Quote of the Day

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

- George Bernard Shaw

Stimulus?

This whole stimulus package thing makes me want to wretch. $100B in consumer handouts is going to have a useful long-term impact? Please. Never mind that the country doesn’t have a spare $100B lying about…

iPhone Bluetooth – Crippleware?

I finally bought an iPhone. I was expecting a hardware rev yesterday, but obviously that’s not forthcoming, so I threw in the towel. It’s still in its shrinkwrap though as I do some research before I commit.

According to this blog post (and others), the iPhone only supports two (TWO, 2) Bluetooth profiles: HFP (Hands-Free) and HSP (Headset). There are over two dozen Bluetooth profiles, including a couple really useful ones like: DUN (Dial-Up Networking – so the phone can be used as a modem for your computer) and A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution) so you can listen to music on a Bluetooth stereo headset. The latter seems like a particularly major oversight.I use Bluetooth DUN all the time (not daily, but many times a week) on my Treo. I’m a fan – super useful when there’s just no WiFi handy. This site reports that folks are getting about 200 kbps on ATT EDGE. my WM5 Treo 750 gets about 300 kbps (I haven’t upgraded to WM6 to get HSDPA yet) on ATT. I can likely live with the slower speed, but not sure I can live without the functionality.

The Bluetooth stack that the iPhone uses is apparently sourced from OpenInterface, and they seem to support every Bluetooth Profile known to mankind. So my only logical conclusion is that this stuff was purposely crippled by Apple for some business or marketing reason, which is a major, annoying bummer.

So is there a way to hack around this or not?

Glenn Gould

I’ve been doing a deep dive into Glenn Gould’s oeuvre – both aural and textual. I was amused to learn how hard recording engineers worked to avoid and/or remove his humming and singing at the various sessions. Remove it? It’s such a wonderful part of the music – I couldn’t imagine wanting it gone! Some of the recordings are almost duets of piano and voice!

Jacksonville Condolences

The Pats put on a great show last night. For the first half they couldn’t pull away. They got their act together after halftime, for sure. For the whole game Garrard and crew worked their tails off. I was impressed. Brady’s fake was a hoot – I’ve been watching the replays non-stop!

My favorite headline this morning was on Don Bank’s article on SI.com:

Jags did what it takes to stop Patriots — and still lost

Ouch.

Fear vs. Greed / East vs. West

I was mentally-jazzing on east coast fundraising this morning and my brain wandered to the conventional wisdom bit about markets and business cycles being driven by fear, greed, and herd behavior.

In the VC world, I don’t think herd behavior is a driver by itself – it’s just a piece of greed or fear depending upon the situation (feel free to disagree!).

I wondered whether or not you can correlate Jim Matheson’s conversation that

The Boston establishment is about preserving wealth, not creating it.

and Paul Maeder’s statement that

in California everybody knows everything goes to the moon, so they actually make things go to the moon …

to fear and greed?

Can we assert that the fundamental difference between east and west coast VCs is that the majority of west coast guys invest primarily on greed while the majority of east coast folks invest primarily on fear?

I am not asserting this, but it seems like a potentially interesting thought train.

Skewed Perspective

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball ninety million miles away – and think this to be normal – is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

Douglas Adams

Madder Rose

Madder Rose’s first album Bring It Down has got to be one of the more under-appreciated debuts of all time. It’s on rotation this morning, keeping me from swallowing a bullet as I fuck with financial models for the zillionth time.

Highly recommended listening. Enjoy!

Generous and Inarticulate

Did you mean to tell me but seem to forget?
Since when were you so generous and inarticulate?

Elvis Costello

Video from the VH1 tribute to Elvis Costello. Fiona Apple does this incredible Elvis song 110% justice, and then she 10Xs it from there. Amazing performance.

Kudos to the USPS!

I had to mail a package this week to a friend downtown. The only time I had to go to a post office during daylight hours was before 0700 one morning. I assumed that would be a problem, but I figured I’d try the main post office in Framingham on Route 30 – I was going by anyway. Two things surprised me. First the facility is apparently open 24 hours – neat! The second and more impressive surprise was that they’ve got this damn useful Automated Postal Center.

It’s got a scale to the left and a touchscreen to the right. It works just as you’d expect it to, and you can apparently do all the standard (and then some) extra services like tracking and certified and whatnot. Pay with a credit card. Couldn’t be easier! Kudos, USPS!