{"id":103,"date":"2002-06-20T23:42:20","date_gmt":"2002-06-21T03:42:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/excellent_prospects"},"modified":"2002-06-20T23:42:20","modified_gmt":"2002-06-21T03:42:20","slug":"excellent_prospects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2002\/06\/excellent_prospects.html","title":{"rendered":"Excellent Prospects"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“So,” said Miles gently, “after we shot up the police station and set the habitat on fire, what did we do for an encore?” — Miles Vorkosigan, getting to the bottom of a sticky situation in Diplomatic Immunity<\/a><\/cite><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So I bought Diplomatic Immunity<\/cite> for my Dad for Father’s Day, only to find out that he had already checked it out from the library. He said I could take the book home and finish it, then hand it back to him. What bad luck for me, eh? Anyway, the book’s a winner, as far as I’m concerned. My one complaint is that Ekaterin didn’t have much to do in this book, especially compared to A Civil Campaign<\/cite>. In this one she just leans down and kisses Miles at various intervals — that’s about it. <\/p>\n

I am also listening to the Moby album Play<\/cite> over and over. Weird. Am I becoming some sort of electronica fan? Hmmm… well, I am getting paler<\/em> these days, but I’m certainly not getting thinner<\/em> and mopier<\/em>. So maybe it’s some kind of delusional behavior. I only buy about five CDs a year, so perhaps I need to fool myself into thinking that this was money well spent. Well, whatever. I’m digging it.<\/p>\n

Page wanted me to make a correction to my previous account of our Burn Rate<\/cite> game from last week. Basically he felt that he and Justin got short shrift. Page, Page. Don’t you get it? This journal is about me, me, meeeee! Ahem. Anyway, this week everything was reversed. Jay and I cratered our startups very early. Justin and I tangled several times, to my eventual detriment. I finally managed to hire financial whiz kid Ben Zhao, but then courtesy of Justin he had a “difference of opinion” with my other, less competent VPs, and headed back to the labor pool. I couldn’t scrape together enough funding, and I went belly-up. Meanwhile, Page stuck to his tried-and-true “big government” strategy of building a giant organization with plenty of redundancy. Justin couldn’t really attack Page with any “Bad Idea” cards, because Page’s massive, idle engineering department had enough staff to handle pretty much anything out there. Eventually Justin slipped away, leaving Page as the victor. The take-home lesson: bloated, inefficient bureaucracy wins over all! Huzzah!<\/p>\n

Finally, I’m trying to decide whether I like The American Prospect<\/a><\/cite>. Let me switch into Tevye-mode for a second:<\/p>\n