The CDN patent battle is about to heat up in a major way.  GigaOm has a guest column by Dan Rayburn titled Level 3 Adds IBM’s CDN Patents to Its Portfolio.  If you believe in the defense use of patents, this is a brilliant maneuver.  If you believe in the offensive use of patents, this is a brilliant maneuver.  If you don’t believe in software patents this is a brilliant maneuver.  If you believe in the power of software patent pooling / commons this is an extra brilliant maneuver.

Following is an email I just received from a friend.

Subject: I am stupid

Problem with the MacBook air is it is too small.  Just realized four hours late I left it in the seatback pocket on the plane.  Explicative!!!

At least he didn’t get a black eye protecting it.

One of our new investments – based in the Los Angeles area – is looking for some hardcore software folks.  The company has provided the following job descriptions.  If you are interested, have serious software experience, and are either based in the LA area or willing to relocate, drop me an email with a resume / bio / cv / links to stuff you’ve done.

The following job descriptions are as creative as the amazing folks behind the company:

1. Software person with experience designing large-scale platforms and managing code for release. So someone with both good architecture chops and the willingness to say: hey, now, you’re not allowed to add that class into any repository I merge with unless you’ve tested for memory leaks on the playstation III, matey. Or you walk the plank. (So, I guess, fluent in Pirate, too.)
2. Hacker who’d be excited about writing production-quality code for our low-level algorithmic runtime, plus all the visualization and management apps that let us see what the system is doing. So, good coder, strong math background a big plus though not necessarily essential (we have pure algorithm folks for this person to work closely with); strong design sense a big plus.
3. A mathematical modeler to add to our growing collection would be great. (Buy three lapsed physicists right now, by calling this toll-free number, and we’ll throw in a lifetime supply of unscented Kalman filters, absolutely free. And that’s not all …) Sometimes what we do looks a little like machine vision work; sometimes it feels a little like information optics; some days we just wander around mumbling "Clifford algebra… 5D conformal isometries… pesky k-blades" and bumping into walls. Experience in these vicinities is fabulous, though also not actually necessary; thus far none of our approaches has been a standard one.
4. The kind of hacker who likes TCP/IP stack optimization, and absolutely loves filesystem design work.
5. UI designer/hacker with a deep and abiding love for C++. We have a very nice library that encapsulates basic pixel-pushing in 3d space. We need to expand that into a full GUI tool-kit. The two catches are: 1) nothing in our world has a direct precedent in today’s mouse-driven guis, so we’re inventing this stuff as we go; 2) the nature of the thing is that you have to be happy hacking on the C++/OpenGL level to build the actual production-quality widgets other folks will use. And performance matters a lot, despite plentiful assertions to the contrary among those of us lucky enough to have forgotten that there are problems you can’t parallelize just by adding round-robin DNS to your Apache config.
6. A pitiless abuser of scripting language implementations. We want to write a great set of Ruby bindings for our platform. Excitingly, this is a terrifically delicate job, requiring that we craft Ruby->C[++] bindings for the entire library set and at the same time that we enable a large proportion of library functionality to be extended in Ruby. (Callbacks, call-outs, oh my.) And it should all feel like Ruby, so good dynamic inheritance and little-language feel are a must.

I can also assure you that a love of sushi, amazingly spicy chinese food, weird music / movies / fiction, and twisted nerd humor are critical attributes.

This rarely happens to me so when it does, I notice it.  And – in my effort to write some of my tricks about work-life balance, I thought I’d call this one out, especially since it was totally my fault.

In a board meeting last week, I had a quick reaction to something I saw and rather than say something in the moment (since my comment was off topic), I added an item to my todo list to email out a note about it. 

Rather than write an email with my specific thoughts, I wrote an email that said something like "I have some thoughts about X."  The person on the receiving end suggested that we get together quickly and discuss it.  Mistake #1 on my part – I should have simply responded with the substantive thought.

We scheduled a brief meeting for the end of the day today.  He ended up bringing two other people by to hear my "important" feedback.  I was 10 minutes late to the meeting because I was down the block from my office at a board meeting.  They sat around in my conference room for 10 minutes (mistake #2 on my part.)

When I showed up, we got right to it.  Sixty seconds later I had given them my thoughts and comment.  In a moment of self-reflection, I realized everything I had just said could be summarized in one sentence.  I made small talk for another minute so that I wouldn’t feel like 91% of their time was wasted hanging around waiting for me.  While my efficiency improved (arguably I had now I had only wasted 83% of their time if you valued the small talk), I now felt like I’d wasted 12 minutes of their lives.  We quickly said goodbye.

They were very gracious about it.  I walked back to my office and felt like a schmuck.  So I wrote this blog post (which took another 12 minutes to write and post.)  Of course, you could argue that I’m wasting even more system time by having posted this (and causing you to read it), but that’s your choice.

Presumably you get the message.  I could have saved everyone a lot of time by simply saying what was on my mind during the meeting.  I had a second – and easy – chance to do this in the email I sent after the meeting.  Eventually I got around to saying it, but only after it wasted some more time.

Love it.

Are you a Facebook developer?  Do you live in Denver or Boulder?  Do you like food?

On Thursday March 27th, from 6pm to 9pm, there is a Facebook Developer Garage meeting.  It’s happening at the TechStars office (also fondly known as "The Bunker") is Boulder.  Sign up via the Facebook Developers Boulder Denver site (recursive, I know) and then check out the meeting info.

We (Foundry Group) are providing the food so there should be plenty of it.

I’ve never really understood the primary process – especially for superdelegates.  That shouldn’t be surprising since there are a lot of things about politics that I don’t really understand – like why "one person, one vote" doesn’t actually equate to a democracy (or maybe it does, just not the way we run one around here.)

I just got an email that a friend of mine – Rick Klau (FeedBurner – now at Google) has put up a great site called SuperDelegates.org which keeps track off all the Democratic superdelegate stuff.  It’s very cool and based on MediaWiki so you can edit it.

While after reading it I now know more about how superdelegates work and the little cynical part of my brain understands better why they exist.

The application deadline is 3/31/08.  Applying is easy.   The mentor list continues to grow.  And Somewhat Frank has a cool three minute video tour of the Bunker (TechStars new facility for 2008.)

Today is my dad’s 70th birthday.  Without him, I wouldn’t be around.  That’s an unexpectedly deep thought that just sent me down a weird mortality rat hole.

Except for a brief period of time during 7th grade, my dad has always been one of my best friends.  I have hundreds thousands of memories pre-college of things we did together that shaped my future.  We’ve had plenty of arguments, but they were usually healthy, constructive ones which taught me how to think critically and helped me understand that it was ok to have a different point of view.

I have a key memory during my freshman year at MIT that sticks in my mind.  My parents came to visit me during the MIT equivalent of parents weekend (maybe it’s actually called parents weekend – I can’t remember.)  I was depressed and homesick – all of my high school friends were at UT Austin and having a blast and I was at MIT getting brutalized.  During a walk in Concord on a crisp fall day, my dad turned to me and said "look – just give it a year.  If you don’t want to stay, call it after a year.  But at least give it a year so you have enough time to really figure it out."  I stuck it out for a year, discovered I loved the place in some sick, twisted way, and never looked back.

My dad was a partner in my first business with me and Dave Jilk – who also happens to have a birthday today.  Dad was the adult supervision / business mentor and Feld Technologies wouldn’t have been as successful as it was without his help.  He helped me early in getting grounded in "doing the right thing all the time – even if it is hard" in a business context.

I finally had my childhood rebellion in my mid-20’s after I got divorced, dropped out the MIT Ph.D. program I was in, and sold Feld Technologies.  He appropriately realized what was going on, so he backed off for a few years and when I got through my stuff our relationship was stronger than ever.

The last 10 years together have been awesome.  I’ve continued to learn an amazing amount of stuff from him and his experiences, and he regularly tells me how much he learns from me.  Our time together is precious – especially our annual weekends and the Feld Men’s trip where chocolate ice cream is consumed in huge quantities.

Happy birthday dad.  You are dad #1.