After all the depressing shit that I read in the New York Times today, I felt compelled to buy a new clock.
These were on sale in the Boulder Bookstore and I couldn’t resist. However, I’m not so sure about the “… will soon be over” thing.
I’m running the Boston Marathon on Monday, April 17th. I’m much too slow a runner to qualify, so my friend Nick Grouf and his fiance Shana Eddy gave me a charity number for my 40th birthday. I’m running for The Michael Carter Lisnow Respite Center, a remarkable home away from home for children and adults with disabilities that offers parents time off from the emotional and physical care needed by their children.
Amy and I are heading to Boston on Tuesday. I like to spend a week or so in the city where I’m running a marathon to get acclimated. We lived in Boston for 12 years, so we’ll see some friends, I’ll spend some time at MIT with Eric von Hippel on some open source / democratizing innovation stuff, meet with some colleagues, and have a few nice meals. As my friend Ilana, who is also running the marathon (for the American Liver Foundation) says – I’ll work to get my “marathon head” in the right place. Today was my last real run – before I headed out all I could think about was “my knee hurts, I feel fat, should I listen to music during the marathon, will the weather be good, …” By the end of my run I felt great and knew I was ready.
If you are in Boston watching the marathon, look for me – I’ll be the slow guy near the back of the pack wearing number 20778 (my goal is to finish while not coming in last.) If you are interested in supporting me, please cheer me on and/or make an online donation to The Michael Carter Lisnow Respite Center.
Sometimes it’s best not to read the newspaper first thing in the morning. Randall Stross has an excellent and disturbing article in today’s New York Times titled “Looking at the Free Market, and Seeing Red.” It leads with the story of Lou Dobbs bashing Lenovo and their recent deal to sell $13 million of computers to the US State Department. Dobbs asserts that the PCs will provide spies within the Chinese government a way of conducting espionage. His sound bite on the lead in was something like “when the State Department seeks secure network communications it turns to Communist China and thus renders the United States perhaps more vulnerable than ever.”
Give me a fucking break. Last month this kind of xenophobic nonsense killed Check Point’s acquisition of Sourcefire. This time around, Dobbs and some guy named Michael Wessel who is a member of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (an advisory body to Congress) and Larry Wortzel (the chairman on this same commission) are kicking up a bunch of dust about how dangerous it would be for the government to buy Lenovo computers.
Now – I’m not going to go so far as to say something absurd like “Lenovo is a national treasure” (I’m sure if it was still IBM’s Personal Computer Division, which is a big part of Lenovo, someone would use that argument), but given that Lenovo is a public company traded on the Hong Kong stock exchange, has an American CEO (a former executive at Dell), is partially owned by several American private-equity firms, and the computers in question are manufactured in North Carolina, my mind just boggles at the things these guys are saying.
Fundamentally, guys like Dobbs, Wessel, and Wortzel are using “security issues” and “xenophobia” to tarnish the reputation of a global company in an attempt to undermine a deal with the US government. Maybe these guys should get focused on making sure these same Chinese that they assert are pulling all the strings would stop buying up the massive amounts of US debt that our government continues to issue – that seems like a little more “dangerous” issue to me (actually, the debt, not so much the owners of the debt.)
Maybe Penn and Teller should do an episode on Bullshit! on Dobbs and the current “security issues” running around our government that are really anti-competitiveness attacks reminiscent of the moochers in Atlas Shrugged. Blech.
When I was at Microsoft last week, I once again noticed interesting art in the lobby of the buildings I was in. I’ve always liked the art at Microsoft and enjoy the typical five minute wait in the lobby as the person I’m meeting with (or their assistant) comes down to escort me to the meeting.
This time I noticed a brochure titled Microsoft Art Collection: Redmond Campus: Spring 2006 Program. I picked it up and looked through it. While the brochure was informative, the link to the Microsoft Art Collection web site had piles of information on it.
I’ve always loved being surrounded by art when I work. If you’ve ever been to my office, my house, Newmerix’s office, the Nature Conservancy building in Boulder, or my family office, you’ve seen portion of my collection. While I don’t have 4000+ pieces (like Microsoft), I’ve probably got enough pieces to put together a web site at this point.
The next time you are in a building at Microsoft, make sure you keep your eyes open in the lobby.
I got an email from a blog reader that said “there’s one attribute ‘missing’ from your list of needed characteristics for an entrepreneur – being a good salesman.” There is no question that being a fantastic salesman (not merely a good one) is a key attribute of entrepreneurial success. Terry Gold – CEO of Gold Systems – who is a superb salesman (without being “salesy”) – takes it a step further with a great post on hiring salespeople. Every entrepreneur should read this post carefully.
I’ve encouraged all of my portfolio companies that have an online service to supply both REST and SOAP API’s to their web services. This week, both Rally Software and NewsGator released REST implementations of their API.
NewsGator’s API is a public one and has been gradually expanding is scope and documentation. It has been exercised extremely well since both FeedDemon 2.0, NetNewsWire 2.1 Beta, and the NewsGator Private Label solutions are using it extensively to connect with NewsGator Online. The SOAP implementation has been around since August, but a number of people have requested the REST API which is now out.
Rally’s API is limited to customers, but you can get a look at it by signing up for a test drive.
NewsGator and Rally’s REST API’s join FeedBurner’s API’s which has been out for a while. I remember when SDK’s were the thing ISV’s focused on – if you wanted widespread adoption of your product, you built an SDK to make it easier to integrate with other applications (Microsoft is the master of this.) Obviously, API’s are the SDK’s of the online world and it’s fun to get some REST from several of my portfolio companies.
In my Microsoft-only web diet, I’ve been pleasantly enjoying Microsoft Search. While some of the results are a little wacky (e.g. I was searching for the Microsoft Empower program yesterday and all I got were old links to the Irish and UK Empower pages – which were no longer active), it’s been generally very effective and I didn’t really notice any functional difference from Google.
However, Microsoft Search seems to have been down for the better part of the morning.
So – I had to break my diet and use Google for the last few hours of searches. Fortunately, in Firefox, it’s really easy to change the search engine used.
A few weeks ago, I got a note from Kunal Anand that he was doing a project to create a visualization of my del.icio.us tags and their intersections. I gave Kunal my del.icio.us info and he sent me the following picture yesterday.
I asked him what it meant (besides being pretty) and this is what he said.
It looks like I’ve got a decent amount of intersections.
There’s an old joke about Microsoft that it takes them three major releases to get it right. So – when “version 3.0 of something” comes out – it’s time to pay attention. Microsoft shifted away from version numbers to year numbers a while ago – presumably someone in marketing figured out that the version numbering approach wasn’t effectively confusing customers about the maturity of products.
Earlier today, Microsoft announced the road map and feature set for Microsoft Speech Server 2007 which is expected to be released at the end of this year. One of my portfolio companies – Gold Systems – has been working closely with Microsoft Speech Server over the past year and has implemented a number of projects with it. When I was at Microsoft last week, I spent some time with Richard Bray (Microsoft GM Speech Server) and Terry Gold (Gold Systems CEO) discussing where Microsoft was going with the product and how Gold and Microsoft could expand their relationship around Speech Server, Microsoft’s upcoming unified messaging product, and Microsoft LCS. It was a great conversation – Richard definitely gets it – and I expect Microsoft will really nail it with v3.0 of Speech Server.