Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year is my new best book of the summer. It’s a diary of Esme Raji Codell’s first year as a public school teacher (fifth grade) in Chicago. It is hilarious, sweet, sad, inspiring, disheartening, uplifting, and deeply insightful. Esme’s got a great web site at Planet Esme – A Wwwonderful World of Children’s Literature. This woman needs a blog! Esme Codell has a new fan – me.

Dan Bricklin has a great essay on his site today titled Software That Lasts 200 Years. Dan is indubitably one of the world’s great software visionaries and his thoughts are always worth reading. This essay was especially poignant for me since the first significant custom software application I wrote is still in use today. I wrote the Bellflower Dental System (a patient management, scheduling, and insurance billing system) for a large dental practice in 1985 and deployed it in 1987 (amazingly, their phone number is the same as it was in 1985, except the area code has changed from 310 to 562). Bellflower Dental Group is a large practice (at the time, they had over 50,000 patients) and the system was incredibly complex. My first company – Feld Technologies – continued to do work on it through 1993 when I sold the company to AmeriData. AmeriData continued to support the application until I left in 1995 since by that time I was pretty much the only person around that could modify the software without breaking everything. Once a year, until about 1999, I got a call from my friends at Bellflower and made a trip out there to tune things up. In 1999, we had to modify a bunch of the system for the year 2000 bug (yes – we had it everywhere – who would have thought that this would still be working 15 years later in 1985). I hired Dave Jilk – who was my partner in Feld Technologies and between gigs – to do this since I simply didn’t have time to do it. After this experience, we finally hooked them up with some local consultants that knew DataFlex – the language the system was written in (amazingly DataFlex – is still around today) and the software – as far as I know – has continued to work. Twenty years is a long time for any software system – especially the first one I actually created.

I appear to have several people in my life (Amy Batchelor, Dave Jilk, Chris Wand, and Steve Bayle) who view correcting my grammar, spelling, punctuation, and word usage as part of their role on this planet. I did not ask for this; however, I tolerate it because they have other useful traits (Amy just looked over my shoulder and said, “Great use of the semicolon; hot!”) In an attempt to lower their workload, I read Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. I learned a lot which will hopefully be reflected in my future punctuation efforts. Unfortunately, the author is a brit so you might get some foreign usage.

I don’t read much history – for some reason I don’t get into it. I do like biography and get most of my “history reading” from it. So – it’s always special when I can get a bunch of biography, history, and – well – CHARACTERS – all in one book. Amy and I were with our friends Nick and Helen Forster at The Kitchen in Boulder about a month ago. Somehow the topic turned to our families and genealogies. Nick was talking about growing up in this old mansion in upstate New York and eventually suggested that I read The Astor Orphans: A Pride of Lions. Nick’s a fascinating guy that – with Helen – runs etown (a weekly radio show produced in Boulder) – so I figured it’d be fun to find out more about his ancestors, especially a group he referred to as “eight kids who were direct decendents of the Astor’s who lost their parents when the oldest was a teenager and rattled around in this huge house I grew up in.”

I was in the middle of responding to an email and I used Visicalc as an example to make a point (remember Visicalc?). I couldn’t remember how to spell Bob Frankston’s last name (I’ve been friends with Dan Bricklin, the co-investor of Visicalc since I lived in Boston – but I’ve never met or talked to Bob) so I did a quick Google search on Visicalc. I hit the jackpot. Dan has a copy of Visicalc that you can run on a PC. I downloaded it and three minutes later I was staring at the Visicalc screen from my childhood (the first time I ran Visicalc was when I was 13). The MS-DOS version is 27,520 BYTES. That’s 27k. Not 27MB. 27k. Smaller than most GIFs and JPEGs.

Steve Bayle has appeared in the blogosphere. He made an audacious entrance into my NewsGator Online Services custom search feed for “Brad Feld” where he asserted that I don’t know jack about naming things (he’s correct – my first company was creatively named Feld Technologies, proving Steve’s point). I’ve been involved with two of Steve’s companies. The first was Mainspring which went public in July of 2000 and then was acquired by IBM. Softbank Technology Ventures and Flatiron Partners were investors and I sat on the strategic advisory board. Mainspring had a happy ending, but I didn’t have much to do with it as my involvement was light (but hopefully appreciated).

Now that I’ve chowed down a bunch of Stephen Frey books, if there’s one you read, it should be The Legacy. It combines light Wall Street stuff with a giant JFK / government / mafia conspiracy. It’s well written, lots of twists, turns, unexpected surprises and – yes – a happy ending. In contrast, The Day Trader sucked. I didn’t finish it, but I’m going to count it as read since I bailed more then half way through.

Earlier this week, one of my companies – EYT – announced that it had merged with ePartners. My close friend and collegue Howard Diamond was the driver of this deal and is now executive chairman of ePartners. Howard was previously the executive chairman of Rebar / Corporate Software – an investment of mine that was acquired by Level 3 in 2002. This is a big deal for us since the resulting company – to be called ePartners – is the largest Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) provider in North America. ePartners has over 400 employees, including 220 solution consultants, 29 offices, and is headquartered in Seattle. For those of you that don’t know anything about MBS, it’s the division of Microsoft that was formed through their acquisitions of Great Plains and Navision over the past few years and includes the Microsoft CRM product line.

Amy and I saw a double feature tonight. Our place in Alaska is in a small town (Homer) and we have one movie theater that shows two different movies a day (one at 3 and 6, one at 9). The two movies change every Friday so if we wanted to catch the ones from this week, tonight was the night. 6pm was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It was what you’d expect.