And that Something is Joe Posnanski, the leading sports columnist of the Kansas City Star. For years I read Joe and took him for granted. I remember when he started his 'Cup of Joe' and I thought it was a totally natural extension of his writing. Little later after that experiment he started his widely successful blog. It's funny because he initially got hired by SI because of his blog….and now I have a feeling of wanting him to fail at SI so that he can come back…

I remember discovering Joe's first blog. He had started a blog for local sports legend Buck O'Neil. He had these great, exciting, and insightful posts about the 'Behind The Scenes' behind The Soul of Baseball. He talked about the red dress story of Buck – Buck loved red dresses, he would often approach random red dressed women – he talked about Buck's take on baseball, he talked about Buck's take on the Royals, and he started talking about the Royals. Actually he talked about a lot more than the Royals. He talked about baseball, he talked about metrics, and he talked about his talking: writing. It was inevitable: he had to start a blog because he was why people were reading about Buck O'Neil, but not just for Buck. It's funny because his blog is what got him into SI initially.

He had become a Star. He became a voice of the Kansas City Star newspaper. He participated in multiple baseball talks at the Negro League Museum. He became a voice of Kansas City. On his blog he had become a voice for Bill James and the greater theory of using spastics to explore baseball. He became a voice for himself allowing us the privilege of gaining deeper knowledge into how he thought.

Those are really the thoughts we'll miss in Kansas City. Joe has always been a great author, but what made him legendary in Kansas City is his way of thinking about situations, and people, and ideas that set him apart from other sports writers. He neither claims originality or intellectuality with these ideas and that's his strength, he knows when to ask, when to read, and when to question.

We'll miss Joe's constant writing in The Star, but we can't help of feeling happy for his contributions to the Kansas City community.

I've never been yelled at for doing laundry, until today. Let me give you a little background:

In my condo building almost no one has laundry in their unit so we all get to share the five washers and five dryers in the basement. Normally most days are pretty calm and you can get away with using three or four washers and dryers no problem, even though it's advertised that you're only supposed to use two. Sundays are busy, of course.

Today I determined that I needed more socks in the worst way so I took two loads of laundry down and started them in the washers. When I came back after half an hour there was only a single dryer that was completely clear, one that had clothes in it that were done and three that were still in the middle of their cycle. The one that was done was simply displaying the "$1.00" message instead of the "0 minutes" message which is indicative on the load being done for some time (I don't know, 5 minutes or more?).

I proceeded to take the load that was there and put it on the folding table and load my two loads up. Just as I was leaving a dude came in and went for the table and I started apologizing that I had just taken out his load. Obviously if I had known he would have come within 60 seconds I wouldn't have dumped his load on the table, ya'know?

He then gave me an earful about he's the most dutiful laundryman in the building and it must have been just a few minutes of the dryer being done. The counter-argument that I had no idea when or if someone would lay claim to the load fell on deaf ears. The argument that at some point I needed to free up the washer that was in use by me had no merit to him. The fact that all the other dryers were still operating was apparently illogical.

I apologized in advance; I did my best to explain my thought process. I'm sorry your towels spent 60 seconds on the clean folding table. The only thing you accomplished is proving that some people are just douche bags about their laundry.

Sigh.

Raging sea is the best song, if nothing else but for this lyric:

I told you the review was short!

(link for the uninitiated)

From Joe Posnanski's brilliant pen:

I'm a huge fan of Grienke.  He's on my fantasy team, I better be!

I do have to tell one story about Grienke.  I was at a Royals game, sitting third base side in the lower deck for a Kansas City, St. Louis game.  To my right was my Grandma, diehard Cardinals fan.  To my left was my Dad, somewhat less diehard, but still a Cardinals fan nonetheless.  I did catch some of the Cardinals fever growing up, but my team was always the Royals.  Busch stadium was nice, but the K is the best park in America other than Wrigley in my not so humble opinion.

Anywho, its the first inning and Zack was out there throwing for the Royals during that God awful season where he just failed and flopped and struggled.  He loaded the bases for Pujols who came up to bat with everyone at the K, Royals and Cardinals fans alike, I mean everyone, everyone expecting him to just nail the laces out of the ball.  Pujols worked the count to 3-2.  It was the end for Grienke and it was the first inning.  Everyone knew it.  Zack then unwound one of his then-famous slower than slow curve balls.  Pujols was in the dugout before the catcher caught the ball.

It was the single most exciting thing I've ever see in a baseball game.

And then Grienke proceeded to give up 2 or 3 or 8 more runs or some silly number.  Oh well.

Two words and a link: Price Discrimination. Wikipedia doesn't do a terribly great job of explaining what exactly price discrimination is, so I'm going to give you my own brief version.

The Demand Curve

For typical markets with elastic demand* curves, consumers as a whole will determine that at price P they will, as a whole, purchase quantity Q of product. If we map that out we get the following graph:

*Elastic in this context means that consumers have a choice. Insulin to a diabetic is a very inelastic good since they'll be willing to pay almost anything for it.

The total revenue by this firm is P*Q, or the cost of each good times the number of items sold. It should be noted that the entire area under the curve is the total possible revenue. Companies notice this when their customers say, "Boy your product is cheap!" or, "I really wish I could justify spending X because then I would buy 10 of them!" The companies account then go back to their excel spreadsheets and figure out how they can make both happy and make more money. They end up with this:

Again, their profit is dictated by the area underneath the demand curve that they're covering. Notice that the area when selling at two different price points is greater than when they are selling at a single price point! This is what's called Price Discrimination: appealing to multiple segments of the demand curve based on perceived wants and how much they'll pay to achieve those wants in order to maximize revenue.

For the Calculus Loving Folks

People who did well in Calculus will immediately notice that an integral "solves" this problem. These people will say, "Hey, why don't we just chop up that demand curve into infinitesimally small chunks and we'll maximize revenue!" They're right of course, but practically it's either too confusing for the consumer, the producer or both.

In software, there have been a few ideas to integrate the integrals* by using ideas such as subscriptions and pay-for-features. Subscriptions have kind-of, sort-of worked, while the pay-for-feature model has never really taken off.

*I apologize.

Applications to Windows 7

So now it should be clear why Microsoft has six different versions of Windows 7. I'll attempt to break them down to make it clear which aspect of the demand curve that Microsoft is applying too:

• Starter Edition – Super cheap, emerging markets
• Home Basic – Cheap, emerging markets
• Home Premium – Alright, worldwide. This is the brunt of first world consumers.
• Professional – A tad expensive, worldwide. Aspiring geeks and companies who don't have contracts with Microsoft.
• Ultimate – Expensive, worldwide. True geeks, professionals who need everything.
• Enterprise - $Bling$, worldwide. Geeks who do geek things for a living. Companies who have 1,000+ computers.

If Microsoft were to simply sell a single version of Windows 7 for, say, $150 then it would be missing out on a lot of area under the curve. That's a lot of money to throw away when Windows is currently selling 15 billion dollars worth of product every year.

The Solution and Way Forward

The biggest complaint about Microsoft price discrimination practices is that it's confusing. Clearly Microsoft isn't going to consolidate to a single version so what is the fix? It's simple and something Microsoft has trouble with: clear, honest, open communication. Consumers hate to be surprised when they discover that they don't have XYZ feature that they need. Partly we fail because we depend on our OEMs to help us. Dell, HP, Lenovo and so forth have to do a good job allowing for this great communication to happen when consumers are purchasing their new laptops. Furthermore, we need to make distinctions that are meaningful and relevant to the average consumer. I do believe that Windows 7 is doing a bunch better job with their SKUs than they did in Windows Vista. It's quite simple:

If you're buying a new computer, get Windows 7 Home Premium unless your IT department tells you to get Windows 7 Professional.

Maybe I'm a robotist.  Maybe in 50 years we'll be inaugurating a half-robot, half-latino president with a Japanese sounding name.  Maybe then I'll be viewed as a robotist in the same we all have to painfully attempt to laugh with our grandparents when they talk about African Americans.

But for right now I hate the Fox NFL Robot.  I especially despised his recent performance during the Cardinals and Eagles game on Sunday. For those of you who saw the game, why the hell couldn't they give him more than one animation? After every commercial break we have to watch this robot wave his checked flag around. Sure, it might have approached cute the first time, but every time after that was just painful.

Furthermore, I'm not sure if Fox is aware of this, but there are no checkered flags in football! Much like crying doesn't belong in baseball; no one is crossing a finish line in football. If football involved a finish line then we wouldn't have 300+ lb linemen, and that would be a damn shame.

It should be obvious that Fox was gearing up for their Daytona coverage, which is a fine thing to do. But everyone was already aware that Fox was covering the Daytona 500 because they showed an ad every single commercial break…we don't need that message reinforced with a robot who has exactly one animation is his Sunday afternoon repertoire. Be a little creative, have him drive around a little robot car or have him changing a tire or have him smocking 3 packs of cigarettes while wearing his John Deer hat. Add a little spice, ya know?

I haven't fully explained why the Fox robot was so horrible on Sunday yet. Here's why: he was waving a checkered flag for no one. He was just waving it. No cars were going by, no horses, no Lance Armstrongs, nothing. Now that's just silly.

I've had a couple of people come up and ask why they should be using the Windows 7 beta so I thought that I would list a few of the reasons that I've been giving.

1. New Taskbar 

The new taskbar has been written about extensively so I'm not sure there's reason or me to elaborate about it functionally. 

The great thing about the taskbar is what it allows Microsoft to do long term with the concept of windows, documents and applications. No longer do applications have to solely exist within their windowed environment, but now there's a great launching point for quick, common actions that users want their applications to perform. Additionally, I'm really excited to see the current MDI fad go the way of the platypus*. MDI implementations have been mostly driven in the browser sphere basically because Windows used to suck at managing a whole bunch of windows belonging to an application. Windows 7 fixes this and blurs the distinction between an MDI and SDI app to the point where "tabbed browsing" is no longer a feature people need.

* Within the software industry there seems to be these pendulums that keep swinging back and forth. We've seen three major swings of the distributed vs. centralized within the last ~50 years: the rise of the mainframe (centralized) which gave way to PCs (decentralized) to where we're at now which is Web 2.0 type of centralization. Eventually we'll get to a point where cloud computing is pervasive and we'll be decentralized again trying to get a bunch of devices working together nicely.

2. Window Management and Control

Windows 7 borrows from an idea that's been around for a while in MDI applications such as Visual Studio where you can "snap" certain display elements to the side of the interface. What this practically means is that if you drag Word to the left edge of the screen it "snaps" there and takes up half the screen. And if you were to drag Excel to the right edge it would snap there and take up the other half of the screen. And now you're super productive because you can see your Word report and your Excel spreadsheet at the same time without having to futz around with window sizes. That's awesome.

There are a couple of other nice improvements as well. Drag a window to the top and it maximizes. Sweet. If you use multi monitors you'll appreciate this: drag a maximized window from one monitor without having to un-maximize it and then drag it.

3. UAC Improvements

User Account Control was the controversial feature in Windows Vista. To put it plainly, they've made the Windows 7 UAC what Vista should have been. 95%+ of the complaints I got regarding UAC with Vista was that it constantly asked you if you were sure that you wanted to do an action that you initiated yourself. Examples of this might be changing the workgroup or various display settings.

Windows 7 has improved UAC to the point where it knows whether the user is initiating an action or some software piece is trying to initiate the action. By default UAC will only warn you of things that software is trying to do. This is a tremendous reduction of prompts and I'm sure the public will have a better reception to the smarter Windows 7 UAC.

4. Driver Support

No major subsystems have been rewritten for Windows 7 unlike Vista where several huge systems were redone and broke driver compatibility (video, audio, networking). This means that if your PC can run Windows Vista it can run Windows 7 for the most part. On the two machines I've installed Windows 7 on all drivers but one have been successfully installed. A quick trip to the Dell support site provided a driver for the last piece of hardware.

5. Improved Battery Life

I installed Windows 7 on my girlfriend's laptop and her battery life went from about five and a half hours to just under eight. That's a huge improvement for every laptop out there!

6. QAM with Media Center

QAM is a technology to deliver HD video over a standard cable connection provided by a service like Comcast or Time Warner. With the Windows 7 Media Center you can decode this and get picture perfect HD TV for free with a standard cable package and no set top box. Previously you would have to use something like Over the Air HD which had major pitfalls for people in downtown areas or in bad geographic areas. Grab yourself a cheap TV tuner and turn your computer into a Tivo.

7. It Works Better on the Same Hardware

Windows 7 performs equally or better than Vista in most cases on the same hardware. Netbook support for Windows 7 I'm told is a particularly compelling story. Ultimately the point is that you have almost no reason to fear the Windows 7 better on any hardware that runs Windows Vista. In some cases you'll find that it runs better than Vista ever did and that's a great success story. So really there's no excuse to not jump in.

I'm not going to promise lots and lots of updates, but I do really want to get useful things in this space; resume, achievements and so forth which has been rather haphazardly scattered all over.