Amy has a magnificent photo of her old Mercedes CLK55 on fire up on her blog. This apparently complements the thrill she got from driving 120 mph in my SL55 tonight on her way home. And – yes – Mercedes did the right thing and eventually replaced her car (that’s a long story for another time) and my car appeared to still be in one piece when she parked it in the driveway tonight.

A few days ago I posted about turning on the Pipelining feature in Firefox. In many cases, I’ve seen a dramatic performance improvement. However, now that I’ve been using it for a few days, I’ve run into some sites that it simply breaks, including the Wall Street Journal site. One of my comments suggested that I try the Tweak Network Settings Firefox Extension. It’s great – it exposes the same options but also gives you and easy off button (“Default”) and on button (“Power”) through a menu option in the Tools menu within Firefox. Interestingly, when I used the “Power” settings (which are slightly different then the ones I had listed in the previous post), the Wall Street Journal site automagically works again.

At lunch today (sushi) with Amy and my two nephews, the song “Fish Heads” suddenly inserted itself in my head. No one at the table remembered it, but the waitress did and we struggled through the chorus together. I whipped out my trusty T-Mobile Sidekick and googled “Fish Head Song.” Voila – lyrics: Chorus Fish heads fish heads Roly poly fish heads Fish heads fish heads Eat them up Yum (Repeat Chorus) In the morning laughing happy fish heads In the evening floating in the soup (Chorus) Ask a fish head anything you want to They won’t answer they can’t talk (Chorus) I took a fish head out to see a movie Didn’t have to pay to get it in (Chorus) They can’t play baseball they don’t wear sweaters They’re not good dancers they don’t play drums (Chorus) Roly poly fish heads are never seen Drinking cappuccino in Italian restaurants with Oriental women Yeah. (Chorus) (Repeat Chorus 2X) (Repeat Chorus a capella) Yeah

As chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, I’m always on the lookout for real evidence that there is causal impact between various programs aimed specifically at women in helping with IT and entrepreneurship and long term competitiveness and economic development. The Center for Women’s Leadership at Babson College just released a study that shows that Women’s Business Centers (WBC’s) are driving entrepreneurship among economically disadvantaged women. WBC’s were created in 1988 through the federal Women’s Business Ownership Act – there’s some good stuff in the report summarizing the current state of play of WBC’s.

Royal Farros is has now joined the swelling ranks of Microsoft bloggers. Microsoft bought Royal’s company (MessageCast – which we were investors in) a month ago. Royal has been a long time friend and collegue – he was my partner Heidi Roizen’s business partner in their first business (T/Maker – thanks for the clip art Royal) and then we backed his previous company iPrint. Royal is endlessly delightful, insightful, and often – as Amy (my partially Irish wife) would say – full of the ole St. Nick. He was on the receiving end this year as Heidi pulled one of the greatest ever April Fools Day jokes on Royal this year – it’ll be echoing in the halls for many years to come. Let’s just say that since the MessageCast deal closed in mid-April there was a linkage between the April Fools Day joke and Royal’s soon to be future (and now current) employment at Microsoft.

It’s the end of the quarter and many of the entrepreneurs I know are crunching hard to get their quarter end deals done. I was riding in the car with the CEO of one of my companies who is in a particularly challenging negotiation on a large deal. We were in a Jaguar that he’d rented from Hertz and he made sure to point out the sign in the car that said “Hertz #1 Gold Club: We appreciate your business! Please enjoy our complimentary upgrade.” I smiled – told him I knew he was cheap and wasn’t worried – and waited for him to say something like “yeah – but the point is that the Hertz Gold Club membership was free also.”

I’ve been using Firefox for a while and love it. I’m waiting patiently for my beta of IE 7.0 to see how they’ve done, but for now I’m addicted to Firefox. My partner Greg Galanos (another software nerd – he used to run Metrowerks) sent me the tweaks to turn on pipelining in Firefox. The performance improvement is awesome. If you are a Firefox user on a high speed line (don’t try this on dialup), try the following:

I’ve been thinking about “Innovation” a lot lately. A big part of the NCWIT theme is that having women in computer science is critical to the innovation process. I recently read my doctoral advisor Eric von Hippel’s new book Democratizing Innovation and re-engaged with Eric around the research he’s doing about user-driven innovation, especially in software around open source communities. This morning, I finished reviewing proposals for the MIT Deshpande Center’s next grant cycle. 

My RSS world continues to be busy as both Technorati and Feedburner had lots of action this week. Technorati released the beta of their new site. Dave Sifry has a post up about the features as does Niall Kennedy, who includes some fun old Technorati designs from 11/02, 6/04, and 7/04. Awesome progress guys (as of today: 11.2m weblogs watched and 1.2 billion links tracked.) On Monday, the Feedburner guys put out an analysis of their existing aggregated podcast metrics. Feedburner now manages feeds for 6,000 podcasts and are seeing solid growth in the number of per-podcast subscribers (average of 33 – up from 15 in February; average of 65 if you eliminate the podcasts with less than 4 subs).