Today’s NY Times has a clearly written article describing what’s really going on with Auction Rate Securities titled It’s a Long, Cold, Cashless Siege. There’s a lot of confusion going around about what ARS are and how they work so it’s nice to finally see “the simple stories” appearing. If you are curious about how these things really work or if you are interested in another straightforward story, Fred Wilson has one of the best first person accounts up on his blog titled Our Run In With Auction Rates And What It Taught Me About Markets.

With the sudden and ubiquitous emergence of PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), I thought I’d investigate several other “aaSes” as I always thought PaaS was something VC’s did. BaaS: This is a fish. CaaS: Commission on Accreditation of Ambulance Services (or the Chet Atkins Appreciation Society) DaaS: Dogs-as-a-Service. Also known as Dogster. EaaS: Elephants-as-a-Service. Also known as The Nature Channel. FaaS: How I generally drive my SL 55. GaaS: New pricing model. Unlimited supply for $4 / hour. HaaS: Hardware-as-a-Service. This what Amazon really sells. IaaS: Infrastructure-as-a-Service. It’s in Wikipedia, so it must be true. JaaS: Java Authentication and Authorization Service. KaaS: The fat singer in the Mamas &the Papas. LaaS: A Mango flavored Indian drink; Local Area Augmentation Service. MaaS: Catholics-as-a-Service. This is also Evangelicals 2.0. NaaS: Birds-as-a-Service (Northern Arizona Audubon Society). OaaS: Porn 2.0 – use your imagination or try xtube if you don’t know what I’m talking about. QaaS: A little known country in the UAE. RaaS: 17 different things – mostly systems of some sort. TaaS: The guys and gals that write the stories for the official news agency of Russia. UaaS: This domain for sale for $4675. Invent your own aaS. VaaS: Warnakulasuriya Patabendige Ushantha Joseph Chaminda Vaas. WaaS: Weekend-as-a-Service. This is what keeps me sane. XaaS: X-as-a-Service. Coined by Scott Maxwell of OpenView in 2006. YaaS: What Yahoo is going to be called after the Microsoft acquisition (or maybe they will be “Yahoo Cloud Computing SP74”). ZaaS: The giant tree that eats dust mites containing planets in Dr. Seuss books. It all started with SaaS which those of us in the know refer to as ASP 2.0. My heart beats quickly for the days of “hosting”, “ASPs”, and “On Demand.” Shoot – I even miss eSomething. Fortunately, Cloud Computing will enable lots of TLA’s for us to enjoy.

As I sit here in the San Francisco International Airport (they announce that so proudly over the PA when they tell me that the thread condition is orange every few minutes) I’ve been pondering the unexpected Frontier Airlines bankruptcy. My Frontier flight is now an hour late so I’ve had plenty of time to surf the web and try to figure out how / why this happened so suddenly. I’m also almost brain dead from my 10 day trip so it’s hard to actually do anything productive at this point.

I was going to respond to Fred’s post We Need A New Path To Liquidity in between my elephant meeting and my rocket ship meeting but I ended up reading all the comments as well as a bunch of the linked blogs (via TechMeme.) As a result I’ve run out of time. The comments are fascinating, as are some of the linked blogs. Well worth a deep read.

Fred Wilson has an incredible post up this morning titled We Need A New Path To Liquidity. I don’t agree with everything in it, but it’s a great, heartfelt post in the context of the gigantic Internet elephants stomping around trying to reconfigure themselves and consolidate things while accidentally crushing all the pretty little toys gathered at their feet trying to get (or having gotten) their attention. I’m rushing off to go spend the morning with a bunch of my friends at one of the elephants so I don’t have time for a more thoughtful post – go read Fred’s to get a starting point for the discussion and I’ll try to join in later today.

I spend plenty of time making connections between people. Email has certainly made this a lot easier. One of my best friends – Warren Katz (the founder / CEO of Mak Technologies) recently send me some prehistoric emails that he had saved from me demonstrating that even when I was in my mid 20’s, I was using email to connect people. Note the Compuserve email address – can you remember your Compuserve (or Source) address? And yes – the Compuserve address bounces now.

Will Herman reminded me that Speed Racer the movie is arriving on the scene on May 9th. Speed Racer is the cartoon of my childhood. A few years ago I bought all the episodes on DVD and watched them one after the other one weekend until my head exploded. I used to be so hot for Trixie and Racer X was like the big brother I never had. I can’t wait for the movie. I am so pleased that the Wachowski Brothers created it.

My mom just hung a new exhibit of her photographs titled Japan and India: Faces and Places. The images are spectacular – take a look at the slide show if you have any interest. The show is up at the Mesquite Art Center, 1527 N. Galloway, Mesquite, Texas (972-216-6444) until May 3. Congrats Mom on a beautiful looking show.

Return Path has 50 open positions in Colorado, New York, and Europe. The specific job page has detailed descriptions – all applications / resumes go to jobs@returnpath.net. Who said email is dead?