I am losing my mind ?

Welcome to my site! I'm Lach Mullen, and I'm glad to see you here. Please feel free to click around, read what you will, check the "About Lach" page, and leave a comment or message. I'm so glad you're here! If you have any ideas of suggestions, let me know!

You know, ever since robots began cleaning my house, I’ve noticed mysanity-meter has been registering a little low.

Today I came home after setting him to run while I was gone and didn’t
hear any sound. I thought to myself, “ahh, he’s done!” but when I looked at his home station (he sleeps in my room) he wasn’t there. Hmm, a little weird he didn’t come home. Then I realised I left my bedroom door open, so he had been wandering the house.

Now, when you have your first Roomba, you really have to Roomba-proof the house. I have to go and make sure nothings laying on the floor, and there’s no dangling cords he could get a hold of and eat. I have a rug I need to roll up and set aside because the ends curl up a bit, and Roomba likes to burrow under the rug and hide. He always makes it out, but sometimes he gets a little scared.

Anyway, when I realised he had wandered out into the rest of the house, I actually called to him. “Roomba,” then I realised I was
calling for a robot. Strangely, I could swear he answered. Roomba beeps, like R2D2, when he’s trying to tell you something, and I heard him beeping in the other room. He managed to get under my dining room table and stuck behind the chairs, in a make-shift robot prison. His power button was amber and his status light was red, saying he was tired and wanted to go home. I moved his home into the living room and let him out from under the table and he went right home.

After he rested a bit I told him to go clean again, and he’s at it right now.

Moral of the story: If you get a Roomba, don’t talk to it, you won’t have any (human) friends once they find out. Oh yeah, and make sure
you set up the invisible wall so he doesn’t escape.

“Women-Owned Businesses Grew at Twice the National Average,” Census Bureau Reports

Mike Bergman
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First Comprehensive Portrait in 5 Years
Women-Owned Businesses Grew at Twice the National Average, Census Bureau Reports
The number of women-owned businesses grew 20 percent between 1997 and 2002, twice the national average for all businesses, according to a new U.S. Census Bureau report. The nearly 6.5 million businesses generated more than $940 billion in revenue, up 15 percent from 1997.      The report, 2002 Survey of Business Owners: Women-Owned Firms, [PDF] provides a more complete portrait of these businesses following an initial sketch of all firms released last July. The new data provides more information at the state, metropolitan, county and city levels as well as by kind of business.      Women owned nearly 30 percent of nonfarm businesses in the United States in 2002. While 14 percent of women-owned firms employed more than 7.1 million people, the vast majority of businesses owned by women (nearly 5.6 million) had no employees.      Other highlights: In 2002, nearly 1-in-3 women-owned firms operated in health care and social assistance, and other services, such as personal services, and repair and maintenance. They owned 72 percent of social assistance businesses and just over half of nursing and residential care facilities. Wholesale and retail trade accounted for 38.3 percent of women-owned business revenue. There were 117,069 women-owned firms with receipts of $1 million or more. There were 7,240 women-owned firms with 100 employees or more, generating $275 billion in gross receipts. States with the fastest rates of growth for women-owned firms between 1997 and 2002 were Nevada (43 percent), Georgia (35 percent), Florida (29 percent) and New York (28 percent). Counties with the highest number of women-owned firms were Los Angeles County, Calif. (265,919); Cook County, Ill. (130,418); Miami-Dade County, Fla. (88,173); New York County, N.Y. (86,364); and Harris County, Texas (86,042).      The 2002 Survey of Business Owners (SBO) defines women-owned businesses as privately held firms in which women own 51 percent or more of the interest or stock of the business. The 2002 data show that in addition to the nearly 6.5 million majority women-owned firms, there were almost 2.7 million equally male/female-owned firms with $731.4 billion in receipts. Separate reports on minority-owned businesses will be issued over the coming months. -X- The SBO is part of the 2002 Economic Census and combines survey data from a sample of more than 2.4 million businesses with administrative data. Data for 2002 are not directly comparable to previous survey years because of several significant changes to the survey methodology. See “Comparability of 2002 and 1997 SBO Data .” The data collected in a sample survey are subject to sampling variability as well as nonsampling errors. Sources of nonsampling errors include errors of response, nonreporting and coverage.

Super Bowl Beer Sales Can Drive Allied Categories

• According to the American Institute of Food Distribution, Super Bowl is the second-largest food-consumption day (behind Thanksgiving).
• The Snack Food Association expects that over 30 million pounds of snacks will be consumed on Super Bowl Sunday.
• According to The Beer Institute, nearly 3.5 percent of annual beer sales are consumed around the Super Bowl period. (This includes on-premise sales.)
• According to the Hass Avocado Board, two-thirds of all avocadoes sold in the U.S. each year are purchased within three weeks of the Super Bowl.

  The following table from IRI shows historical dollar sales increases in the three weeks before Superbowl Sunday (sorted by Dollar volume increase).

	Category	Increase
1	Carbonated Beverages	21%
2	Beer/Ale/Alcoholic Cider	21%
3	Salty Snacks	19%
4	Frozen Pizza	20%
5	Crackers	13%
6	Natural Cheese	8%
7	Total Chocolate Candy	21%
8	Processed Cheese	15%
9	Ice Cream/Sherbet	8%
10	Coffee	12%
11	Dinner Sausage	20%
12	Mexican Sauce	29%
13	Frankfurters	18%
14	Frozen Appetizers/Snack Rolls	29%
15	Mayonnaise	24%
16	Mustard & Ketchup	29%
17	Snack Nuts/Seeds/Corn Nuts	26%
18	Wine	6%
19	Cookies	5%
20	Frozen Seafood	13%

 

Nearly 50 percent of Super Bowl party attendees are women. While women are also beer drinkers, many choose alternatives, like wines (primarily white wines), as well as malt-based citrus concoctions . For best results, be sure to merchandise and market these other alcoholic drinks alongside the beer.

Thank you FMI for much of the information in this news posting.

http://archives.subscribermail.com/msg/FMIA8B9C3845.htm

How to Work Extremely Well

I read this great article in Fast Company today called "How to Work Extremely Well."  Really, if you have to be told this stuff for the first time, it’s probably too late for you, but it doesn’t hurt to brush-up from time to time to remind yourself of what’s important.

1. Think of things you like to do outside of work. Pick one.

Citigroup’s John Bishop likes to run. Irene Tse of Goldman Sachs is a concert pianist who takes classes twice a week at Juilliard and will perform with an orchestra in London this summer. "For my first five years, all I did was work," she says. "All of a sudden, this person who used to be able to talk about a wide variety of topics couldn’t converse about anything but the market. I thought, If I don’t do something about this, I won’t be able to do it anymore. Trading has a lot of highs and lows, but no happiness. Music has happiness."

MTV’s David Clark doesn’t play golf or tennis or poker. He and his wife, he says, have become highly disciplined about spending time together when he’s home. "I don’t think it’s possible to survive in these jobs unless you really simplify things," he says, "especially if you try to pull off the hat trick of having a family."

3. Make time for friends.

"You have to work very hard at maintaining relationships," says Avery Baker, a Tommy Hilfiger exec. "Your friends have to be quite patient and understanding with the idea that you’re not around. And when you are, even if you don’t feel like it, you need to make the effort. Otherwise, you won’t have anybody to welcome you home."

4. Build little rewards into your daily life.

Knee-jerk review

I added my little brother to my family plan and he got the Moto RAZR from Cingular. I had it shipped to my house to I could bluetooth some ring tones to it etc before sending it on.

I hated this phone a week ago. I call it a fashionphone. Good for Paris Hilton, good for all those “metros,” good for high-schoolers, but bad for a REAL phone user. Or so I thought.

Carrying this phone around for a day I can tell you this: it’s not as bad as I thought. Sure, it has Moto’s CRAPPY UI, the processor is SLOW, the digital camera SUCKS. But the sound is clear, the screen is huge (on the inside, outside one’s pointless) and I like being seen with it.

Knee-jerk review: pass this one up. Get a real phone. If you’re super into image though, this is the ONLY phone you should have.