I’m going to be out of town on election day so I just filled out my absentee ballot (thankfully I got my ballot, unlike my 13,000 friends in Colorado that didn’t.)
The anarchist is me voted for Colorado Amendment 36 (proportional voting). Last time I checked, we lived in a “one vote for each person country”, although I can’t ever remember whether we live in a democracy or a republic (and – after reading this link – I still can’t tell.) Lots of folks rail against the electoral college – I took my mandatory semester of government in high school and couldn’t figure it out. Colorado’s proportional voting amendment is retroactive, so if it passes, the 9 Colorado electoral votes will be allocated proportionally (making Colorado most likely a 5-4 state.) My election prediction at this point is that Kerry will win by 3 votes, Colorado Amendment 36 will pass, Colorado will go 5-4 to Bush, the Bush faction will sue for unconstitionality of the retroactivity of Amendment 36, and the Colorado Supreme Court will have some fun in November and December (and we won’t find out who our new president is until 2005 sometime.)
I also voted to raise taxes on myself for all the Boulder County stuff around funding for the arts (SCFD), open space protection, and fire prevention and forest management. Does that make me a liberal sissy?
I’ve added a new NewsGator feature to my blog – Ratings. If you are looking at my blog online or via NewsGator Online, you’ll see a new thing in the footer of each post that says “Rate” and has five stars next to it.
To rate each post, simply click on the number of stars. If you have a NewsGator Online account (or create one), you’ll be able to see both your rating (red) and the aggregate rating (orange).
Look for announcements as to how to put this on your blog next week. If you want a headstart on this, take a look at the thread on the NewsGator Support Forum.
If you have suggestions as to what we should do with the data (we’ve got plenty of ideas that we are working on), feel free to post comments here.
I discovered Danny Gregory this summer in Alaska when I read Everyday Matters.
I bought all of his books and tossed them in the to read pile. Today I read Change Your Underwear Twice a Week: Lessons from the Golden Age of Classroom Filmstrip. Remember filmstrips? I do. They sucked. I remember taking off my glasses in elementry and junior high school to make it “harder” to see them since they were so incredibly dull and banal.
Gregory goes deep in his analysis of filmstrips in this beautifully illustrated book. He concentrates mostly on filmstrips from the late 1940’s to the early 1950’s. The actual filmstrip frames form the core of the story with Gregory’s narration of each section dripping with sarcasm as well as insight into the way our government was programming the minds of our youth through the filmstrips they funded for public education.
Cynical, sarcastic, and beautifully illustrated – this is a must read for anyone that ever had to run the filmstrip projector as their punishment for being an overachiever.
I finished Florence of Arabia by Christopher Buckley an hour ago. I am still laughing about it. It’s by far the funniest thing I’ve experienced in October – even better than the Jon Stewart Crossfire episode.
If you desire a “middle eastern comedy” written by a satircal god, you’ll enjoy this one.
If you are a Neal Stephenson fan, there’s a great interview with him up on Slashdot.
Snow Crash remains one of my all time favorite books and losing myself in The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon was the only way I survived a two week safari in Africa (the seminal moment of the trip was captured on video tape by my brother – I was sitting in a chair looking sunburned, dirty, tired, and generally miserable at which point I said “if I ever talk about going to Africa again, show me this video.”)
I’ve been holding off tackling the The Baroque Cycle trilogy (Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1), The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2), The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 3)), but as someone once said, “I yield to superior firepower.”
I sat through about 20 PowerPoint presentations yesterday (feel free to snicker now.)
As I was sitting in the audience, I noticed one thing that kept annoying me. A number of the presentations said Copyright “SOMETHING_OTHER_THAN_2004” in the footer. I’ve noticed this a lot recently, as footers seems to have “Copyright 2002”, “Copyright 11/02” or simply “4/12/03”. You’d think that PowerPoint would have an autocorrect rule for “Copyright.”
I know this borders on “nerd pet peeves”, but there you have it. There’s only one correct way to copyright something – it’s “© YEAR Company_Name.” If the presentation contains multiple years of work, then you should include both the first year of copyrightable material to current day (e.g. © 2002-2004 Company_Name).
Consider my pet peeve vent satisfied.
EDS put a big stake in the ground by declaring friends and foes yesterday when they created the EDS Agilty Alliance.
- Foes: IBM and HP.
- Friends: Cisco, Dell, EMC, Microsoft, Sun, Xerox (listed in alphabetical order presumably not to indicate any preference.)
When EDS acquired The Feld Group at the beginning of the year, Charlie Feld became EVP Portfolio Management – think of it as a role where the CTO and CIO report to him and he defines and builds both the product / service strategy and the internal systems to support the strategy (massive in EDS’s case.) One of Charlie’s classic moves whenever he becomes CIO somewhere is to lock down a finite set of well defined technology relationships to act as the backbone for all future buildout of technology. I remember a few examples of the top of my head – he did this at Frito-Lay with IBM (I think at one point, Frito-Lay was one of the largest users of OS/2 in the world) and Delta with Tibco.
Reading between the lines, EDS has decided enemy #1 and enemy #2 are IBM and HP respectively. The EDS Agility Alliance draws a line in the sand. If you add it up, you’ve got a “virtual company” that has $150 billion of combined annual revenue and $13.6 billion of annual R&D spending.
There are lots of good nuggets in the press release, including the signalling that “EDS will announce its application, business process and industry alliance members in the coming months.” (e.g. expect more to come.) If you are interested in the evolution of the high end of the IT services world, it’s worth a look.
NewsGator released a new version of NewsGator Online – their web-based RSS aggregator.
This version is free to consumers and includes new features including folders (manage all your feeds the same way you do in Outlook), per-post rating system, feed recommendations based on what you read, clippings (to save your favorite posts with one click), and smart feed enhancements including converting email-based alerts to RSS.
NewsGator Online includes subscription level synchronization with NewsGator Outlook Edition, allowing you to manage one set of feeds across multiple machines (I have four different computers, plus the web version with synchronized feeds.) As a result, I don’t have to worry about making sure my feeds are the same on all machines – whenever I change something on one machine (in Outlook or on the web), it synchronizes to the other machines.
There are lots of other cool features – along with a bunch of UI improvements – and more premium content relationships.
Check it out and tell us what you think.
I screwed up.
I was involved in a merger of two companies in Q4 last year. Post merger, I let both companies slip on completing their audits. I figured we’d do the 2003 combined audit after audit season. In an attempt to save money, the company let it slide into the fall. This isn’t a governance issue – I’m comfortable that both companies are clean – it’s a timing issue – we figured we’d get it done later in the year to save money and just hadn’t gotten around to it.
Recently, this company was approached to be acquired. Due to their concern about SOX, the acquirer is insisting on a 2003 audit (not a surprise). However, their accountants also want final 2002 independent audits through close and 2002 combined stub period audit. A little surprising, but not unreasonable given the size of the transaction.
Independent of cost, we have a time delay as a result of the audits. In addition to the complexity of the various audits required, my company’s previous Big 4 auditor decided that they didn’t have time to continuing auditing this company. There were no technical or legal issues – I’m experiencing this throughout my portfolio – the Big 4 auditors are so busy with public / SOX work that they are billing ridiculous amounts for that they no longer care about VC-funded private company work (or the relationships with the venture firms that they worked so hard to develop between 1997 and 2002.) Our new auditors – one of the next 50 firms – is doing a great job – but they had to start from scratch and come up to speed on the company. The end result is that we’ll probably lose a month in the deal process due to the audit work.
So – the simple lesson if you are a venture funded company is to get your audits done by mid-year every year, no matter what. Since you’ll likely need previous year audit for a Q3 or Q4 transaction, you’re better off getting it done so it doesn’t hang you up in a transaction. Note that you don’t need a previous year audit to close a Q1 transaction and occassionally (but not always) don’t need one to close a Q2 transaction.
So – eat your wheaties. Do your audits early.