Brian A. Paul

The Church of the Customer blog has an interesting piece about a religious order of silent monks and how they sell their beer. I’m not as interested in the ‘niche marketing’ aspect as I am the ‘niche culture’ aspect of the requirements these people place on themselves and others for acquiring this beverage. An interesting aspect of this is that these monks prohibit the resale of their beer. If you think you’ve found a source for this beer other than directly from this abbay then you are either looking at a counterfeit or at someone who has agreed not to re-sell the beer and then done so anyway. I certainly would love to try this this stuff but I think my wife would have some reservations about me hoping a plane to Belgium to buy a beer.

Articles like this open up a whole world of possibilities in my mind. How many other monastic orders, artistic enclaves, or other small groups of people organized around some principal or goal are producing unique things for consumption? Also, is it entirely possible that these monks have always sold their beer this way and that it has just become anachronistic to my sensibilities because of cultural or temporal divide? I wonder if at one time beer sold this way was just the way things were done and it only looks strange and cool to me because of my perspective.

Bunnie Huang is giving away a Chumby, all you have to do is accomplish the next to impossible (for me anyway) task of identifying his piece of mystery hardware.. and be the first one to do so.

Bunnie is a cool entrepreneurial hardware guy. He came to my attention from all the fanfare around his company’s device the Chumby. I subscribed to his blog when he started running a very informative and enlightening series about sourcing manufacturing in China and all the requisite steps it has taken to bring the Chumby to market.

I’ve always been fascinated with the hardware side of computing and electronics but have next to no experience with it. I imagine that the complete lack of depth about hardware development I feel reading Bunnie’s blog or the Flylogic Blog must be what non-technical people feel when I babble on about writing software, tuning and optimizing MySQL, or scaling web delivery architectures.

As my friend Loren Says:

“Any fight is pretty much over when the other guy starts throwing his head at you.”

I caught this post over at BoingBoing regarding special rules for Canadian winners of a Starbucks sweepstakes. Essentially if you win and you’re Canadian then you also have to solve some sort of math problem. For a few minutes I went through all the screwy reasons I could think of that this might be the case and then it suddenly occurred to me that Starbucks has no plainly visible business reason for implementing this clause. Canadians aren’t any worse at math than anyone else, generally speaking, so this doesn’t look like some kind of loophole that would allow Starbucks to decline payment of the prize. That being the case I quickly came to the conclusion that something this asinine must have origins in the law. Viola, Wikipedia knows all:

“Notably, Canada and several European countries require entrants to solve a mathematical puzzle, making it a contest of skill, in order to overcome requirements that would classify sweepstakes as a form of gambling.”

In this case specifically, avoiding breaking the law seems to be the idea. Now, I entertain myself with what kind of mathematical operation might be required of the winner. 1 + 1 if they’re blatantly side-stepping the law or possibly one of these if they’re more interested in holding onto their prize. Correct if I’m wrong but I believe that in the U.S. the prize must be placed in escrow (the company offering the prize cannot keep it even if no winner is forthcoming) for the sweepstakes to be legal.

In a word, Failure. This is not surprising, it has happened every year I’ve made an attempt. It just seems like things go sideways in November and this year was no exception. Without going into gory detail we had some pretty significant family tragedy around here. Life comes at you whether you want it to or not. This just gives me that much more respect for all those people who have managed to finish a full length novel regardless of the other challenges they’ve had to overcome in the process of doing so.

The challenge of Nanowrimo is to write something that might be more clearly described as a novella. The word count target is 50,000. As a point of reference, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has a word count of 76,944. As anyone who has read the Harry Potter series can tell you, each book is a bit longer than the last. The final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows weighs in a bit higher at 198,227 words.

Keep in mind that one point of Nanowrimo is to get the 50,000 words written regardless of quality, cohesive story-telling, etc. That’s a far cry from writing a polished publishable novel that someone will actually print, much less something that will sell to readers.

My congratulations go out to all Nanowrimo participants whether they achieved their goal or not. At least you put yourself out there and gave it a try. Better that than giving up before you ever started.