Bet you didn’t know that he had it in him.

Enjoy!

http://www.thepartyparty.com/

(thanks to Chris for the link)

I’m going on my first internet date tomorrow. Well – it’s actually not technically a date. For starters, I’m married and on top of that, neither of us is gay. Still, we’re meeting for coffee after many months of e-mailing, reading each others blogs and one or two times talking on the phone.

I say this all in jest, but I’m actually pretty stoked to finally meet Ben Casnocha in person. I’ve talked about him on my blog before (here), and am a big fan.

I’ll let y’all know how it goes.

I’ve had a couple of experiences in the last month that have alternately made me feel good about the human condition or wonder why people can be such jerks. First the positive experience which essentially involved two strangers going out of their way to help me out. One in particular was pretty inspiring. My car battery managed to die i  the parking lot of the Safeway up in Fraser on a recent Sunday night. I had just picked up a carpet steam clearer (the kind that doesn’t work very well, but I still feel compelled to rent every once in a while). I was in the process of walking this up the hill back home when I was passed by a car who turned around to see if I needed help (it was pretty dark out – god only knows what he might have thought I was dragging behind me). This guy drove me (and my steam cleaner) back to the Safeway and jumped my car. He then gave me his card (he’s a retired Delta pilot) and told me to call him in the morning if the car wouldn’t stat again for another jump (all this after I told him that I was planning on leaving at 6:30am to get back to Denver in time for work). Pretty amazing (incidentally, the 2^nd stranger in this story was the guy who ended up giving me a jump in the morning when, as I was not very surprised to learn, my battery was still dead). I’m sure many of you saw the movie Pay it Forward and I feel a little sappy saying this, but I’ve actually been looking to try to pay back this man’s kindness by helping someone else out in need. In my book its all karma.

Unfortunately I’ve also had an experience recently that reminded me of the other side of human nature. It’s a long story and not worth going into, but the net of it was that a simple misunderstanding was turned into a big (and much more time consuming and expensive) to-do because rather than picking up the phone and calling, someone assumed the worse and blew the situation up in a way that will ultimately result in a worse outcome for everyone (not to mention taking about 4 months to work out rather than less than a week) I don’t know what it is about some people that makes them act in this way . . pretty  pathetic if you ask me.I’m going to re-read the first story here – it much more of how I’d like to think of my fellow humans.

When I was interviewing for my job at Mobius I asked Dave Jilk interview not only with MDs and other associates, but also with portfolio – who had briefly been an associate at Mobius and was then (as he is now) running a portfolio company – what he thought the most important attributes of successful VCs were (as an aside, I don’t know that I appreciated at the time what a good sign it was that the VC I was interviewing to joined had me company CEO’s to get their take). Without hesitation he said that in a nutshell good VCs need to have attention deficit disorder. I laughed about it then, but I think its time that I acknowledged to Dave (and the world) that he was right. There are lots of attributes that are required to be good at this job, but the core of being a good VC is the ability to move from one thing to the next, often completely disconnected thing, quickly and without slowing down Rare is the time when I sit down and spend a few hours doing something (anything) without interruption.; so much so that I generally interrupt myself these days if I’m spending too much time on any one thing, but mostly because in any give day things just seem to come up constantly. With something like 8 companies that I actively work with these interruptions are all over the map – I may be helping one company sell its business, another raise capital, another plan for a strategic offsite and another with an executive search. Keeping all of this straight in my head is a bit of a task, as is shifting gears from talking about the tax considerations of a particularly merger structure with one company to looking at moving into a new vertical market for another. Its different than the jumping around I did in banking (where I would typically be working on only one or two projects very intensely at any given time) or when I was working for an operating business when my days were much less varied (and much more similar to every other day).

I love it, of course. And thanks to Dave I was at least forewarned about it. Now you are too . . .

Thanks to JB for pointing this out.  Pretty interesting idea.  I particularly like it from a data representation standpoint (see my post on that subject  here).

http://milliondollarhomepage.com/

My daughter reached an important American milestone yesterday – her first credit card offer.  Four months shy of her 2nd birthday I’m not entirely sure she’s ready to handle the responsibility, but I did send the response card in to see what would happen (I circled her date of birth and indicated her occupation as ‘pre-school student’).  I’ll keep you posted.

hAs you could probably tell from my last post, I’m getting more onto the tagging bandwagon (I haven’t posted about this, but have in the past expressed skepticism privately to a number of you in off-line exchanges).  In case you missed it, NPR did a nice piece on tagging tahis evening. Here’s a link to the story. Props to del.icio.us and flickr who were both featured prominently.

Everyone knows that Microsoft announced at this year’s Gnomedex their support for RSS in their Longhorn (now Vista) release. A quick search on Google or Technorati comes up with plenty of people who have already weighed in on the subject (I particularly like Nick Bradbury’s post here). Most of the talk, however has been around how RSS integrates into IE (see the IE blog post on RSS integration here) and the associated ease with which IE users will be able to subscribe to feeds, create feeds and some of the ways they are extending RSS to handle lists and a common data store, etc. The rest has been centered around Microsoft’s RSS effort for developers to enable them to more easily pull feeds from applications. All great stuff, but that’s not at all why I’m excited about Microsoft embracing RSS and since no one else was writing about it I thought I’d throw my 2c into the ring. Love it or hate it, the Microsoft Office suite is a critical part of most businesses (with apologies to Star Office . . . ). Unfortunately their organizational/search/storage/retrieva  paradigm is all wrong. While trying to ease users into the computer age, Microsoft has unfortunately created programs that attempt to mimic how people use and store information in the off-line world (i.e., in logical hierarchies, folders, etc) – which limited the power of the new computing medium. This is true both within applications and between them; in our file folder hierarchies and in how we store mail; in how we save bookmarks to the admin of an LDAP directory. Anyone who has ever tried to search in  Outlook for a contact for whom you had only limited information or for a file that you misplaced understands the limitation of this system – it works great for structured data, but not so great for unstructured data (i.e., if you know you’re looking for Joe Smith in your contacts you’re fine; if you remember meeting someone name Joe who was an investment banker and who you met sometime in the summer of 2003 you’re screwed). The current system is fine for storing basic information, but lacks the database like ability to assign attributes and then search on those attributes (there are some limited ways to do this both in outlook, in contacts and for files – i.e., you can create different categories of contacts or add certain information to file properties but neither is very powerful and neither is meaningfully searchable). Enter the Internet age and people have discovered the power of unstructured data. Google built an entire service around it in the form of Gmail (lots of storage is great, but their real innovation was the elimination of folders in favor of fast and easy search and what essentially amounts to the ‘tagging’ of conversations). Both Google and Microsoft recognize it in their efforts in desktop search. And companies like del.icio.us and social text really really get it in allowing us to control how we label and categorize information. Perhaps I’m stretching some or perhaps being a bit too hopeful, but I believe RSS can bring Office into the 21^st century. Imagine being able to tag a contact or a file with various attributes that you can later quickly and easily search on. Imagine being able to subscribe to a shared document folder to know when someone in a workgroup updates a file (enabling shared folders to function almost as a wiki). Imagine being able to stop placing files in work folders altogether but rather tagging then with the pertinent information which will enable you to much more easily find them later (and remember what they were for).

Great stuff – I hope MSFT is listening . . .

From the New Yorker . . .

My dad sent me the following link that shows a map of the New Orleans flooding overlayed on a map of Boston (great UI).  Being from Boston, this is a particularly relevant scale for me (particularly since I’ve spent a total of only 2 days in New Orleans in my life).  Even if your’re not from the Boston area I think you’ll find the perspective helpful in understanding the true extent of what happened last week.