Skip to main content

I was not a fan of Apple& Other tidbits

I was not a fan of Apple computers, I never understood the fetish that it caused among its users.  First, you have to understand that I was of the first generation of PC.  For me a computer was not a thing of beauty, it was a tool I used every single day, many hours a day.  The very last thing I wanted to do was to have a computer at home. 

I purchased my first home computer while living in Asia -- in late 1999, and only because I was starting a consulting business, and needed a computer! Then in 2002 I bought my first Ipod, and I immediately understood what made Apple better -- it was the user interface.  Four years ago, fed up of my every two year purchase of "Gray Boxes" that seem to fail with great regularity I bought a Mac mini -- again the interface blew me away.  Two years ago I bought an Ipad, and "magical" was the first word they came from my mouth -- this was the computer device I always dreamed of (I of the star trek generation)!  

Mr. Jobs, who died yesterday, was an innovator who as one Tweet comment said:  Made something beautiful from something that was ugly.  Mr. Jobs embodies everything that is great about America:  A smart man can rise to the top -- make his mark is few can do anywhere else in the world.  Granted Mr. Jobs is an exception, but where else in the world can such a story occur.

For all of its faults (and they are many as America's numerous critics are found of pointing out) America remains a beacon where the impossible can occur.  The question remains today, where tuition fees even in public university are skyrocketing, if this dream is still possible, but for a 56 year old adopted man in a  blue collar family the dream was possible -- and he made the world a better place.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki

So we sold surplus electricity one time last summer...(Update)

I guess that we will be buying an additional tank for our methane after all.   Over the past few months, we've had several electricity utilities/distributors which operate in our region come to the farm to "inspect our power plant facilities, to ensure they conform to their requirements".  This is entirely my fault.  Last summer we were accumulating too much methane for our tankage capacity, and so instead of selling the excess gas, that would have cost us some money, we (and I mean me) decided to produce excess electricity and sell it to the grid.  Because of all the rules and regulations, we had to specify our overall capacity and timing for the sale of electricity (our capacity is almost 200 Kw) which is a lot but more importantly, it's available 24/7, because it's gas powered.  It should be noted that the two generators are large because we burn methane and smaller generators are difficult to adapt to burn unconventional gas, plus they are advanced and can &qu