Michael Gracie

Brought to you this one day only in true order of importance

Fly Fishing

Technology

Finance

MG signing off (not really)

Technology

Finance

Fly Fishing

Adieu.

You have to follow CNBC to get the straight talk from the master seer:

“Oil could be closer to $100 a barrel towards the end of this year, this could be a negative shock to the economy.”

Or you could have gotten the much less publicized version of the relatively same opinion almost two months ago:

No matter – if oil continues its march, consumers won’t be joining the summer of love. And any chance of the recovery the powers that be are trying to convince them is well in hand will be swirling in a tanker parked off the Gulf Coast.

How this all plays out is anyone’s guess, but with interest rates also on the rise it seems unlikely that we are going to see burgeoning demand for goods in the near future. There’s just too much out there, and given the choice between a widescreen TV and filling up the tank, the latter is going to win hands down. Heck, even yard sales are hurting for business.

I don’t lend much credibility to information garnered from Comedy Central, but this one was good…

I can’t say I agree with Mr. Schiff on hyper-inflation being right around the corner. I believe he is vastly underestimating how far Americans can and will go to reduce their standard of living. You need not concern yourself with how much credit is being poured into the system if there is no actual demand.

He’s certainly hit the bullseye on this though: stimulus, on credit, is having the opposite effect from what was intended. Look no further than the recent spike in oil prices to understand why. That alone could be the recovery’s undoing.

(h/t The Big Picture)

UPDATE: Arthur Laffer says get ready for inflation and higher interest rates. The latter isn’t going to do much for housing – driven by market expectation (i.e. the selling off of Treasuries we’ve seen as of late), it is leaving Bernanke & Co. in one hell of a quandary.

I find the OS X platform exceptional for development, but what buggy code I do produce is almost exclusively for the web. Therefore, I don’t follow what goes on at Apple Developer conferences – it just doesn’t concern me. But today I heard that Apple had announced a new iPhone at their Worldwide Developers Conference, and almost immediately the news turned sour. Amongst the spoiled grapes, users were peeved that AT&T was not going to allow existing iPhone owners to upgrade equipment at subsidized prices unless existing contracts allowed for it, and that MMS and internet access tethering wouldn’t be available right away either. People are downright hostile, over a phone.

I’ve toyed around with an iPhone, and I don’t understand the attraction. But it certainly seems like a fatal one. It’s got a pretty, but delicate screen. There’s no tactile keypad or keyboard. You can’t swap batteries when the charge dies. You can install applications on it, but only those the manufacturer approves (and delivers). Rumor has it the manufacturer can “brick” the phone, of any “owner”, any time it likes. But my goodness it plays music. And you are always “connected” when you have it.

Considering the magnitude and intensity of the obsession with the device, I wonder whether the always connected mantra is becoming a neurosis.

It sounds like you need to unplug man. What do you think DeJour…should we take him with us? Definitely.

Forget the white rabbit. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg…heck…Oprah Winfrey – they’re handing out their own brand of blue pills.

I doubt those passed even phase 1 trials, hence the side effects are anyone’s guess.

I started blogging roundabout January 2005. Between my old personal blog Thoughtmarket (which opined on all things finance and technology), my internet security blog Spamroll, and the latest incarnation/combination now heavily swayed towards something I know even less about, fly fishing, this would be post number two-thousand five-hundred.

I’ve earned no fame, and no fortune. I’ve surely pissed a few people off, but thank goodness I’m not yet burned out.

Let the woefully misinformed goodness continue.

I watch very little television – viewing is essentially limited to sports, in bars. But some friends have been out of town, and I’ve been doing some dog sitting. They have a big screen TV, and I’ve been passing dog time with it on.

A few days back I saw my, say sixth Viagra ad. And along with it I saw another little notice pop up on the screen which said…

See our ad in Golf Magazine

I’m not much for golf anymore – I spent the lion’s share of my leisure time fly fishing. Just as (if not more) difficult, and the gear is 10X more expensive [insert obvious stupidity of this choice here]. But I will pick up ‘the other sticks’ if a friend needs a fourth.

Call it an unwillingness to accept inevitable aging, or stating (with some measure of bravado) that I just can’t relate to the ‘need’ the ads were trying to convey. But I woke up this morning wondering if I’ll ever bother playing golf again.

Is this the message a sport with declining participation rates (closing in on fly fishing) should be wanting to project?

Why a lot of what you read really doesn’t matter:

Fragmentation applies to 100pct of media. We have gotten to the point where it is so easy to publish to the web, that most of it is ignored. When it is not ignored and it garners attention, the attention is usually from those people, the amateur outties, whose only goal is to create volume on the web in hopes of being noticed.

Additionally, I’ve often wondered why people are so willing to syndicate their content across networks they have little control over, and require additional engagement on their part. According to Mr. Cuban’s hypotheses on attention and relevance, it’s amateurish.

But where content, and distribution, are available for free, can the laws of scarcity even be applied anymore?

Memorial Day is more than just a work/school day off, for backyard BBQs. It’s a day of remembrance, for men and women who have fought and died so you could freely drink a PBR while fly fishing for carp today. So before you fire up that grill, pop that bottlecap, or start your backcast, take a moment to thank your lucky stars (and stripes).

MG signing off (to say thank you)

Yesterday was my dog’s birthday. He got his present back in early April, a new bed. But as this was #10 for him, some celebration was in order. Unfortunately, collies aren’t allowed in most French restaurants, so he slept on that bed while a feast of magnanimous proportions took place…

For Starters

Main Course

Wind Up

Conclusion

The locale was the outdoor patio at Denver’s Bistro Vendôme, and our host for the evening was Leah (a stupendous gal). And while I’m going back to burgers and PBR after this (return thy heathen), I figure if folks can play Roger Ebert over YouTube videos I can pretend I’m the Claude Lebey of the Denver fine dining scene. The entire experience was fabulous. The only bad part about all this is I’m probably going to get hassled to learn how to cook all this myself some time in the near future, and I’m short next semester’s tuition to the French Culinary Institute.

Happy birthday, dog.