Random

I had a superb run this morning through the English Garden in Munich . This is only the second time I’ve ever been in Munich – the first time was with my friend Bruce over 20 years ago. While it was cloudy, it was a lovely morning, the park was fresh, green, and hidden from the city, and there were some wackadoodle surfers practicing in the small river under a bridge with a water pipe. I discovered the incredible value of the map function of my new Garmin Forerunner 305 – without it I would have been lost in the park and would have never been able to find my way back, especially since none of the signs made any sense to me except the ones that said “GaragePark” which weren’t of much use and I forgot to leave myself a trail of bread crumbs. ...

Paul Kendrosky’s pickup on Joey Ramone’s affection for Maria Bartiromo made my head spin around in circles this morning. The full interview is in the Financial Times / Arts & Weekend section .

Since this is Yahoo month (which is going quite nicely, btw) I decided I really wanted to get into the Yahoo Mail Beta and check it out, especially for the new RSS stuff that I’ve heard about (and seen over other people’s shoulders, but never used for more than a few minutes.) I’ve been “applying” for the Yahoo Mail Beta program for three months (at least ever few weeks – whenever I think of it) and all I get back is a deafening silence. I considered emailing a few friends at Yahoo; however, earlier today, Chris Wand sent me a cheat via HiveLive via the Google Operating System blog that tells you how to fool Yahoo to letting you immediately into the program. ...

Last month, I decided to spend April with Microsoft, May with Yahoo, and June with Google. As April comes to an end, I turn from Microsoft to Yahoo. I already changed my search default within Firefox and am now sending traffic to Yahoo instead of Microsoft. In hindsight, April was frustrating. I started out by trying to switch all my software infrastructure to Microsoft, including IE7b2. In addition to bonking hard, this attempt messed up enough other things on my desktop computer at home that I quickly backed off the “all Microsoft” and went to “online Microsoft only.” The nice folks in the IE group tried to help, but the pre-release of the next version that I downloaded was too unstable (and – after one iteration – I decided I simply didn’t have the time to keep fighting with it) so I bailed and just kept using Firefox. ...

As my Microsoft Web Only diet continues, I found myself using Live.com Image Search today to put together a presentation. I hate text heavy Powerpoint presentations so I try to go to the Seth Godin school of Powerpoint and limit myself to six words per slide (e.g. lots of pictures.) Historically, Google Image Search has been my friend when I put a presentation together. I loved Live.com Image Search – it’s substantially better than Google’s. The actual image search is about the same, but the UI is dramatically better. It’s very Ajaxy – resize bar, mouse over to enlarge image and get image detail, drag and drop image to other apps, infinite scroll (rather than next, next, next), and overall nice / fast presentation. Someone on the Google Image Search team needs to take a look.

After all the depressing shit that I read in the New York Times today, I felt compelled to buy a new clock. These were on sale in the Boulder Bookstore and I couldn’t resist. However, I’m not so sure about the “… will soon be over” thing.

Sometimes it’s best not to read the newspaper first thing in the morning. Randall Stross has an excellent and disturbing article in today’s New York Times titled “Looking at the Free Market, and Seeing Red .” It leads with the story of Lou Dobbs bashing Lenovo and their recent deal to sell $13 million of computers to the US State Department. Dobbs asserts that the PCs will provide spies within the Chinese government a way of conducting espionage. His sound bite on the lead in was something like “when the State Department seeks secure network communications it turns to Communist China and thus renders the United States perhaps more vulnerable than ever.” ...

When I was at Microsoft last week, I once again noticed interesting art in the lobby of the buildings I was in. I’ve always liked the art at Microsoft and enjoy the typical five minute wait in the lobby as the person I’m meeting with (or their assistant) comes down to escort me to the meeting. This time I noticed a brochure titled Microsoft Art Collection: Redmond Campus: Spring 2006 Program. I picked it up and looked through it. While the brochure was informative, the link to the Microsoft Art Collection web site had piles of information on it. ...

In my Microsoft-only web diet, I’ve been pleasantly enjoying Microsoft Search . While some of the results are a little wacky (e.g. I was searching for the Microsoft Empower program yesterday and all I got were old links to the Irish and UK Empower pages – which were no longer active), it’s been generally very effective and I didn’t really notice any functional difference from Google. However, Microsoft Search seems to have been down for the better part of the morning. ...

There’s an old joke about Microsoft that it takes them three major releases to get it right. So – when “version 3.0 of something” comes out – it’s time to pay attention. Microsoft shifted away from version numbers to year numbers a while ago – presumably someone in marketing figured out that the version numbering approach wasn’t effectively confusing customers about the maturity of products. Earlier today, Microsoft announced the road map and feature set for Microsoft Speech Server 2007 which is expected to be released at the end of this year. One of my portfolio companies – Gold Systems – has been working closely with Microsoft Speech Server over the past year and has implemented a number of projects with it. When I was at Microsoft last week, I spent some time with Richard Bray (Microsoft GM Speech Server) and Terry Gold (Gold Systems CEO) discussing where Microsoft was going with the product and how Gold and Microsoft could expand their relationship around Speech Server, Microsoft’s upcoming unified messaging product, and Microsoft LCS. It was a great conversation – Richard definitely gets it – and I expect Microsoft will really nail it with v3.0 of Speech Server.