From my Dad – a great one!

In Tennessee, a guy sees a sign in front of a house: “Talking Dog for Sale.”

He rings the bell and the owner tells him the dog is in the backyard. The guy goes into the backyard and sees a black mutt just sitting there. “You talk?” he asks.

“Yep,” the mutt replies.

“So, what’s your story?”

The mutt looks up and says, “Well, I discovered this gift pretty young and I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA about my gift, and in no time they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping. I was one of their most valuable spies eight years running.”

“The jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn’t getting any younger and I wanted to settle down. So I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security work, mostly wandering near suspicious characters and listening in. I uncovered some incredible dealings there and was awarded a batch of medals. Had a wife, a mess of puppies, and now I’m just retired.”

The guy is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog.

The owner says, “Ten dollars.”

The guy says, “This dog is amazing. Why on earth are you selling him so cheap?”

The owner replies, “He’s such a liar. He didn’t do any of that shit.”

Hey Satoshi have you tried the Harmony web interface? It is actually amazingly good, it wasn’t hard to use or understand at all.

Now I agree that we can do so much better…all my devices should broadcast their ids using some RF scheme, so that my remote can learn about them dynamically and reconfigure itself on the fly. But the harmony is pretty good, my family is way happier with it than with any previous universal remote.

Hey make an offer on it now before it is gone – Park Place Ltd., Sales Department. I love this car, rides like a dream, but ultimately, it just wasn’t me.

To wit: Last year at Halloween, I was at Home Depot picking up some 10’ lengths of PVC pipe, for my floating lantern project. So there I am in the parking lot, running 10’ lengths of PVC pipe from the front passenger foot well out the left rear window. This made the Jag look really classy.

A guy walks by with his wife, observes my loading, notes the Ohio State alum sticker in my window, and says sotto voce to his wife: “Isn’t that just like a guy from Ohio. He buys the nicest car he can buy, and then he loads it up with lumber.”

Made my day!

My new car is a Chevy Avalanche. Love it, love the fact that it has a fullsize backseat, but can also carry a 4’x8’ sheet of plywood or foamboard or whatever for my Halloween projects. I waffled between the Avalanche and its upscale Cadillac twin, but the guys at the Cadillac dealership made me feel like a sucker: “Why exactly is this better than an Avalanche?” “Oh, it is just better.” That was all I could get out of the guy.

And it is super functional, a much better match for me than…

Eric says:Let’s distill Joel’s piece down even further to make one single piece of advice for how the VC world should change: If you would become a lot more patient about liquidity, you could attract much better portfolio companies.

If you are still playing at being a VC in 2003, you have nothing but patience about liquidity. There is no IPO market, the M&A market is moribund, there is hardly a B and C round market. Patience is all there is left! Which means that all you can do is encourage companies to get to break even, and help them to do so. I am not , on the other hand, very patient about getting a revenue stream going and getting to break even, that is the only path to survival now.

Everyone seems upset that we’ve found no WMDs – for instance – Philip Greenspun points to some UK news.

Seems to me our government set too tight a definition for WMDs. Didn’t September 11 demonstrate that the worst WMDs by far are people and organizations of people? With trivial technology, just people can cause all kinds of harm.

If I was in charge of the case for the war, I would have included people and organizations within the definitions of WMDs; particularly people and organizations that foment and export hatred of our culture/society (or really any culture/society, as it is the hatred and the actions that hatred bring on that we want to target).

But then, no one asked me.

I am a huge fan of reading RSS inside outlook or my mail client of the day, totally agree with Greg on this. Now I just need some more features. How about preview of postings from those sites that only publish headlines in their feeds – i’d love to get the first 3-4 lines of their article right in outlook so I could decide whether or not to go to the site.

Joel on Software - Fixing Venture Capital – hey I’m pissed at Joel because he didn’t list my blog or tong’s blog as examples of vc blogs.

Seriously it is a good thoughtful piece from an entrepreneur. If Joel was in Seattle I’d take him to lunch and learn more. I don’t think we’ve done any of the things that he considers most heinous (like a no-shop) but he may have a point about the fundamental misalignment on risk. Tho I am not sure it plays out today like he suggests – I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone at our firm telling a startup to spend more, faster.

I generally agree with Bob Frankston that Bluetooth is troubled. But I did manage to make my first use of Bluetooth yesterday – I sent a picture from my Nokia 3650 to his t68i and it worked amazingly. And then he sent a business card back and it worked.

The #1 way I’d use this would be to transfer entire phonebooks between phones if this was possible. Right now the phones just let you send single contacts at a time, this sucks.

The goals of this digital ID DIY project at Escapable Logic seem great. I remember talking with Ben Slivka when he tried to add Passport support to his site and gave up. An easy to implement simple digital ID effort that works for me and my close circle of friends would be great, I have to look into this more.

A useful compilation of links – The Furrygoat Experience: Win 2003 Security Guides. The Threats and Countermeasures doc is huge – don’t make the mistake I did of blindly sending it to the printer.

Please consider – Lawrence Lessig

The Chronicle: 6/6/2003: Scholars Who Blog, pointed to by some of my friends at Forest Ridge. Good discussion, much worrying about whether blogs are just a fad. Maybe the current technology is a fad, but self-expression and self-publishing seems pretty durable.

Just finished Cousin Felix Meets the Buddha: and Other Encounters in China and Tibet by Lincoln Kaye. Great read, very much enjoyed especially the title story about his travels with a living Buddha – fascinating.

I upgraded my server today to Windows Server 2003. Kind of rocky so far, a lot of events thrown during setup and on reboot, and some troubles getting some services to run. still, http server seems to be alive, tho i can’t access the net as a client. Probably should have read the “planning guide” and actually thought about things before I just rammed it on the system. Forgive any rockiness the next couple of weeks as I get things worked out.