Archive for February, 2007

A fire early Saturday morning in an apartment building on Aberdeen Street killed two Boston University students and a third person suffered serious injuries from smoke inhalation, according to The Boston Globe. It is not yet known what caused the fire. A similar fire in a building next to our backyard a couple of years [...]

Foreigners are funny: This is reality for many in Bulgaria, unpleasant as it is. Stray docs flock around kiosk where poor people buy unhealthy ‘snacks’ as they are called, made of flour, water, salt and sunflower oil. I bet the stray docs are pestering people to eat healthier food. Judging from the picture in article [...]

Professor Media Critic Dan Kennedy links a New York Times article on Norwegian publisher Schibsted’s unusuallly successful Internet ventures. Writes the Times about Schibsted: Its earnings rose 28 percent in the fourth quarter. Online operations will generate about 20 percent of the company’s revenue this year, according to analysts at Kaupthing, a bank based in [...]

Let’s be frank and honest here. This post really has no purpose other than to gratuitously display scantily clad women, so I won’t try to dress it up with witty or sarcastic remarks in an attempt to pretend otherwise. Selling Halloween is a magazine that keeps retailers up to speed on Halloween-related offerings. There is [...]

Little India Magazine has terrific article, Conveniently Yours, on the Indian dominance of the convenience store market and how they have leveraged hard work, business acumen and America’s business-friendly laws and regulations (well, friendly relative to those in India) into paths to prosperity. The article describes why immigrants from India were attracted to the industry [...]

Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center in Boston has stirred up some controversy in hospital circles by posting the hospital’s “central line infection rates.” He writes in a followup post that some of his colleagues are somewhat displeased with with his announcing the data publicly. In defending his decision, Mr Levy writes: [...]

If you use Google to search for “Boston” on Swedish-language websites you’ll find that three of the top ten links (actually eleven, since one site gets two links) are to articles about those dadgum mooninite ad pieces. For good measure the corporate tchotskes get another four links on the second page.

The following snippet from a Motley Fool column on McDonald’s is interesting with regards to the minimum wage hikes that are sweeping the nation: One important note that came up during the Q&A is on menu-price increases. Historically, the company has raised prices annually just below the “food-away-from-home” inflation index, which has been “running at [...]

The garment industry in Bangladesh suffers from a shortage of skilled workers/supervisors/managers, reports The Daily Star (“Journalism without fear or favour”): Dr Nazrul Islam, principal, BIFT, said the shortage is of two types; one is the shortage of skilled workers. The other is the shortage of mid-level managers like skilled machine operators, quality controllers, merchandisers [...]

I’ll freely admit that my sample data is small, but my experience with the MBTA commuter trains has been quite pleasant. With only a couple of exceptions, the train has arrived and departed on what can reasonably be called on time. I suppose I shall eventually be hit with some massive delay that will make [...]