journal.melendez.org

So, if you live in a historic city, should there be a Wal-Mart there? Absolutely not. Problems with Wal-Marts: predatory business practices displacing small businesses, lack of a living wage paid to employees, visual pollution, questionable politics, traffic.

Last night, we went to Cooter Brown's, one of the best "college" bars in the city. It's always a very laid back atmosphere. Instead of jello shots, people are drinking premium beers. It also has one of the most rockin' grills of any bar. The Radiator's Special, a mix of fried shrimp and oysters served with melted cheese on french bread will rock your world.

OK, so here's an idea I had for a new business concept: microjobs. Instead of people working at one job, what if we employed people with a series of small jobs? Could this help small business more effectively control their labor costs and give workers more variety and challenge? Ideally, microjobs would be: portable, not capital or resource intensive, simple concepts, utilizing partners instead of employees (think lemonade stand as opposed to amazon.com), local first, scaling to where business can be done, able to start up fast and shut down fast if necessary and with little requirements for offices and other expensive trappings. Flaws that I can think of so far with this idea: 1) There is still a need for a stable, seasoned, knowledgable worker (you don't want your brain surgeon moonlighting as a bartender) in some vocations. 2) Without some sort of national health care insurance, these people could be as screwed as they would be working at a single low wage job,...

Last night was mojito night at The Audubon Club, a gentrified bar in the Lower Garden District. It was good to see some people I knew (and some I didn't) and have some drinks, but I was not all that impressed with the bar.

"The final jet-booster of this trend is the airlines' extraordinarily successful frequent-flier programs, which have provided the burgeoning hyperflier culture with its own currency, lexicon, and class structure. ... The hyperfliers may think they're getting something for nothing, but they're actually playing the airlines' game. By tightly restricting free flights, airlines have rigged it so that a passenger flying for free almost never displaces a paying customer, and typically costs the airline only about $20 per flight. But to earn that $20 flight, hyperfliers will go out of their way to book all their tickets on one airline, and may waste hundreds or thousands of dollars building their status." --Warren Berger, "Life Sucks and Then You Fly," Wired, August, 1999

Updated the opening page to this site .

Friday night: a visit to Ninja Cafe, where the waitress was very skeptical of my knowledge of Japanese. Then, we went to dba and had a few cocktails with the owner of some New Orleans websites for those with prurient interests. On Saturday, I worked on the pond, getting proper filtration set up for it. This will give us the opportunity to add more fish to it. On Saturday evening, I roasted garlic and we made some drinks with Red Bull and then we visited Rese and Kenneth in Rese's tony Henderson condo .