¶ Matins: How much weight will I have to lose to slip into these fetching Milanese outfits?

¶ Tierce: How I wish I’d been blogging ten years ago! Then I’d be able to post a link to my prediction that Sanford Weill’s Citigroup agglomerations, unveiled with much trumpeting at the time, would turn out to be supercalifragilistic. It was obvious that the merger titan had no interest in the hard slog of expialidocious.  

¶ Nones: Goodbye, solo computer, Hello, KVM!

Oremus…

§ Matins. That’s the way to start the day! What rhymes with Zip?

Rip! That poor guy on the right! What is he, a Ken doll?

But, seriously — the outfit on the left: pretty classy, huh? You have to admire the — what’s the word? — self-similarity between the capelet and the skirtlet. Mr Browne ought to have consulted me, though; I could have told him that he’d left out the stirrups.

§ Tierce. From Eric Dash’s story in the Times:

Whatever the case, Mr. Weill’s appetite for profits, rather than an orthodox belief in the diversified banking model, always drove his deal-making. The “financial supermarket” was part of the Wall Street sales pitch. Over the years, Mr. Weill built his empire by making big acquisitions and then wringing out costs. He pressed his business heads to maximize profits every quarter to finance his next deal.

But Mr. Weill, reluctant to sacrifice those earnings, failed to connect Citi’s sprawling operations. Instead, Citigroup stuck businesses together but ran them independently.

“It was like they were painting the house without making sure the plumbing was strong as it needed to be,” said one longtime Citi follower who was not authorized to speak by his company. “After a while, that catches up.”

The good news is that Citigroup didn’t crash. The better news, maybe, is that it never took off.

§ Nones. Amazing, but true: the Belkin KVM toggle switch that Megan and Ryan had lying around their apartment* and were happy to give to me actually works. What this means: I get to continue applications on the old computer until I’m good and ready to install them on the new one. At the press of a button, my keyboard, video monitor, and mouse connect to the other computer — whichever one that might be.

The new machine is hooked up to the cable modem, while the old one has fallen back on dial-up, which is just fine for that machine. Plus, it’s redundant. You can’t overdo redundancy, until you do too much of it.

* Sans the power adapter, which — Oops! — was apparently swept up in a bundle destined for the electronics recycling event at Union Square.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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