For those of you that just got a flood of posts in your Feld Thoughts feed, that’s because of me.  Yeah – I wrote a bunch of posts over the past few days, but I forgot to update where FeedBurner was pointing to grab the feed when we moved over to WordPress.  I’m loving WordPress.org, but still futzing around with a few things.  The feed should be better, but if you notice something messed up, tell me.

Error Code 80169d94 cost me an hour of my life last night and ninety minutes of my life this morning.  All I wanted to do was upgrade my Xbox Live Silver account (which comes free with an Xbox) to Xbox Live Gold (which costs $49.99 / year) so I could stream Netflix movies on my Xbox (cool feature).

I spend the first 15 minutes following the directions and trying to update to Gold on the web.  Every time I hit confirm the update page refreshed and did nothing.  Being stubborn, I did this about 25 times, including firing up IE and trying that (figuring that it was a Microsoft / Firefox thing.)  Wrong.

So – I stopped following directions and started poking around on the Xbox itself figuring there was an "upgrade to Gold option."  Of course there was, so I did it.  And got an error message: "Can’t retrieve information from Xbox LIVE.  Please try again later. Status Code: 80169d94".  I stared at it for a few minutes as though I had been pithed.  I tried again figuring it was some wonky connection problem.  Same error message.

I googled xbox live 80169d94 and found no shortage of other people with this problem.  The best explanation was at Xbox Live 80169d4 Fix.  It seems like there’s a case where your account gets "locked from making purchases" when the credit card info doesn’t exactly match the Xbox user info.

This is obviously ridiculous since there are never any instructions that these need to match and anyone that has a credit card knows that it probably isn’t the same as your user id.  Since I’ve successfully bought 100+ Rock Band songs using the credit card I’d previously entered, this is a recent issue with my id – possibly occurring when I recently did the Xbox upgrade to the new software.

Ok – that was about an hour, and I still have no solution.  I gave up for the night.

This morning, while procrastinating from going for an 8 mile run in 5 (feels like – 12) degree weather (at least the sun is out today), I called Xbox support. I used their spiffy voice automated system, which worked well.  I chose to talk to billing since that seemed most relevant.  "Marcus" (or "Michael" – I had trouble understanding his accent) verified my account information but decided he couldn’t help me.  Marcus then transferred me to tech support. 

I then spent 30 minutes on the phone with "Carlos".  I explained the situation to him and told him I was getting error code 80169d94.  He walked me through the upgrade steps I had done last night that didn’t work.  I tried to explain that I’d already tried this but he insisted that I walk though the steps with him.  When we got to the magic error code he had to check his resources.  After holding for a few minutes, Carlos came back on the phone and told me that he needed to transfer me to billing!  I asked if he realized that billing had transferred me to him and he said he realized this, but they were the ones that could help me.  Carlos put me on hold for a few minutes and then transferred me to his colleague in billing, who is named "Billy Jean."

For the third time I confirmed all my account data with Billy Jean.  I explained the error message to her.  She put me on hold to check "her resources."  She then had me go to https://billing.microsoft.com, log in, and "update my account information."  I’m not really sure what she meant by update my account information, but I went ahead and modified all the information on the Xbox account to match the data on the credit card I was using (name, address, phone.)  After completing that, Billie Jean put me back on hold to check her resources.  She then came back on to get the best phone number to contact me at (the same one in the account!) and a time (Brad: "anytime", BJ: "you need to give me a specific time", Brad: "how about 6am to 10pm", BJ: "it has to be between 9am and 9pm Central Standard Time", Brad: "ok – anytime between 9am and 9pm Central Standard Time.")  Billy Jean then had to put me on hold to check her resources again.  After a minute, she told me that someone from upper management would be calling me in 5 to 10 days to help resolve my issue.  I amazingly asked why it would take 5 to 10 days and she informed me that a supervisor from upper management would need to resolve my issue.  I asked if she knew what the issue was, especially since I was able to provide an error code.  She told me that it was a problem that only upper management could solve.  I asked if there was any way we could resolve it faster than 5 to 10 days.  She told me that is the fastest they could call me back.

There are two phrases I heard at least ten times during this call sequence (exactly the same phrase from Marcos/Michael, Carlos, and Billy Jean: (1) "I need to put you on hold for 1 to 2 minutes to check my resources" and (2) "Thank for you patiently waiting, sorry for the long wait."  None of these 1 to 2 minute resource check waits were very long, especially when compared with the 5 to 10 days that I now have to wait.

I’m done procrastinating from my run (at least for the day.)  I guess Microsoft isn’t going to get my $49.99 for somewhere between 5 to 10 days and I won’t be watching streaming Netflix movies between now and – well – whenever upper management calls me.  It’s pretty amazing that it’s almost 2009 and Microsoft Tech Support can’t handle an Error Code 80169d94 in real time.  Oh – and during one of my hold periods, I was informed by the on hold music that I was talking to Samsung Customer Care in Richardson, Texas – obviously the Marcus pressed the wrong hold button from his call center – wherever he was – probably not Richardson, Texas.

A marathon wouldn’t be a marathon without my sherpa.  Amy plays the role perfectly, including taking all the important pictures.  My favorite:

I think I’ve read every book that Michael Lewis has ever written going all the way back to Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street .  While Lewis merely edited Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity , it’s a brilliant book and a good start to my year end "16 days of books" (where I read a book a day while I’m up in Keystone.)

Panic covers five modern financial crashes:

1. The Crash of 1987
2. The Russian Default / Collapse of Long Term Capital Management
3. The Asian Currency Crisis of 1999
4. The Internet Bubble
5. The Subprime Mortgage Disaster

Each section has a perfect setup – a few articles preceding the actual crash followed by articles that are written as the crash is happening.  Lewis finishes off each section with at least one post crash article.  Taken as a bundle, each of the five crashes are very symmetric, generating a very cynical set of reactions from this particular reader about the nature of modern finance.

I stumbled on some interesting characters throughout the book at odd spots.  My two favorite examples from The Internet Bubble section are Bernard Madoff (yup – the one everyone has been talking about for the past week) and Albert Vilar (yup – the one whose name used to be on the Grand Tier at the NY Metropolitan Opera and is awaiting sentencing on securities fraud charges.)  And of course John Meriwether (Salomon Brothers, Long-Term Capital Management, and now head of JWM Partners) makes several appearances throughout and is one of the central characters in the Collapse of Long Term Capital Management.

Bernard Madoff: (1999) "The same volatility and heavy trading by individuals convinced a market veteran, Bernard L. Madoff, that his trading firm should stop making a market in four wild Web stocks.  ‘You’re literally seeing hundreds of thousands of orders in the stocks,’ Mr. Madoff says.  ‘That puts a strain on everybody’s systems.  And on the way down, it’s always more extreme.’  To Mr. Madoff, "it was insanity.  This thing was getting out of control.’  In January, his New York firm, which bears his name, dropped Amazon, Yahoo!, Infoseek and Egghead, even though trading in them had been very profitable."

If you lived through the Internet bubble like I did, you probably remember the Barron’s article by Jack Willoughby that came out on 3/20/2000 titled "Burning Up."  In it, Willoughby listed the "months until burnout" of 207 Internet stocks.  He specifically called out 51 that "are likely to run out of cash, according to year-end 1999 data.  Some can raise more funds through stock and bond offerings.  Others will be forced to merge or go out of business.  It’s Darwinian capitalism at work."  I remember this article (which Lewis reprints) like it came out yesterday – I was co-chairman of two companies on the list (company #15: Interliant and company #88: MessageMedia) and was an investor (via my VC investments – either in funds I was involved in or funds I was an investor in) in #5:VerticalNet, #31: ELoan, #33: Ask Jeeves, #48: Multex.com, #49: eToys, #67: Critical Path, #110: TheStreet.com, #118: StarMedia, #120: iXL Enterprises, #147: ITXC, and #181: Exodus Communications.)   I probably missed a few, but I remember almost every company that was on the list.

Albert Vilar: (2000) "On Monday, March 20, many of the stocks on Barron’s list fell sharply: it was another bad day for technology stocks generally.  The Nasdaq fell 188 points, nearly 4 percent, to 4,610.  During the next few days, there was a predictable attempt to discredit the Barron’s piece.  ‘I didn’t set my performance record, which is about the best in the business, with any help from Barron’s,’ Albert Vilar, head of the $700 million Amerindo Technology Fund, declared.  Investors who avoided Internet stocks during the next five or ten years would miss ‘the biggest explosion of profits and growth ever seen."

Every crash has an index case (or "patient zero") equivalent.  The Barron’s article was the one I remember most clearly from the Internet bubble.  Even the dotcom advertising at the 2000 Superbowl fades like a distant memory.  AutoTrader.com, Britannica.com, Computer.com, Epidemic.com (a Colorado-based startup), E-Trade.com, Hotjobs.com, kforce.com, LastMinuteTravel.com, LifeMinders.com, Monster.com, Netpliance.com, OnMoney.com, Oxygen.com, OurBeginning.com, Pets.com, Webex.com, and WebMD.com.  Several survived, but most didn’t.  When I reflect on the Barron’s article, it marked the peak for me.

I was a grad student MIT and running my first company during the 1987 Crash and remember listening to it on a portable radio in my Feld Technologies office at 875 Main Street.  I then took the T home to downtown Boston with my business partner Dave Jilk.  I didn’t really know what to make of it (Dave regularly reminds me that when I showed up at MIT in the fall of 1983 I made the insane statement that "real estate in Texas will never go down in value.") I’m sure I was unsettled by it, but I woke up the next day and went back to work (and school).

I remember each of these crashes and, with appropriate emotional detachment, rethought some of the lessons I’ve learned in the past 20+ years as I read Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity.  Not "fun", but important stuff extremely well edited.

I was inspired by the hilarious McSweeney’s article Recreational Jewish Youth Basketball: An Ethnography (thanks Amy) to host a Jewish Christmas party this year near Keystone, Colorado.   If you happen to be out this way on the evening of December 24th and have a hankering for Chinese food and a movie, please drop me an email to coordinate.

I love to invest in plumbing.  Not toilet plumbing, but Internet software plumbing.  At Foundry Group we call it Glue and – among a variety of investments – have helped start up a conference with Eric Norlin (the creator of Defrag) called the Glue Conference.

One of our investments in our Glue theme is Gnip.  I had a meeting yesterday with Jud Valeski (the CTO / co-founder) and a few other folks, including the two founders of a new seed investment (in the Glue theme) we are planning on closing in early January.  We covered a bunch of stuff, including debating whether 99.95 is now “good enough” for cloud computing, and also talked about some of the architectural issues that Gnip has dealt with as they put together their service.

As part of our discussion, I encouraged Jud to toss a blog post up talking about the stack Gnip is using, the architecture, and the volume of data that is currently flowing through Gnip on a daily basis.

That post just went up – it’s titled Numbers + Architecture. Jud and the team he’s put together are some of the best cloud architects I’ve met to date (yes – they travel in packs.)

Gnip is less than 9 months old – it’s hard to believe I first blogged about it in July when I wrote Gnip is Ping Spelled Backwards given the progress they’ve made.  We recently led a new $3.5m financing (that follows the seed round we did earlier this year) that funds Gnip through the end of 2010.

I’m excited about watching the daily traffic through Gnip increase by 10x over the new few months and expect them to be able to do it without missing a beat.

And don’t forget – everyone appreciates a courtesy flush when you are in a public bathroom.

I’ve started writing a monthly column for Entrepreneur Magazine called VC Insider.  The first article is titled Perfect Your Pitch and has a list of mistakes I see over and over again from entrepreneurs approaching me for financing.

If you haven’t done your holiday shopping yet and you like food, go check out the 20% off sale that Foodzie is having.

Foodzie is one of the TechStars 2008 companies and recently announced they have raised $1m from First Round Capital, SoftTech VC, and some great angel investors.  As I’ve mentioned in the past, I love all the TechStars companies the same way a parent loves their offspring, but I have a special crush on the Foodzie folks.

Foodzie showcases products from small artisan food producers and growers and is up to products from 25 amazing companies. 

Chocolate anyone?

Or maybe some extra special artisan cheeses.

Or maybe even some awesome Boulder Popcorn.

Foodzie is also hiring.  If you Love CSS and Food give the Foodzie’s a shout.

Close your door.  Turn off your computer monitor.  Sit quietly and look out the window.  Now – ask yourself the following question: "How much time do I spend on the wrong things each day?"

Don’t bullshit yourself.  Answer it as honestly as you can.  5 minutes?  15 minutes?  30 minutes?  60 minutes?  2 hours?  4 hours?  More?

Now, turn on your computer monitor.  Scan your inbox, even if it’s 4,137 messages (aha – I see you aren’t a zero inbox person of a GTD guy.)  Bring up the weekly view on your calendar and look at it.  Look at your todo list (if you have one).

Turn off your computer.  Answer the question again.

Are you spending your time on the wrong things?