Gulf Islands. Just back from an 8 day trip in SW British Columbia. A couple days in Vancouver, a couple in Victoria, and a bunch in the middle in and around the Gulf Islands. Ganges is a nice little town. Sydney has a beautiful harbour. The baby beluga at the Vancouver aquarium was great.

I used our new Kodak DX4900 4Mpixel digital camera with the Easyshare dock. I really love the dock, recharging and downloading pictures is way easier than with past cameras I’ve used.

Digital Sound Board. A nice digital sound board using CF storage – the electech EM3018B. right now i use banks of cd players for sound effects at halloween but this might be a better way to go…

Microsoft R&D. Paul Andrews wonders if Microsoft can point to a “single successful original product to emerge from R&D expenditure”.

I’d nominate the DirectX game api on Windows. Highly original work. The core of which was done in the company. A huge amount of economic activity stimulated above the interface (games) and below the interface (video and audio and controller hardware). The single most successful API set introduced on Windows in the last decade.

The Plug and Play work first in Win95 merits a mention as well.

Fencing. A plug for my friend Greg Jones’ fencing center – Rain City Fencing. Great folks and they do a great job with camps.

Command Prompt. Another one from Lockergnome – Command Prompt Explorer Bar. I hope bloggerpro gets the search feature soon so i can find all these links again some day.

Useful Blog. Furry Goat – and it points to me.

Summer. Wow been busy. Warcraft III. Boating. Work – Wildseed plus a new one plus seeing lots of plans. Family visits. Video ripping. Great weather. Watching the collapse of AOL – amazing how Microsoft’s competitors manage to impale themselves.

Posting Pics. Looking for a good way to do this – maybe this is a useful solution. ornj.net - Web Album Generator

Another utility. See all the drivers on your system with DriverManager

College. OK the apps are flying in now. Occidental, Reed, Pomona, Scripps are all in. Harvey Mudd I think too. Starting to become very real for Liz.

Cloudmark. Met with Karl Jacob yesterday to catch up with his life post-Microsoft and DimensionX. Cloudmark seems pretty cool and something I will try in the next couple weeks.

Business Plans. Saw a great business plan presentation this week. Crisp, to the point, fact based, clear demonstration of the distinctive assets of the company. Little in the way of hyperbole about the market, the product architecture. I think some companies must forget that, as a vc, I’ve seen literally thousands of plans and presentations (and thousands more in my life pre-vc). My patience for fluff is gone.

Please please hone your plans and presentations. Tell us about the key people on the team and why they are winners. Tell us about the real customer and product progress you’ve made so far, not what you wish will happen. Be honest about what you don’t know – be honest about the risks and unknowns in your plan, and tell us how you will adapt if plans don’t come true. Be a skinflint in your plans and needs. Focus wins – be clear about your focus.

Now I’d love to hear from folks about how I can be a better prospective investor, from the viewpoint of a startup…

Video Ripping Update.

So I am in the midst of moving all my DV and VHS-C home movies to DVD. Here’s my learning so far:

A. Allocate a lot of time. Ripping generally runs in realtime, and you make mistakes and need to rerip, and then you will want to analyze and clean up all the video and chapterize it. And I haven’t even gotten to dvd burning yet. Generally I would say you need to allocate at least 3-4 hours of time for every hour of video you bring in, and that is just to do the basics. If you want to really futz around with editting, add more. B. Buy a big hard disk. No, bigger. One 60minute DV tape was a 13Gig file on my system. my 120Gig NAS is going to disappear fast. C. The ATI all-in-wonder card is working well at the hardware level. But the bundled software is pretty indifferent. In particular the video capture stuff didn’t seem to handle DV well or analog well (it captured my analog in some wierd proprietary file type). D. Win XP Moviemaker was fine for DV capture. Tho slow – why does it go in realtime? I have a 1394 connection, the captured stream is 25Mbps, 1394 is 400Mbps, i should be able to move over the stream 16x faster than realtime but it didn’t seem to allow this? And it didn’t work at all for analog capture, it couldn’t seem to see my S-video input. E. The HP DVD writer (200 external) installed very easy. F. The Arcsoft Showbiz software bundled with the DVD has a goofy interface but seems easy to use to do basic chapterization and editting. But note – do not use the auto scene detection feature. It takes a LONG time to process a 13G file, and it doesn’t work – it split my file up into hundreds of snippets that didn’t match with the real scene delineation points at all. Maybe there is something smart I am supposed to do at filming time to tag the scenes.

Another Utility. Traces Viewer (freeware)