Businesses I want to own - part 1 in a series

1.) Burgers and Beer

A restaurant.

Location: Someplace residential, preferably middle-class, if such a place still exists. Surrounded by quiet, in any case. No busy roads. Ideally in such a location as to have minimal through traffic.

Menu: Burgers, fries, and beer. For $7 or some similarly modest price, you get a hand-patted burger, homemade thick-cut fries, and a bottled domestic beer, milkshake, or water. There are no menu options - if you dine here, you will have a burger, fries, and beer, a milkshake, or water. If you want fancier beer, you can buy it a la carte.

Building: The restaurant itself is an island-style bar under a canopy, with standing counters around the edges at which people can stand and eat. Outside, a gently-fenced lawn with picnic tables. Minimal or no seating "inside". This design is intended to maximize a sense of openness and community between diners - no private experience is available. Further, the entire food preparation operation will be totally open to view.

How it will make money: Low overhead combined with strong concept. Two employees ought to be enough to run the entire operation at all times, with limited open hours to allow for diligent prep work. One employee cooking, one running a register. Only five major pieces of equipment are strictly necessary: a fridge for beer, a cooler for ingredients, a flat-top griddle, a milkshake machine, and a fryer.

A burger, french fries, and beer (or a milkshake for the kids) in the open air is designed to appeal as an experience as much as it is designed to appeal as a food. The concept revolves around limits - you may have a burger with whatever toppings are available, fries, and one of three beverages, and you may experience it in an open-air setting during a limited portion of the year (warm months, obviously.) Honestly, I'm not sure I want to offer water and milkshakes, even though those options would broaden the potential clientele dramatically. Limitation really is the key to the whole idea.

The challenges are numerous - one, getting a liquor license. It's easier to get beer-only than to get a full license, but still. Two, location. It'd be hard to pull off perfectly, and I view location as crucial - some cities may not even have a place that would support such an establishment. Finally, keeping costs low enough to make money with low menu prices.

Challenges aside, though, imagine walking a few blocks with a friend or two on a summer evening when it's getting cool, walking up to the bar, and ordering. You can see the cook slapping beef onto the hot griddle to make thick, juicy burgers, and tossing them into baskets with hot fries. Go to the toppings bar and top the burger with onions, pickles, banana peppers, and baconnaise, then grab a cold bottled beer from the fridge. Find a picnic table with a good view of the sunset, and enjoy. It's a compelling thought.

Assorted assertions without evidence or support

The feminist movement is as closed-minded and judgmental as the patriarchal system it claims/tries to replace.

Our country is in a crisis of un-scarcity.

Stupid and lazy people should not be encouraged to attend college.

Good furniture is in tragically short supply.

Knowing how to cook is one of the easiest ways to improve one's overall happiness.

“Thus in one sentence they admit that evolution is real,” Dr. Bengtson said, “and that they have to invoke magic to explain how it works.”

Mark, on the likely origin of Spaten:

"So in 1397 these two ditch diggers are like 'Dude, we're seriously f***ing poor and feudal. Let's drink this ditch water.'"

The sweet hopelessness of summer feels like the weather it accompanies. It wraps around me like heat and humidity, sapping my will and making me crave darkness, stillness, and cold. I hate what it makes me. I hate what it does to my relationships with others. When I forget about it, or choose to re imagine it, it's a muzzy sort of peace - a warm, meaningless existence - but my brain betrays me, driving me back toward reality.

The job search is fruitless. I'm running out of time, and I feel no closer now than when I began.

On the impersistence of memory

Assorted pleasant randomness I've run across recently.

Is everyone a possible valued customer? and from the same blog Health Care

It takes a bit of doing to configure, but this desktop is super cool.

A great number of movies I want to see are coming out soon.

...more later.

After the heavy note of the last post, I figure it's time for something lighter. So I'm going to talk about WoW.

I've lately become involved in competitive Arena play, particularly in the 2 vs 2 bracket. There are two other brackets - 3v3 and 5v5 - but of the three, 2v2 is the most intimate and painstaking bracket to play in. You're working closely with one other person against two people who are also working closely together.

Every team has a rating which rates their prowess relative to the rest of the server - it's a 3000 system, so at 1500 you're superior to 50% of the competition. At higher ratings, powerful in-game rewards become available. These rewards, along with the prestige of performing against an objective measure of skill, create an intense atmosphere of competition in the Arenas. There aren't many easy matches. Those who approach the Arenas with a casual attitude, without the willingness to work hard to improve, quickly become frustrated and typically quit.

Consider that your introduction if you didn't already know.

The Arenas are psychologically and emotionally pretty taxing. You have to work as closely as possible with your partner - ideally, you want to behave as though each has a direct line to the other's brain. This coordination is achieved through practice and familiarity, though simply possessing compatible play styles helps enormously. For example, I play with one partner sometimes whose style is extremely aggressive and fast-paced, which matches my own nicely. Despite the relatively poor communication we enjoy, we get wins because we play with similar mental rules in place.

Once communication is in place, and you get used to your partners habits, you can focus on learning about your enemy. And here's where it gets interesting.

The best Arena players know the skills and abilities of all 10 classes well enough to predict and react to their use. Each class has between 10 and 30 abilities which are likely to come into play in the Arenas, of which probably 5 or 6 are worthy of close attention. Once you play against each class enough, you begin to get a feel for which abilities they tend to use in a given situation. A Priest Healer will Mana Burn anytime he doesn't have to heal, a Mage will Counterspell any big, slow heals he sees, and etc.

But there are always two players per team, and now we get to learn about synergy - the way that the abilities of two classes mesh together to create a dangerous pair. Synergy is what dictates the success or failure of a team composition. A currently popular composition, for example, is Rogue/Priest. Rogues are lightly armored high-damage melee damage-dealers, and Priests in this case are survivable healers with a few powerful anti-healer capabilities. Together, they bring a balance of control, damage, and survivability that is very potent.

Games tend to follow one of three courses - quick burst games where one partner is taken down quickly, long mana (the resource used for spell-casting in general and healing in particular) wars, and control/burst wins. Of the three, I prefer the last - controlling one partner and bursting down the second requires finesse and coordination, so such wins are satisfying. Quick burst feels cheap - just tunnel-visioning one person and hitting them until they're dead doesn't provide many thrills, though some teams' strategies revolve around doing just that. Mana wars can be somewhat enjoyable - carefully rationing heals and casts and timing abilities to maximize survivability - but they currently tend to favor classes other than mine so I don't get many wins that way anymore.

In all three types of games, though, victory is a matter of dictating to your opponent the terms of the match. The team which sets the terms of the game will typically come away with the win. Such control can be achieved by a combination of three major ideals - setting your own tempo, controlling place, and punishment/reward.

Denying the opposing team their choice of tempo is as easy as looking at what they do when they come out the door. A team that hangs back or runs away wants a slow, careful pace. Denying it to them is as easy as running them down and forcing them to engage you. A team that charges you can be denied their quick start by crowd-controlling one or both of the team members and forcing them to regroup before they can attempt to return to their quick pace.

Controlling place has always been critical, and becomes particularly so against certain teams. Against Priests whose Mana Burn ability can quickly deny me the ability to heal, for example, I try to use line-of-sight as much as possible to prevent them from being able to cast against me. Against a Druid, though, who I want within easy reach so as better to make his life miserable, I prefer to play out in the open, away from line-of-sight. Sometimes the place is a wash - against certain teams there just isn't much advantage or disadvantage to playing anywhere on the field. When the advantage exists, though, it tends to be significant.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, there's punishment and reward. All of the miscellaneous behaviors that your opponents employ can be punished or rewarded to help persuade them to behave in a way that's beneficial to your team. If a DPS wants to deal damage one person on your team, for example, you can make it as hard as possible for them to do so while offering the other player instead. If a healer wants to hug pillars, you can punish him by trapping him behind one and putting pressure on his partner.

To put all of this into a real-life example, let's say I'm playing with my Paladin/Hunter combo against a Priest/Rogue team. I know several things about this team as soon as I see that the Priest is apparently alone because the Rogue is in stealth, and that the Priest has no buffs from a Druid, the only other class which can stealth. I know that the Rogue will attempt to Sap me, which is a 10-second incapacitation effect. I deny him the ability to do this using one of my abilities which will break the Sap if my partner takes any damage. I also know that the Rogue will deal significant amounts of damage in the first few seconds after he breaks stealth, so I put every damage reducing ability on myself in case he jumps me - if he jumps my partner, I can easily deal with that damage, but if he jumps me, I'm in a significantly less defensible position. I also know that the Priest will want to Mana Burn me, which rapidly takes away my ability to heal. I have a couple of options to deal with Mana Burns - I can hide from them using line-of-sight, I can attempt to control the Priest continuously, or I can force him to heal his partner continuously. The third option is my favorite, so I'll attempt to achieve that flow in the game.

Now on to the course of the game. The Rogue Saps me, then emerges from stealth to attack my partner. My Sap is broken immediately by Hand of Sacrifice, and now that the Rogue is out of stealth his damage potential against me is dramatically reduced and I want him on me. So at this point I begin to punish him for every move he makes to attack my partner. If he moves toward my partner, I stun him, slow him, hit him in the face with my shield - whatever it takes to prevent him from doing what he wants to do. As soon as he begins to attack me, I reward that behavior by playing defensively for myself. He's still taking monstrous damage from my partner all this time, whether he decides he'll play my game or not. When he does decide that he'll give in to my punishments, we've won the game. I can sustain myself indefinitely against an unstealthed Rogue, and my partner will quickly put him on the floor even despite heals from the Priest, who will be unable to play the offensive game he wants to against me because he's forced to heal his Rogue.

Sound like fun? That's a relatively easy game for my composition, since Hunters with support perform well against Rogues. There are double-DPS teams to worry about, DPS/Healer teams with much more durable DPS, and even surprising oddball compositions that don't make sense until they've killed you. It's tougher than I thought, and I haven't even hit the "big leagues" yet - we're at 1700, still shy of the magic number for good teams, 1850.

This'll be my last WoW-post for a while, promise. ;-)

I've talked a few times about my relationship with Jen here, though never in detail. I feel the need to speak in detail about it now.

Jen is the girl I want to marry. I can't say with absolute certainty that she's the girl I will end up marrying, but whenever I consider spending the rest of my life with her, I am made tranquil... Filled with a peace that's so blank and featureless that I can't find any foible in it at which to pick. There may come a time when I regret having said any of this, but at the moment I can't imagine the possibility. I know my future self is out there, and I know he's a judgmental bastard.

I've heard people talk about "compatibility" for my entire life. eHarmony would like us all to know that they rate their online dating matches on "compatibility". eHarmony, like everyone else, fails to define what they mean by the word. I didn't know what the word meant. People fit together like puzzle pieces, sometimes. I believed that this was true, because I had been told so many times that it was true, but I didn't understand. The truth of what "compatibility" can be is so much more than what I'd assumed that when it first happened I didn't think it was possible.

The irony in this whole story is that the two of us didn't seem at all compatible, at first. Many people thought I was crazy the first time we tried dating, though that assessment arose from a misapprehension of my priorities. I was literally asked whether I was crazy... and not by one or two people. Several people asked the same question. They assumed that my lifestyle would preclude a relationship with Jen. Sadly, part of me agreed with those people.

What that part of me failed to realize is that you can't determine how compatible two people are by tabulating their habits and values. There are things going on under the surface of any person that don't come out on a regular or predictable basis. On top of that, people can be persuaded to change by the realization of something they've always wanted. In my case, I finally had the chance at a relationship that gave me everything I wanted... someone I wanted, in every way. I didn't even realize at the time just how much that would turn out to be true, but I was nevertheless prompted to change by even the relatively narrow slice of who Jen was that I knew about.

When I think about it, though, I'm not sure that I've really changed. At heart, I want the same things I've always wanted. But there's this person that satisfies those wants, who makes me feel content in a way I didn't so much as hope for before. It's difficult for me to articulate this changing-into-myself feeling.

It's all very difficult to articulate, really, and this brief exposition has taken me hours. I hope it all makes more sense.

This makes me happy

It's not that I didn't expect good things from this relationship, just that I couldn't begin to comprehend how good it could be.

So I've been watching Battlestar: Galactica...

And it's a great show. I love the psychological and social difficulties the show presents... it's very topical. If you haven't seen it, mild spoiler here: the evil robots look like and seem to be people to the point that it's impossible to tell by looking at them or cutting them open. So the question must be asked - how do you determine who among you is the enemy, when they look and act the same?

It's been a while, I suppose. I blog when I'm alone, and I've been with at least one person most of the time lately.

My territory has been broad these recent weeks. Every weekend and sometimes during the week it seems as though I'm driving all over Indiana (and occasionally Ohio) for one reason or another. There've been weddings, concerts, visits with people... It's fun, but I'm beginning to get very tired of driving seemingly all over the planet. I'm looking forward to sitting still for a couple of days later this week.

I excursed (real word?) to Columbus this weekend. I've never particularly liked returning there, but that dislike drove home harder than usual this time. Visiting my parents' house doesn't bother me; it's the city itself. Being there dredges up memories that are inside me but somehow not mine. It's not even that I'm no longer the person that formed those memories, but that I feel contempt, almost hatred, for that me-who-was. I feel crippled there now the way I felt crippled there before, but it's difficult to define precisely what I mean by that. So little good came out of anything I did there that it's difficult to believe that anything good can come out of being there, even though everything else has changed.

On a lighter note, I've discovered Battlestar Galactica, and it's fun.

I've spent an enormous amount of time with Jen lately, which is an unqualified positive. During (and certainly as a result of) all of that time, I've begun to notice even the subtler of my own emotions reflecting from her, and vice versa. It's a degree of intimacy that I'd never had any conception of before, and it continuously surprises me.

I watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button today. Like any movie which covers the majority of a person's life, it makes you think that you ought to reorient your perspective on life. It really is just like Forrest Gump, though.

I've been thinking about the social map of WoW a lot lately. I have friends and guild mates in that game from every walk of life - white-collar jobs, blue-collar jobs, students, and retired people. Yet all of those people click with me in a way that doesn't seem probable given their background. Is class put under erasure by the medium of WoW? It seems possible.

I have a friend who works as a cook at a restaurant in New York, late nights, then comes home around 3am when I'm about to sleep and talks to me.

Another friend who's just finishing high school, and has to be in bed by midnight.

Another who's been retired for 8 years and plays because her kids play, and is one of the most intelligent, competent players I've ever met, and wonderfully compassionate to boot.

Another who's a software consultant who travels the country - single, no kids - and plays WoW from his hotel rooms.

There's something going on there that's so much more than meets the eye. A network of people who find each other on a playing field which is leveled so differently from real life. Perhaps more on that later.

I keep meaning to write a graduate school retrospective here. I haven't found the mood.

I'm terribly worried about getting a job. About getting one, to be sure, but also about what happens when I do get one. Will I be a worthwhile employee? I fear that I won't be. I'm truly terrible at things that bore me, and most employee-type activities bore me.

I was looking at the leaves climbing to the tops of the trees
but you were nowhere to be found.
Just beneath all the green you were buried
like a little seed among the roots and underground.
I was licking at the leaves, but I was in short sleeves and you,
you were like some sickness that I caught.
My sweetheart moved away, swept off like garbage in the ally way -
I need more grace than I thought.

Deeply. Tired.

I'm still writing papers. I will be done tomorrow. For sure, and for a while.

Eastern Promises is a seriously dark movie. I find myself admiring the main character. He's quiet, settled, purposeful... approaches everything with a steady patience. I like that.

It's hot, and I can't focus.

"There are lots of things I don't understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.”

—Noam Chomsky

Today, I heard a British guy complaining about how ugly American accents are.

Umm.

Buddy...

Your society was the source of Cockney.

So yeah. This has been your xenophobic moment of the day.

GettingTFO

And going to Cincinnati.

My Drama professor nearly gave me a heart attack yesterday. My heart literally skipped several beats. Spots appeared before my eyes. Black spots. I think they were the souls of my ancestors coming to take me.

Then I un-heart-attacked when it turned out that he was mistaken and our massive final paper was, in fact, due Tuesday of next week rather than Thursday of this one.

Whew.

I have a TON of writing to do next week. I'll do it as I usually do... in large bursts punctuated by sleep and WoW. Whee!

When I decide to lose weight (and actually act on that decision), I lose weight wonderfully fast. It's great.

Ridiculous vanilla soft serve craving...

It's late (again) and I'm awake (again)

I just got the email saying I've been accepted as a ChaCha guide. This may well be my primary employment for a while, so hooray for that.

I have acquired three keychain breathalyzers.

At some point in the near future, I need to go clothes shopping. I have clothes in three categories - good, worn out, and ill-fitting. The second and third categories are becoming overburdened.

Today is 4/20. Have fun, people who have more fun than me.

Bed.

Repost: "3. Since you've begun your blog, how have you seen yourself grow?"

"I began this at the end of the school year freshman year, and it really got off the ground that summer. I wrote it mainly to deal with summertime - those who know me in all 4 seasons know that summer does something bad to me. It has mostly to do with the amount of work and the lack of human contact, and that first summer was exceptionally bad in both departments. I worked 11-hour days with no breaks due to the fact that there were only two employees, the other of which was my functionally retarded manager with the stupid frosted hair and the 20-years-older girlfriend. Most of those days had me alone all day, basically watching television. It really wasn't terrible at any given moment... I mean, yeah, it sucked sometimes, especially when I had zero-customer days, but overall it wasn't such a bad job. The big problem was the 11-hour days, focused on weekends, meant that I rarely got to see other people. I left home shortly after getting up the morning and got back just in time to say goodnight to my family.

The product of all this, interestingly, was a lot of emotional growth. Left to my own devices, I changed quite a lot. I stopped thinking about things as being my fault 100% of the time, and realized the roles that others play in my life for what seemed like the first time. I became aware of my thoughts and what they meant.

Then school started again, for my sophomore year. Sophomore year was a roller coaster. Along with an increased awareness of myself, I had gained an increased awareness of the implications of my actions for others, which led me to some moral dilemmas. I tended to take the path of least risk, and I don't say that in a negative way, because when I say risk I mean risk for others more than risk for myself.

Sophomore year ended, and I felt like a ping-pong ball in a dryer. Pulled in directions I didn't expect by forces I didn't understand. I worked a job that I more or less tripped and fell into, and hated it. I learned that a good boss is incalculably valuable. Ditto good co-workers. Working with 4 people that I not only didn't like, but also didn't respect made a job doing something I essentially don't enjoy just that much worse.

Junior year was wild. My grades fluctuated a lot - I blame a combination of lack of focus, lack of interest, and too many considerations besides school. I had wonderful friends, and we had fun like it was going out of style. I'd never valued people so much before last fall and the subsequent months.

Spring quarter brought better grades and better times. I made my best GPA ever at Rose-Hulman and thoroughly enjoyed life while doing it.

Summer began, and with it another job. I worked at Rose-Hulman, at the Help Desk job that I've been working part-time since I got here, but as a full-time employee. It was wonderful. I absolutely love the people, the job was excellent (though frequently quiet,) and for once I found myself wanting to get up and go to work, because there was something there that I wanted to accomplish.

Outside of my job, though, this last summer was a very rough time for me. I was plagued by uncertainty, about myself and my life, and felt that I needed to make a change. I was going in a circle, and I needed to break the force holding me to the center point of that path. I'm no longer in that circle, and I'm moving in a direction that I'm reasonably happy about, but it was costly.

Right now, I find that I've learned just enough to realize how much more I have to learn. Like coming over a hill and realizing you're still miles even from the next hill.

I don't know that that really answers the question. I can't give you an A->B growth summary, but hopefully the idea is there."

Later in the same post:

"I was feeling horrible one night sophomore year - sick, frustrated by homework, and worst of all, unable to work out because of a twisted ankle. It seems that at least a few other people felt the same way, and we all ended up somehow on the futon and sort of half-dozed for a while. I don't know how that moment happened, and it never did again, but for a little while we were all completely comfortable just to be close. I found myself completely relaxed and at peace for the first time in months.

It's kind of funny, now, because two of the people who were there don't speak to me now. Such is life."

Sept. 24th, 2006

I read a book, a few years ago, about a man whose parents were a mountain and a washing machine.

But that's not really relevant.

What is relevant is that in that book, the man bought an old, run-down house with hardwood floors and trim. Working entirely by hand, he sanded the entire house down to bare wood, then worked wax into the wood to reseal it. The description of that process was, for me, the highlight of the book.

There was also a fascinating discussion of the potential of an ad-hoc network.

But that's not really relevant.

The project of sanding and waxing this entire house was a work of immense love for this character - he poured all of his waking hours into it, and did it with all his care and attention. When he finished, the entire house was a study in smooth, soft-finish, light-colored wood.

I have an abject obsession with the feel and smell of raw wood.

But that's not really relevant.

The obvious questions come to mind - why didn't he just hire someone to do it? Why not use a machine? Well, doing it by hand was better somehow; expending all that energy pointlessly was necessary to imbue the finished product with something difficult to define.

Why am I writing all of this? I'm not sure, yet. I'm sure that I'm unsatisfied with the narratives readily available to me to formalize the value of finishing the house in this way, but the narrative I want to create to replace them is unclear to me.

Have you ever been whistling the song "Kung Fu Fighting" and turned a corner to find yourself face to face with two Asian women?

I'm sad to say that I very much have, as of today.

After the past two weeks, I am mentally drained to such a degree that every time I sit down, my brain collapses into crippling ennui. This weekend will help enormously, I'm sure. I have work to do tomorrow, but the fact that it's not due for a while makes it a lot less painful.

After you analyze (because you have to) the why behind enough of what you see, read, and hear, you start to do it for everything, even when you don't want to. Movies are an exercise in analysis, now, which really takes the fun out of some of them. Ironically, though, it makes really bad movies better.

If you like cute things, emo things, or especially things that are both cute and emo, visit http://www.ponandzi.com/. Or watch this video.

By the way, I'm sad that Bedlight for Blue Eyes broke up.

There's a dual sense of disappointment inherent in the most purist concept of indie rock, if you think about it - disappointment, first, that good music can never become popular and therefore is doomed to the limitations that come with being "indie", and disappointment that the general public isn't capable of enjoying good music, or at least the particular kind of good music in question.

My enthusiasm for cooking wanes when I have no one to cook for but myself. If you want good food, come visit. I will give you a couch and food. Other amenities are extra.

It really irks me when people say, "Oh, I don't think such-and-such is wrong, it's just not the right choice for me," with that fakey tone of voice that makes it extremely clear that they do think it's wrong.

Doing a particularly tough Crossfit workout from start to finish at a good pace felt fantastic. I'm going to be crippled tomorrow, though.

If you guessed "writing even more", you're right!

Sweet Jesus, I can't wait to be done with this semester. Working at Wal-Mart seems good in comparison.

This hotel captures my imagination. I've got whole reams of thoughts that stem from this story.

Bed.