Kyle Mulka’s Blog

Over the last year or two, Yahoo hasn’t been doing so well. Their CEO, Terry Semel, stepped down last year. One of the founders, Jerry Yang, took over and embarked on a 100 day review of the company looking for ways to improve the situation. Recently he announced that they had evaluated priorities and will be laying off a good chunk of employees. Just after Yahoo’s most recent earnings report, Microsoft announced an unsolicited takeover bid. Microsoft is definitely taking advantage of the fact that Yahoo’s stock has recently fallen significantly recently. The offer is more than twice their current stock price making it seem like its a really good offer. We’ll see what happens. Will Yahoo accept the offer? Will Microsoft be able to acquire the company without breaching any laws?

I watched the MacWorld 2008 Keynote by Steve Jobs, and frankly wasn’t as impressed as I’ve been by the last few. I guess its hard to follow the announcement of the iPhone.

The MacBook Air is pretty cool, but how much value is there in getting a laptop that small? I consider my current MacBook to be thin and light enough to not worry about it. The screen and keyboard looks to be the same size, so the amount room it takes up hasn’t really changed. The extra multitouch gestures are again cool, but with the current applications, don’t appear to be that useful. Maybe I just don’t use the right applications. Maybe it will enable entirely new applications that we haven’t seen yet. That would be cool.

I think the movie rentals on the Apple TV will be a game changer, especially since you don’t need a computer anymore. But, since I’m a technology guy, I’m not that impressed because I don’t see any new technology here. It’s all about the content deals with the major movie producers. I’ll bet that it was the content deals which was causing Steve Jobs to keep saying that Apple TV was Apple’s hobby project. He couldn’t say anything about what was in the works, so he was putting off the fact that Apple TV wasn’t doing that well.

Time Capsule I think was a smart move for Apple. People really need to backup their stuff. It needs to be really easy to do. I think that adding a hard drive to the home router is a good way to go. I personally don’t need it because I bought a Drobo and hooked it up to the Airport Extreme. So, I have two redundant 500 GB hard drives in there so that if one dies, I don’t  loose any data. So, I can use it not just as backup, but for primary storage.

Yup… that’s right, I shelled out $400 for an oversize PDA with a black and white screen that has a refresh rate of about once per second.

On the other hand, it has a free wireless internet connection wherever you go, replaces the weight of over 200 books, and has a screen which looks more like a book than a computer screen.

Last Sunday, I went with my friend Preat, who is working at Boeing this summer, to the Boeing factory in Everett, WA for Family Day. It’s the one day per year where Boeing employees get to take their friends and family into the factory. The building itself is the largest building in the world by volume. They make the 747, 767, 777, and the brand new 787 there. The building was packed with thousands of people. I got to walk under the wings of 3 of the four types of plans, and also got to see two huge cargo planes called Dream Lifters which they use to transport the wings of other plans.

Ban on using an iPod while crossing the street in New York City considered.

http://www.wnbc.com/news/10948106/detail.html?rss=ny&psp=news

You know those banner ads that are like little flash games, where you have to shoot the ducky, out lift our president, slap the monkey, play dress up, or whatever? Well, straight from that genre, this is quite possibly the most annoying web advertisement I have ever seen. It’s just a mosquito that flies around the screen making a loud obnoxious mosquito like noise with the only ways of stopping it being either zapping the mosquite with your zapper thing (which is actually harder than I thought it would be) or leaving the page.

Just testing out this schedule iframe thingy with my schedule for this term… although the term is almost over.

How many gigabytes of information does an average human brain have in it?

How would you measure this?

Here’s some possibilities:

A transcript of everything you ever said.

The audio of everything you’ve ever said.

All the words you’ve ever read.

Ok, so Google seems to be confused as to where the online grocery stores serving Ann Arbor actually are, so I’m going to list them here in hopes that Google will find this page and at least put them somewhere in the top 10 results.

Busybody’s Student Laundry - they deliver other stuff too (besides your laundry)
Ann Arbor Grocery Delivery
Wolverine Grocery
Munchy Delivery
A2 Errands - opening May 2011

Out of Business:
Arbor Grocery
Go Blue Grocery
Grocery Run

Google:
online groceries ann arbor
online grocery shopping ann arbor
online grocery delivery ann arbor

And, of course, if you have any additions to the list, let me know in the comments or send me an email. Sometimes comments get held up by my spam protection system.

My theory about why most of these online grocery delivery companies go out of business, is that they were run by students who then graduated to find real jobs. Groceries is a very low margin business and hence difficult to make successful. You have to charge a healthy markup to make money, but if your markup is too high, students won’t buy from you. Also, I believe a lot of grocery delivery companies have problems with the usability of their websites.