Archived Posts for December 2010

The Joy of Stats

This is a fantastic documentary – highly recommended to watch. I love stats!

  1:44pm  •  Science & Technology  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

The Mobile Device App Market

I’ve been hearing a lot over the last month about how the Big Growth Area for 2011 is the mobile market. Here are a random couple articles that are relevant:

• p://technmarketing.com/iphone/peter-vesterbacka-maker-of-angry-birds-talks-about-the-birds-apple-android-nokia-and-palmhp/
• Mobile Economics Will Trend Toward Web Economics

  12:28am  •  Internet  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Reddit talks about what it was like growing up in the 70s & 80s

Some samples from an intriguing Ask Me thread:

• No cell phone, pagers, texting, voicemail, or answering machines. If you wanted to meet up with someone, you had to call them until they were home and picked up, and then make plans. If you ended up at a party, that was usually it. No “hey I’m over at this address, swing by” or anything like that.
• No Facebook or email. Long distance calling was expensive. When I left for college, I wouldn’t hear from friends for months, unless one of us bothered to write a letter and mail it. You would just lose track of people.
• Sundays were the days to call family and friends, because rates were cheaper.
• If you went to study abroad, or if you joined the Peace Corps, you were really isolated from friends and family, pre-Internet. You might send or receive letters on very thin airmail paper, but imagine 2 years not speaking to, or seeing your friends and family, except for an occasional snapshot.
• If you ran out of film, no more pictures. You would be very selective about what to take a picture of.
• There is no film or video of me (or most of my friends) throughout our childhoods. Super-8 had died off, and VHS wasn’t yet available. I have no idea what I acted or sounded like, or how poorly I played soccer.
• You had to book all travel through a travel agent (or call the airline, but go to the airport to get the ticket).
• You could buy a plane ticket with cash and just walk onto the plane.
• If you wanted to know something, there was no Google or Wikipedia. You might be able to find out a basic fact if you had a set of encyclopedias. But most information, from important stuff to basic trivia (“who was in that movie?”) was not available unless you had a reference book or went to the library and really searched.
• if you really liked someone, as a rite of courtship you would make them a mix tape. you needed a dual-tape deck, or possibly a boom box. it had a cassette “player” on the left and a cassette “recorder” on the right. you’d put a blank tape in the recorder, and then cue up sixteen to twenty audio cassettes in the player — using the fast-forward and rewind buttons over and over until you got to the start of the song you liked on each one. you pressed the “play” button on the cassette player on the left and the “record” button on the cassette player on the right at the same time, and the blank tape would gradually get a (hissy, degraded, second- or third- generation) copy of each song added to it. 90 minute blank tapes were standard, so you had 45 minutes on each side. you only ever had a vague idea of how much space was left on the tape.
• Playgrounds were covered in wood chips. These were meant to break your fall off of the giant rusted steel playground structures that had large bolts and lugnuts sticking out everywhere. There was no such thing as soft padding anywhere. Playgrounds were made of steel, wood, and blood stains.
• Kids born in the 90s and even the early 2000s have no fucking idea what it’s like to grow up [or just live] without constant access to media and information. Their heads would explode if they had to live the first 15-20 years of their life with [at most] 14.4 access to the outside world and no cell phone.

Oh man, I’m part of that generation… even though it was the tail end, that is still somewhat depressing. I think the difference between kids growing up in my parents’ generation and my generation is nothing compared to the difference between life for my generation and the next (i.e. the kids who were born just after the turn of the century).

One of my childhood memories: after school (year 1 or 2), I’d hang around my parents’ workplace, waiting for them to finish up for the day. I would spend the afternoon hanging out at the nearby coin-op laundry watching cigarette-smoking teenagers play a Galaga machine, climbing trees, getting ice blocks at the local milkbar, and getting into general mischief with a couple of friends. Hours of fun. And then at home I would play RPGs like Shadowkeep, Wizardry and Bard’s Tale and classics like Lode Runner, Choplifter, Dig Dug and Robotron.

  11:18pm  •  Science & Technology  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (1)  • 

Cities over the last 365 days (2010)

Reprising this 2009 post, here’s a list of cities and towns I’ve passed through over the last year. It’s a very sorry looking list compared to all the past lists… hoping to remedy that in 2011.

Los Angeles, CA
Laguna Beach (OC), CA
San Francisco, CA*
New York, NY*
Union City, NJ†
Salt Lake City, UT*
Ogden, UT
West Yellowstone, MT
Yellowstone National Park, WY*
Blackfoot, ID†
Napa region, CA*
Tokyo, Japan
Washington, DC

All places had overnight visits, unless marked with ††.
* Multiple entries, non-consecutive days.
†† Daytrip only.

  11:06pm  •  Travel  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Merry Christmas!

May your days be merry and bright!

Oh, and this is awesome:

  1:35am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

London Review of Books on the topic of Bed Bugs

LROB writes about one of the hotter pop topics of 2010: bed bugs. I found this part to be somewhat amusing:

The landmark case this century has been Mathias v. Accor Economy Lodging Inc. The plaintiffs, Burl and Desiree Mathias, were bitten by bugs while staying at a Motel 6 in downtown Chicago. They claimed that in allowing guests to be attacked by bedbugs in rooms costing upwards of $100 a day, the defendant was guilty of wilful and wanton conduct. The jury awarded each plaintiff $5000 in compensatory damages and $186,000 in punitive damages. The defendant appealed, complaining primarily about the level of the punitive damages, but the appeal court judge, Richard Posner, dismissed the appeal. His decision was bold: a Supreme Court statement had been made not long before that “few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, to a significant degree, will satisfy due process.”

The “lower than 10x” rule of thumb was laid out in State Farm.

  6:43pm  •  Law  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (1)  • 

Survivor Nicaragua Ep 12

Bunch of freaking quitters. Weak. WEAK. Zero respect. And a lifelong regret for the two of them. There’s just something about this that really annoys me. Incredibly disappointing.

Now pulling for Jane or Holly to win. They are both impressive women and deserve it.

  11:09pm  •  TV  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

An incubator blacklists a law firm

TechCrunch reported that The Founder Institute blacklisted Gunderson Dettmer, a reputable VC-focused law firm for having:

caused problems for Founders around the country. In New York, Gunderson has told Founders that Class F stock hurts entrepreneurs and allegedly spread negative rumors about other law firms to secure clients from the program. In San Diego, associates at Gunderson billed Founders for cosmetic changes to template agreements that have been accepted “as is” by dozens of lawyers from other firms across the country. In the Bay Area, Gunderson billed multiple rounds of cosmetic changes to standard investment agreements that caused at least one Graduate financing to fall apart needlessly. The Institute has contacted various attorneys at Gunderson and had unsatisfactory responses.

I’ve never had any dealings with Gunderson (apart from hearing one of their partners present about the firm once), but I was still happy to see below the TC article a real flood of comments from clients and former clients expressing how much of a great experience they had with them. E.g:

In fact, GD single-handedly saved our Series B financing deal with a heroic, creative, out-of-the-box solution on a midnight “party line” call with 2 VC firms, 2 law firms, and 2 founders. Additionally, in a handful of other separate cases, GD has generously done me a number of favors (some gratis) that has helped minimize if not eliminate costs and friction.

I’m a bit surprised by the experiences depicted by FI as my take on GD is consistent with other founders’ experiences that I’ve heard and I’d be happy to share more with anyone who contacts me directly. My guess is that, much like any firm (i.e. VC, accounting, etc), what really matters are the people you work with and I can vouch for every attorney I’ve worked with at GD.

I guess the two things here are: when evaluating whether to pick a firm, solicit multiple opinions; and often it’s the particular partner you work with rather than the firm you work with (although the higher caliber the firm, the greater the chance that the partner you get, if picked at random, is going to be a gun).

  7:53pm  •  Law  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  •