Solipsism
It's a business question that has bugged me more than almost any other. No, not how do they get the soft center into Caramilk bars, but why are some nonprescription items sold behind the counter in pharmacies? It is a...
We are endlessly distracted in this world of continuous partial attention. While most of us have become more adept at dealing with all these technology distractions — IM! email! blogs! phones! iTunes! live weather! — we are mostly kidding ourselves....
Every time I visit tech.memeorandum.com I am amazed at the clustering of people around the topic du jour. A few days it was the “startups 101” thing, and before that it was Riya’s non-purchase by Google, and today’s it is...
Mike Singer’s wonderful Weather Watcher is one of my favorite pieces of software. I was reminded of that moments ago when the following warning for here in La Jolla popped up on my screen: SURF WILL BUILD SIGNIFICANTLY TONIGHT AND...
Now and then I plug software tools that I use regularly on the assumption that other folks may find them useful. Here are a couple more tools that have stood the test of time here at Casa Kedrosky: Blogjet. This great...
Way back in October I gave a short but fun (I hope) presentation on Web 2.0 (“Get Your Out of the F**-ing Tag Cloud”) to a large audience in Vancouver, British Columbia. The audio is now available alongside some visuals....
Folks are acting like there’s big news out from Amazon/Alexa about opening up Alexa’s search engine to third parties. While that’s great, it’s not clear to me why this is news. I posted about Alexa’s plans back in October, right...
There is a thoughtful ongoing discussion of the Yahoo acquisition of del.icio.us still underway at my “sno.oker.ed” post....
After twenty years of using personal computers, I finally decided to start backing things up. I bought a 300 Gb Maxtor OneTouch II Firewire/USB drive, which, with included software, I found via PriceGrabber for around $240 (shipped). While I contemplated...
Pardon a brief cinematic digression, but there is a heartfelt Dennis Lehane essay on the Criterion site about the company’s new DVD transfer of the classic Henri-Georges Clouzot film Wages of Fear. Whatever your feelings about Clouzot’s politics, this remains...
You know someone is telling you that you shouldn’t be flying that day when … … You go to the wrong terminal at 6am and only make your flight because eight people in front of you in the security line...
I'm traveling over the next few days so postings here may be light. I'm in Palo Alto on Tuesday, then in Portland on Wednesday, then Vancouver on Thursday, before returning to San Diego late Thursday....
I added Evernote to my repertoire of software tools some time ago, not really thinking I would continue to use it. But I have. Matter of fact, it has become indispensable. It is a toolbar-resident infinitely scolling “page” onto which...
If you travel as much as I do, you spend a great deal of time wondering about the people sharing that pressurized cylinder with you. With that in mind, here, from the Department of Homeland Security, is the current list...
Okay, the Real Estate BubbleWire is fixed again. It wasn't truly broken, but I had done a bunch of verboten things, including screwing up some date formats and embedding HTML marketup in an RSS feed. For whatever reason (for the...
On re-reading Robert Burton's wondrously strange The Anatomy of Melancholy tonight I finally figured out why Burton's classic book is more appealing every time I read it. With its digressive prose, with the profanity-loving clergyman's compulsive quoting, paraphrasing and inline...
Sorry folks, my BubbleWire feed is acting up. The data is still coming in fine, for some reason the underlying HTML presentation is going batty, so what should should be a pretty table looks more like a jumbled mess of...
-1) { // tell the user alert("You've already voted on this question. Thank you for your interest!"); // doesn't count as a choice ChoiceMade_gb = false; // otherwise if they haven't made a choice yet } else if (ChoiceMade_gb...
Life changes fast Life changes in an instant You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends The problem of self-pity – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) There was an appropriately fumbling piece...
I had a good time as a guest this morning talking about the consumer side of Web 2.0 during the “debate” on the Financial Times site. Give it a read and you’ll see my various comments on the topic....
Just so folks know, I’m participating in a discussion about Web 2.0 on the Financial Times site this Wednesday morning from 7am to 8am PST. The address is www.ft.com/webfuture....
The following is from a fine Bruce Robinson essay in the gorgeous Criterion Collection DVD of the classic cult film, Withnail and I. The essay is about writer/director Robinson’s 1960s friend Viv, upon whom many aspects of the Withnail character was...
Nick Carr thinks technologists have a porn problem. According to him, they wink, nod, and retail porn’s technological innovations — Porn drove VCR adoption! Porn is driving micro-payments! Porn is driving online video! — while ignoring its damaging effects. In...
Sorry folks. In adding a feature to my site’s feed I created a bug in many feed readers. I was trying to make it easier for people to keep track of comments on the site, but in doing so the effect...
I’m up in the Palo Alto area for some meetings on Wednesday. While I’m otherwise booked, I just had something cancel at 10am, so, on a whim, if there is anyone with an interesting project in that geography that they’d like...
For a bunch of reasons today was a train wreck, but it was one that required writing and responding to an unholy amount of email. So, here are my email stats for November 14, 2005: Messages received (non-spam): 218 Messages sent:...
Why do people (apparently) only nurse beers? Why not nurse lemonade, or maybe mixed drinks? Or maybe nurse a pizza, or even lamb vindaloo? These all strike me as eminently nurse-able. Inquiring and overly cliche-attuned minds want to know....
As was inevitable given the absence of adaptive filtering in Movable Type 3.2, I'm seeing what looks like a flood of MT--tuned comment spam. While MT folks say that MT 3.2 has deprecated the need for MT-Blacklist, I wish there...
I had a nice sushi lunch yesterday in San Francisco with the estimable Om Malik . I see that he has blogged about our “attention crisis” conversation, and some of the ways we try to manage the problem. (Yo Om, “iconic”?)...
Posting here may be spotting over the next two days. Tomorrow morning I fly up to San Francisco for some meetings, and then I’m back down to San Diego on Thursday....
Wanda: Aristotle was not Belgian, the principle of Buddhism is not "every man for himself", and the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up. Otto: Ah…hmmm. — A Fish Called...
The following is excerpted from an email today to me from a VC friend of mine. He decided to remind me about some public predictions I made in a December 2004 column about the outlook for Apple. Here is what...
Okay, I definitely have a not-so-suppressed geek streak. I laughed this morning in reading the following Perl one-liner regular expression joke (from use Perl): Obligatory Doug Adams reference by jbodoni (3320) <jbodoniNO@SPAMgmail.com> on 2005.11.04 10:10 (#44321) > Use ($foo, $bar,...
I keep running into vendors who have left out crucial features in their products and services, but who extol the virtues of their fine API instead. “We left those features out on purpose,” they say. “We want the community to...
Argh, Microsoft has bought p2p synchronization company FolderShare, a service that I rely on heavily. Note to BillG: If you screw FolderShare’s products/services/pricing up — including unnecessarily folding it into some other Live-related service that I do not want — I...
Speaking as an infrequent dawn patrol surfer, and, more often, a 6am runner, this L.A. Times piece on the subject today is lovely. It captures the combination of joyful solitude and holier-than-thou righteousness of we early-rising exercisers.These are the rationalizations...
In a typically knee-jerk contrarian post on his site, Nick Carr jerks his knee and takes me to task by leaping (as he predictably does) to the other side of this Forbes vs Blogs topic. The trouble is, there is...
This is allegedly writer Michael Kinsley talking about writer Bob Novak, but in my experience it’s much more widely applicable: Beneath the asshole is a very decent guy, and beneath the very decent guy is an asshole. This kinda “assholes...
For those of you in Vancouver and environs, I’m giving a Web 2.0–ish talk (maybe more like a throat-clearing, given that I’m only allotted fifteen minutes) at a Vancouver Enterprise Forum get-together on Tuesday of this week. It’s in some golf-ball-shaped building...
As a transplanted Canadian living in La Jolla, California, I have to get my fix of the first snowfall of the year from Flickr. And there are some lovely shots already, like this one from a fellow in Colorado....
Two highly useful media sites that I use regularly and haven’t mentioned here before: Beeline TV: An index of live, streaming video feeds online, in all languages imaginable. My favorites are from the BBC, Korean TV, and AFTV movie classics...
Folks might be interesting in some blogs, some new and some less so, that I’m newly reading: Cool Hunting — Keeping track of things at the “too hip for the room” end of consumer markets Organized Shopping — Price comparison...
Okay, my mash-up is finally working (mostly). I’ve just finished coding my little project, a Google maps mash-up I’m calling PublicLoos. As the name suggests, PublicLoos overlays the location of various public restrooms against a city map. In honor of...
I like how Brian Dear incorporates my “dark matter” idea into his description of how his Eventful service works: When it comes to events, EVDB and our Eventful service are all about enabling discovery of the whole long tail of events:...
It was three weeks shy of two years ago that the Cedar wildfire began near Ramona, California. The fire started at dusk, so we went to bed unknowing, but awoke the next morning to an orange sunrise (I distinctly remember The...
I’ve just noticed that I’m now the first search result at Google for keyword “greed”. I’m sure advertisers will be tumbling out of trees at the news. Damnit, where are Fastow, Lay, Boesky, and the rest of the “greed is...
As someone who spends a good chunk of time close enough to Los Angeles to know I don’t want to be closer, here are two (non-Didion) recent descriptions of that city I’ve liked: Los Angeles, as I have stated elsewhere,...
On a personal productivity note, having installed a decent pop-up YubNub client, I’m finally finding that social command-line tool useful. Most-used commands? quote, gim, w, sendsms, gbg, and gnews, among others. [Update] Nivi has an entertaining YubNub command, pi-search, that...
With more than 100 responses in to my screen real estate survey already, I thought people might be interested in the results so far: 1) How many screens do you have now? 1: 44.6% 2: 50% 3 or more: 5.6%...
I’m admittedly no instant messaging maven — and I sometimes go months without even being connected — but why is it not (seemingly) possible to have different modes of IM depending on what I”m currently doing? When I’m at work I...
When checking in for a flight: "There are only middle seats left, sir." [Update] A few entertaining variants are being posted in comments, plus I’m receiving others via email. A current favorite from BobZ: …it gets worse if you here...
I should have mentioned this sooner, but I’m too darn bashful to toot my own horn. Anyway, check for a mention of this site (Thanks Mark!) about mid-way through the following piece from Barron’s this past weekend. [Ed.: I’m not...
Running around like a mad thing today — including a fascinating breakfast discussion about developments in contact lens technology — but here a few articles I’ve been reading that others may found interesting: Tim Draper as Gonzo VC I don’t...
There is a fascinating archive of searchable North Korean propaganda available here. For those of you, like me, who love the bizarro cult-ish character of such stuff, with its over-stuffed prose and Python-inspired fondness for multisyllabic insults, the site is a...
In a post yesterday author William Gibson reminds me of one of my favorite Tom Waits quotes: Tom Waits frequently annoyed reporters with his tall tales, inaudible responses and penchant for evasion. Waits was once asked why he had allowed six...
The following chart shows the number of times various of my rules have been hit by comment/trackback spam on my Movable Type blog installation. I use MT-Blacklist to block such stuff, one of the pluses of which is that you...
From a Detroit News article on why golf handicaps have not come down despite significant improvements in golf club technology: "Amateurs are less consistent and, therefore, do not experience the full effect of this technology," said [a prominent golf course...
Focus is the new black. Last week at the AlwaysOn conference I watched as a bevy of back-row bloggers typed madly — doing email, blogging, IM-ing, participating in the in-room chat, etc. — as speakers tried desperately to get their...
I keep being sent eggcorns lately, bizarre incorrect phrases that improve upon (sort of) misheard common ones, and here are two examples: “[John Doe] is my brother’s next store neighbor”. This one came in an email last week. And as...
Brad Feld has a practical and touching piece out on work/life balance. It is well worth reading, especially for those of us who have had an undying focus on work tear apart a relationship (or three), who are always on...
One of the more entertaining features of southern California in summer is the existence of a savage thermocline. Case in point, temperatures today here in La Jolla are 22 C (72 F), but temperatures in Anza-Borrego Desert, about 150 km...
Argh. Email distribution lists are evil. While I am subscribed to a declining number of such things — RSS has appropriate replaced many of ‘em — I still get quite a few lists via email, from news to discussion. But...
I am sitting here this morning watching the British Open, doing some blogging, answering email, and, most importantly, following the Tour de France “queen” mountain stage via Cyclingnew.com live updates. The most recent entry was the following, which is definitely the sort...
Ahh, adventures in hosting-land! I got sidetracked and ignored three (!) notices from my hosting provider saying that my kedrosky.com domain was due to expire. It was only this morning when I read email — for the first time in...
For those of you who are readers of TheStreet.com and who watch for my weekly Weekend Reading column, there will not be one this week. I’m on holidays, and the column will be back a week from now....
No, the slow pace of postings doesn’t denote a work slowdown at Infectious Greed HQ. Instead, I’m still out on quasi-holidays, getting in some golf (with a personal record of seven lost balls in one round the other day), doing...
Here is author Michael Crichton explaining in a letter to a Financial Time journalist why his skeptical views on global warming and the environment should be taken seriously: I am just an interested observer with a summa cum laude degree...
This weekend's Doonesbury is a savagely funny anti-blogger panel, one guaranteed to vault the somewhat-languishing strip into the hot topic du jour -- at least this week:...
Fixed up my little hack for manipulating Feedburner's API. Click here to visit a page that does a better job of helping you set up an RSS feed to receive Feedburner statistics for your site. As always, if it doesn't...
I'm generally fond of my (already-scuffed) Treo 650, but I'm frustrated as heck that Verizon has apparently made it impossible to send photos as attachments to email messages. While that was possible with the Treo 600, the 650 defaults to...
Have had a few people ask if I'm at Gnomedex conference this week, and the answer is no. Had originally thought I might go, but scheduling issues intervened as a result of all my recent travel. I will, however, be...
I had a conversation last week where we agreed on something that I hadn't thought about before: The bloggers we both liked best were people who spent most of their time doing other things than blog. They find a few...
Cliche-watch: Every once in a while I realize I'm thoroughly tired of a phrase. That moment has come with "If so-and-so has his way". The phrase has become an all-purpose segue in articles, with the author setting up a straw...
While many people are getting giddy about Steve Jobs' recent Stanford convocation speech, and while I'm not an uncritical Lance Armstrong fan, I found this excerpt from Dan Coyle's new book about the cancer-survivor and six-time Tour de France-winning cyclist...
I have gone through a number of phases in my use of online travel sites. In my first phase I used Expedia for pretty much everything. It worked, provided decent prices and a good selection of options, and it meant...
I've become more of a re-reader of books lately than a reader of books. I don't always have the patience to wait new books out to see if they are good when there are so many other books that I...
Just felt the shake, rattle, and roll of a decent-sized earthquake. According to this USGS site, it was a magnitude 5.6 quake centered not far from Palm Springs, roughly 55 miles northeast of here in La Jolla....
From the SD U-T's weather blog:Yesterday's thermometer at Lindbergh Field was very compact. The high was 65, and the low was 62. Shades of L.A. Story, nothing changes in SoCal weather: "Next weather in four days"....
If you travel at all and you're anything like me you probably have an overstuffed backpack containing your laptop and some books you're currently attempting to read. The set changes all the time, with some books moving from backpack to...
I'm off on an evil travel jag over the next few days: Boston (for a venture capital talk), Quebec City (for another venture capital talk), and then Ottawa (for a family visit), and then back to San Diego. I'll still...
Lots of people making noise about some stats concerning AOL users' email usage, but my question goes in the opposite direction. Who are these people that only check email five times a day? My various PCs poll both personal and...
While Tom Peters' presentation style may not be your favorite, there is no denying that the man is a skilled and entertaining presenter. That is why it is great that he has put out (in Powerpoint format, of course --...
In case folks can't tell the from the number of posts, I'm back from New York and IDG's Syndicate conference. I'll have some comments on it later, but as always most of the more stimulating stuff happened in the hallways....
We have now put together a DVD of the first few episodes of my previously televised interviews with various entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, including Qualcomm chairman Irwin Jacobs and Enterprise Partners venture guy Bill Stensrud. If anyone would like a...
While this N.Y. Times piece is mostly about the writer's misadventures guest-hosting a conservative blog, it does contain a perceptive comment about pacing in blogs:The best bloggers develop hobbyhorses, shticks and catchphrases that they put into wider circulation. Creating your...
Okay, it's half-way through May so putting up an April most-read list may seem a little strange, but let's just say I have had a few weeks I wouldn't like to repeat. Nevertheless, here are the most-read items for last...
Translate the following bit of financial columnist bloviation into normal English:It is near impossible to achieve positive results if the inputs to the process and perhaps the process itself are flawed or worse illegitimate.I'll start:Garbage in; garbage out....
Recent readers of this site may not realize that last year I wrote an OpEd for the Wall Street Journal on the trouble with Tiger Woods: I argued he swings too hard. Without getting over-deeply into the data -- other...
Just about anyone can get sucked into the blogging vortex, even management guru Tom Peters. While he had been posting prolifically to his blog for most of last year, he suddenly disappeared a few month back, only to reappear with...
A few people have asked for an mp3 version of Carl Icahn hectoring Blockbuster management on last week's conference call, so here it is....
One of my favorite parodies of overly personal journalism -- the sort of thing too many bloggers self-parodyingly practise -- came almost a decade ago in an issue of the New Republic. Called "Annals of Communication: Awestruck", it was a...
I gave a seemingly well-received keynote talk this week on the subject of "Entrepreneurs are from Mars, VCs are from Venus" at the Connect Financial Forum. I was being deliberately light, and I was pleased that there was as much...
The top ten stories from this site last month:1The End of (the) Slashdot (Effect)2VCs, Consumer Technologies, & Cursed Lemmings3Jeff Bezos (hearts) Vertical Search4What Would We Do Without Recruitment Firms?5Biotech, Bursisitis, & the Willing Suspension of Disbelief6One Rock; No Regrets7Self-Service MBA...
Haven't disappeared, just been running around these last few days. Will be back and sorted out late Sunday or Monday....
Apologies for the downtime here today. My hosting service changed hosting services and as tends to happen in such cases things went, to use the technical term, kerflooey.Anyway, to continue in a solipsistic vein, I am interviewed in a piece...
I use the word "interesting" too much here. It is remarkable how easily you fall into these traps, even when you know about them. But I was looking at an earlier entry here and I caught the word "interesting" in...
This site apparently showed up in the Financial Times recently:Infectious Greed ... it has been a pleasure to read the almost daily commentary on his blog where he comments on topics ranging from iPods, bird flu, the failure of Transmeta, analysis...
For some time now I've been using Caelo's NEO Pro overlay for Outlook email. It has been, in a word, a lifesaver. Here are just some of the things I'm fond of: Integrated search (far better than relying on an...
I'll be speaking at the IDG Syndicate Conference in New York on May 18th. Lots of interesting folks on the agenda, including Ross Mayfield, Jon Udell, Tim Bray, Jason Calacanis, Marc Canter, Bob Wyman, and others....
Danny O'Brien gave a raucous, rocking, and relevant "life hacks" talk to a standing-room-only talk at ETech. There were many highlights, but I quite liked this comment of his from an interview with Lifehacker:...geeks are able to memorise almost any trivial...
A conversation I had recently with someone about the long tail led to some musing about its temporal opposite, the long march through bleak economic territory that precedes economic success (not to mention preceding outright failure). Said conversation then got...
I'm guessing, perhaps wrongly, that there won't be any readers of this blog at the event, but on my way to ETech on Tuesday I'm giving a talk Monday in San Diego at the American Chemical Society annual meeting. The...
For people who haven't yet read my Harvard Business Review piece last year on feeds and syndication technologies, let me summarize a theme that I find myself talking about to many groups: Dark matter -- of the information type.One of...
Andy Kessler: Nazdog & The MOMOsOm Malik: The Beholden YearsRoss Mayfield: Relationships Over Transactions, A Learning from the BubblePaul Kedrosky: The Bubble and MeAs a card-carrying contrarian I should have been elated when the technologybubble burst five years ago....
In case anyone is interested, there is a rough-cut streaming version of my recent interview with Qualcomm CEO, co-founder, and chairman Irwin Jacobs available here. A properly edited multi-camera version at broadcast quality will be available on UCSD-TV (and at the...
Maybe you have to be Canadian (even ex-pat Canadian) to get excited about a one-in-a-million curling shot like this one, but it was wonderfully done. Of course, I have now spent enough time out of Canada to realize that most...
Here are the top ten most-read stories from this site last month:1Zen & Barron's2Assistance Needed!3Profile of the Six Apart Founders4Gmail Needs to Pay Me5Shorting Google6Google is Having I/O Problems7A New Venture Fund Bubble?8Podcasting Provider Gets Smoked9George Colony Eats Crow Over...
A recent book about Norbert Wiener, the creator of cybernetics, and one of the earliest and most important theorists of our technology-drenched days, looks to be a moving piece of work. The book is called "Dark Hero of the Information...
I just learned through my Pubsub "ego search" that my site was selected as one of the best business-related (specifically, venture capital) blogs on the net by the folks at Fast Company. Gee, thanks guys! I appreciate the kind words,...
Roger Ebert has Stanley Kubrick's "Paths of Glory" on his Great Movies list. The review, which is highlighted on Ebert's site today, is nicely done. This is probably my favorite Kubrick film. You see much of what Kubrick does best,...
Argh, apparently I somehow broke this site's Feedburner feed in the last 24 hours with some errant characters, but a) Feedburner never told me; and b) Feeddemon dutifully read the feed anyways. It is now fixed. While I appreciate Feeddemon's...
Porsche's Carrera FT (retail price: $448,000) is scary-expensive, and the ardor-object for many recently-monied entrepreneurs. And said car is expensive, visually striking -- and terrifying to drive. Not, however, because it is so fast (although speaking as someone who has been...
Oh boy (no pun intended), but this name-centric data exploration site is fascinating. What, for example, is up (well, down) with Paul? Why has it fallen off a cliff since the 1960s? And why are my brothers' names (Robert, Doug,...
Something went kerflooey (a technical term) at this site's hosting service for a while today. Seems okay now, so sorry about that, but that's apparently life in the online world of binder-twine, balsa wood, and Elmer's glue....
This is admittedly only interesting to a small segment of this site's readership, but for those of you who, like me, use Yahoo for some of your mail, there is a new version of the YahooPops! freeware app (for SMTP/POP...
I'm trying to come up with an example of a company that has accidentally released some news on its website before it intended to. I know this has happened a number of times, and to some prominent companies, but I...
Overnight I newly have 50 (!) Gmail invites sitting in my account. If the folks at Gmail really think I'm going to somehow give away that many invites then they need to put me on payroll. More seriously, we must...
It is hard not to make all the obvious jokes when talking to a reporter about procrastination. You know, like, "I wanted to call sooner, but I just didn't get around to it until now." And so on. Anyway, this...
Tomorrow's NatPost column is on a recent BMJ study concerning helmet use among skiers & snowboarders, and the current illogical penchant among such folks for wearing protective headgear. I argue it is partly a societal misunderstanding of risks and injury...
Posting will be slow over next few days. Am away at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on a much-needed ski holiday. Now, if only the snow gods would cooperate: You could literally fire a bullet at this place and it would bounce...
A post from Om Malik today calling a "market top" on photo-management site Flickr reminds me that I didn't tell people here that my most recent column in Canadian Business magazine was about, you guessed it, Flickr. My working title...
According to Feedburner, here are the most-read stories on this site from January of 2005:1Paul-TV Redux ... Ouch2Critical Thoughts About "nofollow"3What Me No Bosses4Eclecticism Apologia5Transmeta & the Innovation Disadvantage6KPCB Hires Bill Joy: Alsop or Metcalfe?7Snow? Pshaw, Darn Americans8iPod = Walkman,...
A discussion between me and a service manager yesterday while checking in my 2002 Hyundai Santa Fe for some recall work that needed to be done:Me: So, what has to be done under this recall?Him: I'm not sure ... let...
Travel-writer Tim Cahill has a great piece in the Sunday NY Times on a fascinating book of weather porn, "Extreme Weather: A Guide and Record Book". Cahill lavishes praise on the book, and revels, as I do, in its collection...
Sitting in an airport lounge thinking ... Am I the only one who can't stop himself from compulsively watching "A Few Good Men" any time it comes on television? I tumble every darn time for this over-the-top melodrama, especially the...
Well, that was painful. While it got better as it went on -- I don't look nearly as much like a somewhat younger Marty Feldman during the Q&A part of the program -- watching this installment of the me-hosted von...
I just looked back and noticed that in the last few entries I have talked about snowstorms, vacuum cleaners, RNAi, avian influenza, and Sequoia stock distributions; and I touted my little TV show and raffled off some Gmail accounts. My...
From the Toronto Globe & Mail, as a storm drops 39cm of snow on eastern Canada, disrupting travel, causing the cancellation of schools & flights, plus a major political visit:His beard encrusted in a layer of ice, Brian Ferrier snorted...
If you're in California, don't forget that this month (tonight if you're in San Diego) you can watch the most recent installment of the von Liebig Forum, a program I host on innovation, venture capital, & technology. It is admittedly...
Like Jeremy, I have somehow ended up on vacuum-buying detail. I wouldn't burden people with this were it not for how much the vacuum market -- and vacuum technology -- has changed. While vacuums are not yet fun, exactly, the underlying...
Gmail accounts are like tribbles: you give some away, you get more back. Anyway, I have four more Gmail accounts to dole out, if there is anyone a) still doesn't have one, and b) didn't get one the last time...
Various U.S. VCs are pitching for ex-PeopleSoft people to call 'em up, and I'll join the chorus. If there any soon-to-be-former PeopleSoft sales & marketing sorts out there who are either in Canada, or want to return there (or, of course,...
Here are the ten most popular stories from this site in December:1Chris Scores for "Long Tail"2Why Flickr Doesn't^K^K^K^K^K^K Sucks3Gmail Accounts Here ...4Om Does Contortions; Russian Judge Says "9.8"5Tech's Hot-or-Not List for 20046Sales 101 for Venture Capitalists (& their Investees)7Ticker Talk:...
Jeremy asks where others are keeping their holidays pics. While there aren't many, I have been messing with some of my own on Flickr here. As you'll see, my pictures are mostly devoid of people -- lots of ice though....
The BBC Magazine has a strange little long-standing contest (called Lunchtime Bonus Question) wherein it poses an answer, and you come up with the question, in semi-Jeopardy fashion. Today's entry is, however, some of the more spectacularly wrong answers of...
The New Scientist story's first two 'graphs had me cold:The first American civilisation sprang up rapidly on the central Peruvian coast more than 5000 years ago, new research has revealed.In less than 150 years, people went "from small hunter-gatherer bands...
Periodically a succession of stock tickers crosses the wire and you get that strange feeling, like Steve Martin in L.A. Story, that a supposedly inanimate object is talking to you. I just had that feeling moments ago when I saw...
Anyone out there still looking for Gmail accounts? I'm sure there can't be many, but if so, post a comment here with your email address and I'll send the first four Gmail invites. Google has just deigned to give me...
I host a semi-regular program on UCSD-TV/UC-TV that is rebroadcast on the Dish Network (channel 9412!). Called "The von Liebig Forum", it is generally a talk, and then an interview conducted by me with high-visibility folks who live/work at the...
I just finished traveling up to Canada for some holidays with family, so I've been somewhat incommunicado. The arrival has been, to put it mildly, a shock. To give you a visceral sense, here is the weather forecast for tonight/tomorrow...
The books currently sitting on my desk in the in-progress pile:"Our Own Devices: How Technology Remarkes Humanity," Edward Tenner"Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th Century World," J.R. McNeill"Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945," Max Hastings"They Marched...
I should have mentioned this sooner, but Urs Holzle of Google's talk at UCSD is online in streaming format. It's here, and at roughly the ten-second mark you'll notice the back of a dark-haired guy's head swim into view in...
Now that I run Copernic's search as a background process I see a steady list of "what's new" on my computer. For example, until I actually search for something, all the new emails are listed on the main screen as they...
Was checking the weather in Vancouver for a trip, and I scanned a webcam that I usually look at to get a sense of things. Gorgeous there this morning:...
I run the excellent Weather Watcher app in the background, and one of its features is that it allows you to display a semi-live weather map of the region of your choice as a desktop wallpaper. I have selected a map...
It is always interesting to check the server logs and see what search words are bringing people to this site. Here are the top dozen terms from the last twenty-four hours:...
Top ten most popular stories here last month: 1 The WSJ Rough Guide 2 I Came, I Saw, I Jotspot-ed 3 A Prolixity Apology 4 I Have Seen the Oil Problem and it is Us 5 The Shorter Gretchen Reynolds...
Here are some selected paragraphs from tomorrow's National Post column. It is on truth and falsehood in email, and its consequences:Has anyone emailed you yet the picture from the 1954 Popular Science article? I have been sent the photo a...
What happens after trackback and comment spam? Granted, neither problem is entirely solved, but let's just say for the sake of argument that they are both beaten down to manageable levels. What's next for spammers?How about ego spam in RSS? Like...
It is a constant source of amazement to me how people think that because a hiking trail is a) busy, and b) within sight of city lights, that it must be safe as a sidewalk. The straightest trail up Vancouver,...
It is easy to forget in the overwhelming PR-athon around the release of the first three seasons of Seinfeld on DVD that there once was a fresh and interesting show called Seinfeld. Well, there was, and it had some classic...
The first few paras of tomorrow's NatPost column:It is the battle of television's business billionaires, and the results are in: It is Donald Trump uber alles. Good for The Donald, but his success on television has little to do with...
I was scanning a chapter of "The Cell" this morning and reading about pathogens, infections and innate immnunity when I came across a retelling of the story of how it was finally demonstrated that the bacteria H. pylori was the...
From tomorrow's NatPost column:Last week a few million people in the U.S. received in their home mailboxes a catalog from eBay. It contained 32 shiny pages of products currently for sale on the online auction service.Wait a minute. As any...
I don't usually get into personal disclosures here, but I have been wildly sidetracked the last few days with two feverish kids. One of my sons is three-and-a-half and the other is 10 months. Both have have been up and...
I want to read Gretchen Reynolds piece in this weekend's NY Times Magazine on avian influenza, but I can't seem to work up the nerve. Its 7,385 words (or roughly $15,000 to Gretchen, assuming $2 a word) is daunting, to...
Folks, apologies for today ;-) I've been a little under the weather for the last couple of days and ... well, I felt better today. As you can see/read, I had a lot of things on my mind and they all...
Here are the top ten stories by viewership from last month here. Anyone detect a Google theme running through?1Google's New Investor-Friendly Nature2Feedburner Goes Deep3Google's Mysterious (Financial) Ways4GOD: "Good Bits on Demand"5Yahoo's Got (More) Mail6Google Results Out7Do I Hear Google $400?8Changing...
I notice this morning that a Google search for "greed" now brings this site in at number two, right behind the seven deadly sins, but in front of the Church of Scientology. It is august company....
Nathan Torkington at O'Reilly has a post containing a photo of some his deskside books. He argues that it is an indicator of what you're working on and how you work. I agree, and in a variant of what he has...
For all these years I've been nervous that I take too much on business trips. Hard to believe now, given that I rarely take more than carry-on -- and given that the following is business guru Tom Peters' mid-trip self-audit...
I usually leave these bizarre-o stories to Drudge and FARK, but one here in San Diego caught my attention. Apparently a man died, was taken away in an ambulance, and was then returned to the house -- dead -- and put...
In case folks out there haven't noticed, by popular request I have switched over to full-text feeds. If that is irritating people to no end, then let me know and I'll add another feed that is abbreviated like the old...
I mentioned last weekend that I was in a mountain race in Vancouver. Well, Eric Promislow (of ActiveState/Sophos (and Baconizer)) snapped a few pix -- including a couple of yours truly -- and put 'em up on Flickr. I'm the...
Traffic is on the rise here, and the following were the top ten most-read articles from September:1eBay: Too Big to Fail?2Make me Like A93Time-to-Laptop (TTL) at Conferences4Donald Trump and the Art of the Interview5Best Tech Headline in Recent Memory6Is Anything...
As a sidenote, I'm posting these Saturday-morning comments while sitting near the start line of the annual Grouse Grind mountain run. The race usually attract a few hundred people who want to spend their Satuday morning racing up 2,800 vertical...
The people behind the recent mini-eruption at Mt. St. Helens mistimed things. I flew over the volcano on the way up to Seattle the prior day, not Friday. Mind you, the latest news (10-02-04) sure makes it sound like the...
Having accidentally caught "Dr. Strangelove" on television twice this past weekend (almost certainly bringing my lifetime total & fractional viewings into mid double-digits) I find I've tumbled into speaking in Strangelove-ian patois. It's not all bad though: You would be amazed...
Am on the road and in meetings today (Wednesday) and tomorrow, in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver. Postings will be light while I'm navigating the unfriendly western skies of North America. Pray that I'm not 25,000 feet over Mount...
I was spelunking in my server logs earlier tonight (now there's a sign of something or another) and I discovered that a significant number of people find this site by searching Google for keyword "greed". In case you're curious, I'm...
Jon Udell has a typically thoughtful post where he segues from the topic of canonical URLs to that of the network effects that flow from defragmenting fragmented online conversations. It is worth reading, and something about which I feel strongly....
I've clearly gone wrong somewhere. Despite umpteen gazillion media appearances, more OpEds than I care to be reminded of, a relatively non-soporific speaking style, and a generally sunny demeanour, I don't get overly large speaking fees, nor am I overwhelmed...
As I have remarked on before, the single most common topic on blogs is apologizing for not having blogged. So ... here is an apology for not having blogged (much) lately. I have been traveling like a fiend, and then...
While I generally avoid reading pieces about Donald Trump -- you get the feeling that Donald is watching you read them, and getting too much pleasure out of it -- this one in the weekend NY Times is more fun...
I'm fond of measuring TTL at conferences. I don't mean time-to-live, however, even if some conferences are so dreadful that the measure might seemingly apply. I mean time-to-laptop: How long it takes before an arbitrary percentage -- usually 50% --...
Anyone going to the Albany Symposium? I'm missing it this year, but I'd happily hear a report. And speaking of entertaining conferences, I'm at Demo Mobile in La Jolla, so if any readers are there, let me know....
In the spirit of my post last week about the merits of "most popular" lists, here are the ten most popular pieces from this site last month:1FeedDemon, RSS, and Degrees of Connectedness2NatPost Column: Vonage Doesn't Matter3Flexibility in Venture Capital4Google's Pitch:...
I haven't mentioned it before, but the Patently Obvious blog on patent law is far more fun than it deserves to be considering the dry subject matter. (And did I mention the great pictures?) Today's topic: the DMCA and the legality...
Since comparing Blinkx and Copernic Desktop Search earlier this week, I have stubbornly continued to run the two tools in tandem. And now I have surprised myself somewhat with the results. While the things that bugged me about Copernic (and...
I was wandering around a bit in the previous post, from Richard Feynman, to beach volleyball, to Krispy Kreme. I'm always curious whether others have found links among such superficially unrelated things, so it is interesting to Google the question. It...
Pleasurable dinner/chat last night in Vancouver with Dick Hardt of sxip and Stewart Butterfield of Flickr fame. They are up to very different things, of course, but it is remarkable how many of my recent conversations implacably converge on emerging...
I should have mentioned it sooner, but I have an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal about movie grosses. It is in the Leisure & Arts section, and it takes Hollywood to task for being, arguably, worse than ever in...
Earlier today I sent an email mentioning Yahoo Labs to someone at their Gmail account. They wrote back just now saying that Gmail had read the piece and run what it thought were the correct ads alongside:"you writing "Labs" brought...
As should be zero surprise to folks, my National Post column on Saturday is about the Google/Playboy imbroglio. The opening few paragraphs follow. It was great fun working in the requisite number of double-entendres:Christie Hefner of Playboy magazine should write...
Over the weekend I was searching for something at Google and, in a slip, I searched under the name of a site I used to run years ago: Groksoup.Now, for most people reading this site the name Groksoup will deservedly...
The best book I read in the last twelve months was fire historian Stephen Pyne's magisterial "Fire in America", a history of wildland fire in North America. I read it late last year, shortly after wildfires raced from thirty miles...
I haven't disappeared. Instead my MT database blew up two days ago, and it has taken me since then to find the time to upgrade to MySQL from MT's default database. Things are still in flux as I recover CSS...
ScienceDirect emails me various academic journal abstracts as they come out. Most of them are finance & economics journals, but I'm also subscribed to a few medical journals, including the Survey of Opthalmology. This month's issue has a fascinating piece...
My June Harvard Business Review piece continues to attract emails, interesting comments, and strange conference invites (almost always in multisyllabic, vowel-free places). Fair enough, although I don't think what I had to say should have been too surprising to any...
From a quick search of Feedster: Number of posts containing "infrequent" and "posts": 724 Number of posts containing "overly frequent" and "posts": 5 Not to get all blog-solipsistic and meta-blog-ish about it, but I am beginning to come to the...
Golfer Tiger Woods soldiers on, delusional as ever. I've said in the past that his current behavior is magnificently baffling, a supreme example of someone convincing himself of six impossible things before breakfast.In Tiger's case, he has somehow convinced himself...
Yesterday I mentioned a Mercer study on the healthiest places to live, and today I ran across a Famers Insurance list of the "most secure" places to live. You'll notice two things about the list. First, only one place in...
Mercer Human Resource Consulting has annointed Calgary as the best place in the world in which to live for a clean, healthy lifestyle. While there is nothing specifically wrong with Calgary -- and you are reasonably close to the Rockies...
Ran across this picture while scanning the N.Y. Times this morning. Sure makes it hard to read economics pieces:...
Pardon this bit of self-promotion, but I have a piece in the current Harvard Business Review wherein I write about the business implications of syndication (i.e., RSS, Atom, etc.). I'm mostly concerned with idea of freeing up "dark matter" in...
I've learned never to be surprised at where journalist Mike Kinsley ends up, but him as the editorial page director at the L.A. Times is a little baffling, nearly as puzzling as his Crossfire departure for Microsoft's Slate adventure. You can...
Dawkins's Law of the Conservation of Difficulty: Oscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity....
Hell hath no fury like two reality show hosts going at in real reality. Case in point: Mark "The Benefactor" Cuban isn't happy about some recent cutting remarks made by Donald "The Apprentice" Trump about Cuban's new reality show....
For those of you reading this site because you spotted my Tiger Woods OpEd in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, here are two graphs underlying the piece.First, here is the all-PGA relationship between driving distance and accuracy:And second, here is Tiger...
James Altucher's new "Trade Like a Hedge Fund" book is excellent. While the title might seem a little off-putting, like a "...for Dummies" book aimed at jejeune hedge fund managers, the book is among the very best of its (admittedly...
The first few paragraphs of tomorrow's National Post column on Microsoft versus the EU:Microsoft will be punished this week by the European Union, and the punditrocracy is dutifully taking up flanking positions. But both supporters and critics are adrift this...
I'm briefly on the road through Friday, so updates may be a little slow here. Up to Seattle/Vancouver and back again....
At right you will see a new link to an RSS feed for prices in the storage market. I have a program running here that tracks daily average prices for two popular sizes -- 80Gb and 120Gb -- and you can...
Well, another business academic has joined the "something's funky about business schools" club. This time it is Michael Watkins, a Harvard Business School professor who was recently denied tenure and is now musing about how HBS is failing its students...
In case you have a copy of the Wall Street Journal handy, you'll find an editorial by me in it today about the Mydoom virus/worm outbreak. Playing provocateur, I name names, and lay blame. Update: Lots of interesting email on...
According to the current Advertising Age, things were busy, if nervous, at this week's National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE -- pronounced to (sort of) rhyme with "nasty") conference in Las Vegas. TV execs can't figure out where the...
My National Post column today was on bumpf and posturing at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos.Update: Ah, if only I had seen this story before I had written the above column. Apparently the WEF anticipated my criticisms...
Microsoft's quarterly financial results tonight seemingly have many investors in a tizzy. It has nothing to do with the higher-than-expected equity compensation costs, however. Those are shuffling of costs from one period to another, and it isn't all that important...
Quirky piece in the Independent about Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's recent marriage to romance novelist Melanie Craft. It is requisitely snide in that U.K. way, so you get bon mots like the following: "At 34, Ms Craft is 25 years...
Can't get enough Kedrosky? I'm on CNBC's Kudlow & Cramer today (January 9th) at 5:30 EST. The subject is the economics of offshoring, and, in particular, Infosys's standout results today....
The record drought in British Columbia has spawned a fire near Kelowna that has destroyed more than 200 homes -- so far. While this is terrible, it could very well be happening in Vancouver, not Kelowna, and the costs would...
In case anyone noticed, I'm already not posting here as often as I had thought I might. Seems to be par for the course with these things. It isn't for a lack of ideas about things to write about --...
