My friend and almost relative (fiance of my wife Amy’s sister) Stacy Maxwell has started a blog. Last fall at the age of 28 Stacy was diagnosed with Berkitt’s Lymphoma and his life (and his fiance Wendy’s, and his family’s) was turned upside down. Stacy has handled things incredibly well, was dedicated to his treatment, and is currently in remission. He’s started to write about his experience – if you have a friend or family member with cancer, Stacy’s story will resonate and might be helpful.

I’ve been deeply involved in the email business for the past decade through investments in companies like Postini, Return Path, Critical Path, MessageMedia, and Email Publishing and have been involved in the challenges of separating spam from legitimate email for a long time. On Monday, AOL announced a set of changes that I think are a gigantic step backward for users of email. While their announcement – that they are phasing out their IP-based Enhanced Whitelist and implementing Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail program – seems simple enough, I believe it is ultimately validation and support for “paid spam.”

If you are interested in Sling Media’s $46m financing by the likes of Liberty Media, EchoStar, and Goldman Sachs, my partner Ryan McIntyre (who sits on their board) has his view of it.

I decided today was a retro day at the office and decided to see if some of my old computers still worked. My dad cleaned out his attic last week and sent me all of my old computers. My Compaq Plus – which hadn’t been booted up since 1988 – started up immediately. While it had PFS Write and WordPerfect on it, there was no TCP/IP stack or Ethernet card. So – I downshifted to my old Apple II.

Niel Robertson, the CTO of Newmerix, has what I anticipate will become a legendary blog post up called I Pity The Fool that dissects Oracle’s recent “Half Way To Fusion” event. In addition to casting John Wookey (Oracle’s SVP of Application Development) as Mr. T, Niel does an extraordinary job of walking through what Oracle has announced and what he thinks it means for Oracle’s customers. If you use (or more importantly are responsible for managing and deploying) Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, or Siebel applications, you must read this. At the minimum you’ll get a great laugh out of it.

Other than reading a bunch of blog posts about the Google / China thing, I hadn’t paid much attention to it. Early today, I got an email that fits the proverbial “picture is worth a thousand words” cliche. Google Search for Tiananmen Square Google Search for Tiananmen Square from China I wasn’t able to try this using chinese characters (er – I don’t know chinese and I’m tired and lazy after running a marathon yesterday) so this might be a spoof. But – if not – enough said.

This was another marathon weekend for me. Amy and I spent the past week at our friend Jared Polis’s apartment in South Beach getting acclimated. I ran the Miami Marathon today – knocking another state of the list in my quest to run a marathon in every state by the time I turn 50 (I’ve done 6 and I recently turned 40.) South Beach has been a trip. When I was a kid, my dad’s parents lived in Hollywood Hills and I remember never being allowed to go to South Beach because it was “too dangerous.” I’ve been here several times over the past few years and dig the scene, even though I’m not a late night party guy. Jared’s place is perfectly located on the corner of 14th and Ocean, which happens to be the turn at the 6 mile mark of the marathon. 

The guys at FeedBurner have had a busy week. Earlier this week – they announced that their FeedFlare service – which they announced in December – could now be incorporated directly into a blog with one line of javascript. As an example, let’s look how FeedFlare impacts the post “The Coming Irrelevance of My.Yahoo For Me.” If you get my feed, you’ve noticed the following in the footer: Now, you’ll notice the following on my blog:

After reading Fooled By Randomness, I found myself becoming increasingly annoyed by the information on My.Yahoo page. I’ve had My.Yahoo as my default home page since 1997 or so and probably have it refresh (deliberately or otherwise) at least 100 times a day (more than 300,000 page views during that time of just the main Yahoo page.) I use it primarily to track news on about 150 public companies that I follow regularly. If you’d asked me a year ago, I’d have told you that I couldn’t live without it. I’ve tried to switch to other things (including My.MSN) but no dice – I’m just too used to My.Yahoo.