Cool

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

The answer to the secret

There's this book and video called 'The Secret' that purports to let anybody in on the secret of success. I hate the book and think that it's a load of crap and actually destructive in a sense. It lets losers justify their lethargic underachieving lives so that they can continue to sit on the couch watching their bellybuttons waiting for gold to pop out if they believe it enough because some mystical force is going to deliver it to them. I think you have a better chance of U2 playing live in your rectum than being successful just by wishing it to be.

And so...

There's a follow up book by one of the contributors - a Canadian named John Assaraf that's actually pretty interesting. This book ('The Answer') is about taking action and getting your fat lazy ass off your filthy couch. Although it still refers back to the Chopra-esque inter connectivity of all things and quantum power wells, it does so just to tell you to get off your lard bags and start taking action. I'm not finished reading it but it seems to be quite accurate and rational and so far I'd say that it's a pretty good asset for those starting or running their own gigs.

Here it is on Amazon.

One Voice One Will

Mark Ronson

Mark Ronson seems to have the golden touch these days, here's his new it girls video - Candie Payne/I Wish.

Here's All I need to hear from CP, no video unfortunately;




And if you like that smokey soul sound, here's another one from Saint Etienne;



Thanks to Fred Perry/Subculture for getting me back on this stuff.

Subculture Radio

Fred Perry has some great radio stations under their subcultures brand. Here's one of them.

Siouxsie

I was reading an interview with Siouxsie from this past winter in which she goes on in detail about what a good time she had vacationing in Sri Lanka, scuba diving and hanging out with monkeys. I found that really striking because she was always portrayed as such a severe and serious character sometimes like a spinning ball of razorblades if you crossed her line. While I couldn't imagine her drinking mojitos and dancing to Andre 3000 around the Hilton pool, I understand where she was coming from and for the most part I'd much rather be hanging out with monkeys and manta rays than the urban monkeys I'm forced to hang out with most of the time.

Speaking of manta rays, I was in Costa Rica recently and saw a ray that was much larger than our 20 foot panga (boat), looked like a huge cloud passing underneath. It really gave me shivers and at the same time was breathtaking. I've never seen such a huge creature up close.

Oh yeah, by coincidence, Siouxsie's newest album was called Manta Ray, here's "Into a Swan" (2007):



And here's a really awesome live clip with Suede from 1993;

My Spring Vacation

Ubuntu 8 thumbs up

I just installed Ubuntu 8 on a laptop headed for Costa Rica. I'm figuring that if I put Windows on there I'd be asking for it because out in Mal Pais the bandwidth is crap so it wouldn't be updated and XP would be hacked in minutes without updates.

I didn't want a Mac because it's too pricey so I got an old hand me down Dell laptop and threw on Ubuntu 8.04.

All I can say is WOW is it ever cool, very fast, functional and so far in the past couple of hours it's been totally headache free.

If somebody can put an AOL-esque shell on it, it would save hundreds of millions of old computers from the trash. I think I'm in love, sweet.

Download it, run it from CD to try it out and then put it on some old hardware - you won't be sorry.

Find it here.

BMW X6

On my way out of a dental appointment yesterday I saw the first new BMW X6 on the back of the delivery truck being unloaded at the BMW dealer. Very sweet wheels. Looks like a 6 series with 19 inch wheels.

Off for a couple of weeks

I'm off to Costa Rica for a couple of weeks on a working vacation and then back in time for 10 more roadtrips in the next 3 months. Such is the price for that that I asked.

I haven't been updating this blog much probably because I haven't had a hell of a lot of inspiration outside of my work (which in itself has been hair-raising and exciting). I'm not sure if I'll continue this blog or just let it wither as it does from time to time.

I'm actually thinking about starting a cutting edge technical group blog related to my profession with a few other posters, lets see how that goes.

Maybe I'll just drink some tequila and go fishing for the next couple of weeks and say fuck it.

CNN T-Shirts

CNN have this strange but cool feature where you can order any one of their headlines as a T-Shirt. How cool is this?

One pint of piss and three shots of peroxide

I was having a couple of brews with some friends on Sat nite and one fellow who works in a health food store told me about some secret cure for almost every ailment known to mankind. He tells me that gargling, inhaling and drinking hydrogen peroxide will kill most germs and viruses in your mouth, lungs and gut and it's a proven fact that your immune system uses peroxide to kill bacteria and viruses.


Hold on a sec, last time I checked there was a poison label on peroxide bottles and it says clearly on the side "not for internal use".


So I called him a nutbag more or less and forgot about this story until yesterday. You see yesterday I had to go in for some dental surgery so I googled peroxide mouthwash and did some research on ozonated water and found something startling. First off, peroxide is regularly used as a mouthwash and can be found in all the off the shelf mouthwashes with opaque bottles including Crest super white. Just check the ingredients (I did). Second, the FDA approves the peroxide up to 3% (10 vol) as a mouthwash (not ingested). Third, the Time magazine product of the year for 2006 was the Lotus sanitizer which uses something similar in the form of ozonated water. And finally, the EPA approves peroxide as a sanitizer.

Here's what got me really curious, I found hidden in a report on the Tersano (lotus mfg) site that shows that 3% peroxide is seriously more effective than ozone-water or even Lysol!



So finally I go to see my dental surgeon and ask him what he thinks about peroxide mouthwash. He says its excellent and he recommends it for his periodontal patients but it's overkill for most people.

Seems like a pretty good treatment for throat, mouth and sinus infections when gargled but deadly when ingested in a concentrated form (i.e. over 10%). I've tried gargling it and it tastes and feels horrible but seems to work because my mouth is pretty fresh and my teeth are extra clean. I'm not going to use it regularly but I'll probably start buying the Crest mouthwash with peroxide.

Here's a relatively accurate article from truthorfiction.com.

As for the piss, some other people drink it for medicinal purposes. Personally, I'd probably be dying before I'd consider drinking pee.

Introducing Earl

This is my new roommate Earl the bearded dragon.

The Nigerian Mergers and Acquisitions Scam

Let me tell y'all about the Nigerian M&A scam. Here's how it goes, a small company (Smallco) gets an offer to be acquired by a large company (Bigco) and all the founders are thrilled because they're about to become multi-millionaires. Bigco feeds on Smallco's greed to rub out Smallco. Here's how the burn works;

• Smallco spends hundreds of thousands in legal fees during due diligence
• Bigco ties Smallco down in a 'no-shop' agreement that means Smallco can't go get re-financed
• Bigco stresses everybody out at Smallco and Smallco's business suffers because everybody is working hard on retiring
• Smallco employees and founders are shopping for yachts, watching Bigco stock prices and ignoring their business
• Bigco examines all of Smallco's customers, technology, share structure and decides that there's patent/intellectual property/scalability etc. issues and drops the offer by half at the last minute
• Bigco now decides that the offer is all stock and the shares are restricted and are in escrow (i.e. very hard to sell for a long long time)
• Smallco is out of money and accepts the offer
• Smallco founders get stuck with shares in Bigco that they can't sell for years and watch the stock drop to pennies
• Smallco founders likely owe significant taxes based on the capital gain at the time the acquisition took place and not at the time the founders can sell their paper

All in all, the Smallco founders are fucked and lost a crazy amount of real money (vs make believe stock money) and are probably broke and demoralized. Variations of this story happened a thousand times over in the dot com days and will keep happening in more subtle variations over time. This is just like a corporate version of the Nigerian scam.

Things to learn from this scam:

• Find a lawyer/firm who'll spot these problems and let you know about them on day 1 of your deal
• Don't confuse shares for cash
• Escrow sucks, get at least 2 X cash value of the Company in cash and enough cash to cover taxes & legal fees
• Restricted stock sucks
• Cap gains taxes suck, get good tax advice
• Get a deposit from Bigco
• Find 2 Bigcos and let them bid against each other

As for me, I've been burned by escrow, legal fees and no-shops. Luckily I never sold my company for Bigco stock, it would mostly be good for toilet paper today. As my NDA's have expired, I can tell you that my Bigco's were Intervu, Akamai, Yahoo and Microsoft. Intervu sucked us dry and luckily I told them to keep their paper which is why my I no longer have any business partners. We never got very far with the others so I can't say if they would have tried all of the dirty tricks but from what I've heard Cisco made the playbook.

My New Friend Earl

My GF and I adopted a bearded dragon this weekend named Earl. Pics to come. Who knew that a lizard could have a personality?

This is pretty cool

My Startup Rules

Here my first crack at a list of startup tips:

1. Love what you're doing passionately enough to not sweat the short term pain of things going wrong and not having much cash.
2. Learn how to explain what you're offering to non-industry people in under 10 plain English words and make that your whole company's mantra.
3. Love your customer and provide something of incredible value to them. If you would be a passionate buyer of your product/service then you're probably on the right track.
4. Hand pick a team that really believes in what they're doing and confront them with kid gloves regularly if they seem distracted or disinterested. Discard bad apples QUICKLY!
5. Build a cult around what you're doing. If you, your team and your customers believe strongly in what your doing then nothing can stop you (See point #1).
6. Read as many books as you can about your field and people that have succeeded, learn from others successes and mistakes.
7. Buy cheap stuff and have an ugly office if you never have customers come over. You can buy tables for $100, chairs for $250 and computers for $1000. Get furniture at office refurb/recyclers cheap if you need a pretty office. Get as much software as you can for free/cheap from Microsoft/Oracle/Whoever dev programs.
8. Get to cash flow positive as quickly as you possibly can unless you are ready to hand over some of your company to investors.
9. Don't give everybody a phone extension until they are talking to paying customers regularly.
10. Forget about hype and tons of tiny customers and find yourself a really nice big reference account that loves what you're doing and will fund your new projects. This is of course assuming you're not starting a dollar store or micro commerce business.
11. You don't need a full time accountant but you'd better have tight control over your pennies because they'll evaporate quickly.
12. Try to do the rounds and talk to everybody in your office at least twice a week to see how they're doing.
13. Pair people up in teams that depend on each other so people don't slack off on their own moods as much.
14. Experiment with variations of what you're doing if it isn't working well.
15. Don't work crazy hours + weekends non-stop all the time unless you want to miss out on life and be a bitter rich asshole, there's a time to walk and a time to sprint. Choose them wisely. Same goes for your team, don't burn them out unless its worth it for everyone. At the same time, don't let opportunities pass you by because you don't want to work nights and weekends.
16. Ignore trends, listen to your customers pain (needs) instead.

Startup rules

Two really smart guys have posted their tips for starting up a new business. Read what Jason Calacanis and Mark Cuban have to say on this subject. Personally, I been part of about 5 or 6 startups including 2 that went public so I've got my own opinions. On the whole I agree with about half of either of those guys observations.

Jason is a guy who starts blogging companies for a living so buying Macs and a $5000 espresso machine might work for him but I think its just plain dumb for most business models. Mark starts and invests in varied technology businesses that he scales out rapidly in a hurry (or at least hopes to) so he's got a different spin that's a little closer to mine.

Myself, I tend (recently) to start 'old fashioned' profitable, private software start ups and I don't tend to sell them in any hurry.

I haven't thought of my rules yet but I will post them soon when I compile them. A lot will overlap with what Jason & Mark say.

Across the universe

I never had an astronomy class when I went through school but I can imagine that it would be pretty dry. It takes a leap of faith to visualize a night sky in three dimensions, especially when the scale of what's out there is so incredibly enormous. In fact I don't even know if the human mind is capable of imagining how huge the universe really is.

All that to say that this Microsoft World Wide Telescope project is pretty staggering. Essentially they've composited pictures from the best telescopes that mankind has and put them together in some software that lets you navigate the universe in 3d. I guess over time as the imaging gets richer, so will the visualizations.

It's hard to look up at a nighttime sky and see a swirling mass of millions of stars when all you see is a little white dot. This software lets you zoom into the swirling masses and read up on what's there. Check it out;

Another Zune

It's no secret that I really like my Zune 30 better than my iPod touch and so did my GF and we were timesharing the thing to the point that it became really irritating and finally broke down and bought her a new red 8GB Zune of her own.

She would have killed me if I bought an iPod and I understand why because she's used to the Zune and gave away the free iPod that she won because frankly it sucked for what she used it for. Most Apple people are equally or probably even more religious about their products and I guess it's easy to see why when you look at how nice the industrial design and form factors are and how easy they are to operate. Unfortunately, it seems they're also a little out of date with certain features for active users and the iTunes UI is really out of date.

That brings us to the new Zune and what's cool about it:
- Same zippity/fadey/glowy UI as the Zune 30 - super easy to use and great for sports/etc
- Squirt songs, albums & playlists wirelessly between devices but with a 3 play limit
- Wireless sync (GREAT!!)
- Flick through big lists with a feather touch flick vs. multiple clicks or click&hold

What's bad
- Software is maybe a bit too simple
- Firmware didn't update right away, I had to switch to a second USB port after a few cryptic errors
- Harder to get add ons

So in short, if you're an of the Church of the Fruit then don't bother because you've already got a great way of working but if you're starting from scratch it seems to me like a much more functional and modern alternative but not quite as pretty as the fruit. Then again looks are deceiving.