A few weeks ago I enabled the MyBlogLog Community feature on my blog – I just put it up higher on the left hand side.

I’ve been using MyBlogLog for about a year for link tracking – they’ve got a very good inbound and outbound link tracking system.  If you’ve ever hovered over a link on my blog (or someone elses) and seen the “N Clicks Today” message box, that’s MyBlogLog in action. 

Recently, they rolled out a Community feature.  Now you can see who is actually visiting my site.  In addition you can come join my community.  Also, some “community groups” are starting to form, such as the VC Neighborhood.

Help me experiment with this – come join my community.  Over the past year, I’ve enjoyed talking to Eric Marcouiller (one of the founders) and suggesting features; his technical co-founder Todd is clearly a wizard.   They are iterating quickly on feedback, so offer it freely, either by email or via comments. 

John Funk, an entrepreneur (I’m an investor in John’s newest company – Evergreen IP) and friend has a innovative proposal up concerning changing the rules on the current patent system.  I’ve been on both sides of the patent aisle with John – we like to joke that early on in our relationship John’s company sued one of my companies (and then my company sued John’s company back) for patent infringement (the companies settled several years later for a cross license and $1 – much to the delight of the lawyers who got all the bucks.)  Fortunately we got past all that crap and have developed a nice friendship.

John’s proposal is straightforward – let’s change the rules so patent applications get published after six months and – before the patent is granted – there is an open debate using a Wikipedia (or Digg-like) system that helps surface all the prior art and blow up stupid patents for obviousness and prior art.  This would be a real debate – online and out in the open – that the patentee would be able to engage in.

While I’m sure all the patent lawyers in the world would groan at this, it’s certainly better for them than my proposal, which is to simply do away with software patents altogether.  We certainly have the technology to implement this – say – in 24 hours.  I wonder who will try to patent that?

I got several emails from folks at Microsoft in response to my post titled *#)$()@#$% Internet Explorer offering to help me with the problem I was having and suggesting solutions.  Several of these came on July 4th – within hours of when I wrote my post.  While I wish I hadn’t had the problem in the first place (and – as my first partner Dave Jilk suggested (and I summarize) – “hey Brad, it’s beta software – don’t bitch”), I was impressed by how quickly several folks at Microsoft responded, especially on their (and everyone else in America’s) day off.

Nice job guys.  And yes – I got IE Beta 3 working – thank you.

I know I’m in a bitching about my computer mood.  I’m particularly grumpy because I’m on day two of the update / reboot cycle, which is just stupid. 

Among other things, my Microsoft Outlook config in Homer isn’t connecting to our Exchange server because we modified our email configuration about six months ago.  Ross is on vacation until tomorrow so I don’t want to bother him, so I figured I’d just use OWA, which works fine.  However, I noticed that I was running the IE 7.0 Beta 1 (which I must have installed 10 months ago – we are just now on beta 3) so I decided to try to upgrade to IE 7.0 Beta 3 since there are lots of noticeable bugs (and a weak feature set for IE 7.0 Beta 1.)

Thirty minutes later and two reboots later I gave up.  I can’t get past the Install Windows Internet Explorer “Internet Explore 7 is already installed on this computer.  Please use ‘Add or Remove Programs’ in the Control Panel to uninstall it.” error message.  Of course, IE 7 is not listed in Add or Remove Programs messing around with Add/Remove Windows Components simply deleted IE from my quick launch toolbar, but didn’t actually get rid of it.

For a brief moment, I thought I’d lost IE forever (it was gone, but I couldn’t get past the IE 7 is already installed message) so I said (and I think I said this out loud because Amy turned and looked over at me) “fuck it – I’ll just use Firefox for OWA.”  I fired it up and then remembered the reason I use IE for OWA is that when OWA sees Firefox as the user agent, it gives me the crappy last version instead of the pretty good current version.

I dug around for IE 7B1 on my machine and found it pretty quickly, so I’m back to where I started 30 minutes ago.  And I thought I was pretty good at this.

I’ve been in Homer for 24 hours and my desktop computer – which I turned on for the first time in 10 months yesterday – is still downloading software, updating itself, and rebooting.  I caught a note by Alex King about the same issue (he’s only been away from his PC for two weeks.)  I’ve got four desktops (Eldorado Springs, Homer, Office, and Treadputer) that have “identical configurations.”  It’s remarkable how much “updating” is going on to this one, and I’ll still only have current versions of the software on it – my configuration is far from the same as my other three machines (which are pretty close, but each have their own special software quirks.) 

The worst part of this is figuring out what special configs I need for certain things that I depend on all day long.  Fortunately I have my laptop with me to help figuring things out.  It seems like there should be a simple way to keep all your computers “in sync” – there used to be this briefcase thing, right?  Yeah yeah, I know, switch to a Mac and use .Mac.

Oops – Adobe is telling me “Your system must be restarted to continue this update.  Click the Reboot Now button to reboot your computer…”  Time to go.

I generally hate conferences and do my best to avoid them.  However I find myself thoroughly enjoying Gnomedex 6 (which Amy refers to as the “conference for short nerds” (Chris – she might be talking about you)) for the second year in a row.

Chris Pirillo and his fiance Ponzi put on a high energy and very entertaining conference.  It’s in what’s now becoming “classical unconference” format – rather than lots of presentations with commercial bents, people get up for 30 minutes and lead “conversations” of the audience of 400 or so people.  Susan Mernit – now of Yahoo – just got up to talk about “sex and relationships” (instead of widgets and microformats.)

It’s been a romper room of interesting people so far today. Michael Arrington started the day off with – well – I’m not exactly sure what his theme was, but there was plenty of arguing.  Dave Dederer – one of the founding members of Presidents of the United States of America – led a discussion on revenue models using the music industry as a guide.  John Edwards (yes – our friend the politician) got up and held his own nicely in a discussion where political topics were (mostly) forbidden.  Werner Vogels – CTO at Amazon – led a discussion about Net Neutrality.  Steve Rubel talked about PR, advertising, and toilet paper.  Marc Canter held forth on being open open open.  And now – Susan is talking about sex (some guy – trying to promote his wife’s blog – inadvertently just said “and my wife – well – I’ll pump her” – freud is definitely present.)

Great energy, stimulating discussion, highly interesting, and lots more to go today and tomorrow.

Nick Bradbury, one of the great programmers that I know, has a post up about his approach to working out new ideas.  He also has a few hints about things he’s playing with for the next version of FeedDemon.  I’ve gotten to know Nick over the past year or so since NewsGator acquired Nick’s company and love his style and his products (I use FeedDemon all day long on several machines – it’s my primary newsreader.) 

Back when I was one of the world’s best Basic programmers (self proclaimed, although my partner at the time liked to remind me of this random outburst on a regular basis), I used a very similar approach – just start coding for a while, bang into some of the real issues, and – when I feel like I’ve figured out the right approach, but well before I’ve put the final touches on everything, throw it all away and do a design / code process.  As I’ve been able to work with some great software developers (and plenty of not so great ones) over the past twenty years as well as helped build companies like Rally Software that are working hard to help spread new approaches like Agile Software Development, I’ve seen – over and over again – that there there are a few key techniques that make all the difference in the world, especially early in the design phase of a new project or feature set.

A blog reader pointed me at the new JWP creative ads that are up on The Huffington Post web site.  I think they are absolutely brilliant, although Amy suggested that the Scruffs ad was simply an excuse for pornography.  It’s pretty wild what you can end up when you don’t have to worry about the FCC.

My buddy Ryan McIntyre – who is in the process of moving to Boulder – gives a great example of an issue with our friendly neighborhood online mapping services and then goes deep to understand what is actually going on and where the problem comes from.  He also describes the obvious unintended side effect – one that I personally experienced last week in Connecticut when my driver was relying on Yahoo Maps for directions to my meeting.