AOL Mail finally enters the 20th century

I was on my personal AOL webmail account tonight when I noticed something that I have not seen before, at least on AOL. On the left hand panel of the mail screen, sandwiched between the folders titled “Inbox” and “Sent” is a new folder called “Draft.” AOL webmail users can now save unfinished emails on their accounts without having to entertain complex workarounds such as saving them onto a Word document or emailing them to themselves.

 

When I went onto the AOL/AIM Mail Product Insider Blog to read the announcement, I realized that the real story is not the addition of the new functionality but the absence of it for so long. I first heard of Hotmail more than ten years ago before it was owned by Microsoft and I don’t recall it ever not having had the “Save as draft” functionality. The same can be said about other major providers of free email such as Yahoo! and Gmail. Yet AOL somehow has managed to survive for so long without adding this much needed functionality is a story within itself.

One truly “malicious web site”

At the company where I “work,” we use a service called Websense to block employees from looking at certain web sites on company time. Websense allows companies to set the desired levels of censorship, which usually depends on the corporate culture. At my company, in addition to the standard suspects such as pornographic and hateful sites, employees cannot access sites that offer other vices such as free email, streaming audio/video content, or social networking.

I first learned of this three months ago today when I started working and for the past three months, it's been interesting to learn that Websense classifies some of my regular internet destinations as "tasteless" and others as gambling sites. Yet I was still shocked the other day to learn that Websense classifies the Cavalier Daily web site as “malicious web site.” Not sure what the justification for that is, not that I disagree with the it considering how the paper used to run the nastiest quotes about me when I was in college.

Your best life now

I have been working at my new job for almost three months now and within the past month, I began to notice that I am actually beginning to like my post business school life quite a bit. Thursday night was a bit of a wild night – or about as wild as it can get for me not being in school. I kicked off the Fourth of July three day weekend by going to Bub’s for karaoke night. After two hours of watching townies and old people making an attempt to sing, me and a bunch of girls went to Lucy’s (the new name is P.T.’s Grille but I will forever call it Lucy’s) for 80s night. We had tons of fun even though we didn’t stay long enough to hear my favorite Journey song.

 

Afterwards I thought what a difference one year makes. A year ago that very same night I went out to eat by myself and afterwards drove by Franklin Street wishing I had some people to hang out with. And now for the second weeknight in the same week I went out late into the night with a bunch of people (part of the trick here is to make friends with teachers so during the summertime they don’t have to go to work).

 

I thought about this again on Sunday when I talked with a friend. He recently experienced a change of circumstances and is now in a situation where he has to make new friends. He was lamenting that because people tend to socialize within the same age group, making friends was much easier right out of college compared to now when more of his peers either have children or at least are in serious relationships.

 

Given that this friend is not that much older than I am, I consider myself  pretty lucky that I have the friends that I have in Chapel Hill.

God bless Senator Jesse Helms

I heard on the radio this morning that former U.S. Senator from North Carolina and conservative firebrand Jesse Helms died. My initial thought was how fitting it was that he, very much like others who love America such as his hero Thomas Jefferson and Charles Kuralt, died on the anniversary of the American independence.

 

When I first began following politics at a young age, Helms became an immediate hero because he was one of the few conservatives who was not afraid to speak his mind regardless of the consequences. Yet it wasn’t until I became older that I realized just how rare of a trait this is. Unlike most of his colleagues and many of the people I went on to meet later in life, Helms was more interested in following his internal compass than he was in making social and professional connections or in having people say or write nice things about him.

 

I had the chance to meet the Senator during my first semester in business school when his book came out and he had an event at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. As I was leaving the store, I held the door for a woman who attended with her two children. She was explaining to them that he was controversial and some people don’t like him. I replied that “they don’t make Senators like him anymore.”

Unfortunately they don’t.

 

Speculators and their role in the free market

I don’t like to do this but this is so important that I am going to copy word for word multiple paragraphs from a book that has been on my mind lately. I first read Hidden Order: the Economics of Everyday Life more than ten years ago when I was at UVA and what David Friedman (son of economist Milton Friedman) wrote in Chapter 13 does a much better job at explaining the speculation in the oil market (or any other market for that matter) today than manyof the Congressmen who appeared on the news earlier today.

 

SPECULATION

It is difficult to read either newspapers or history books without occasionally coming across the villainous speculators. Speculators, it sometimes seems, are responsible for all the problems of the world – famines, currency crises, high prices.

 

How Speculation Works

            A speculator buys things when he thinks they are cheap and sells them when he thinks they are expensive. Imagine, for example, that you decide there is going to be a bad harvest this year. You buy grain now, while it is still cheap. If you are right, the harvest is bad, the price of grain goes up, and you sell at a large profit.

            There are several reasons why this way of making a profit gets so much bad press. For one thing, the speculator is profiting by other people’s bad fortune, making money from, in Kipling’s phrase, “Man’s belly pinch and need.” Of course, the sae might be said of farmers, whoare usually considered good guys. For another, the speculator’s purchase of grain tends to drive up the price, making it look as though he is responsible for the scarcity.

            But in order to make money, the speculator must sell as well as buy. If he buy when grain is plentiful, he does indeed tend to increase the price then; but if he sells when it is scarce (which is what he wants to do in order to make money), he increases the supply and decreases the price just when the additional grain is most useful.

            The speculator, acting for his own selfish motives, does almost exactly what a benevolent ruler would do. When he foresees a future famine he drives up the current price, encouraging consumers to economize on food (by slaughtering meat animals early, for example, to save their feed for human consumption), to import food from abroad, to produce other kinds of food (go fishing, dry fruit, …), and in other ways to prepare for the anticipated shortage. He then stores the wheat and distributes it (for a price) at the peak of the famine. Not only does he not cause famines, he prevents them. 

            Speculators, if successful, smooth out price movements, buying goods when they are below their long-run price and selling them when they are above it, raising the price toward equilibrium in one case and lowering it toward equilibrium in the other. They do what government “price-stabilization” schemes claim to do – reduce short-run fluctuations in prices. in the process, they frequently interfere with such price-stabilization schemes, most of which are run by producing countries and designed to “stabilize” prices as high as possible.

Some nice things I have missed

What an incredible time I had last weekend at the 2008 UVA Reunion where the Classes of 2003, 1998, 1993, 1988, and so on, were invited to the University for its annual reunion weekend. This is the one time every five years when alums can return to campus and expect to regularly run into some of the people who made their University experience the special time that it was.

I spent the weekend attending class dinners, dance parties, talks by prominent members of the faculty and mini-reunion events organized across dorms and campus organizations. Throughout the weekend I was constantly reminded of several things that make the University a unique place where I received a college experience that was second to none.

The first is that the University is a place steeped in history. During the lecture by an architecture professor on the design of the Lawn and the Rotunda, it dawned on me that when I walk by certain parts of campus I am literally walking the steps once taken by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe – three former U.S. Presidents who played a role in the founding of the University. Even though UNC is at least 20 years older than UVA, I don’t have the same sense of history when I walk the campus of UNC. Thesecond is the commonality among those who attended this institution. I remember when I first started working I got an email from a friend asking how the working world was different and I told him that while I always had no difficulty finding commonality with my classmates at UVA, I had trouble finding a similar commonality with people I was meeting outside of school. On Saturday night when after the class dinners, we had a performance on the steps of the Rotunda by current and alumni members of the acapella group Academical Village People. It ended with the UVA President joining the performers in linking arms across shoulders and leading the audience to a rendition of the Good Old Song. There was no more powerful demonstration of this common bond than to see the Lawn littered with alums all proceeding to join hands to sing. Lastly, the University serves as a place where I often get randomly reconnected to people whom I have had encounters with in the past. I was at the Rotunda Dome Room talking to a 2004 alum who was there to help plan her five year reunion next summer. She mentioned that her sister was my year and when I saw her last name on her name tag, I knew exactly who her sister was. Later that day I was at a book signing by NBC reporter and 1983 alum Sarah James, who looks nothing in person like she does on TV by the way, and overheard two women talking. I heard one say she was an economist and when I looked at her name tag, I realized she was a 1978 alum whom I had an on campus job interview with ten years ago during my senior year.

What was without a doubt the best part of the weekend was catching up with the people I graduated with. But the most interesting aspect was what was left unsaid. There is this guy who was your typical pre-law, student government type. I didn’t particularly like the guy and didn’t talk to him at the reunion but each I saw him I smirked at just how fat he’s gotten and how much he resembles Chief Wiggums from the Simpsons. He was nowhere this fat at the last reunion. Another thing that’s changed since the last reunion is that one particular couple is no longer together. The two have since gone their separate ways, gotten married, and went to the reunion with their respective spouses. They strategically made sure they were nowhere near one another at the class dinner.

Every time I reminisce about my college experience, I feel like the main character in the movie Stand By Me looking back to his years growing up. The movie endswith him saying the following words “I never had friends later onlike the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”

The best place to park your car

I saw this last week on Columbia Avenue, South of Franklin Street, on the construction site of the addition to UNC’s Sitterson Hall. This is an even better parking deal than the parking lot on Franklin and Graham Streets that I blogged about during my second year in business school.

With all the students returning to campus in August, I hope the construction crew gets its work done before classes begin. Because I’d hate to think how the large construction vehicles will get into and out of the lot when it becomes completely packed with students’ vehicles.

aoljurlAdd, aoljurlAdd_1