions. for those not understanding what CAFE is, read here. now i’m assuming you’re with me. obama is playing with your emotions. today, your car doesn’t get 50mpg; it may just get 20mpg. you feel like you’re suffering. obama wants you to believe that automakers are to blame for cars that have “poor” fuel economy, and that it is their responsibility *today* to give you cars and trucks that get 30 to 80mpg. he believes forcing automakers with the threat of fines will persuade them into building more fuel efficient cars. he wants you to join him in pointing the finger at automakers for not giving you what you want.

up until gas hit 4 dollars, the car buying public was purchasing SUV’s and trucks like there was no tomorrow. toyota, ford, gm, chrysler, the others were all giving you exactly what you wanted. you wanted air conditioning when it was hot, heated seats when it was cold, huge cupholders, leather, etc. those things add weight, making a vehicle less fuel efficient. on top of that, car companies have added airbags, safety belts, reinforced frames, stability control, and the list goes on. what was once a driver side airbag is now 14 airbags that pop out of god knows where to protect you. you demanded to be safe, and you got it. you now need to blame the same automaker that got you the car or truck in the exact color, with all the options and features that you wanted, because $80 to fill up each week is just too much. they should have even warned you, that hey, just think if gas is $4 dollars in 3 years, you’ll be really unhappy you purchased this vehicle.

the automakers are suffering too. if car companies were to blame for not giving you what you wanted, they probably wouldn’t be laying off hundreds of thousands of workers. but their pain is coming from the fact that you now want fuel efficiency to be your primary buying factor. it took 4 weeks for all the automakers to see fuel efficiency is the #1 most important thing on a car buyers mind today. that’s the first time in history buying habits have changed so dramatically and so quickly. before that, believe it or not women were most concerned about the size of cup holders in their vehicle. men bought cars on horsepower. the automakers know there is an issue…that is why they are all now rushing to change the products they sell. the free market, not the government is deciding whether 25 mpg is enough or 50 is more adequate. it’s becoming clear that the government doesn’t NEED to increase CAFE standards. the car buying public has already determined that cars and trucks that get under 20mpg are no longer acceptable, which is why sales of those vehicles industry-wide is down in the range of 30-40%. raising the standard does nothing but put more pressure and less flexibility on car makers to actually build the vehicles that people want.

CAFE is really just a number on a piece of paper. some companies don’t even bother to meet the criteria. it makes more financial sense for them to pay the CAFE fine. those companies as of 2006 are the former daimlerchrysler, volkswagon/audi, ferrari, porsche, and maserati. buyers of those brands wouldn’t buy their product, as they’d have to sacrifice luxury, performance or speed. CAFE fines are also a pittance compard to the losses of american auto companies that range in the billions of dollars a year because they cannot keep up with changing demand. the highest recent CAFE fine was close to $25 million to BMW. using total year results, in 2006, ford lost $35 million dollars a day. for total year results in 2007, gm lost $35 million dollars every 2 hours. 

obama’s bold claim to enact these higher standards is also an insult to tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of engineers who have spent the better part of the last 100 years bending, prodding and cajolng everything they can out of the laws of thermodynamics, while keeping you safer, giving you better “performance,” a more comfortable ride, all for you and anywhere between 5 and 7 of your friends. and your golf clubs. everyone in the industry understands the need for more fuel efficiency. claiming that it can be done with today’s technology at reasonable costs doesn’t understand the economics of the situation. the battery pack in the ford escape hybrid itself costs over $7,000, and the public is barely willing to pay the $3,000 premium on those vehicles. honda discontinued the accord hybrid because people weren’t willing to fork over the $4,000 premium over the standard accord.

automakers like GM can make you plug-ins for $40,000. they’ve also said they plan to lose money selling them to the public. some like honda can give you hydrogen fuel cell vehicles but it will cost you $600 a month, and honda has also agreed to lose money. they’ll lose SO much money making these cars, that they’ll only build 200, and at least one of the criteria for getting one is living in Southern California.

obama wants to punish the automakers for a decision you made. in the end, you signed the lease, or the loan to get a car with 17 mpg because you wanted something big and safe and cheap. chances are, when you bought that car 2-3 years ago, there was a more fuel efficient choice. most every single major automaker (except those in niche luxury markets) has at least one vehicle that gives you over 30 miles per gallon. you DID NOT choose that car for one reason or another. today you’re ready, willing and (maybe) able to choose the more fuel efficient vehicle. and automakers are hearing the call by stopping production of trucks, SUV’s and increasing production of more fuel efficient vehicles.

punishing is not a way to inspire innovation. 12 years ago, it was thought that flying to space needed multi-billion dollar budgets and NASA. a reward was proposed to see if anyone could do it on just a multi-million dollar budget. just 10 years after the reward was announced, there was a winner. a couple of engineers flew INTO SPACE, without NASA and with far far less than a billion dollars. so maybe instead of punishing automakers, suppliers and their employees, why don’t you encourage some others to get involved in the innovation. throw some support around this, maybe?

transportation  used to be simple, cheap and affordable for everyone. it can still be that way with a massive shift in driving habits, types of vehicles and a dramatic and drastic change in consumer expectations about what they will PAY and what they will GET from a car that gives them 45 mpg in return.