Brad Feld

China in the summer (via Bokee), now Japan in the fall (via GMO Affiliate).  FeedBurner continues on its quest to deliver the world’s content everywhere it’s needed


My friends Ben Neumann and Chris Ueland have a clever idea for helping out Hurricane Katrina victims called MillionDollarHelpPage.  They’ve taken the idea that Alex Tew came up for MillionDollarHomePage and repurposed it to be a Katrina fundraiser with the goal of raising $1 million.


If you are a frequent flyer like me, Ask the Pilot is a must read.  The author – Patrick Smith – has been a pilot for about 20 years and has been writing about it for Salon.com for the past two years.  The book is an extended Q&A session broken up into logical topics.  Smith is witty, acerbic, and spares no one.  I’ve read a few titillating “insiders guide to air travel” books (flight attendant stories, sex in bathrooms, dogs exploding, near collisions in the air) and they never really did much for me.  Smith’s book is much more practical and interesting – I actually learned some stuff and – even though I’m not a nervous flyer – have new perspectives and have had some myths debunked.


Pandora

Sep 26, 2005

Two people suggested Pandora to me in the past 24 hours.  It’s from the creators of the Music Genome Project.  You create a radio station based on things that you like (e.g. I’m listening to the Pink Floyd Station right now) and it find music you’ll like.  You give it feedback, and it adjusts its recommendations.  It harkens back to Agents Inc (Firefly) from the mid-1990’s, but in addition to recommendations, actually streams the music and lets you buy the song from iTunes or the album from Amazon.  Very cool.


Comfortably Numb

Sep 24, 2005

I had a monster run today in Dallas on my ramp up to the New York Marathon. In the pre-Rita heat, humidity, and wind I covered 16 miles. While I kept waiting for “Lovely Rita Meter Maid” to come on my Shuffle, I ended up hearing the best cover of Comfortably Numb (by Copper Box) that I’ve ever heard thanks to Coverville. I’m a huge Pink Floyd fan and – after struggling for a few miles at about 90 minutes because I ran out of water (and didn’t hit a store for three miles) – this Polka / Stevie Ray Vaughan / Country Rock style version helped me kick it back up into a faster gear.

As every runner that listens to music while running knows, the music you listen to has a meaningful impact on your run. I’m totally into covers and mashups these days because they are complex and different enough to completely suck my brain in. So – if you have recommendations, my legs will thank you – simply tag them in del.icio.us as for:bfeld

And – for the rest of the day – I have become comfortably numb.


Donald Rumsfeld is giving the President his daily briefing on Iraq.  

He concludes by saying:  “Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed.” 

“OH NO!” the President exclaims.  “That’s terrible!” 

His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits, head in hands. 

Finally, President looks up and asks, “How many is a brazillion?”


FeedBurner has a new statistics post up demonstrating the continued rapid adoption of RSS.  I know the post all the people that care about aggregators are interested in is the market share one – expect that soon.

Nice graph guys.


Firewalls for China?

Sep 22, 2005
Category Technology

As everyone is talking about China, it’s inevitable that security will creep (or leap) into the discussion.  The 37th Parallel blog has a great article up by Scott Granneman with a real life example of something that’s going on and his speculation about why it’s happening.


We just changed the configuration of our mail server and as a result my Outlook AutoComplete Cache was now wrong for a number of addresses, including all of our internal addresses.  While some people find AutoComplete to be annoying (and it’s easy enough to turn off – go to Tools | Options, click Preferences, click E-mail Options, click Advanced E-mail Options, and uncheck “Suggest names while completing…” – ok – that wasn’t so easy), I’ve always loved it and it was massively annoying to start having emails bounce from people I work with every day.

So – like a good user – I started trolling around in Outlook looking for a way to clear the cache.  I knew how to delete an item one at a time (simply highlight it when AutoComplete suggests it and hit delete).  However, after a few minutes I couldn’t find the answer.

Fortunately, there’s this thing called a Help file and thankfully F1 still brings it up.  I tried the offline help just for grins.  No go – it told me how to delete one at a time, but I already knew that.  I then tried Microsoft Office Online.  Voila – Reset the nickname and automatic completion cache.  The directions on the Microsoft site are a little tedious – if you don’t know your way around the filesystem, they are perfect for you; if you do know your way around, the instructions are as follows:

  • Close Outlook
  • Rename C:\Documents and Settings\<yourname>\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\yourname.nk2 to yourname.bak
  • Start Outlook

I feel clean again.