If you’ve ever visited Florida and been captivated by the sun, the relaxation and the sheer magic of the Disney theme parks, you (and especially your children) probably felt sad to leave.  The thought of going back to the old routine and leaving behind some great experiences affects most people.

One way to make sure that the memories don’t fade is to buy some Disney jewellery or other trinkets (for example, read this heart chain story - did you have a romantic vacation and would one of these bring back memories in the weeks and months to come? Or how about heart earrings?).

But as with most things, the Disney people have been great at producing merchandise that exploits their brand and makes their name reach an ever wider market.

So why not visit the big Disney store at Downtown Disney and take a look at what they have, for example:

• Winnie the Pooh Jewelry

• Snow White Jewelry

• Princess Ariel “The Little Mermaid” Jewelry

• Aladdin Princess Jasmine Jewelry

• Disney Logo Dangle Charms and Disney Earrings

• Pendant Chains and Necklace Chains

• Gold Charm Bracelets

The choice is almost endless, but take a look and find that special something for the one you love.  You’ll be glad you did!

The view from Florida still looks very sunny and enjoyable but one of the key segments of the economy are showing signs of concern - tourism:

An economic slowdown, a drop in consumer and corporate confidence and reduced airline capacity have combined to create the most challenging business environment the tourism industry has faced since just after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Florida hotels began to feel the impact of the economic crisis in September, when statewide occupancy rates dropped 10.5% and revenue collected on the average hotel room fell 12.6%, according to Smith Travel Research.

Source: floridatrend.com

Anyone looking around during the recent Easter vacation may not have agreed with this, however.  Roads and restaurants were full, as usual.

But there are signs that European and especially UK tourists are finding it more and more difficult to budget for USA holidays, especially with the weaker UK exchange rate - down by one quarter from it’s peak a year or so ago.  Even European holiday experts such as this Portugal Vacations specialist recognize that the recession has taken it’s toll.

There are signs that the worst may be over, though:

• The UK’s exchange rate has weakened against the Euro also, so the USA’s disadvantage is not as great as it could have been.

• Many UK residents are actually better off than a year or so ago - for example, homeowners with a secure job (e.g. teachers and other local government employees) and a variable mortgage have enjoyed a magnificent increase in disposable income as interest rates have fallen dramatically.

• Florida in general and Disney World in particular are still the number one choice for thousands of children - and adults!

So keep your fingers crossed - if the Dow Jones settles down and the trillions of dollars spent by successive Federal governments achieves even the lowest level of expected benefit, the Florida economy should turn out to be just as sunny as the weather is guaranteed to be.

Do you ever look back on your life and wish that you’d done things differently? Or that you’d had some different way to handle the stresses and strains of daily life?

I can’t pick out many things in my life that I would change if I had the chance.  Right now I consider myself very fortunate to live in a great place - Central Florida - and I have a wonderful family.  Even though they drive me nuts from time to time (and I know I drive them nuts too) my wife and kids are the very best part of my life.  And on top of all that, we are all healthy and in reasonable to good financial straits right now.  So I definitely can’t complain!

But reading one press report today makes me wish that I’d been able to take advantage of one ever-growing trend during my 1990s employment: telecommuting.  What a huge difference it would have made to my time management.  From yesterday’s National Capital Transportation Planning Board:

.  .   .  .  .  just released figures showing that there are fewer commuters on the road these days. Getting to and from the office now accounts for only one-fifth of area motorists’ trips. That number is down from roughly a quarter of all trips fifteen years ago.

The new survey finds that commuters are doing more telecommuting and avoiding the roads.

Area residents still spend plenty of time in the car, but now those trips are more likely to be running errands like driving to the gym or picking up kids from school.

How I applaud their lifestyle choices!  And how sensible of them to focus on getting a work-life balance that has more sanity.  And how I recommend anyone who can accomplish it to find a telecommuting job.

During the 1990s, I worked for one of the Big 4 management consulting firms and I was based in Central London.  Although some of the projects I worked on were away from the city, it seemed that the longest and most stressful ones were in the heart of London.  That meant early starts and late finishes.  What an utter waste of time and money and what a crazy amount of frustration the commuting created.

There were three main travel options to get to the office close to Fleet Street from my home in Oxfordshire: car, main line rail and the subway (London Underground, the “Tube”).  No matter which combination I used, my journey in took at least one and a half hours.  It could be longer - two hours or more.  And the same for the return trip in the evening.

Moving closer to the office wasn’t an option, because house prices were too expensive and it would have disrupted the childrens’ education.

So at least three and maybe as much as four or more hours each day were taken up with the “assault course” that was commuting in those days.  I gave it up in 1997, but I’m sure it’s even worse these days.

These days I work from my Florida home overlooking the swimming pool, so commuting is over.  The web cam, broadband Internet access and Skype mean that I can video-conference with business colleagues and friends all over the world when I need to.

And I look back on the man-hours of travel in the 1990s with the very opposite of nostalgia.  Just imagine what telecommuting could have done to my working day.  Just think about how my time management would have been so much different.  Lots of our meetings, project work and interactions could so easily have been dealt with via telecommuting if the technology had been as common and simple and effective as it is these days. And just think about how that would have released so much time for family and leisure pursuits - it would have released the equivalent of two or more extra days per week.

So give me a time machine and one of my priorities would be to go back and invent telecommuting a decade or two earlier.  We can all dream, can’t we?

Well it’s time to leave behind the political scene, worrying and frustrating though our Washington (and Tallahassee) brethren can be, and return to more honest topics before passions get inflamed again. And since the title of this blog is A View From Florida, how are things here?

One of the great changes this week, at least in the Central Florida region that I live in, is the return to more “normal” weather, by which I mean warm weather. We’ve had below normal temperatures for weeks and even some nights of frost. That’s not why we came to Florida!

So despite all the “expert” propaganda about global warming, we’ve had one of the coldest winters we can remember here. Sure, it’s all relative and I’d much rather tolerate slightly colder weather in Florida than the lousy ice and snow conditions that I’ve seen the rest of the USA experience for the last few months. But the cool Florida weather has seemed to go on longer and temperatures have been lower than I remember for a few years.

I guess that’s why we’re now told to use the words “climate change” instead of global warming: if the science is screwed up and the con is losing it’s impact, change the terminology to perpetuate the myth.

One guy on one of this week’s television programs (I think it was an Australian scientist on Fox News) came out with a more balanced and reasoned perspective than I’ve heard from Al or any of his zealots: he pointed out that true climate change can only be measured over many hundreds or even thousands of years because the changes are so slow and subject to temporary diversions. Apparently the inconvenient truth is that the one hundred years or so available to Al in his laughable film would only be relied on by a snake oil salesman or someone who really doesn’t understand the reality. Even the most extreme global warming fanatic may soon have to own up to the real reasons for promoting their cult: an opportunity to increase taxation and to control people’s lives even more.

Anyway, back to Florida and the cold weather. The last few weeks have had a big impact on the plant life and yards everywhere look battered and sad. Together with the lack of rain, lawns look almost destroyed and it’s difficult to see much improvement over the next few weeks even with the warmer weather. It’s become so bad that a serious look at synthetic grass is in order just to preserve the look of the yards and to avoid an annual replacement of worn out sod. Only the initial cost of synthetic turf stops me going ahead - otherwise, no more weekly mowing, no costly weed and feed treatments and no more bugs and lawn pests to contend with.

As far as plants are concerned, many have shriveled and appear to be dead. But a hearty cutting back has already resulted in signs of new life. So maybe the cold wasn’t that bad after all and we should just get on with life like the plant world is - without moaning!

The strength of feeling and emotion in the last post has motivated me to spring into print.  It’s always a good idea to agree with your better half or at the very least to be tactful in disagreeing - but in this case there’s no need for any tact or diplomacy, because if anything, the Boss has understated it, I believe.

I think that the Washington Wackos need to enter some sort of addiction recovery program.  They are clearly out of their minds and can only react to any problem by throwing money at it.  Normal people give some sort of thought to budgeting - which to most folks means figuring out how much money they have coming in (usually from earnings at a job, but sometimes from investments too) and then deciding how much of that they can afford to spend.

First of all are the essentials such as buying food for the family, paying the utility bills to keep the home heated in the winter and cool in the summer.  Next is likely to be the mortgage or rent payment because they need a roof over their heads.  If they have car loans or credit card bills they come next.  And finally there is discretionary spending such as new furniture, a vacation or remodeling the bathroom.  For some, how to get out of debt is an added burden if they’ve overspent in previous months and years - but most people are responsible enough to accept their debts and try to repay them.

But none of this basic common sense approach seems to apply to the Washington Wackos, whether they are Representatives, Senators or even inhabitants of the White House.  They appear to have absolutely no regard for what they’re spending nor how it will be repaid.  They have no regard whatever for the effects of loading up current and future taxpayers with loan and interest payments.

Instead they seem to vie with each other for financial irresponsibility, and this latest incompetent White House numbskull looks as if he’s out to set the record for the most dumb decisions in the shortest space of time.

You might have thought that the previous White House incumbent, along with High Spending Hank from the Treasury made a foul up of things and who would argue with that?  But Tax Cheat Tim and Blundering Barack want to prove that anything W could do, they can do better.  Or in this case, a mountain-sized amount worse.

The whole bunch of them, White House and Congress, Blundering Barack, Nitwit Nancy and Hopeless Harry, are about as welcome and talented as a dose of bubonic plague.

Are none of this group of more than five hundred Wackos possessed of the least bit of any ability to think?  Are they so power-crazed, short sighted and self-absorbed that they can’t see the wood for the trees?  Will they wake up (or will the country just wake up and throw them out of office) before it’s too late and we’re all reduced to poverty?  Do these clowns think that “equality” means making everyone equally poor, except for the riches they bestow on themselves?

I guess only time will tell.

This is not a political blog nor do I normally voice my opinion on political matters to anyone other than family and friends but I am feeling so frustrated at the moment I had to get it off my chest.  I am incensed at the lies our politicians tell and the fact that they think they can get away with it.

I was able to vote for the first time in the 2008 election after becoming a US citizen in 2007.  It was an exciting time and I listened carefully to what the candidates had to say as I am not affiliated to any specific party.  All the candidates were promising “change” in one shape or form and I was particularly interested in those who promised to get rid of earmarks.  Earmarks or pork are not something that I was familiar with coming from the UK.

Everything was going great until the financial crisis hit in September 2008.  That turned everything on it’s head and then first of all President Bush and then the two candidates were promising to fix it for us.

Well here we are in March 2009 and it’s business as usual with big government, no perceived end to the amount of our money they are spending and nobody seems to have a clue how to sort it out. What happened to all the promises that were made not just in 2008 but also in 2006 when the House elections took place?  If I’m not mistaken we were promised the end of “sleaze”, more openness and transparency and an end to pet projects.  So far I haven’t seen anything to make me think things have changed. In fact just the opposite as there is as much sleaze and dishonesty in the present Congress as there has been in previous ones.  I’m reminded of the old joke “How do you know when a politician is lying? Answer:When his lips are moving”.

Barack Obama promised that his would be the most open, transparent Presidency ever and that everybody would have a chance to study any bills before he signed them onto the Statute but we are still waiting for that to happen.  Then there was the assertion that there would be no Lobbyists in the Cabinet but that’s another promise broken.  Then there was the promise that he would go through bills line by line and veto any earmarks whoops another promise broken.  In fact every week more promises are broken.  Then there are the Senators and Representatives of both parties who have said they wouldn’t vote for all these high spending bills that are being put forward but guess what they change their mind.

I am not naive enough to think that politicians don’t break their promises or downright lie but I am obviously naive in thinking that the man at the top should have more integrity and stick to his word.  I don’t know how these politicians sleep at night.  Do they have no conscience or do they think they can get away with anything because they are superior to everyone else?  I, and I’m sure the majority of people, were brought up to tell the truth because lies would always be found out and then the punishment would be harsher.  The majority of our politicians don’t even have the grace or morals to own up and apologize when they have been found out in a lie.  Obviously they don’t think the people will punish them and so far that seems to be the case going back to Bill Clinton when he told his bare-faced lies.

You may think I am just criticizing my adopted country and this administration but that is not the case.  The same accusations can be laid at the door of the British Government and I would suggest every other government in the world. It certainly seems to be the case that “power corrupts” and unfortunately where government is concerned it is us the people who suffer.

We need to reassert our moral principles and let the government know that we expect them to adhere to that moral code that made America great. It will be interesting to see whether in the future we can find some honest politicians who really are willing to stand up to their convictions.

It is a huge achievement to reach a 25th anniversary whether it is that you have worked for the same company for twenty five years or been married to the same spouse for that length of time.  This is especially true in today’s societies with a more mobile workforce and divorce seemingly accepted as a way of life.

In marriage a silver anniversary is a big milestone and one well worth celebrating.  When you take your marriage vows, be it in a church or an hotel or on a beach, one of the things you usually promise is to love and be with each other through good times and bad for the rest of your lives.  Unfortunately for some people the vows they take are just words that are said at the ceremony without any real thought taken as to what they actually mean and entail.  If you get married when you are young it is difficult to envisage reaching your 25th anniversary because it seems such a long time away.  But as you get older and your children, if you are lucky enough to have them, are growing up you realize just how quickly time passes and before you know it 25 years have passed.

This year my husband and I will have been married for 38 years and when we stood in church saying our vows “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part” we both meant the words we were saying and still do. There have been bad times and good times and it hasn’t always been a bed of roses but the good times have far out weighed the bad and we are still each others best friend.

A lot of our friends have also celebrated their silver anniversary and we have all feel a great sense of achievement that we have weathered whatever storms have been sent our way.  But the thing I find really sad is those of our friends who having celebrated being together for a quarter of a century or more and then gone on to get divorced.  From a personal point of view I know that by the time we celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary life was getting so much easier.  Our children were grown up, we both had careers we enjoyed, we didn’t have any money worries and we were enjoying being just a couple again.

My parents were married for 62 years so my husband and I have only got another 24 years to go to match them!

Sometimes it seems like we all need to diet, by order of the food police!  It wasn’t always that way, was it?

Not too long ago, back in the 1980s in fact, I worked in Great Britain for Nabisco, that well-known maker of Oreos, Ritz Crackers and lots of other glorious cookies.  It was just the start of the health fanaticism that we are all bombarded with nowadays almost at the expense of everything else (but watch out - the Global Warming craze has made great strides and may now even exceed food and diet fetishes as the most extreme cult of modern times).

I remember a chat with one of the Nabisco Marketing managers who was something of a cultural student and he predicted that the health issue would be a dominant trend in the years ahead.  His view was that Nabisco should have jumped on the issue right away and started to reformulate products so that they were the predominate force in the industry on health.  I thought he was over-exaggerating, but how wrong I was!

Since then we seem to have been more and more taken over by diet “political correctness”.  In one sense its not surprising that what you put inside your body has a major impact on health and wellness issues - but don’t you occasionally wonder how mankind survived as long as it did during the centuries in which much of this wisdom was  undiscovered?  And isn’t is strange how the advice changes so often?

For example, when I was a mere child, one of the main pieces of medical advice I recall was to eat dairy foods and other stuff that is now considered lethal.  At that time, as long as you consumed milk, butter, white bread and good chunks of red meat, you would always be healthy.  Vegetables and fruit were, of course, good to include, but the extent to which they were left out didn’t seem to trouble many doctors.

And weight?  Well, being fat was not ideal, but hardly a case for frantic worry.

In contrast, where are we now?

Well, it looks as if virtually every ailment has a dietary cure.

Arthritis?  Try the arthritis diet.

Too many toxins in your body?  Go for the master cleanse.

Heart disease, macular degeneration, diabetes? Get help from antioxidants.

Just need to lose weight?  Ok, now you’re in trouble because you have simply too many choices, varying from the one-shot options like stuffed peppers and acai berries, all the way through to rapid weight loss tips and the biggest loser diet.

And that’s before we get started with pro-active health food stuff like fish oil benefits and the merits of green tea.

But do they all really work?

I regularly read about the number of overwieght and actually obese people being on the increase, even after a couple of decades of dietary naziism.  And in tandem, fundamental advice one day then gets reversed (the modern day equivalent of dairy products all of a sudden becoming harmful).  Yesterday it was cholesterol that we needed to control by dietinary means, now the latest theory focuses on tryglycerides.  So I wonder just how far we have yet to progress before we really do have the definitive version of what we need to do with our food.

I’m probably being unfair and over-simplistic.  I know that health is a complex problem with many reasons for the issues we face.  But in the meantime I’ll say goodbye for now because I’m off for a large steak and fries followed by a large slice of chocolate cake.

I might die young, but at least I’ll have been happy!

On re-reading through the previous post, I realize that it sounds as though I’m a Luddite who has no appreciation of what Information technology has done for the world. Maybe the PC was acting up at the time or some website I wanted to access was slow, so perhaps I was in a bad mood. Anyway, I wanted to set the record straight.

In reality, I’m amazed at how far things have come in just a few short years, especially relating to the Internet, which is where I interact the most with IT these days.

In my management consulting days I spent a lot of time trying to help large companies to get any discernible benefits from IT: frequently they had spent millions of dollars (or pounds or euros, whatever) and had bought the latest “fad” system because the management team was sold on the idea by intellectual arguments and marketing hype. But in practice, they hadn’t a clue how to use what they bought. For example, one of the big new things in the 1990s was SAP software, which cost millions to buy and even more millions to install. It was a very clever piece of software, revolutionary in many ways and with fantastic potential. But after several years of this thing being at the top of the software hit parade, independent reports put the “success” rate of SAP installations at about 20%. In other words, 80% of SAP installations failed to deliver what they had promised. No wonder IT gets a bad name!

On the other hand, contrast that with the way the Internet has pervaded everyone’s life and become reliable and indispensable. When I first came over to the USA from the UK in the late nineties, I had a laptop computer, an e-mail account and a dial up connection. It all worked ok, but slowly of course by today’s standards. I could send and receive messages back to the UK parent company, stay in contact with colleagues and my family and get online news about UK developments. I could even download music and video clips, sometimes illegally if Napster or Limewire were used (but of course, I didn’t do that!). However, the dial-up connection required legendary amounts of patience for that.

Ten years on and it’s like a whole different universe, mainly due to the advent of broadband but also the advance of website technology and infrastructure. I can do everything I did before but now I can do virtually everything else online too: I can buy products online, run an online business, earn money online and keep up with Hollywood without leaving home because of the facility to watch movies online.

But for my wife and I, probably the best feature is the ability to have video calls with our UK family just to keep in touch. We have just one grandchild who is now three years old, so he’s at the stage where he’s interested in everything and prepared to carry on a conversation and role-play. Because his parents are very tech-savvy, he’s grown up in a world that has every hi-tech device imaginable. Cell phones are perfectly normal to him (and he has his own toy one), computers are fascinating and the idea of talking to his grandparents who are in the USA is simply commonplace. So despite the dangers of webcams (!!!), we make full use of what’s available.

We have a video call with him and his parents roughly once a week and so we’re able to see how rapidly he’s growing up. He is more than happy to play transatlantic games with cars, stuffed toys, books, in fact anything. And I’m sure that my wife and I get even more from it than he does. Without the technology we would be faced with long gaps in between seeing him (an ordinary phone is fine, but it doesn’t capture the imagination of a three year old like a picture does). His parents are also delighted that he can keep in touch with his grandparents: our daughter had a very close relationship with her grandparents so she appreciates what rewards it can bring to a child.

So regardless of the overall balance of cost versus benefit (see previous post!), everyone in our family is a confirmed technology fan.

A few years ago when I worked as a management consultant with KPMG in London, I mixed with a lot of IT experts (well, someone has to do it!) and there was an enormous amount of positive PR from the KPMG gang about the benefits of IT, what it could do and what it could help with.  Very impressive.

And then there were people like one of the “renegade” IT experts at the firm.  He would come along to meetings or social gatherings and relish in the joy of putting the opposite point of view.  I recall one of his favorite escapades was to quote from some high-powered survey carried out by one or another seat of learning that had tried to value the combined benefit to society and then compare it with the cost.  They covered a long time frame to iron out peaks and troughs of IT development and costs - a forty or fifty year period, I think.  And the conclusion?

There was no net benefit!

Now I’m an accountant by profession so I know you can prove almost anything with statistics.  And I believe that the survey had a high level of contribution from economists, so draw your own conclusion about the results.  But I always remember this guy’s contrarian point of view when I have the sort of problem with my home office computer gear that I experienced this month.

I’ve become reasonably self-sufficient on the PC front over the years.  I’ve had more than one computer virus and had to recover from a crashed hard drive or two (survived only because I have a poor but at least a somewhat effective backup system, for anyone in doubt).  And I try to keep up to date by reading through the hints and tips you can find at places such as this cool stuff website.  But the latest problem drove me nuts.

I have a network with two desk top computers and one laptop connecting to the cable modem via a router (a Linksys, for what it’s worth.  Made by Cisco?).  The laptop is a wired connection and the desktops are hard-wired to the router.  All of a sudden a few weeks ago, connection to the Internet would slow down and eventually stop.  It was almost random - not all machines at once, not all sites at once, but selectively sites became slower and eventually refuse to load at all.

So cnn.com, for example, would gradually slow down each time you returned to it and then finally not load at all (some cynics might regards that as a good feature to be enjoyed, in the case of cnn.com, but let’s leave that alone for now).  Other sites would load ok before, during and after this period.  If nothing was done, more and more sites would be added to the “won’t load” list until it became impossible in practice to use the Internet.  By a process of elimination I found that the only way to remedy the problem was to disconnect the router power supply and then reconnect it after a few sessions.

I tried everything to cure the problem.  Eventually I found an online forum where this phenomenon had been experienced by many sufferers.  Some cures worked (for example, update the firmware; clear the cache) but no one solution worked all the time for everyone.  I tried all the “cures” but it made no difference.  At last I gave in, bought a replacement (not a Linksys this time!) and sanity is restored.

But I’m left yet again with the memory of my former colleague and his contrarian views.  The time and effort involved in dealing with the problem in the first place, trying to fix it and then spending some hard earned cash as the only alternative - does it make the benefits of having the darned things in the first place really worth it?  I think on balance it does, but when you’re in the middle of trying to cure a really stupid problem, you do wonder!