Some great recos from steve for our banff trip – The Furrygoat Experience: Banff pictures – thanks

Animatronics Curriculum, Kits and Hardware – not the band, but a source for talking skeleton heads. Expensive tho.

Purchase glue guns and hot melt glue sticks online-Hotstik.com! – here’s the best site for glue gun stuff. Particularly note the availability of colored glue sticks.

For you non-halloweeners – there are a number of plans and suppliers out there for creating spider web shooters from glue guns. Makes very nice spider webs and colored sticks could make some cool effects.

I’ve used Money with my local bank for years to pay bills. And before that used Checkfree. I’ve become increasingly unhappy with Money as it seems to have a lot of database corruption problems. And my bank is screwing me on fees. So it is time to look around for alternatives.

I found one review site of online billpay products – Online Bill Paying Product Reviews and Reports by Consumer Search - ConsumerSearch.com. This seems to summarize all the services that include bill presentment in some form. Paymybills has been folded into Paytrust since this review. I kind of like the idea of electronic bill presentment but the costs are nontrivial – basically $1 per bill presented and paid thru the system. That is a steep price to pay for the convenience of all online bill handling. I do 40-50 bills a month easily, it is going to cost me close to $50 a month for the service. Maybe I can get smarter about setting up autopay thru a credit card for some of my bills to get the volume down.

Checkfree is cheaper – free! – but only handles online bill presentment for a limited number of vendors. But the price is compelling.

Then there are all the bank offerings. For instance Citibank or BofA. Bill paying is free with an account with either one. Citibank additionally has bill presentment, pricing similar to paytrust. Citibank was rated #1 in some Forbes 2002 Best of Web review.

Finally the portals have offerings. MSN Bill Pay is free for their very limited set of participating billers, but costs $.50 a transaction after that. Bill presentment from a very small set of billers. Yahoo Bill Pay looks similar, $.40 a transaction tho. Basically they save you the hassle of buying stamps and envelopes for a very small premium.

So I am not sure what to do. Path A: go whack on my current bank and get them to drop all their fees so they are in line with citibank and bofa. Solves my cost problem but still stuck with money. Path B: Use Yahoo Bill Pay – pretty cheap. Path C: Switch to Citibank and get the lowest cost for most bills plus the option of paying for online bill presentment. I need to think about. Switching banks is a PITA.

Dave says they need a CEO and new management team, maybe they are for sale. John Robb left, and now his blog has been wiped so you can’t read his statements about his leaving. Seems like a soap opera.

Voltage Security Inc. was mentioned in the WSJ yesterday, they seem really interesting as a way to use PKI without the hassle of key management. I have tried at least 10 times over the years to use PKI solutions and have always given up, key management is such a pain. This seems like a real usability breakthru.

Update: Other VCs are talking about too…

I am so far behind on halloween preps. I have all my gear to do some pneumatic effects this fall but i have yet to find the time to actually construct test circuits and props. It has been such a busy spring and summer. I am not going to really get to anything til september which is sad, it is going to be a mad dash.

I picked up a Sierra Designs Lightyear one man tent last week and used it last weekend. Very happy with the design and weight, tho the assembly instructions are wrong headed. They suggest laying out the tent fabric and staking first, then assembling the poles. It works MUCH better to assemble the poles and attach to the fabric first, and then stake it out.

Just finishing Kim – Good adventure yarn. I was motivated to chose it based on its inclusion in a list in Book magazine of great adventure stories. I was also influenced by Victor Niederhoffer’s observation that he only reads books that are least 100 years old, as they have stood the test of time if they are still in publication. So I am making it a point to dip into older literature. The amount of language and style drift in just 100 years or so is pretty amazing, you get a sense of how rapidly our language evolves.

We had an offsite yesterday to discuss follow-on financing rounds for our fund I companies. We have 7 active investments in this fund and all will need additional funding over their lifetime. Given the weak state of the b+ round and mezzanine round markets, it is likely we will be a significant participant in the future rounds for all these investments. These are tricky investment decisions – we have large financial and emotional commitments to these firms, some of us have fiduciary responsibilities, it is difficult to make objective decisions. It was a great session – I work with great people, we had some great bonding moments. Lots of different points of view, but a good consensus about the need to examine follow on rounds very carefully, in effect viewing them as new investments. Also a lot of consensus that we are wise to have a plan and budget for each company, so that we have sufficient funds for the companies we are most excited about, and that we don’t just let our funds drain to whoever shows up first.

Dana thinks that an MSFT dividend is a bearish, bad thing. As a stockholder I think it is a wonderful thing. I don’t want MSFT to buy ATT stock, to buy Nextel stock, to invest in a bunch of hare-brained startups, to try to start a VC fund, or to do any other non-software adventure. I’d even like to see them shut down some of their money-wasting non-PC adventures like their smartphones and xbox efforts. MSFT is really really good at PC software, and they run a really really profitable PC software business. Everything else is just a money-wasting adventure and is not their core competence. So please, give the money back to the shareholders, let us make our own decisions about what other ventures to invest in. This isn’t bearish at all, I will invest the money elsewhere, and I trust the market economy to efficiently direct that investment towards opportunities that are high growth and that may not be MSFT’s core competence.

Some great ideas at DUH BLOG :: 2003-07-08 about the evolution of digital cameras. Much discussion about how the digitization of photon capture lets you inject so much more processing and data capture – like why don’t we capture gps info, infrared info, etc at image capture time?

At the extreme I’ve often thought about a software-defined lens, where the entire lens and shutter construct is replaced by software, and at the front of the camera you have a photon capture service that records the incoming frequency and direction of all the photons. With this data, you could theoretically do all your focusing and other image manipulation as a post-capture process. I suspect there are some quantum mechanical issues with this, a physical lens does a lot of “computation”. But it is very interesting to consider how to evolve the camera.

We were up at the Salmon La Sac campground this weekend (see Cle Elum Campgrounds) and it was a wonderful area. A great wading and swimming river, one of the best swimming and diving holes we have seen – you jump from the bridge entering the campground into the river, it seems plenty deep. A beautiful place.

We’ve come to love Firenze at Crossroads – it is one of the best Italian restaurants in the Seattle area. Not the most glamorous location but the food has always been killer and the staff is wonderful. We’ve eaten at a lot of west side italian places and we still come back to Firenze every couple of weeks.

Not that I need more books to read – I have close to 100 stacked up next to the bed in the queue – but here are some sites which can recommend books, seen in the ny times this last week. whichbook.net let’s you pick the mood and style and makes recommendations. Allreaders.com is similar but has a cruddy interface.