Author Archive

A Defense of the Humble Box Score

By From https://odonnellweb.com/pelican/ • Apr 1st, 2018 • Category: Blog Entries.Local

Box scores

With the start of MLB season comes the annual challenge of keeping up with all the important baseball news. Back in the olden days you would open up your local newspaper to the sports section. If you lived in a baseball town you got in-depth coverage of the hometown team …



10 Things About a Job In Sales

By From https://odonnellweb.com/pelican/ • Mar 27th, 2018 • Category: Blog Entries.Local

Gen X chart

I’ve been selling for a living since 1995. I’ve learned a few things.

  1. The territory is never in good shape. Don’t believe them when they claim it is. If the territory was producing like they claim, the previous rep. would still be there.

  2. If they can’t explain the comp plain …



Is Generation X Bailing on Facebook?

By From https://odonnellweb.com/pelican/ • Mar 26th, 2018 • Category: Blog Entries.Local

Gen X chart

As I’ve written previously, I’ve changed how I use Facebook. It’s mostly about Groups and Events for me. I unfollowed everybody except my wife and kids. Now, when I want to check in with my friends I simply go straight to their walls or I use the “New Posts” filter …



Facebook Was Not Hacked

By From https://odonnellweb.com/pelican/ • Mar 19th, 2018 • Category: Blog Entries.Local

Crepy Facebook Eye Image

Facebook was not hacked by Cambridge Analytics. Hacking implies that CA broke into their data or otherwise circumvented Facebook somehow to get personal data on 5 million Americans. What actually happened is far, far worse.

The system worked exactly as designed. Facebook is in the data collection and sales business …



Star City

By From https://odonnellweb.com/pelican/ • Mar 17th, 2018 • Category: Blog Entries.Local

Star City - photo credit https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roanoke_star.jpg

I was thinking last month that Roanoke may be the last major city we had not visited in Virginia. Roanoke has a major St. Patrick’s Day party downtown.

Problem solved. Roanoke has been removed from the list of places in VA that we had not visited.I guess we can …



Faith Rewarded + 14

By From https://odonnellweb.com/pelican/ • Mar 10th, 2018 • Category: Blog Entries.Local

Final out 2004 World Series

14 years ago the Boston Red Sox were heading into the 2004 sense with renewed optimism. Even though the sting of Aaron F’ing Boone’s extra inning game 7 HR had not quite faded, the Red Sox had added Curt Shilling and Keith Foulke to the team, and there was reason …



The Autobiography of Malcolm X

By From https://odonnellweb.com/pelican/ • Mar 8th, 2018 • Category: Blog Entries.Local

Malcolm X

The Autobiography of Malcolm X has been on my Amazon wish list for years. A couple of weeks ago the price on the Kindle edition dropped to $1.99, so I finally bought it. I finished reading it last night. I don’t know what I was expecting from the book …



City

By From https://odonnellweb.com/pelican/ • Mar 2nd, 2018 • Category: Blog Entries.Local

City Book Cover

I read City by Clifford Simak recently. If you haven’t read it, it is a dystopian cold war era novel in which man abandons the cities due to fear of nuclear war. Society breaks down as everybody lives in isolation, population dwindles, and eventually most humans abandons the earth, leaving …



Important Events on February 21

By From https://odonnellweb.com/pelican/ • Feb 21st, 2018 • Category: Blog Entries.Local

Us-2018

  • 362 – Athanasius returns to Alexandria.
  • 1437 – James I of Scotland is assassinated.
  • 1804 – The first self-propelling steam locomotive makes its outing at the Pen-y-Darren Ironworks in Wales.
  • 1842 – John Greenough is granted the first U.S. patent for the sewing machine.
  • 1848 – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist …


The Problem With Algorithms

By From https://odonnellweb.com/pelican/ • Feb 18th, 2018 • Category: Blog Entries.Local

Algorithms

Facebook’s algorithms are in the news a lot these days, and with good reason. But this isn’t about Facebook. I’ve been thinking about algorithms in general lately. This has been brought on by my wife’s insulin pump, the Medtronic 670G. It’s the first closed loop pump approved by the FDA …