David Baldacci is in my regular “mental floss” book rotation – whenever one of his books comes out it immediately ends up in the “read when you need a break from serious stuff” pile. His latest – The Camel Club – didn’t disappoint me. It started off slower than most Baldacci books and it took me 100 pages to get completely sucked in. When I finished, I realized that he needed more time to set up all the characters in this one, as he had a large number of interconnected plots. My evening was sacrificed to the reading gods as I downed 300 pages of riveting storytelling. Spies, conspiracies, government corruption, secret societies, old CIA training facilities, presidential kidnapping, secret service heroics, many bad guys (some Americans), a bunch of scary dudes running the country including a few that thought nuclear war was a solution, computer hacks, meglomanics, near miss surveillance incidents, characters with major pasts coming back to haunt them, OCD, a little romance, and excellent gunplay made for a good evening.

Lyle Lovett’s “It Ought To Be Easier” was the 195th song on Amy’s iPod Shuffle playlist that I manually recreated for her this morning. Someone at Apple on the iPod user experience crew needs to go to the Apple Store in Palo Alto, buy two shuffles, three iPods of different flavors, and a G5. Then, they need to go to Fry’s and pick up two desktop PCs, a server, two laptops, and a wireless router (I assume all the machines have wireless cards in them.) Now – set it all up, rip all your music, store it on the PC server (or Mac server, I don’t care), point all your iTunes clients at the right directory on your server, and make a bunch of playlists. Yeah – that was fun, wasn’t it. 

I had lunch with Stan James on Friday at Pasquini’s Pizzeria. Stan is the creator of Outfoxed and was introduced to me by Seth Goldstein who is one of the guys behind AttentionTrust.org and has recently launched Root Markets (Seth has a long essay up about Root Markets: Media Futures: From Theory to Practice that is very interesting (and complex) if you are into this stuff.)) Stan’s moving to Boulder to be in the middle of the Internet software development universe (ok – he’s moving back here because it’s a much better place to live than Silicon Valley, but don’t tell anyone). We spent a bunch of time getting to know each other, we talked about the research he’d been doing for his masters these in Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrueck, and how this led to Outfoxed. Oh – and we ate a huge delicious pizza.

Nope – I’m not referring to an HTTP 404 error. I’m talking about Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Section 404. If you are a software developer and don’t know what SOX is, it’s the law enacted after all the corporate accounting scandals in the early 2000’s that was intended to increase the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosure. There are many opinions on SOX, including the widely held opinion among the VC community that SOX has been instrumental in discouraging companies from going public. Love or hate it, we’ve all got to live with it.

I woke up this morning thinking about User Agents (ok – I was also thinking about Naomi Watts and Sean Penn who were amazing in 21 Grams.) A commenter on my Personalize Feed post pointed out that most of the big online aggregators include subscriber counts in their user-agent headers when the aggregator polls the RSS feed. While I agree that using the User Agent to report the number of subscribers to a feed is a good approach, I’ve noticed a bizarre pattern lately. Since I use FeedBurner to manage my feed, I’ve got great visibility into which aggregators are providing their subscriber numbers. I’ve got enough subscribers at this point (> 4500) that the law of large numbers are working for me – while I won’t claim to have perfect “aggregator market share data”, I’ve got a pretty good feel for it (which is really useful given my investment in NewsGator.) As I wrote in my Blog Analytics post, I love numbers and have long invested in, benefited from, and paid attention to web analytics. So – the number of subscribers to my feed (among other feed and blog related data) are near and dear to my heart.

I woke up to a video of The Worst Job Ever in my inbox. On this Thanksgiving weekend, be thankful you don’t have this job.

Have you ever made an error as a result of a formula problem in a spreadsheet. Nope – I haven’t either . A long time friend and uber-accounting-dude Frank Lincks sent me this somewhat painful story of Eastman Kodak’s recent SEC non-reliance 8–K filing due to a spreadsheet error. Quoting from the 8–K: “…the Company has concluded that the severance error that occurred in the second quarter, as described above, was primarily the result of a failure in the operation of … the existing preventive and detective controls surrounding the preparation and review of spreadsheets that include new or changed formulas. The Company has concluded that this situation constitutes a “material weakness,” as defined by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s Auditing Standard No. 2. The Company believes that this material weakness will be remediated by December 31, 2005.”

I was in an Oxlo board meeting recently and Todd Vernon (Raindance CTO who is on the Oxlo board) said “I’ve subscribed to your del.icio.us tag feed – I like it more than your blog because it tells me what you are thinking about. I was mulling this over when a few days later I saw Jason Calacanis’ Wired & Tired post where he called out “subscribing to Fred’s blog” as Tired but “subscribing to Fred’s del.icio.us feed” as Wired. Jason used almost the same phrase as Todd – “I prefer to read what Fred is *considering* blogging about.”

As an investor in a number of companies that do stuff with RSS (NewsGator, FeedBurner, Technorati, and Judy’s Book) and fan and active user of others (e.g. del.icio.us, FeedBlitz, SixApart) I’ve been seeing a lot of “this sucks, that’s great, that sucks, this is great” blog posts lately, but rarely do I see anyone decompose what’s actually bad or great and explaining why. Occasionally there’s some stuff from an end-user perspective (especially whenever Google rolls something out), but I’ve been surprised by the general lack of technical depth and public debate. Ok – maybe I’m reading the wrong feeds – but I’m trying.