March of Dimes

March 28th, 2006 • General

Being a parent, you come to realize how delicate life is at the early stages. The amazing part of it all is that any of us actually survive childhood because of the crazy things that we do (riding a bike with no hands or feet - I still have the scars from that one). But some kids aren’t as fortunate and do have a tough time getting out of childhood - not because of anything they have done personally. That is why I’m a big supporter of children related charities and foundations. So when my good friend Geoff Sutcliffe (who was previously Digital Envoy’s intellectual property counsel) asked me to donate a few years ago to his March of Dimes walk, I wholeheartedly agreed. So this year I decided that, with Geoff’s permission, I would publicize his fundraising efforts for this great charity. If you have any inclination of donating to the March of Dimes, visit this link and support Geoff’s fundraising efforts.  And no worries if you don’t donate, I’ll still be your friend.  That’s it for this public service announcement.

Co.mments

March 25th, 2006 • Technology

Well, I’ve disabled my CoComments.com sidebar because for some reason their server has disappeared for me. It may have disappeared for other people as well and by having that sidebar page loading slowed way down. So when I did that, I thought I’d take a look at co.mments which a lot of people are talking about. I dig it. I’ve enabled a link throughout most of this blog (you won’t see it if you are reading this via the feed though - visit the site to check it out). You don’t even need to create an account at co.mments to use the service (in this case you do have to allow persistent cookies though). In a nutshell, it’ll track postings and comments of any entry that you add to your account. Way cool.

Update: I just added the CoComment thing back in. Apparently I was using the URL which had them as “cocomment.com”. “cocomments.com” works now but “cocomment.com” doesn’t. How irritating.

Update 2: Apparently CoComment’s provider is suffering a DDoS attack on their DNS servers.  That’s the issue.  Hopefully this doesn’t derail CoComment’s business and more importantly their growth.

Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now

March 24th, 2006 • 2 comments Random Musings

I was looking for a job, and then I found a job
And heaven knows I’m miserable now

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m out and about talking to people about jobs so that I have something to do after graduation in May. So today I was interviewing for a job. I emphasis “interviewing” because I’m not sure that what I do qualifies as interviewing in the common sense of the word. I haven’t really “interviewed” for a job in nearly ten years when I first got out of Georgia Tech with my undergrad degree. Today’s “interview” was pretty good especially since I was able to guide the conversation away from any open requisitions they (no, I won’t say who “they” is) have. Instead, I had a lot of discussions about my own custom created position where I can do what I want to do and be left (mostly) alone so that I can be unencumbered by the bureaucracy. Could be fun. I just don’t want to be miserable.

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Must I Say It Again?

March 23rd, 2006 • Business, Entrepreneurship + Startups, The Press, Venture Capital

My god, I have to talk about this again because of the stupidity of it all.  So I still monitor BusinessWeek’s Deal Flow blog just in case things change there.  As I’ve mentioned before (here and here) this blog just sucks.  The reporting isn’t “news” and what is reported isn’t even accurate.  Case in point, is a new posting about Bessemer Venture Partners web site.  The amazing insight here is that BVP actually talks about the deals that they’ve passed on: “The rap sheet includes Hewlett Packard, Apple, FedEx, eBay, and Google.”  Problem is the web page (linked to by the posting) doesn’t say they passed on Hewlett Packard - they passed on Apollo Computer which was acquired by Hewlett Packard.  This may very well be the lamest blog on the Internet.  Can someone please shut this thing off or create a new vision/plan for this blog.  This is like watching a train wreck and I can’t help but to look.  Someone, please, save me.

Oh yeah, I’m sure this post won’t show up either on their site as a trackback to their post.  Pathetic.  Simply pathetic.

CoComment - Comments From Other’s Blogs

March 18th, 2006 • Technology

For those of you reading my blog on the site rather than through the feed, you’ll notice a new addition to the right side of the page. (Note: There is more fancy stuff on the site like CoComment and Amazon AJAX stuff that isn’t in the feed!) This addition is a block of code from CoComment. CoComment integrates into your browser and collects comments that you make on other people’s blogs/sites. Your comments are collected and can be shown as they are to the right or you can use them to keep track of conversations on blogs that you have commented on. You can also see all the (captured) comments that I’ve made on other blogs (not much captured so far). This really is a great idea since you can keep up with an ongoing conversation on a site. Of course, it may enable more drive-by comments but perhaps this tool will enable more fruitful conversations rather than a bunch of drive-by comments. Oh did I mention, like the best things in life (like air) - this is free!