When I read David Halberstam’s Summer of ‘49 recently, I thought of my dad many times.  We talked about it one day and he told me about his brilliant Summer of ‘47.  I told him to blog about it and he did.

Life in America was different then.  For a total of $3, he had an amazing summer based around the New York Yankees and the New York Giants.  His day started at Geller’s Candy Store every morning at 8am and ended on his local baseball field in the Bronx each evening when it got dark.  He tells the story well and it’s a great compliment to his story Jake the Pickle Man.

If you’ve been thinking about tech a little too much, or the absurd H-1B visa situation is bumming you out, go read these stories.  If you are a baseball fan, you’ll love them.

50 years later – as my dad says – “… some things have changed in America.  We now know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Food for thought.

On the heals of their recent financing, Lijit is looking for an experienced software engineer (4+ years) and a database wizard (5+ years).  In addition to a clothing optional work environment, Lijit offers a fully paid health plan and all the M&Ms you can eat.  Interested people should send a resume to info<at>lijit<dot>com.

This job opportunity brought to you by the Feld job board (free listings for companies I have an investment in.)

On the heals of G.E. Unveil[ing] Credit Card Aimed at Relieving Carbon Footprints I’m looking for someone that is willing to sell me some fat credits. 

I’m running the San Francisco Marathon on Sunday on a whim to hang out with my running buddy Katherine McIntyre as well as to give her someone’s ass to thoroughly kick.  I wasn’t planning on running marathon #9 until October when I have one planning in Bar Harbor, Maine, but I’ve had a good stretch of long runs the past two months and feel like it’ll be relatively easy to crank out a marathon at sea level (where “relatively easy” means “only a moderate amount of ridiculous pain – emotional and physical – during the last six miles.”)

However, I’m a little heavier than I want to be.  I had a goal of being around 190 for the Bar Harbor Marathon but I’m hanging around between 210 and 215.  Anyone that has ever run 26.2 miles knows that dragging around an extra 20 pounds is – well – a drag.

So – I’m looking to buy some fat credits.  I only need 20 pounds worth and I’m willing to pay via cash or paypal.  I’m interested in a good price, so if I’m not happy with what I find, I might do a reverse auction or even see if I can pick up some cheap on the Fat Exchange – European Division (FEED).

I’ve also got some Cynical Credits for sale today.

I’ve found my fair share of bugs in Vista.  There is one that is particularly annoying to me.  Someone at Microsoft – please add this to the bug database and fix it in the next service pack – I’ve got to believe it’ll take a competent person 30 minutes from start to finish.

I find the Vista Snipping Tool invaluable.  It’s simple, does what I expect it to do, and is something that under older versions of Windows required at the minimum a shareware program.

It does one thing wrong.  It doesn’t know how to close.  Choosing File->Exit generates and error message that says “Snipping Tool has stopped working.” 

After Windows searches for the problem, it restarts!  Bizarrely, the second time you shut it down, the “Snipping Tool has stopped working” message appears but this time (and every time ever after, until you reboot again) you get a close program option which does eventually close it.

If this doesn’t make sense to you or if you find this entertaining, read my Vista Snipping Tool Recursion post.

Once again I woke up to a Saturday morning blog post flurry on Techmeme.  Today’s was on the criticism by Valleywag of the Microsoft People Ready campaign that ran on the Federated Media network.  It appears that everyone is talking about it – and I guess I just did also (oops.)

This particular conversation made me think of a pair of blog posts that Stan Feld (my dad) wrote recently.  I recommend that you – dear reader – take your brain out of the tech industry echo chamber for a moment and think about the notion of critical thinking.  Let’s wander over to the health care industry for a few minutes.

First, read through Stan’s post titled Women’s Health Initiative (WHI): Medical Community Undermines Itself.  Take your time – like most of the stuff my dad writes it is a little chewy, but he decomposes the issue extremely well and substantiates his perspective with a critical review of the statistics involved.

Now, read a post he wrote a few weeks ago titled What Has Happened To The Medical Professions Ability To Apply The Scientific Method To Our Medical Articles?.  Again, take it slow and pay particular attention to the statistical analysis (even if you don’t really know statistics – he does a good job of explaining what you should be looking for.)

Stan was a practicing endocrinologist for 30 years.  While he’s retired from private practice, he believes that it’s finally time we (as in “we the people”) reform the completely foobarred health care system once and for all.  These two posts are great examples of how the medical community undermines itself through its behavior. 

As we wander into yet another election cycle, I expect our brains will be flooded with an overwhelming amount of unsubstantiated opinion masquerading as fact.  Many people will quickly react to public sentiment without really doing their homework.  The mob will be able to shape reputations quickly and – when the floodgates open on an issue – it’ll be difficult to sort the signal from the noise.

This is one of the beauties of blogging and user generated content.  It’s also one of the risks.  Think critically.  Have your own point of view.  Make sure you know when you are reacting to fact, fiction, an opinion, an assertion, or a trend. 

I’ve got a large stamp collection that I’m considering selling.  The obvious – but relatively labor intensive – way to do this is on eBay.  I poked around looking for some other options, but didn’t come up with anything particularly credible.  Any stamp collectors out there willing to give me a clue?

The Wall Street Journal has a long article today titled Microsoft Embeds Sleeper in Business Software.  It positions SharePoint clearly in the collaboration battle that is emerging with Oracle, Adobe, IBM, EMC, Cisco, and Google and then goes on to mention “lesser-known players” such as Zimbra, Alfresco, Plone, and Socialtext.

According to the article Microsoft has sold 85 million licenses of SharePoint across 17,000 companies.  Say that again slowly: 85 million licenses across 17,000 companies.  I don’t know how many are “free” (according to the WSJ Microsoft has to be careful about giving SharePoint away due to their antitrust settlement) and while I used to tease my friends at Microsoft about simply giving away SharePoint and not caring who used it, this clearly was an effective strategy.

17,000 companies.  I wrote about my positive experience with SharePoint recently.  I now use it every day as part of my regularly work activity and am very pleased.  I’m expecting the hosted version of SharePoint to be announced anyday (maybe at Mix) which will be a logical stab by Microsoft back at Google’s collaboration activity.

I love it when a smart employee of a company calls out stupid / foolish / irrational / annoying behavior of his employers.  Don Dodge – a Microsoftie who I like and respect a lot (and who has a super blog) has a great post up titled Microsoft lawyer rips Google on copyrights – Why?  I don’t have a lot to add other than “I agree – why?” and “don’t the lawyers have enough work to do dealing with their own issues?”

This is a rant – feel free to ignore if you don’t care about Microsoft.

What do Vista, CRM, Sharepoint, and Outlook have in common?  Yes – Microsoft. 

I’m using three of these every day (I dumped CRM.)  I’ve been a PC / Windows user forever – always keeping a Mac nearby, but rarely using it (I like to turn it on once a week just to watch it update all it’s software automagically.)  I enjoy the Microsoft upgrade cycle (of which we are once again starting a big one with Vista, Office 2007, and all the Server 2007 products that are coming.)  I’ve always benefited financially from this (as I’m usually involved in companies that play around the Microsoft ecosystem).  My inner nerd gets to learn lots of new things (or – at least do the old things in slightly different ways.)

This time around, I’m amused.  I thought this upgrade cycle would normalize and clean up a bunch of stuff that I thought time and money could fix.  I was wrong.  The four different products appear to have been written by four different companies.  Vista is what I expected, CRM is a massive disappointment, Sharepoint is a pleasant surprise, and Outlook is just perplexing.

Let’s start with Vista.  It’s a beautiful upgrade from XP.  It feels more stable.  I use Firefox so I haven’t really had spyware problems for a while, but I feel more secure, if only because I’m not getting a security update three times a week and my machine crashes less.  However, so many things that worked fine under XP either got moved, changed, are missing, or I can’t find them.  And then there are just stupid things like how the Snipping Tool – which I find indispensable – crashes and restarts whenever you exit it (I’d snip a picture of the error, but I can’t since – well – it’s trying to restart itself and I can’t run two instances simultaneously.)  Seriously, did anyone test this?  I’m sure the next three service packs will fix this stuff, but was this really a five year OS build?

I had high hopes for CRM.  I have several portfolio companies that use it and one portfolio company that implements it.  It integrates with Outlook and, well, how hard could CRM be?  Version 3.0 was virtually unusable for us.  The implementation was fine and the Outlook 2007 integration even seemed to work (after a rushed patch), but there were several fatal flaws, such as lack of synchronization of the company field with Outlook (munging a bunch of data) and some data scrambling issues (you know you are in trouble when contacts show up three times in your local Outlook and you don’t know why.)  Finally, the UI is completely different than – well – the other Microsoft products. Huh?

I expected Sharepoint would be uninspiring.  Like CRM, we have several portfolio companies that use it and one portfolio company that implements it. I’ve made fun of it for a long time as one of the products that Microsoft had massive distribution for since they gave it away (at least for a while) with every EA agreement. No more – I’ve been using Sharepoint for a month and I love it.  We were using Jotspot for our internal Wiki previously – there have been no changes since they were acquired by Google and – while I expect a new, polished version to be out at some point, I am a Sharepoint fiend for now.  Oh – Sharepoint seems to synchronize better with Outlook / Exchange than CRM – isn’t that weird.  Yeah -the user interface is completely different, but I have figured out how to automatically run the IE engine for it inside Firefox so it’s just another tab in my browser.

And then there is Outlook.  The two windows on my 30” monitor that take up most of the space on my computer are Outlook and Firefox.  I live in Outlook.  I can make Outlook do things it probably shouldn’t be able to do.  Lucky me – I get to figure it all out again with Outlook 2007.  At least I’m not suffering from the miserable performance that some of my friends and colleagues are (I guess I have a computer that likes Outlook 2007.)  But why doesn’t the main screen have a nifty new ribbon that makes it hard to find all the features? 

Now, before you tell me “just switch to a Mac”, I tried.  Really hard.  It rejected me.  I’m not unhappy, just amused.  The opportunities seem endless, especially now that I’m getting to Live with a new degree of freedom across all my computing infrastructure.

Rant off – I feel better.