* A Unified Theory of VC Suckage, via A VC. Mom and Dad will be so proud of me now… * Rich finds an old chestnut – “…the organization of the software and the organization of the software team will be congruent; commonly stated as ‘If you have four groups working on a compiler, you’ll get a 4-pass compiler’ “ * Tom Evslin’s 3rd in a series on managing programmers – great trueisms. * Raymond’s analysis of the Infospace debacle.

* The Sports Economist is a great blog – here a great post on why the average scoring margins between high seeds and low seeds in March Madness is shrinking… * …and here a great post on betting on the tournament and the unavoidable problems it leads to, in part because we refuse to compensate the players. * Of course the NCAA has its head in the sand when it comes to player compensation – here claiming that we couldn’t possibly pay the players because athletic departments are losing money. OK the $6.2 Billion that CBS is paying to televise NCAA basketball is going in someone’s pocket – it is, at best, stupid to claim that the schools don’t have the money to pay the players. Maybe Myles Brand could give up some of his $738K in salary (2003) to help pay a few players * And another older but great post from the Sports Economist talks about applying multipart tariffs to ticket prices – I’m suprised these ideas haven’t been pushed further both at the high end of ticket prices and at the low end – maybe if the schools managed their yields better, they could afford to pay the players a little.

In a boring meeting the other day, I was reflecting on how many ways people can get ahold of me. I did a little inventory.

Voice: You can call me at:

* 425 709 0772. Ignition central number. Accepts Voicemail * 425 460 0841. Ignition direct number. Accepts Voicemail * 425 922 7055. Cell phone. Accepts Voicemail. * 425 641 4973. Home listed. Accepts Voicemail. * 425 xxx xxxx. Home unlisted. Accepts Voicemail. * 425 xxx xxxx. Onstar in Chevy Avalanche. * 425 xxx xxxx. Vonage. Accepts Voicemail.

Fax: You dinosaur you, you can send me a fax at:

* 425 709 0798. Ignition * 425 xxx xxxx. Vonage.

IM: The younger set can reach me at:

* Jhludwig on AIM * Jhludwig AT hotmail.com on MSN (deprecated)

Email: My most used medium.

* ignitionpartners.com: john, jhludwig, johnlu. Actually a few more are also supported that I’ve set up over the years for various purposes. * fanblogs.com: John. For college football stuff * hotmail.com: jhludwig * gmail.com: john.ludwig * exmsft.com: johnlu (need to verify this still works) * attwireless.blackberry.net: jhludwig (direct to blackberry) * a few other domains i have registered which forward mail to me. * i never bothered to set up my comcast isp account, i guess that could work to, but don’t use it, since i never check it.

Text: again for the younger generation

* SMS me at the cell phone above * Or from a blackberry, send to Bberry pin 20053854

Blog:

* Send a trackback to an entry on theludwigs.com * Trackback or comments on fanblogs

Forums:

* Posts on MethodsofMadness halloween forum * Posts on some school forums

Redirects

* Ebay I believe will redirect messages to my account * All the social networking sites – linkedin, judysbook, friendster, orkut, etc – will send posts/messages to me

Physical mail:

* to ignition * to home

And well you can just Google “john ludwig” and probably figure out a way to get ahold of me. especially now that this is posted.

The amazing thing is – I will actually get all these. I monitor all these inputs on a semiregular basis. Some of them constantly, some more intermittently, but I get them all.

Contrast this situation with the beginning of my working life. I had 1 work phone, 1 work fax, 1 home phone at that time. No email, no sms, no cellphone, etc.

Will this explosion continue? How will people stay on top of it all? The big problem is really controlling use and access. Today I conrol access by deciding to whom and how I reveal these addresses. And then as the addresses leak out, I filter them for unwanted contacts. This seems pretty bass-ackwards. I’d like to be able to publish all of them freely, and then decide based on access lists and rules who is allowed to use which of them.

I am certainly on the bleeding edge here – but in the next 5-10 years home cooling is going to get more complicated than it is today.

I’ve got 4 pcs, a network attached printer, various scanners and cameras, a vonage ata box, hubs, speakers, monitors, router, cable modem, and phone system in my office/server room. Naturally a hot room, but it has become unbearable on sunny days – and so I’ve had to add a dedicated air conditioner for this room.

My media center has a similar problem – the cabinet next to my screen contains a receiver/amp, directivo box, comcast box, dvd, vcr, ld player, etc. I’ve had to punch a hole in a wall and install a fan to vent out to the garage.

The heat generated by consumer electronics is just too much. (Attendant with this is the fan noise problem which can be addressed by clever heat sinks and other designs – but you can’t design away the waste heat).

If I was building a new house I’d explicitly design for these issues. Ventilation, extra thermostats, extra cooling capacity – it is a pain to add this stuff later. House HVAC design is going to get way more complicated.

We can do some things to address the problem – moving away from incandescent bulbs for instance – I’ve done that in my problem rooms already. But the problem is just going to grow as we add more sophisticated electronics into our life – I am currently reading “The Bottomless Well”:amazon, on which I’ll write a full review later, but it is pretty convincing that we are going to have more waste heat, not less to deal with, in the future.

I’ve given up on comcast fixing their IP lease time issues, I am still seeing very short lease times a week+ later.

I have found that my old sonicwall firewall was particularly perturbed by these short leases, so i replaced it with a Linksys WRV54G that I had purchased a while ago. No amount of coercion could make it work with the xbox tho – i tried port forwarding, turning on and off upnp, assigning the xbox a static ip and putting it into the dmz, etc. Just never clicked.

So I printed out Microsoft’s advice on compatible routers and trundled off to Fry’s this AM. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Microsoft’s list is very stale, not a single router with these model numbers is actually for sale anymore. So i picked up a dlink DI-704UP -- I know dlink has great market share, and the number was similar to a router that was supposed to be compatible. Works fine.

Gadgets I’ve noticed lately…

* The keyboard organizer – i need the XL model * The Keyscan keyboard/scanner combo – I think I would seriously scan more often if the scanner was this close at hand * A keyboard/pc – the other kind of keyboard * Yamaha YSP-1 – surround sound from a single component. * The latest ipod accessory – your house. * Siemens’ wearable whole-house remote – great for my Halloween setup * Hey I have every freakin’ ipod you can buy, so the ipod phone is a natural. By the way you have to love Apple’s iPod support policy – my iPod Photo was acting flakey, they gave me a new one, no questions asked. * Sam loves the new slimp3 player (nice blog sam). * Tunable glass windows to block selective radio transmissions – because I know everyone is trying to steal our secrets. * Car stereo with removable HD – way easier to use than an ipod in the car * And a wifi access point in my car – hmm, once i have full ip in the car, it sure seems like all these proprietary car nav systems with dated map discs will get crushed by mapquest/googlemaps/etc

One of the highlights of the sporting year. I set up some brackets for friends and family at sportsline – email me if you need the password.

If you need help making picks, the wisdom of the crowd is not a bad way to go…

One month til tax day and what are people thinking about?

* Andy Sack – it’s not competition that kills small companies, it is lack of monetizable demand… * Phil Bogle on walled gardens, social networks, and openness; on social networks as web services. Phil is one smart mofo, ignore him at your peril. * Johnza is feeling badly about his job – he’s been tagged as a liar, quack, and cheat. But you can catch him speaking at DMA World * Martin finds Gurley’s blog and Gurley is right in blasting the state legislators who are helping to reinforce old telecom monopolists. * Rich of course has a ton of tech pointers – decoding blue screen error codes (isn’t it amazing that google is a better way to get answers than the windows help system is?); Via’s Luke platform, another great small pc component; how to reset any flavor of ipod (mine is beyond a simple reset, it is time to go to the apple store); the latest mt plugins for antispam and other malposts * Michelle loves gardenweb as a source of household recommendations

* Love the new customizable Google news – my customized page is here (so that I can use it on all my machines). This page is good enough for me to add to my set of startup pages in Firefox. * got my free annual credit report. Nothing shocking here, thank goodness. * Great list of CMSs up on Wikipedia – thanks gadgetopia * Streamload has a range of online storage plans – some of them very cheap – I wonder if I should start backing up everything up there. * The entire SXSW music program as a torrent.

* “Light, by M. John Harrison”:amazon. Good science fiction romp – quantum behaviour brought into our everyday lives – very imaginative. * “Fairyland, by Paul J. McAuley”:amazon. A near future story involving the extreme interplay of cypernetics, nanotech, and genetic engineering – quite inventive intermixing of these and their impact on humans and human society. Characters sometimes a little thin – or maybe so transhuman as to be unsympathetic. Deftly handled resolution – didn’t try to answer every question. Of these first two books, I’d read Fairyland. * “Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress”:amazon. Very funny. After reading this, I feel like I have been too grown up my entire life. My favorite line – describing a modern modular wall entertainment center as the “deathstar of furniture”.

OK in the last four days Comcast has cut my IP address lease times down to 2 hours. At at the end of that two hours there are often 3-5 minutes when I cannot get a valid lease at all.

Spoke with comcast and got the run around – “reboot everything”, “remove your router”, “unplug your toaster”, “wear a little foil hat like joaquin phoenix did in Signs”. Finally they told me it is all the router’s fault (it’s been working fine for 1 year) and that I need to sign up for their home networking option.

So I am on hold to find out what that is. Anyone have any relevant advice?

UPDATE: spoke with a much better support person at Comcast. Issue has been escalated. I continue to see lease times < 2 hours. And at every renewal, i am getting widely varying IP addresses (not so unusual) AND varying subnet masks – anything from 255.255.255.0 up to 255.255.255.250. that seems odd to me. I’ve switched routers to no avail, also tried routerless.

Microsoft buys Groove and Ray Ozzie named CTO. Because you can never have enough CTOs, joining David Vaskevitch and Craig Mundie.

Two more and they have a basketball team!

* Thomas Hawk summarizes a great Barron’s article on the state of the industry. Suggests the cable operators are the ones to beat – that certainly seems to be the conventional wisdom. * an Ebay plugin for Windows Media Center Edition – with the popularity of shopping channels, this seems like such an obviously good idea. * Centerstage is apparently going to go alpha this weekend – great news for mac minis.

Jon’s latest is a great read. I’ve often wished that I could search just a subset of the web – I’d like to give google not a single domain to scope a search, but a list of domains. Jon’s article is a great articulation of that idea in depth – the list of interesting domains he focuses on is your blogroll, but the idea could be used with other lists as well. Like Tom Evslin, I don’t think I believe in vertical search engines. But I am certainly convinced that people/sites can provide an “editorial voice” on top of the existing search engines, by scoping a search to a set of domains.

This Seattle Times series on Infospace is fascinating and brutal. An incredible collection of misbehaviour. I am very glad Rick Thompson comes out looking relatively good as he is a first class guy who was stuck in an ugly situation.