My mom (Cecelia Feld) is an artist. As kids, my brother and I were forbidden from bothering her from 9am to 5pm – time that she spent in her studio (“Mom’s working”). I imagine this has something to do with my love (and collection of) contemporary art. Cecelia is having a new show at the Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder, Colorado. The show is called Out of Context and deals with the familiar seen in a different light. A partially obscured, rusted sign on an old chain link gate seems familiar, and yet, not. Cecelia Feld explains, “We recognize and identify objects in certain contexts. When a familiar object is seen close up so that only part of it shows or a detail from one object is juxtaposed . . .it takes on a new meaning.”

If you are a runner, you’ll love this book. If not, you won’t. The Purple Runner was written in 1983 and is based in Hampstead Heath, London. The story tracks an overlapping set of runners that include an arrogant American lawyer who is bored of his life, a kiwi racer who is trying to get her act together and run at her potential, an American who is suffering from some strange illness as he searches for peace and accomplishment, and the Purple Runner who no one knows much about, but turns in incredible training runs while avoiding any substantive interactions with his fellow runners.

Jenny Lawton – owner of Just Books in Greenwich, CT – recently had the authors of The Rule of Four (Dusty Thomason and Ian Caldwell) and Codex (Lev Grossman) in her town for an author coffeehouse. Both are great books in the style of The Da Vinci Code. I thought Rule of Four was much more fun (and accessable / contemporary) as I could identify with it more. Codex was a little harder and not as well written, but had a great techno / computer undercurrent which the nerd in me liked. I’m looking forward to the next books from these guys.

There are probably some deep sighs at Six Apart. Hopefully it stays up :).

It appears Typepad has been down for a while (since last night?). On 6/11/04, Everything Typepad! posted a “Scheduled Downtime June 12, 2004” which said the service would be down for maintenance from 12:00am to 2:00am – likely less. It’s 8:12am EST and it’s still down. Oops. In my experience, all hosted software providers experience unexpected downtime – often early as they are ramping their service. I remember Ebay’s 12 hour outage, Critical Path’s two day outage, and a variety of hosting services taking thousands of sites off-line. You can almost see the technical people staring at the computers mumbling to themselves “Oh shit – I can’t get this back up – something’s toast and I can’t figure it out – beepers going off – panic sets in – sweat – focus – the magic reboot dance and incantation – nothing – guess I’ve got to call the boss in the middle of the night and share my stress with him”.

This was a chewy one. I just finished I’ve been involved in companies that develop software for 20 years and have seen numerous different approaches with a wide range of success (and failure). Last year, I invested in a company called Rally Software Development Corp.. Rally recently released their first product – Agile Solution for Software Development Management – which is the first on-demand software development management solution designed to speed delivery of customer value using iterative development processes. Rally’s products are aimed at organizations using Agile development methodologies. As a result, I decided to read a few books about Agile software development to get a deeper theoretical grounding in this area.

I got an email from a close friend last night in response to my recent post of Stratify’s press release.. His comment – which follows – struck a chord. You’ve begun to illustrate one of the problems with blogs… now I go to your blog and half of it is stuff you’re trying to promote (e.g., your companies, WIT). So it’s already only 50% as interesting as it was when you started. Think about it — you actually are a smart guy with stuff to say, and half of what you’re doing is spam. What about people who have nothing to say but lots to sell!

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–June 8, 2004– Stratify, Inc., a leader in unstructured data management for business applications, today announced the launch of Stratify Legal Discovery Service 3.0 solution for law firms and corporate legal departments. The explosion of discoverable information in legal proceedings challenges attorneys to move beyond labor-intensive search techniques that needlessly increase costs and analysis periods. With the Stratify Legal Discovery Service product attorneys can intelligently comprehend the document universe, efficiently tag, review and produce documents, and accelerate and fortify early case assessment and advanced risk analysis for their clients. Providing intelligent concept-based foldering, integrated search and filtering, and email traffic analysis, the Stratify Legal Discovery Service solution enables attorneys to develop, test and execute winning strategies faster based on an early mastery of the facts in a case.

Google just announced the 2004 winners of the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scolarships. The scholarship was awarded to female undergraduate and graduate students earning computer science degrees during the 2004-05 academic year, who were selected based on academic performance, responses to essay questions, and letters of recommendation. Eight received $10,000 awards; eleven received $1,000 award. The mission for the Anita Borg Institue for Women and Technology is to increase the impact of women on all aspects of technology, to increase the positive impact of technology on the lives of the world’s women, and to help communities, industry, education and government benefit from these increases.