Matt’s Blog > Business

Last night we were unloading a shopping cart. When done, the place to put it away was pretty far away. But there were about ten other shopping carts littering the parking lot nearby, so I said, “Meh, what’s one more?”
As we got in the car, I proclaimed, “Broken Windows in action!” I think people were [...]

One company’s job listing advertises the type of benefits its employees get… You know, health insurance, dental insurance, accidental death insurance…
Wait, what?
I suppose it’s actually a good thing, but I’m kind of left wondering what my odds of dying on the job there are?

What is it with American auto companies and so utterly failing with hybrids? Gas it $3.50/gallon and up right now as I post this. There’s a big green movement. In short, people really care about getting halfway decent gas mileage.
So American auto finally got with the program and offered a couple hybrids. The Ford Escape [...]

A long time ago I coined Wagner’s Law: “While driving, the probability of encountering a bicyclist is exponentially higher when approaching a blind curve.” Why this is, I have no idea, but the world’s bicyclists always seem to be entering blind curves when I’m driving. I very rarely get to pass a bicyclist on a [...]

Fast Company has an interesting article talking about how the human race seems destined for laziness. Presented two choices, one the “default” (as in, it’ll happen if they don’t do anything), the other being far superior but requiring that they do something, most take the inferior default.
The main example is the “Save More Tomorrow,” where, [...]

One thing I can’t stand is meetings where people have no sense of purpose. Today we had a group meeting for the final project for one of my classes. No one was really going anywhere with it. We discussed a few ways we could split the assignment up.
So I did something that worked even better [...]

A huge amount of the stuff I do here involves working, online, with other people. I’m surprised at how technology really isn’t where I expect it. Here are some things I do often, and how technology helps me–or fails me.

Communicating with persistent groups. I’ve got a board of people who are taking over the club [...]

There are a few different technologies commonly used in two-way radio. One is digital voice, a la Motorola ASTRO / Project 25’s CAI (IMBE), which is a 9600bps (9.6kbps) digital stream. Another interesting technology is trunking: a city might have 12 talkgroups (think “virtual channels”), but only 4 frequencies. One frequency is designated as a [...]

Now that Comcast has vowed to quit arbitrarily blocking services on their Internet service, they’ve decided to shift the degraded quality to their HD offerings. This article talks a bit about how Comcast is running some heavy compression to fit more HD channels into finite bandwidth, but it has lots of words. So check out [...]

As I’ve mentioned in a few past posts, those of us in business school really don’t think normally. Having found that there are a lot of good jobs in Nashua (versus my previously-narrow search in Boston), I started looking, out of curiosity, at real estate in Nashua. And I stumbled across this place, a home [...]