Dear Plonkr, my boyfriend is always coming up with harebrained money-making schemes.  How can I make him stop, or at least direct his energies into more productive channels?  Yours, Wits-ended.

Wits, here is what I suggest.  You start a website devoted to making life a little sweeter, maybe call it “makesweeter.org” or something.  Get your boyfriend involved, perhaps as a guest writer.  Then, earn some money from the site (I’m a little vague on this part of the plan, your Earth economy confuses me).  Then use the money to get your boyfriend enrolled in an economics course, where he’ll learn why his ideas will never work.

If all that fails, I suggest you convince him to borrow short and loan long.  That’s a harebrained scheme too, but at least he’ll be in good company.

It is remarkable how circular the blog world is. Case in point. Consider this 101 tips to improve your web presence article, which in tip number 87 gives:

87. “Link baiting” means writing some killer content that people will want to link to. Like a “101 Tips to Improve Your Web Presence” list!

I also like tip number 34:

34. Find quality and relevant blogs and leave a comment (with a link back to your site of course).

I see a lot of enthusiastic commenters followed that advice on the article itself.

Another nice pair of tips, so to speak, were 28 and 29:

28. Get a custom t-shirt made with your website url on it, and wear it often.
29. Ask a large breasted lady to wear one too.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose…

Consider celtic pasta, a fusion of Italian-Irishness, sumptuous shades of green, white, and orangey-red; fiery, infuriating, yet smoothly seductive. Sounds delicious. I want some. Yet, as far as I know, it doesn’t exist. I know I shouldn’t be personally offended by market failure, but I am. Market failure, you’ve let me down once too often. Not to mention that wandering hand of yours — you’ve never realized that just because its invisible doesn’t mean I can’t feel it. So long, I just can’t bear your bull no more.

If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me “how do I leverage my architecture?”, and I leveraged those nickels, I would have a whole lot of leverages. So let me clear this up for once and for all. An architecture is a framework. Creating a framework involves just two steps: picking the right frame, and doing some work. But just as the quality of a picture doesn’t depend just on its frame, but also on what it depicts, we must remember that the value of an architecture lies not just in its abstractions, but also in its instantiation. Got that? And to leverage it, well, just verb it and add some acrobatics. You know what I mean, bandy about phrases like “walking the tightrope of business architecting.” Works for me, and I’m allegedly the CEO of something or other.

I’m often asked the secret of my success. At least I assume that’s what people are asking me, I rarely listen. I’ve found that, when it comes to business, it pays to have a global perspective. The idea that works for you could come from anywhere. Take for example “Kaizen”, the Japanese notion of continuous improvement, as practiced by Toyota and others. Complete bunk. What if to improve you need to get worse for a while? What if to improve you need to get worse for years? I prefer the Italian practice of “Magari”, which is a word that means “maybe” except without the same level of commitment. It expresses a kind of wistful desire that something might possibly someday happen, although you’re pretty sure it won’t (if you’ve ever worked in Italy, you understand this feeling). I find that a business that follows the principles of “Magari” has the kind of flexibility and might-do attitude that can just about get by until being accidentally bought-out through confusion with a real company with a similar name. Worked for me!

I didn’t believe them. My people kept coming to me with charts and spreadsheets, but I would push them away. I just couldn’t, in my heart, truly believe there was a market for adopting a horde of rampaging penguins. Well, the sales reports just came in, and how wrong I was.

I still don’t understand it though. I mean, don’t get me wrong, penguins are cute, some of my best friends are penguins, I see the attraction there as much as the next guy, but come on. These penguins are hungry!

I guess the only lesson to draw from this is, sometimes I’m an idiot. I don’t really like that notion though, so I’ll obscure it behind some vague motivational prose about having faith in “the team”. That’s right, I should have more trust in my unerring ability to pick good people. That sounds a lot better…