Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

The AJC (sorry, no link to places that require you to give them a fake email address in order to read stories) has a feature this morning on upgrades happening in company cafeterias across Atlanta. The lead is amusing, but not in the way the AJC intended:

There is at least one inviolate rule at UPS headquarters in Atlanta: Cafe 55, the in-house cafeteria, serves fried chicken on Wednesday.

Every Wednesday.

The one time that food service manager Peter Glakas tried another midweek special, he had 32 e-mails waiting for him after lunch. Some were angry, some pleading, but the corporate managerial staff had spoken: Don”t mess with my chicken.

I don”t know if the line “there is at least one inviolate rule at UPS headquarters” is a nod to the hellishly-restrictive environment at UPS headquarters, but it”s sure an understatement. It”s well known around the Atlanta work scene that employees at UPS headquarters can”t bring food or drinks to their desks, can”t have personal items at their desks, have to clean and straighten their desks every day and suffer through countless other restrictions aimed at maintaining a “professional” workplace. And forget about a casual-dress environment: UPS HQ employees not only have to wear a tie a jacket to work; when they get up from their desks and move around, their jackets must be on.

There”s a former UPS worker who sits by me at work; and whenever I hear somebody talking about our place being “corporate” or restrictive, I get him to chime in with a UPS story.

During times of job dissatisfaction, I”ve seen UPS website openings pop up, but I”ve never been desperate enough to seek out a position in such a horrible environment.

And you really have to wonder how smart or qualified the people who would put up with such crap really are.

But at least they get chicken on Wednesdays.

It”s come to light that Netflix has made it official policy and a term of use that “In determining priority for shipping and inventory allocation, we give priority to those members who receive the fewest DVDs through our service.”

What that means is heavy users (those who rent and return movies most quickly) will:

a) Get a lower priority for the hottest movies
b) May see slower turnaround times between when they return a movie and when the next one is shipped.

If Netflix wants to penalize customers who flip movies quickly, that”s their business. But I promise you this, Netflix: The first time my movies start coming at a slower pace (I live 30 miles from a distribution center. They get movies the day after I mail them, ship them the same day and I get them the next day), I will cancel my membership.

I can easily live without you, and you are no longer the only game in town.

If you”re the super-cool type who has Flickr slideshows running on your desktop through the Google Desktop Sidebar or - if you”re a extra-super-cool Mac user - Tickr for Flickr, it”s not a great idea to run the neworleans tag at work this time of year.

But at home … it”s quite fun.

Now that we”re heading in to Mardi Gras season proper, I”m starting to see more articles taking a close look at the tourism situation in New Orleans. For whatever reason, the basic math questions have largely been ignored up to this point. Such as:

If New Orleans had 38,000 hotel rooms before Katrina, how many actual tourist rooms do you now have available when you subtract hotels that are still closed and the rooms being occupied by hotel staff who have no homes, police and other government officials who have no homes, random New Orleanians who have no homes and contractors/relief workers/government people from out of town? The answer for Mardi Gras, it seems, may be 8,000 - 14,000 rooms. If you”ve ever been to New Orleans at Mardi Gras, you know that 100% of the city”s hotel rooms are occupied by tourists then. To get a room at a French Quarter hotel, you”d need to book a year or two in advance.

So a simple answer might be the best-case scenario for Mardi Gras is to get 21% - 36% of normal tourist traffic based on the available hotel rooms.

But let”s do some more math. If 1 million people normally visit New Orleans at Mardi Gras (figuring probably 80% of them come the last weekend of Mardi Gras), that would suggest somewhere around 800,000 tourists are in town from Thursday - Fat Tuesday. If each of those people stayed, on average, two nights in the city, then you”re talking about 266,000 tourists in town on average each day leading up to Mardi Gras.

That would suggest the average occupancy of a hotel room is 7 people during Mardi Gras. That”s about right for the college set, but probably high for normal people. And it suggests New Orleans could accommodate about 56,000 - 98,000 tourists per day this year.

What”s not being factored in, though, is that a whole lot of people who come down for Mardi Gras usually stay with friends rather than in hotels. Or they drive in from Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Biloxi (another issue in itself) and elsewhere within drunk-driving distance. I think it”s more likely that the average hotel occupancy is about 4 and something like 40% of visitors either drive in for the day/night or stay with friends.

Needless to say, there will be a lot fewer people staying with friends this Mardi Gras. And as well-intentioned as the people within driving distance might be, you have to wonder how many of them will want to put up with what”s going to be an enormously difficult trip into and out of the city.

The image of Nagin”s Chocolate City comment, Blanco”s incessant crazy rants and the perception of displaced New Orleanians as freeloaders and criminals may not make some people want to throw a buck at New Orleans this winter, either.

Say they fill the hotels (which they probably will). That”s something like 100,000 - 350,000 people over the main Mardi Gras weekend. I think New Orleans would do well to get 25% of drive-in and other visitors, which might mean another 80,000 people.

So sitting in the middle of the range, would 300,000 visitors be a success this year? That would be about 30% of normal, and considering only about one-third of New Orleans could be considered “normal” right now, it seems about right to me.

I hope New Orleans does great and a ton of people go down. But I”m not sure it”ll go that well, and it”s really, really important that it does.

I”m beginning to figure out that HDNet is largely a platform to show off hot chicks. Of course, Get Out! is a staple of the DVR and if you check out the HDNet schedule, you”ll notice a lot of things like “Bikini Destinations”, “Hawaiian Tropic Viva El Springbreak” and “A Caribbean Workout 2003″. I wholeheartedly endorse this approach to HD programming. There”s only so much fun to be had watching HD sharks and stuff on Discovery.

Another hottie-filled HDNet program is “Art Mann Presents”. The concept - some guy named Art Mann goes to a random city and shoots hotties in HD, pretending he”s doing a travel show. I”m not really a fan of the show since pretty much all the hotties are these dumb but beautiful look-alike Buckhead-type girls. Just not my thing.

But I decided to pick up an episode filmed in Austin figuring there”d be a good chance it might feature tattooed freak/hot Austin chicks. But no. It turns out for all its ultra-coolness, Austin is still chock-full of the aforementioned Buckhead-type girls, and apparently that”s all that attracts HD cameras. Here we see a bit of the lake segment, which featured the “young and beautiful” crowd getting stupid drunk on boats and shaking their asses as if they weren”t white kids with more money than sense.

Apart from a couple of normal chicks (read: real tits) and one really hot bimbo in a pink bikini and black cowboy hat, there wasn”t much of interest at the lake.

That segment went on for way too long, and it was followed by the “club scene” segment. No, they didn”t go to some dank place featuring live music. Just your typical “hot” club with over-dressed, over-decorated girls, stupid guys with gelled hair and black dress shirts and loud, bad music.

But somehow in the mess of Austin”s club scene, they managed to find one great, typical Austin dude. Click play on the video below to get his classic comment.

… but I”m not sure what it is.

With the Icerocket search, I figure it has to be tied to my logs observation about that “mark cuban” visitor

Maybe it”s just somebody wanting to see if I really do check my logs and having a little fun. Unfortunately, I don”t have the original referer (probably bounced from my little 404-error hack), but nice touch using Icerocket.

It”s not from Comcast in Dallas, but Westlake, Ohio is about 50 miles from Detroit. Mark Cuban is a Pittsburgh native and certainly has the clout to get to the Super Bowl … would he be surfing The Wisdom during pre-game?

Whatever”s behind it, well done.