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A Chip And A Chair 5 comments
HP 12C Financial Calculator
As long as you have a single chip and a seat at the table, you can come back and win a poker tournament. As long as you have a calculator and a chair, you can be a value investor.
But, the calculator in question matters. It really must be an HP 12C. HPQ's 12C is perfect. It looks just right. It feels just right. It is so tough that the following actually happened: A zookeeper used the HP 12C to calculate feed mixtures. One day, he accidentally dropped the calculator near a hippopotamus which promptly ate it. The HP 12C survived the hippo's digestive process as well as the thorough scrubbing that followed (the calculator was much more expensive at the time and not the kind of thing you would discard just because it was covered in hippo poop).
More importantly, it uses Reverse Polish Notation (RPN), a thing of beauty in which every operator follows all of its operands. Simple. Elegant. After two minutes, it becomes completely intuitive and obviously superior.
"(" and ")"? Brackets are unnecessary. Brackets are an admission of failure. Brackets are for computing losers.
"="? Why? Why do you need to say "equals"? Why do you need to ask a calculator nicely after you already typed in the equation? You already asked it once. You bought and paid for the calculator. Shouldn't it just answer the question the first time?
If you don't like wasting money, you should not like wasting key strokes either.
Aeron Chair by Herman Miller
Oh and the chair. The chair. The chair is MLHR's Aeron Chair. If you don't have one, your employer is saying that he is about to go under, or he is saying that you should not get too comfortable in your chair because you won't be in it for long anyway. Like the HP 12C it is a no BS thing of beauty. No pretense. Nothing to hide. Perfect classics need no improvement. After years of effort, every change and innovation leads only to something worse.
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This post has 5 comments:
As I'm sure you're aware from Malcolm Gladwell's blink, the Aeron chair didn't always receive this much praise... it was too revolutionary. This article contains the related excerpts from the book:
http://bit.ly/14rwoxF
I'm just thankful that I've only experienced Aerons.
However, my brother and I agreed to each order one (separate states). Free Delivery and no Sales tax(!) plus a 20% price break said the chair.com human you had to order from, for some reason.
13+ years of daily use and one of my better investments.
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