I would listen to all my music and make a list of the most powerful notes, phrases, choruses. I would be sure to include the fretless bass, the synth, and the vocals found in "Mother Stands for Comfort." It sounds like a song that might have had a rhythm track--a guitar or piano, but someone muted it in the studio, and realized that just to let the other disparate parts play alone, would keep the song just barely together.

They are everywhere. That one corner of an intersection where no store succeeds, while the other three corners thrive. In Chicago, I think of that haunted house at Halsted & Belmont. It was a clothing store, a hair salon, thrift store. No one could make anything stick. There are similar places I see here. A print shop closed and an upscale men's clothing boutique opened up, but doesn't seem to be faring too well. Retail is tough.

The places that buck the trend fall into a few categories: wildly popular brands (Starbucks), high margin variety (budget mobile phone sellers), and shops that go to great lengths to erase the smell of failure from the minds of local consumers. Major exterior renovations, extra press, events, and promotions, hitting the pavement to generate word of mouth. More than anything, pedestrians need to see signs of life. Going from a copy/printer shop which had zero foot traffic to an understated clothing store (with men's clothes, no less) does not bode well.

Obviously, you would hope that you can have several Level 1, a few less L2, and some sort of top level escalation, to either engineering, partner services, or something. But the other factors are time, and leverage. Having a good escalation process means you can have someone to take escalated tickets, architect a solution, and de-escalate. In this way, everyone learns, the highest level is able to focus on more challenging issues, and the issue get solved.

Escalation resource should be good delegators and must have enough bandwidth to work on what are likely more complex tasks.

Git continues to be a real impediment to new users on Pantheon, just like when I worked at a dev shop. We try to make it pretty easy at Pantheon, but if one veers off course of a standard Dev/Test/Live workflow, or God forbid, they make a mistake, its easy to get sucked into the vortex. We are working to make explaining it a bit easier. I have recently been introduced to a few new sites I think are helpful in explaining more complex workflows:

Visualizing Git Concepts with D3: This has some pretty good simplified tutorials using javascript to show what is really happening with various commands.

Atlassian Git Tutorial: Atlassian really took the time to do it right. These are written much better than other git docs I have seen.

Getting excited about being in Chicago next week. It's been a year and a half, plus a few days, since we came to San Francisco. SF is a beautiful place I may live in, but I may never know it as home like Atlanta, Chicago, or Tokyo.

The drama behind the big investors battle over Herbalife is entertaining if only for the sole pleasure of hearing a big Wall Street guy acting like someone with a moral compass, and calling a spade a spade. The phone call is entertaining to listen to, here on Planet Money, and the backstory is described in more detail in Vanity Fair.