Kimbal Musk just put up a blog about his brother Elon’s rocket launch that is scheduled for tomorrow on Kwajalein Atoll. I wrote about it yesterday – Kimbal has a lot more pictures up and I expect he’ll be reporting live (or hopefully simply “alive”) from the scene tomorrow.

Jim Collins has an outstanding short essay titled “Lessons From A Student Of Life” as a tribute to Peter Drucker in the 11/28/05 Business Week.

Stephen Wolfram has accomplished some remarkable things in his life, including creating Mathematica, a very successful private company called Wolfram Research, a set of amazing mathematics web sites including The Wolfram Integrator, and an overwhelming tome called A New Kind of Science which I intended to read last summer but instead just stared at it each day. Now Wolfram brings us Ringtones (well – WolframTones). If you ever wondered about the math behind ringtones, now is your chance to play around and create your own ringtones using “simple programs from Wolfram’s computational universe, music theory, and Mathemetica algorithms.” 

In my last post in the Business Plan series, I promised to tell you about “The Industry”. This is an important early section of a business plan that frames the overall industry the company is part of. It’s important to keep this section short (if I want to learn the history of an industry, I’ll read a history book, not a business plan.) The first part (or first few paragraphs) should describe the industry generally and then become more specific about the segment of the industry that the company is going to address.

Think back to 1992. “It’s the economy, stupid!” Amy and I watched The War Room tonight, the brilliant documentary of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and the organization behind it, spearheaded by James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. Carville’s quote was actually “the economy, stupid” and was part of a haiku that Carville came up with. Change vs. more of the same The economy, stupid Don’t forget health care. Carville is an absolute genius and unbelievably entertaining as a special bonus feature. I’d team up with that dude any day just for the laughs. Stephanopoulos reminded me of Sam Seaborn which – it turns out – was intentional.

If you haven’t used Technorati for a while because of either performance or accuracy issues, try it again. Dave Sifry – Technorati’s CEO – has a post up describing their performance improvements. As a Technorati investor, I’ve given Dave and team lots of steady feedback and have watched with happiness as the performance, relevance, and accuracy has steadily improved as they’ve continued to scale up and tune their infrastructure to handle the massive number of blogs that they are indexing. Oh – and they’ve added a bunch of cool new features along the way. Dave and his team listen – if you have issues after trying it again, email me and I’ll pass it on or give them feedback directly.

If you want something chewy to read over Thanksgiving, I recommend FeedBurner’s thoughtful piece titled How feeds will change the way content is distributed, valued and consumed (also available as a PDF.) This is the first article in FeedBurner’s “Feed For Thought” market reports. Fred Wilson also had a good post on The Second Coming of RSS worth chewing on. I promise neither of them are turkeys.

On Friday 11/25, Elon Musk’s new company, SpaceX will launch their first rocket, the Falcon 1, at 1pm PST. I got a note from Elon’s brother Kimball – who now runs an awesome restaurant in Boulder called The Kitchen – with some photos. Yes – that’s a rocket ship on a remote island called Kwajalein Atoll. According to Kimball, Kwaj is the largest Atoll in the world, 1,400 miles away from Guam, 2,100 miles away from Hawaii, has a population of 2,500, a runway, a small military base, and a lot of excited rocket scientists hanging around.

After a magnificent long weekend in the Bahamas, my return to American soil was via the Miami Airport. Blech. The best part of the airport was the landing on the runway. We taxied for a while, eventually ending up in the middle of the airfield next to an active runway (holy shit – did that plane just take off next to us?) A bus pulled up, we got off the plane and crowded on it, and then drove around in a circle for 10 minutes, enjoying the smell of exhaust mixed with jet fumes, eventually ending up at a terminal. We went up an escalator and wandered past a huge number of gun-toting security dudes. Eventually we made our way through the very nice and tidy customs area (I didn’t understand a word the custom agent said to me – he definitely wasn’t speaking English), down another escalator to a dingy baggage claim area, where we walked past rows of doors that were locked. Eventually we found the one open door (hint: it was the one with the long line of people), waited a while, and got waived through the bag check area.