Posts from June 2004

Josh and I went fishing with some friends yesterday.

I didn’t fish as a kid and don’t know a lot about it, but Josh and I are learning how to do it together. It’s a great bonding experience.

Our friends that we went fishing with do it all the time and took us to an amazingly beatiful place which I was sworn to secrecy not to divulge. It seems that people who fish seriously don’t like to share their fishing spots with others in fear that they’ll become well known.

We fished for about two hours and only caught one fish but had to throw him back.

But it was a great experience and now we know where to go to catch some good fish.

I was flying through my RSS feeds and stopped at the iTunes Music Store’s Top 10 Albums List (yes, Apple send me that via RSS).

On the list are two of my favorite albums right now. Franz Ferndinand and Modest Mouse

The links are to the iTunes Music Store because Apple sent me the feed.

To follow up on my post from yesterday on this subject, this RSS + Bit Torrents thing is powerful. I get notified every day of stuff that I can easily and quickly download via Bit Torrents.

It would be nice if I could configure these RSS feeds with keywords so I can create custom feeds that deliver very specific things – Jon Stewart, Wilco shows, Larry David, etc.

The only problem is I’m filling up my hard disk at an alarming rate. I’ve downloaded two TV shows and four live shows (Wilco Dekalb, Wilco Irving Plaza, Ben Kweller, and Death Cab) and I’ve used up 3.6GB already. That’s 10% of my hard disk.

I guess its time for a new machine or a removable hard disk. The problem with the latter approach is I like to have everything on my laptop because I am on the move so often.

Jason Calcanis has some links on his blog to RSS feeds at Supernova.

In my previous post on this subject, I linked to a piece that described RSS + Bit Torrents as Broadcatching. I like that term.

However, I think to make this stuff really powerful, we need to make this broadcatching stuff more automatic. The only issue is disk space.

This is not a blog about venture capital. It’s a blog about things that interest me. I happen to be A VC. So I blog a lot about my business. But please don’t think that I am going to limit what I blog about to the venture capital business.

Benovo and Brad didn’t like my “rant” on John Ashcroft and Benovo isn’t going to read my blog anymore. I think that’s too bad because I’ll miss the comments.

Just to be clear, I blog to create transparency.

Brad has a good post about Agile Software Development. It sounds like a great way to develop software.

But I want to point to the four principals. Because they are great principals for any kind of business activity and are relevant way beyond software development.

Agile Businesses Value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working processes over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Seth told me he tought Gmail was going to hurt Yahoo! mail. I told him I didn’t think so.

I think email addresses are pretty sticky unless there’ s a hugely compelling reason to shift.

Matt seems to agree with me. That’s good because Matt knows a lot about email.

This is a subject that has fascinated me for years.

When I was at MIT, I loved the course I took on signal processing. I found it amazing that there were mathematical techniques that could be used to find the signal and eliminate the noise.

I have always tried to focus on the signal to noise ratio of every system I’ve looked at.

Many of the engineering lessons I learned at MIT haven’t translated well into the venture capital business, but this one sure has. Every deal I look at has a signal which is what I try to figure out. But it also has noise. Determining which is which is not easy. And there aren’t any mathematical algorithms that can be used to do this work. But experience is a great algorithm and it seems to work pretty well for me.

So what led me to post this thought today? My new Bose Quiet Comfort Noise Cancelling Headphones of course. Brad Feld turned me on to them via his blog. I’ve got a night flight out to LA this Sunday and I just had to have them for the trip after reading Brad’s post.

I hopped onto the subway after buying them in the Bose store in Columbus Circle. I almost missed my train because I didn’t hear it pull into the station. If you’ve been in the NYC Subway, you’ll know that’s an amazing job of noise cancellation.

My partner Brad swears by Jon Stewart. So does Tom Watson.

The Gotham Gal and I have started watching it. We Tivo it every night and end up watching it when we can.

But yesterday, I found a new way to watch the show. I downloaded the Wednesday show via Bit Torrents. Boing Boing sent me to a blog called Everything Isn’t Under Control. This blog is hosting a bit torrent of the part of Wednesday’s show where Stewart made mincemeat out of John Ashcroft.

I don’t care who you are, Republican, Democrat, Non-political, or something else. You’ve got to see this piece. It’s really funny but it’s scary at the same time. We’ve got a guy who has no respect at all for the constitution running the Justice Department.