Celebrating Lil' Pinot's Birthday at the Larkspur Creek Inn

Last night, Lil' Pinot and I enjoyed a wonderful dinner at the Larkspur Creek Inn. What a cool little four star restaurant that I had never really heard of, though I've since learned that it's been a renowned spot for San Franciscans since the turn of the century, where they would come out to enjoy the wonderful country atmosphere and food. Lil' Pinot's Alaskan Halibut was delicious and while I ordered an ordinary dish in the pot roast, it too was very well prepared. The waitress at one point casually asked us if we were there for a special occasion, and we let it slip out that it was Lil' Pinot's birthday but that she wasn't a desert fan. Well, that didn't seem to stop them from doing a very sweet thing in making sure that Lil' Pinot's day was immortalized. The picture above tells the story, all written in a yummy chocolate sauce which I gladly indulged in so Lil' Pinot could enjoy it vicariously :)

Kitesurfing season gets started with a bang!

Well all signs for the weekend were that after a week of getting teased for wind, things would finally come together. As my buddies and I began to assess the wind meters we began to get prematurely concerned that we might get skunked again. First we watched the meters, then we chased the wind to an area known as the Brickyard in San Rafael. Nothin' doing, the winds were too light there though they had once looked promising. Crissy Field was slow in building and all fogged in. After a little patience, we suddenly saw the move in our pagers indicate that the wind had kicked up to 17 kts at Crissy...time to bust a move.

Crissy was still fogged in when we got there, but by the time we were rigged and ready to go at 2:30pm, it was like the gods smiled upon us and parted the fog to let the sun shine through. Precious. Perfect winds, sun and a nice swell under the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, not much more we could have asked for. The crew was out "en masse" and a good time was had by all. After 1.5 hours of riding, then packing up our stuff, the fog suddenly returned and closed the playground just as quickly as it had opened things up. Nice.

Sunday I made the move to Sherman Island in the Delta where I managed to get in three sessions, and though I'm really out of shape as the season gets started here and only managed an hour ride each time out, it was as perfect of a 70+ degree day as we could have hoped for this early in the season. The wind was steady and all I can say is that I'm still buzzing (and aching ;) from the smoothness of the conditions on this second day of the weekend. All in all, a great start to what we hope will be an awesome season.

Snowboarding Sugar Bowl yesterday

After hearing all of the stories on how much snow Tahoe got this past week, I decided that it was time to investigate. Lil' Pinot was already boasting of her girl's trip to Aspen, which had the auspicious start of dealing with a delayed flight followed by a canceled one leading to a 4 hour van ride to the resort, but that's for another time...where was I...oh yeah, so "Tahoe this Friday" became my mantra this week. As the day approached, a few friends who were going with me began to bail, when it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn't seen a very dear buddy who lives up there. And so, on Thurs evening put a call into the only guy in the world I know who can on less than 10 hours notice rearrange his schedule for a big day on the mountain. My buddy Mario is with whom I spent a season 6 years ago snowboarding most of the 100 days I had that season. He's a few years younger but really pushes me to ride my best.

And so, the amigos were reunited yesterday for 4.5 hours (non-stop from 10:00a to 2:30p) of remembering what we were like that epic season (2000/'01). By the end of that season, we were both laying out 360s and more (he actually pulled off a front flip) off of 25-30 foot cliffs on powder days. We used to describe fresh pow days as having a tough day at the office (when riding is all you're doing for a season, that becomes your office :) because we would throw our biggest tricks on those days. Well, yesterday was more about remembering than throwing down. We had a great time finding the goods at Sugar Bowl getting turns in untouched pow (had to know your way around to find these). Even the areas that had already been ridden were still nice with easy to move snow as there was a crisp cold in the air, though the sun was keeping our bodies perfectly tempered. This was only my second bona fide day of pure snowboarding for the season, and his fifth (though he got 3 of those in the past week), so our stamina wasn't what it used to be, but we still rode hard and extreme (as in the terrain rather than the tricks). It was good to know that even though I got tired faster, I could still hang with Mario on the big stuff.

Anyway, it's my understanding it was beautiful up there today and should be like that tomorrow, albeit a bit warmer for some perfect spring conditions. Hope you get some.

Lovin' Blurb!

For the past 4 months, Lil' Pinot and I have been handling the biz dev activity for Blurb. In case you haven't heard about it, it's an on-demand photobook service. The quality and price and really nice and they get lots of creative professionals and creative enthusiasts using Blurb for creating books of their work as portfolios. These are much cheaper than more traditional portfolios but of high quality and providing options on book size. I believe there's an artist experimenting by trying to selling a compilation of his work in book form, (cheaper than the real thing ;).

Anyway, a few weeks ago a good buddy of mine took a bunch of pictures of Lil' Pinot and I snowkiting in Skyline Ridge, Utah. (direwolff.wordpress.com/2007/0...e-utah/ ). Well, he turned them into a book of our snowkiting adventure, complete with shots of the area, other kiters, that really told a story. He wrote captions as well as a page of text where appropriate describing the area or the adventure. It blew away some friends of mine who saw the book a few days ago. After seeing the third book that someone I know has created, I'm convinced of how totally cool this capability is for any one to have. There are lots of family books getting created as well.

Tribe already offers the services of QOOP for soft-cover books and other great stuff (ie. posters, shirts, mugs, etc.), of which I have a few :) But, where you're intent is to create a coffee table book of high-end production value, Blurb should be included in your investigations. I realize I'm biased here, but having only recently gotten the book, I'm still all googly-eyed over it :)

Do my eyes deceive me or...

...has Tribe become cool again?! F**ken A! It's really nice to see some of the ideas of the team finally getting to see the light of day. Congrats to the team that remained there and worked through what was probably the most difficult period in any start-up's life, when the wrong management takes over. Fortunately, they've persevered and come out the other end with what I think is the dawning of an awesome new beginning. Wow, now I may just need to start blogging here again too :-)

Special shout out to the "Back to the Future" logo!!! Yeah baby!!!

KickTheOilHabit.org

A friend of mine sent me this link recommending the video on the landing page, and so after seeing it I'm recommending this to those of you who happen to catch this blog post, so you can also experience it.

Check out: www.KickTheOilHabit.org

Some times it's the simple ideas that are worth the most, and while this isn't solving the big picture, it may be a good achievable first step towards beginning to reverese the natural course of things.

When politicians have too much time and too little knowledge on their hands, things get weird

From the department of misguided laws and regulations that never needed to get the time of day, we bring you Rep. Michael G. Fitzpatrick (R-Pa) latest attempt to bring his vision of the perfect world to the rest of our country (does any one know why it's always the Pennsylvania representatives that seem to behave with such disdain for tolerance of any sort?).

Follow the action here, www.latimes.com/news/print...65050.story , to see why he's seeking a bill to block access to MySpace...and this guy calls himself an American, blasted! And of course, my favorite line if not for its idiocy and hypocricy comes in the form of:

"The social networking sites have become, in a sense, a happy hunting ground for child predators," said Fitzpatrick, a father of six children, including three teen girls. His legislation, called the Deleting Online Predators Act, "is essentially a bill to protect children from the Internet."

(Someone had better tell him that it wasn't so long ago that the House of Representatives' pages program used to be the happy hunting ground for child predators not so long ago ;-)

And how does Rep. Fitzpatrick propose to achieve his goal of protecting the children, you ask? By prohibiting "anyone under 18 from accessing ["social networking" websites] on school or library computers". Will the people of Pennsylvania (a state that I have much affinity with and a great respect for its people) *PLEASE* stop voting for idiots!!! Arrrrgggghhhh!!!! :-)

NSA sleuthing and the importance of social networks

Ran into an interesting article this morning on how the NSA is using its access to Americans' telephone calls (are these the "lugs" so often referred to in "Law & Order"?), courtesy of our friendly phone companies, to map social networks. Here's the article, www.wired.com/news/techno...70888-0.html , while short, it gets the basic point across.

So imagine that we could find out through people's phone records (oh yeah, and cell phones too), everyone they called. As the article suggests, knowing what was discussed is far less important than who's talking to who. Building implicit social networks is something that many services have been trying to do, but for a start-up the challenge is far greater than for the NSA and it's "we have ways of making you talk" methods for getting the phone call records from the telcos. Companies like Spoke (www.spoke.com ) do this for corporations where they let their employees' e-mails get processed for just such type of relationships. Others like ZoomInfo (www.zoominfo.com ) work on putting together implicit bios on people from sucking in the various press releases, news articles, and Web site company bios about them. With services like LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com ) or one that I recall Alacra (www.alacra.com ) offering that mapped executives' corporate affiliations and board seats, you can really start getting a good sense for the corporate relationship landscape. Of course none of this does anything to address mapping the "masses", and certainly nothing quite like the phone logs.

OK, so where am I going with this? Something about this feels like a more invasive privacy violation than someone getting a hold of my credit card information and purchase history. Explicit links are one thing, but when we get to implicit it raises several other issues. These are currently being raised and debated in the context of AttentionTrust.org, but also need to be looked at in this latest NSA context. At what point will people's information be held to a higher standard, to a *private* standard. Has the idea of *privacy* really lost all meaning under the directive of the war on terror (someone please explain how one can be at war with "a state of intense fear"...and they say that English is our country's national language, but I digress ;-).

Now if we take a counter position here for a moment, the extent of the abuses that we've been experiencing in corporations and government (some times being one and the same) lately, which I do believe have greatly surpassed those of previous decades (part of our culture of breaking world records I guess) both in scope and in damage, this really starts to support the idea that we need a way to understand who knows whom both in government and in corporations. If to at least stem the payola abuses between corporate lobbyists and government officials. The Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay fiasco certainly points to how lobbyists and charities were even used in quite an elaborate scheme. But when you go below the surface and start to see who knew who, you really get a good picture for how incestuous and insular the group involved in these fraudulent activities were. You also get a good picture of how and why those involved were involved and how they knew each other.

So the question of privacy here really comes with a double-edged sword, of which both sides are strongly defendable. What also occurs to me is that those often making the laws are the ones who violate them the most aggregiously and for whom these laws really need apply. Call it the cost of going into "public" life. The NSA knowing my social network won't really do much for them given that I have no inclination for power nor for any nefarious activities. But them knowing Tom DeLay's social network could unearth more crimes than we could prosecute him for in his lifetime. The funny thing is that he has already shown the power to have judges and evidence removed from his case, so will any of these NSA actions really ever affect him?

Given that government officials are held to higher standards (by their own doing and arrogance most often) and corporate chieftains of public companies are now making significant sums of money and positioning themselves as part of the public trust, then it's probably right that these folks be subjected to the social network mapping exercise, while leaving the "hoi polloi" to go about its private business privately. Or at worse case, people should only have this sort of intrusion occur if they're suspected of committing a crime, but not as a matter or policy as it appears to be happening with these NSA exercises. It's really very interesting to see that in our country where the cries of privacy and freedom are loudly pronounced and bandied around like they're part of the common sense of living here, we now live in a place that 's closely reminiscent of what we were told was happening in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s. It was all the rage to talk about how the Soviets were spying on their own and no one was free to say anything against the government for fear of retribution. They weren't free was the mantra espoused in this country at the time. Well, who's not free now? ;-) If you follow the progression of these violations you can start to see how the current investigations into government "whistle blowers" tied to mapping of their social networks could start to get a lot of people in trouble for doing the right thing...and yes, then we could never say anything derogatory against our government either...but I digress ;-)

With that I'll end my rant :-)

Peace!

So what's missing out there Stowe?

Flew to LA today for the AlwaysOn OnHollywood conference at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. The hotel sits in a pretty seedy part of Hollywood as was described by someone, but I like to think of it as the character filled more edgy side of Hollywood. The Chinese Theatre is straight out of my hotel room window and its a veritable carnival out there w/some gal dancing on her own non-stop, musicians down a block or so from her, tourists by the dozens, all sorts of interesting costumed characters (wait, I see a Goofy handing out pamphlets of some sort), all-in-all a pretty crazy scene out there.

While having lunch, I noticed Stowe Boyd blogging away down the hotel bar from me and went over to introduce myself. Super nice guy and he's apparently become a paid model recently. He pulled this off by auctioning his t-shirt-wear space to the highest bidders and is now booked w/logo'd t-shirts for the next 240 days. Too funny. He had very fond words for Tribe (wishing it was doing better), and more specifically for Mark Pincus.

After eating lunch I caught up w/him again and asked him the question, "so Stowe, what's missing out there, or what have you seen that's interesting, new and unique?". He paused and explained per one of his previous posts (which I'll refer to here after I find it on his site), that there are lots of clusters of so-called Web 2.0 applications. It feels like as soon as someone does something interesting several others rush to do the same stuff with incrememental differences. But it does seem like there's lots of other stuff out there that no one has yet taken a crack at. The example he gave was accounting systems.

I loved it. Given that accounting systems do often require several people to interact w/them, enabling a distributed Web accessible accounting system does seem to make sense. Sure there are security issues, but no better no worse than what Salesforce.com has to deal with. Perhaps even with a synching component if the company deemed a need to back-up its content locally as well as having it sit in the cloud. I thought this simple example was actually very insightful given how many small companies out there deal with accountants on a retainer basis and need them to regularly look over their bookkeeping entries. It would save both the accountants and the small companies time. For the accountants they could simply review reports electronically at will. For the companies, they'd save time in not having to print everything out or e-mail reports to the accountants.

I'm always amazed by what interesting information can get unearthed some times from asking the simple questions. Now time to get started working a hosted accounting system before a cluster emerges there too :-)

Bush on Plame...but what about the tax payers?

With all the hubbub about Bush leaking Valerie Plame's CIA role to the public, the speculation over how he's allowed to release classified material and so there should be nothing wrong with what he did, it occurred to me that this all begs some basic questions. For one, if he did nothing wrong, then why didn't he come clean...ah, I mean why didn't he just tell the public ("come clean" sounds like I'm suggesting that he was dirty or something, right? ;-)? Afterall, given how long the investigations into this matter have been going on, at great expense to the American tax payers (that's us folks), if he had simply divulged the fact that he authorized this release of information then this matter would have been addressed and resolved years ago.

As always, I suspect every one involved knows that this was not all that clean of a matter. So the next question is how dirty of a matter was it and what punishment should be doled out given that fact? The President's effective denial to all branches of government (since no one appears to have known about this until Libby's recent statements) for as long as he declined to divulge his involvement, suggests that at the very least there's a matter of lying to the American people (yeah, I know you liberals out there are chuckling at my seeming naivete on this matter, "why he's been lying to us since the day he took office" ;-) and to Congress. Doesn't that mean something any more, or is only when one denies receiving felatio in the oval office?

In the words of conservative movement in America, "I think it's time someone be held accountable"! Both Bush & Cheney have done nothing but obstruct justice in this matter and it's time that they take responsibility for their actions, not simply by admitting their guilt and complicity, but by also being removed (or stepping down, I'm not fussy here) from office.

OK now, who's with me?!...close your eyes, click your heels three times and repeat after me, "there's no place like home, there's no place like home"...I can dream can't I? :-)