April 23, 2007.  Another 24 fanatic just came in my office and announced that to me.  Unfortunately I agree.  I watched it last night with Amy, Jason, David, and Jill and we all had that ho-hum look on our face when it ended.  Oh well – it’s rare that a show makes it six years anyway before it loses it.  At least GeekSugar has great pictures of Chloe.

I hate almost all automated phone systems (except of course the ones created by Gold Systems.)  Most suck and even though a little bit of effort could radically improve them, companies (and their customer service groups) don’t seem to understand (or care) about how their customers interact with them.

While I try to avoid picking up the phone and asking for help, it happens sometimes.  I try to get a special magic phone number that reaches a human immediately (e.g. I fly United a lot and can get a person on one ring), but this is the rare exception not the norm.

Jason pointed me to the Dial A Human web site.  This is a great site that lists the real phone numbers for customer support for a bunch of companies along with instructions to hack the phone system to bypass the menu prompts and get to a human right away.

I tried it on a few – it worked pretty well (I found one error and corrected it.)  Obviously a wiki format would be great for this, but at least there is this.

Let’s play another quick game of “Where is Brad.”

I got a private tour of the West Wing on Sunday.  I can’t remember ever going on a tour of the White House, although deep in the crevasses of my mind I vaguely remember possibly doing something with my parents once.

I had plenty of expectations about what it would look and feel like – none of them were accurate.  The most inaccurate was the Situation Room which was much smaller than I expected it to be.  The Oval Office was closer to what I thought it would be like, but felt a lot different when I was standing there staring into it.

I recommend every American – regardless of party affiliation – try to visit the White House at least once in their lifetime.  It’s a powerful experience.

I’ve been traveling a lot lately.  A lot.  So – I’ve gotten to experience airport security in many different forms throughout our beautiful country. Today’s experience in Boston reinforced how silly this whole thing has become.

Amy and I are heading to Washington DC.  The line is short as this part of Logan is pretty empty today (not many US Air flights mid-afternoon on a Saturday.)  As a result, the TSA guy has come up with a few new rules and he’s repeating them as steadily as your favorite metronome.  “Put your shoes, liquids, and bags directly on the conveyer belt.  Do not put them in the plastic trays.  If you have a drink, you can you drink it on that side security but you must throw it away before you come through.  Put your id’s away.”  Over and over again.  Instead of getting through security in three minutes, it took about ten as everyone forgot to take the purses, their liquids, or their shoes out of the little plastic trays.

All I could think of was my Acela train trip from Baltimore to NY.  We bought a ticket in the train station, zero security, bought some drinks in the train station, and walked on the train.  There were more people on it than on the airplane I was on from NY to Boston on Thursday night.  Our ending point was Penn Station.  No security – go figure.

I also thought about John Corzine’s (the NJ Governor’s) horrible car crash yesterday and how easy it is to either have a random (or deliberate) car accident.

Our government is spending an incredible amount on airport security and I’ve yet to feel fundamentally more secure than I used to.  Maybe it’s just me and I’m cynical, but this pet peeve gnaws at me.

Sometimes the web is a hysterical place.  Ryan sent me the brilliant description of The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel.  I wonder if this will have any impact on Chipotle’s stock price.

Also – if you were having difficulty getting access to my blog today, it apparently was a failure with the pneumatic tubes that connect my server to the Internet.

I wrote a post on March 12th titled Daylight Savings Time is Stupid.  A bunch of people agreed with me, but some didn’t, suggesting that (a) I was missing the point and it was more fun to have light at night than in the morning or (b) the “authorities” insisted that we’d get GDP gains, (c) there would be big energy savings helping save the world, and (d) restaurants and stores would make more money due to sunny night shopping.  Oh – and I also learned DST = daylight saving time, not “savings.” 

The guy in my shop that suffered the most was our IT guy Ross who had to update – well – a bunch of stuff.  Here are his thoughts a month later.

Good thing we all went through the DST change, right?

Well according to the US Department of Energy no.  It turns out what many of us already knew has been confirmed, the DST change (Daylight Savings Time) has made no difference in national energy consumption and probably cost us more than it saved in lost productivity.

So why didn’t this work? Weren’t we supposed to have more daylight and therefore have to use less electricity?  Apparently most of the electricity we use isn’t just for our lighting anymore.  It is our computers, plasma TV’s, Xbox’s (playing Guitar Hero of course), etc.  Since we are all home the same amount of time we’re all pretty much using the same amount of energy.  Seems like a no brainer to me and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Guess what, I’m not.  According to Southern Co. Power: “We haven’t seen any measurable impact.”  New Jersey’s Public Service Enterprise Group said the same thing: “no impact” on their business.  Great, so we went through all this work for, uh, nothing?

Well I guess not nothing.  It was a good excuse to update the phone system to the latest and greatest software (which didn’t prevent issues….) and I got to spend more time in the office late at night.  The guys got to miss meetings, doctors appointments, and have to constantly verify their calendars.  I guess it wasn’t all bad, it was really easy to blame anything and everything on “that damn DST change”.  Thanks Congress – all the IT guys out there appreciate it!

Exactly 20,000 miles.  What numerical fun!

I love a good satire.  The book Anonymous Lawyer did a brilliant job of this for lawyers and the legal profession.  Every now and then I fantasize about writing “Anonymous VC” but I’m too chicken to try to take it on.  Mike “the i-banking monkey” (a analyst in a large ibank in London) sent me a link to his blog which is a ibank satire.  I’m enjoying (and laughing at) every post on The All Nighter.  Nothing like a little humor on April Fools Day (not that it’s hard to find it on the web today.)

A guest blog from my partner and Ask the VC co-author Jason Mendelson.

In case you’ve ever found yourself cursing lawyers and / or the legal system (I do on a weekly basis and I am a lawyer), I have finally found the answer to the question “Is there anyone more stupid than a lawyer?” 

The answer apparently is “law professors.”

I guess this intellectually makes sense, as someone has to train the lawyers – they aren’t born this way.  Well, maybe a couple of them are.  Anyways, I digress. 

So, this all stems from a scholarly legal paper entitled “Fuck”.  Brad blogged about it here.  In short:

This Article explores the intersection of the word fuck and the law. In four major areas, fuck impacts the law: First Amendment, broadcast regulation, sexual harassment, and education. The legal implications from the use of fuck vary greatly with the context. However, to fully understand the legal power of fuck, the non legal sources of its power must be tapped. Drawing upon the research of etymologists, linguists, lexicographers, psychoanalysts, and other social scientists, the visceral reaction to fuck can be explained by cultural taboo.

The article was written by Christopher Fairman, a law professor at Emory University and The Ohio State University Law School.  It’s a great paper and no, it’s not a comedy piece or a riff on George Carlin’s prior works.  It’s a legitimate work that has some real interest to legal minds as well as casual readers.

Law Professor Brian Leiter from the University of Texas has a website that ranks all sorts of fun facts regarding law schools.  One of them is regarding the most downloaded faculty.  In this new ranking, he excludes #8 Emory & #10 Ohio State because of association with Professor Fairman’s “provocatively titled article.”The not so hidden assumption is that the “wrong people” downloaded Fuck and therefore shouldn’t count.  I guess all the “right people” are downloading articles about proposed civil procedure changes in the eastern district of Texas and how this will affect riparian water rights in Arkansas. 

Brad sent this to me with the quote “Jason, you should be embarrassed (again) to be a lawyer.”  He’s right.  If our law professors aren’t willing to keep an open mind and discuss issues from multiple points of view, than I shiver to think what types of practitioners will be released upon society upon graduation.  Leiter, who went to Michigan and got a PhD and teaches in law and philosophy should be ashamed of his arbitrary decision.  Did he even read the article?  Or is he just jealous because more people are interested in Fairman’s works than his own?  Either way, there is no excuse for this type of behavior.