I’m an MIT grad. We are all geeks at heart. After I graduated, I was involved in a number of things around entrepreneurship at MIT. One of the guys who was in the middle of everything was Joost Bonson. Joost was one of the co-founders of what has become the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition. If you take a look at Joost’s website you’ll see confirmation that he’s been involved in – well – most everything around entrepreneurship at MIT.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris is fucking hilarious. Sedaris has written several other books about his dysfunctional family. I guess I’ve been living under a rock so I didn’t hear about him until Thursday morning while listening to NPR’s interview of him while driving 100 miles an hour on E470 home from the airport (can I get a ticket for admitting that in a blog?). The interview had me laughing hard enough that I had to slow down to 80. I was at the grocery store later that day picking up some stuff so I grabbed his book.

I’m not a horse racing fan, but my wife is so I’ve gotten to “enjoy” the Triple Crown this year. In case you’ve been asleep, Smarty Jones is going for a triple crown and – if he wins – would be the first horse since 1977 to take it. I just saw the final of the Belmont Stakes (don’t click the link if you don’t want the surprise to be ruined). However, the race had a great finish that’s worth catching tonight on ESPN or your local news.

My partner Gary Rieschel was recently part of a Time Magazine roundtable that has shown up in an article titled Start-Up Your Engines! One of the topics that came up was social networking. Judith Meskill wrote about the exchange in her post on The Social Software Weblog titled Social Networking Glut = Greater Than Four. To date, my personal experience with social networking services (yes – I’m a member of many of them – just to see how they work) is that it’s content enhanced spam. For example, so far I’ve received about 300 linkedin request and have accepted 108 requests (hence – having 108 connections). From these connections (directly or indirectly), I’ve received about 10 actual requests for something with only two of them either (a) appearing remotely interesting or (b) from people I felt comfortable hooking up. So – there have probably been 1000 emails involved in this experience, at least 300 visits to the linkedin web site, and absolutely no value to me.

After a few weeks on Typepad, I decided to switch to Movable Type 3.0 so I’d have more control over my blog format. I’ve reached the point where I’ve changed my home page to be my blog. No – you don’t have to change your feed or your links since (a) I use Feedburner for my feed so I can change it transparently to you and (b) since I’m using Movable Type on my server, I can redirect pages easily.

I had a great experience with Buzz Bruggeman and his company ActiveWords this morning. Here’s the story. I was reading through my new feeds this morning and ran across Marc Orchant’s The Office Weblog post on Buzz Bruggeman / ActiveWords. I’ve been looking for a macro recorder that I like (they all suck) and ActiveWords sounded interesting. So – I went to the site and downloaded a trial (30 days). I played around with the trial for 30 minutes and couldn’t figure out how to do what I wanted to do (although it had some neat functionality). I finished up reading my feeds and started grinding through email.

Fred Wilson and I have been ranting about the need for better feed stats (in the category of “user analytics”) for a few weeks. We’ve both been using Feedburner and really like it, but it’s still in kindergarden. Dick Costolo at Feedburner just posted a message about Improved Statistics on the Way. Goodness.

I hate spam (who doesn’t). While I was running this morning, it dawned on me that spam was ruining the english language. “Huh – you ask?” I noticed a handful of emails yesterday that had perversions of cuss words (I grew up in Texas – we called them “cusses”, not swears or curses.) All of a sudden, one of my partners is saying “shite” instead of “shit” and I’m seeing “f*ck”, “fcuk“, and “b*st*d” in casual emails to me. Oh – and there’s a preponderance of “frig”-related words (frig, friggin, frigging).

Two books in one day – that’s either a long day or a delightful absence of television from my life. Stephen Frey’s Shadow Account is fun (4 of 5 stars). Frey is a managing director at Winston Partners – a Virgina-based private equity firm and hedge fund, so think of him as the up-and-coming John Grisham of Wall Street. The protagonist – an up-and-coming investment banker – gets tangled up in a complex story line that is based around an accounting fraud ala Worldcom / Enron. Unlike a lot of other books of this genre, Frey actually takes time out from the endless drama and plot turns to cogently describe key issues that apply to the real world (such as Chapter 8 where he addresses the question “… explain how a public company can manipulate its earnings.” Fifteen pages later he’s done a nice job of it in a way that keeps you in the story. This happens a few times in the book – which makes it a little easier to justify as on the border of the junk book category (notwithstanding the murders – real and fake, prostitutes, infidelity, insider trading, government conspiracy, and a senior white house staff that reminds me of the one in charge right now (minus Tenet).