Nice crystal
August 24th, 2007
Congrats to Aurora, Annie, Karen, Nilesh, and Sridhar for the Yahoo platform excellence award. Well-freaking-deserved.
The internets vs. the Glorious President-for-Life
August 21st, 2007Will the internet and social media defeat top-down conservatism?
We are fast becoming a bottoms up media society where all the information people need to make informed decisions is becoming more readily available to them. With the power of YouTube or Google or a simple website, you can learn all that you would never have learned years ago. And this is devastating news for conservatives.
Imagine what would have happened in 1968 or 1972 if the media had done its job and played the video or audio clips of Richard Nixon’s McCarthyist rantings?
Well, maybe… other circles are using the internet to argue for, um… less than Democratic ideals
President Bush has a valuable historical example that he could choose to follow.
When the ancient Roman general Julius Caesar was struggling to conquer ancient Gaul, he not only had to defeat the Gauls, but he also had to defeat his political enemies in Rome who would destroy him the moment his tenure as consul (president) ended.
Caesar pacified Gaul by mass slaughter; he then used his successful army to crush all political opposition at home and establish himself as permanent ruler of ancient Rome. This brilliant action not only ended the personal threat to Caesar, but ended the civil chaos that was threatening anarchy in ancient Rome – thus marking the start of the ancient Roman Empire that gave peace and prosperity to the known world.
If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege while terrifying American enemies.
He could then follow Caesar’s example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court.
President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming “ex-president” Bush or he can become “President-for-Life” Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons.
Fear not, the former head of the CIA and associate of Dick Cheney is… on the Board of Directors of the organization that published this essay. Why are they so busy scrubbing their site? Don’t they need support for the Glorious Plan? Or would too much discussion of it just botch things up?
TechCrunch & DailyKos: an accidental 2-fer
August 1st, 2007I’m driving across the Bay Bridge at about 10:30pm when I get a text from my buddy Greg. “dude you are on techcrunch!”. Funny, I’m thinking, my startup hasn’t released our alpha/beta/whatever-we’ll-call-it. What’s up?
I get home, pull up the Crunch, and apparently Scott Beale took this photo which aroused some interest. In fact, someone put an ad on craigslist looknig for the “cute”, “tall blonde guy” in the pic.
So here’s the screenshot from TechCrunch, and I’ve added a little callout:
It’s good to know that love, or lust, or whatever, can blossom at a tech networking event. In other news, a diary of mine made it to the front-page of Kos thanks to the fantastic Rescue Rangers’ diary rescue. It was a PowerPoint expose of Gonzales’ Senate testimony. I think I’ll do more of those. It was fun to apply some bullet-point basics to political analysis, which as my diary points out, is what the DC stenography press corps needs these days, since they so often lack a clear grasp of basic facts.
Anyway, it is always amazing how gratifying it is to receive online kudos.
The power of community is incredible. Just as nice was receiving a phone call from my friend Molly this morning. “Hey, I was on DailyKos and saw your diary on the front-page. So funny that you laid that out in PowerPoint!”. Which makes me think: two totally unrelated appearances on totally unrelated blogs leads to two messages from unrelated friends.
Who needs tall and blonde when I have friends lookin’ out for me online?
Decision-making
July 18th, 2007How do you make decisions?
This way
Or this way
Just asking. Sure, the pictures are about more than just decisions. But I think they are illustrative. Compare/contrast. Discuss. Enjoy.
Gore pic h/t Thor Muller, which got me looking for a “Bush” at work pic, found via the White House.
(Kind of cross-posted at The New Down)
It could be kids, not age, that make a startup less likely
July 10th, 2007Someone was telling me that there is an age cutoff for founding a startup. According to an article from Psychology Today forwarded to me by another friend, it’s not the age that matters, it’s having kids.. and therefore needing to focus on their upbringing, which pulls an entrepreneur away from his or her startup dreams.
In every society at all historical times, the tendency to commit crimes and other risk-taking behavior rapidly increases in early adolescence, peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood, rapidly decreases throughout the 20s and 30s, and levels off in middle age.
This curve is not limited to crime. The same age profile characterizes every quantifiable human behavior that is public
…
The cost of competition, however, rises dramatically when a man has children, when his energies and resources are put to better use protecting and investing in them. The birth of the first child usually occurs several years after puberty because men need some time to accumulate sufficient resources and attain sufficient status to attract their first mate. There is therefore a gap of several years between the rapid rise in the benefits of competition and similarly rapid rise in its costs. Productivity rapidly declines in late adulthood as the costs of competition rise and cancel its benefits.
Some interesting food for thought in that article. I had the pleasure to work with Jo and Lawrence from Psychology Today, back in my Health days. Not only are they extremely nice fellows, but they know how to create compelling content.
making your own reality
June 29th, 2007At a big company, an idea “isn’t real until it’s in PowerPoint”.
Sadly, you can’t exactly launch a PowerPoint.
That’d make a good presentation, though. Only one slide needed.
Yahoo gossip
June 28th, 2007So much gossip-worthy politicking took place, and in addition, I am still getting a steady stream of news about all the drama from my friends there. I just had to post some of the news/gossip/rants about the latest shenanigans.
Just teasing. Move along now.
Saying goodbye to my big, purple friend. And all my little purple friends, too.
June 12th, 2007After almost 5 years (4 years, 11 months to be more precise) I’ve officially left Yahoo!
I remember so clearly the first time I stepped onto the campus in Sunnyvale, back in 2001. It was awesome, especially for someone who’d worked at a string of small startups. Here I was at Yahoo, the #1 site on the internet. Blazing fast. Easy to use. Beautiful, modern buildings. Sunny and bright. Glass cafeteria. Outdoor volleyball courts. I wasn’t sure if I was at an office, or some futuristic college campus.
It still is an impressive place. Now, of course, there is also a Mission College campus, a Santa Monica office, an OvertureYSM office in Pasadena, the San Francisco offices, Berkeley offices… apparently it’s part of Yahoo’s strategy to seed various cities with purple and yellow furniture, candy, caffeine, laptops, and some cool, smart people.
No doubt what I’ll miss most is the great people I had a chance to work with. If I try to list all of those people, this post would get insanely long. And then I’ll decide I have to link to their various online profiles, put up their photos, thank them specifically, maybe format the list yet again. Basically, I’ll never finish this post. I can’t even do the “team” shout out since I worked with several teams and groups across the Yahoo matrix. Is “you know who you are” good enough?? I hope so.
Suffice it to say that the time came for me to start something new, from the outside of the purple kingdom. The beauty of it is, I still have my friends and colleagues from the big Y (all day, every day, omnipresent on Y Messenger). It’s not really goodbye at all, except to the Yahoo! campus. To all my Yahoo friends, it’s just TTYS.
Facebook move shows how they think ahead, rather than defensively
May 24th, 2007Facebook is opening up its platform.
Facebook has become a primary relationship and identity broker for millions of people. Now outsiders can capitalize on that information in a safe way, pulling from users’ expressed interests in their profiles, building on their stated intention to attend events, or simply giving them more dedicated tools for expressing themselves. The outside apps will be woven into a structure that’s already been built and is utilized every day.
While other companies scurry to protect and seal off their user base, Facebook will help create a bigger network. It just makes intuitive sense that people want to tap into relationship networks, both developers and users. Facebook platform is great news, except for those companies who haven’t figured out they’ll have to open up eventually. Hopefully closed-minded companies will change their tune and open up, rather than take on the boring task of defending a shrinking network.
Write your own “Mission Accomplished” banner
May 2nd, 2007Now, normally, I try to keep my political blog separate from this one. But… yesterday was the anniversary of Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” stunt on a US aircraft carrier, in which he showed off his flightsuit, codpiece and all.
So check this out: a site where you can write your very own banner, and watch a great video to boot.
I hope you like mine.
(h/t Digby)