Dominos has a so-called Brooklyn Style pizza, whose main feature, it seems by way of their marketing, is the ability to fold it in half. This is exactly why I have never in my life bought Dominos pizza (I have tasted it): it was not flexible enough. Thank you Dominos for addressing my concerns.

At any rate, the New York times took one of these to the test.

Yes, as expected, New Yorkers are grossly offended by the taste and the marketing! Here are my favorite bits:

The Domino’s pizza has an oddly sweet crust that somehow manages to blend the characteristics of cotton and rubber.

“In Utah, they’re going to love it because they use ketchup and American cheese on their pizzas,”

The [television ad] features characters purchased at the Brooklyn Stereotype Store.

“To our sophisticated palates, Domino’s is about as Brooklyn as Sara Lee Cheesecake is Junior’s.”

“We found that Brooklyners like to eat their pizza differently,” said Dana Harville, a spokeswoman for Domino’s. “They like floppy, large slices, and they fold them into almost a sandwich.”

Yes, hammer the point in: You can fold these slices! I am sure this pizza tested well with groups that just fold pizza but never put it in their mouths, but for the time being, I’d rather get my New York pizza from any third-rate slice shop around Times Square.

The Hopkins Homewood Campus is especially pretty in the fall. These are a set of pictures I’ve taken on an October day with a beautiful sunset. Find the full set of pictures here.

Upper (Keyser) Quadrangle. You can see the Gilman Hall in the background, the most recognizable building on our Georgian red-brick, white trim campus.

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It looks like the Apple Q4 was great, but I wanted to hear more about iTunes Movies on the conference call. I guess we’ll have to wait another couple of quarters until these become presentable.
I enjoyed Oppenheimer’s admittance of the Back to School Mac+iPod promotion was a major part of the iPod sales number, although I don’t understand the reporter’s fascination at all. Yes, the stand-alone music player market is doomed, but 1.6 million macs did most certainly not cell almost 9 million iPods. To all naysayers, thats a 36% increase year to year, which means Apple might be correct in its decision to milk the stand-alone industry until the end, and it’s certainly interesting to see how Apple will buoy their iPod sales in the future.

For a value investor’s stock the four most important days of the year are when the company quarterly results come out. This is the time of the year when public companies take a break from their secrecy and announce to their holders what they’ve achieved, through webcasts and conference calls, and often, what they expect to achieve in the future.

Having switched to using Google’s great calendaring service, I found that it is a little bit difficult to keep track of the quarterly meetings on any of the calendar apps, web or not, unless you add them one by one yourself. This should come as a surprise, as both Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance have your portfolio saved and should present you with the option of adding the information directly to your calendar.

Having not found anything that even remotely accomplishes this, I’ve written a public service that will do just this: configure once, and forget for all eternity.

This is essentially an earnings announcement calendar aggregator. I’ve named it MyEarnCal for short for now. You don’t need to create a portfolio, account, pay me any money, or anything like that at all (it’s free.)

You can use it right away through any calendaring service that supports iCal, like Google Calendar. Subscribe to the following calendar:

http://cmichae.acm.jhu.edu/myearncal/MSFT+AMZN

Substituting MSFT+AMZN for any list of stock tickers you’d like. For example

http://cmichae.acm.jhu.edu/myearncal/GOOG+GE+JNJ

will show earnings announcements for Google, General Electric, and Johnson and Johnson. And you don’t have to do anything at all for the next batch, it will automatically show up.

This is still in beta; the only missing feature, is accurate reporting of the time of the press conference. Right now, all After Market conferences will show as 4:30 events, while Pre-Market events will show as 9:00 events. For now, it accomplishes the essential feature, allowing you to add your share’s earnings announcements and corporate actions to the plethora of calendars that take the iCalendar standard, such as Kontact/Korganizer, iCal, Google Calendar, Evolution, and Outlook 2007.

Here is the calendar for some favorites stocks to watch, as imported by Google Calendar:

Update: I’ve noticed that sometimes, it takes a while to load one of these calendars on Google Calendar. This happens because Google Calendar indexes the calendar at the address once, and will cache it for later. So one way to get around any error messages Google Calendar reports is to just wait a few hours and retry again with the exact same URI address.

So with the advent of Google Code Search, I’ve tried at first to search for my name. Sadly, nothing comes up despite my having contributed to sourceforge projects, and having started one of my own. So I did the next best thing, I searched for the more interesting ones. Here’s what I learned:

• bar (3M) beats foo (1.5M)
• There are hacks (600K) and then there are huge hacks (100)
• There’s lots of broken (542K) but there’s definetely not enough bbq (6K).

What other interesting searches have you raked? Post a comment!

New York, Summer 2006

Taken in the Baltimore Inner Harbor in 2003.

Although this figure came out weeks ago during Apple’s Showtime event, I’d like to mention this, because it reinforces the prediction made in the iTunes sales statistics page, that 2 billion downloads will be reached by February 2007. As you can see from the graph on that page, the 1.5bn mark was predicted for the first half of September, which coincided with this announcement.

I’m very interested in seeing what kind of traffic iTunes movies will have; I am very enthused by the news that Wal*Mart might potentially work together with the iTunes store. Wal*Mart is the largest sole retailer of DVDs, but as I am sure, they realize the business of physical distribution of data has an expiration date.

At this point, the iTunes Store - a rename of the original iTunes Music Store - has huge potential. I am convinced the non-Disney studios have no choice but to eventually join, and I am happy Apple did not water down their terms of service (to the best of my knowledge) to appease them. iTunes presents a money-on-the-table opportunity for them, and they’d be crazy to not jump the wagon. I thus expect them to resist until the first quarter of 2007, right after the shopping season, where most DVDs are bought, largely as gifts. As this is not the market iTunes would serve well for now, their interest in joining iTunes is displaced by the potential alienation of their largest distributors, who would do a better job of serving the holiday season anyway.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time now: The entire site is now ran using wordpress! I’ve converted the static pages into wordpress pages, added a tagcloud, and removed the sidebars completely. I’m probably not done with it yet, but hopefully this is a step forward.