Month: March 2005

Ed Sim has some great comments on how small firms can play against competitive firms that are incumbent in the same space. [here]
I work for the smaller competitor of the incumbent in our market, so I have seen the ups and downs of our approach. We do suffer from some of the faults that are listed here, but we also shine in some of the areas Ed talks about.
It was just a refreshing piece to read on a slow, thought-piece Friday afternoon.

Found a stupid GrabIP bug last night. When I clicked on one of the IP addresses in my log analysis system, it showed that the visitor was from Nigeria, then threw an error when the WHOIS attempted to get more information.
I realized that I did not have the code to handle the AFRINIC Registry in my tool. DOH! A simple fix and everything is good.

Stephen O’Grady describes “continuous partial attention” in this post. He notes Scoble’s decision to retire the link blog and try and devote more time to his life.
How much is too much? That is a question we all fight with daily. I currently have a half-finished Zen book, Beyond Bullets, and a long article out of the Harvard Business Review in paper reading.
I track 143 blogs…which makes me a lightweight, I know. But it is amazing how much I have learned and absorbed by doing this. How this has changed my view on things I look at every day.
But SO’Grady also talks about having times when you aren’t connected; where you can be free of the shackles. I read about folks who suck down a book a day. I am lucky if I can string together enough time in a day to read 5 pages.
I definitely suffer from “continuous partial attention”, a cousin of ADHD.

Even Steve Rubel is detecting the trend of blogging burnout. [here and here]

Read it here.
Interesting that most of the people who came to read my post about the sale rumour came from Forrester Research. Perhaps this is an indication that they were as surprised as I was.
I wonder if Brian Kardon, chief strategist and marketing officer at Forrester, would like to post a comment to set the record straight, as he is the one quoted in the article. Or perhaps Alan Meckler will comment on his theory why someone would want to start a rumour like this.

This post contains stale information.
Please go here for the latest.

Damn. Looks like the analyst world is going to be a hell of a lot smaller in the next few months.
So, with that in mind, who is going to be the unbiased source of information for companies?
[here ]

This article has seen a lot of traffic today. If any of the folks reading this have more info on this story, drop me a line.

Travis Smith points to this AP article on the death of the family in the two-income world. [here]
Samantha and I have discussions about this topic on a regular basis. We are a one-income family by choice and by restriction (Visa restrictions prevent Samantha from working in the US). However, the concept of scheduling our children’s lives to the point where we are using other people to raise and rear them is broken and failed in my mind.
I am not anti-activity. I believe that a child who is to be properly socialized in today’s world needs to interact with and engage in some structured activities with other children/people.
However, as much as they drive me/us nuts, Samantha and I are the main caregivers to our children. I work 7AM – 4PM every day to ensure that I am home for supper, bathtime, stories and tuck-in.
On weekends, the boys and I try and do at least one activity together. As a family, we do one big outing every weekend. The boys are free to do what they want, when they want, with parental consent. They play. they build. They draw. Cameron is better with a hammer than I am, and I caught him using the cordless drill one day (he’s six), complete with eye-protection, and I did not object because he knows how to use it!
My boys are extremely imaginative. Kinnear tells incredibly inventive stories, and loves to give visitors a tour of the house, describing each room in detail (he’s 3.5).
So, will my kids be the MBAs of the future? Will they lead corporations and make decisions that change the course of history?
Probably not.
But my children will be able to think, adapt, and dream. And to me, the ability to do these things beats the structured, scheduled, contolled thing called “existence” that is described in the article. It is not a life; it is an existence.
Give your kids a life.

I actually have two of these old Optiplex cases in my basement… [here]
Via Neuvo

Lots of inward-looking thoughts from some of the VC blogs that I read.
Jeff Nolan flames alarm:clock for claiming that VCs are greedy, soulless vampires [my paraphrasing].
A VC and Brad Feld comment on Paul Graham’s Essay, “A Unified Theory of VC Suckage”.
I wonder why so much attention is now being focused on the VC community? I kinda like them, as they have provided me with two very solid companies to work for over the last 6 years.
My opinion, not backed up by any facts or knowledge, is that there is a new bubble occurring, and people are already looking for someone to lay the blame on when it bursts.
The VC community, on the other hand, has learned a lot over the intervening years. To claim that they are going to let the madness that occurred 1995-2000 to occur again is highly unlikely. The bubble is occurring because there are smart companies driving smart ideas to people who are now ready to use them.
Now, whether the VCs will drive this bubble like they drove the last one remains to be seen. I think that the caution and conservatism (if that word can be applied to the VC community) that arose from the flame-out in 2000-2001 will see more firms driving their own success through the methods seen in Paul Graham’s other essay, “How to Start a Startup”.

Via AdRants

Either a joke or a simple error, Amazon has listed a Viewsonic monitor as a computer having a 10GB chip, 2,000 DIMM, a 30,000 GB hard drive and weighing 14 hundredths-pounds. All for $2,312.95. Certainly, there will be computers that powerful someday soon but not right now. One reviewer raved about the “product,” writing, “This laptop is the bargain of the decade. 10.00GHZ of power. I use one to currently calculate the meaning of life, the universe and everything. I even caught it calculating on how to make the perfect cup of tea. The speed that this laptop can move at is nothing short of outstanding. Shame it doesn’t have legs though.”

Another one of the comments on this product.

I got one of these for the multi-OS capability. So far, it runs HP-UX, Red Hat, BSD (2 flavors), XENIX, OS X, AIX, AppleDOS, Solaris, DG-UX, Netware, Debian, Mandrake, CP/M, QNX, Win 3.11, Win95, Win95b, Win98, Win98se, WinME, WinCE, Os/2, NT [34], Windows server 200[03], DR-DOS, & BeOS, all in separate windows. Couldn’t load SCO – licensing issues. We also managed to get Lotus Agenda working pretty well; we dumped the entire Internet into Agenda and were able to solve most of the world’s crimes and determine who on the planet is related to whom. And we were able to use the included Cray Supercomputer Simulator (4 instances simultaneously) to beat Deep Blue and Baby Blue at chess, at the same time. Nice machine. But I think soon I’ll need an upgrade.

As soon as the characters started speaking in this vicious and detailed bit of parody, I knew it was Canadian. [here, 32mb MP4]
And sure enough, Avion Films is a Canadian ad agency.
I miss my home country.
care of Site-9.