Category: Startups

We went to Beaver Lake High School and Caucused today. It was jam packed and old timers were telling us this is the fullest they’ve ever seen it. The table next to us got 50 votes for Obama and only 4 for Clinton. Our table (or precinct) got 25 for Obama and 14 for Clinton. That resulted in 4 delegates for Obama and 2 for Clinton at our table. Kerry was elected as a delegate for Obama so she has to go to the regional caucuses in April and then maybe county and national.

It sounds like Obama took WA by storm today which is really great news and it was awesome getting together with our neighbors and chatting about how much we think Obama rocks.

I think one of the big differentiators with Obama is that he gets you thinking about how you can get involved and how you can help your country. It’s a very Kennedy-like approach to politics (…ask what you can do for your country) rather than Clinton who simply tells you what she’s going to do while she’s in office. It’s the people in a country that make it great, not the politicians and Obama gets that.

Based on the passion of the people I was seeing today, if for some reason the Democratic party superdelegates intervene and elect Clinton as the nominee, it will shatter the party like never before. The folks who support Clinton aren’t as passionate and as vocal as those who support Obama – at least here in Washington and in many other states from what I gather – and my guess is that we’ll all hit the streets and make a lot of noise if something like that happens.

This is a very exciting time for the United States and it reminds me of South Africa in the early 90’s when the ANC came into power and Nelson Mandela was released from prison and took presidency. I was in the Cape Town city center when Mandela spoke for the first time and one senses the same kind of enthusiasm at Obama rally’s that we had back then for someone new and a great change in the direction of our country.

Kerry and I hit the Obama Rally at the Staples Center today at 11am. We got there late and it was already full to capacity – which is 17,000 people. So we decided to hang around outside with a crowd of around 5,000 other folks in freezing rain. The buzz was awesome and when Barack showed up he did a little impromptu speech on the stairs with nervous secret service agents behind him with an SUV with the door open and the engine running. Then they broadcast the speech from inside on the speakers outside. It was more like a rock concert than a political rally.

The message that resonated with me was “We don’t need a disease care system we need a health care system” – talking about preventative maintenance in health care rather than treating illness once they arise.

A few years ago drug companies started moving their focus to ‘lifestyle drugs’ like Lipitor that provide a constant revenue stream for the entire life of the patient. Lipitor is the worlds top selling drug incidentally. Keeping people healthy is not very profitable but treating sick people for their whole lives is very profitable.

The NY Times had an article yesterday on Lipitor and how it is being investigated by a congresional committee. There’s an interesting follow-up article today about how the congressional committee is trying to track down the stunt double that actually did the rowing that Dr Jarvik was supposed to be doing in the Lipitor ads. The NY Times says the rower is from Seattle and is a member of the Lake Washington rowing club and it was filmed locally.

A friend took this photo inside the staples center (right-click and view image for a much larger version)

Our morning walk took us past two bald eagles sitting in a tall tree with no leaves so we had a great view. The NW Rocks!

I spent some time with Marc Andreessen and Naval Ravikant yesterday which was a lot of fun. They’re both Apple converts and Marc is a recent convert. So today I decided to take the jump. I’ve had a macbook lying around for a while that I use as a dev server but my dev server is now sitting in a cosy hosting facility so I grabbed the macbook, bought Office:mac which was surprisingly cheap at about $150 and – what the hell – bought an iPhone while I was at it.

So I’m all Appled up. Of course I’m waiting for my iPhone to activate – I got a lot further than Kerry did before she got stuck, but based on her experience I’m expecting the worst so maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Update: I was pleasantly surprised. The trick is to enter a ZIP code that is in the same area code as the cellphone number you’re trying to transfer. That’s what caught Kerry and I didn’t make the same mistake and my number transferred without a call to AT&T. SWEET!!

Not to give widgets a bad name… (ours are FAST!!) but a friend is on the front page of Delicious and his facebook widget has just slowed his site to a crawl. It looks like badge.facebook.com is down right now.

Dell’s fiscal year ends Feb 2nd. If you want the best deal on servers negotiate with a Dell sales person at the end of a quarter. This one ends in a few days so you’d better hurry if you’re going to place an order. If you want slightly cheaper prices and same day shipping (Dell takes 2 weeks to ship) then email me – I’m trying out a guy who resells “previously ordered new” 2950’s in Florida.

I turned on VS today to check if there was anything on fly fishing showing. I watched a father and son harvest a bear. They were dressed in hunting camo gear. Dad had the tripod and video camera set up and son had a high powered rifle with high powered scope.

A big black bear came sauntering out of the forest to take a drink at the waters edge about 200 ft away. After much giggling anticipation son took the shot and the bear took the hit, ran off and died a short way away.

I have a few questions about the whole affair and maybe a few bear hunters can help me out:

Is this sporting? Taking a shot at 200 ft from a high powered scoped rifle doesn’t seem like much of a challenge. The world record sniper shot is almost 4000 ft (and it killed an armed human enemy combatant).  There’s no stalking involved in bear hunting – especially when you consider there’s son and dad standing in the open 200 ft away with the bear ignoring them complete with VS channel film crew standing next to them with broadcast quality film gear.

Is it a right of passage? I’m not sure what son learned from the whole experience. To take the easy shots? That bears don’t really give a shit about you until you shoot them?

Is it an impressive feat that will give son the street cred to start life? When your guests come over and sit in your family room  next to your bear rug to watch your home video of an easy shot and the death of a beautiful piece of American landscape that was trying to get a drink of water, I doubt they’re going to be impressed.

Does bear meat taste particularly good? No, it tastes like greasy beef and it tastes like crap if the bear has been eating dead fish. And I doubt you’ll be eating 300 to 500 pounds of greasy bear meat.

And why call it “harvesting” when it has nothing to do with subsistence and all you’re really doing is getting kitted out in the latest Cabela’s catalog gear and playing cowboy in the forest with your video camera.

So really this looks to me like a fashion statement. Look tough with gun, shoot big bear on TV, pose with big bear for closing shot. Skin and decapitate bear for bear rug and trophy to show girls how manly you are and leave carcass to rot.

I guess I’m a little confused about why this is on the ‘sports’ channel.

We totaled it all up and 3.5 hours spent on the phone to both t-mobile and AT&T and the iPhone works. Strangely enough she actually seems to think it’s worth it. Whatever. I’m sticking with my Blackberry for now. Who needs an interface that’s good enough to lick and those sweet animation effects and that beautiful touch screen and super-bright display anyway.

Obama’s victory speech at Iowa this evening was one of the most inspiring political speeches I’ve ever seen, particularly the second half. Watch it on cpan.org and it’ll be on youtube tomorrow.

I gave a loved one an Apple iPhone as a gift this afternoon. The happiness lasted until she started trying to transfer her cellphone number from T-Mobile (who we love) to AT&T (the only network with iPhones).

After spending 40 minutes on the phone with an AT&T customer service rep she had to call T-Mobile and when she called AT&T back they had lost all her data – which meant another 40 minutes. It also meant they had to do another credit check which dings her credit a second time.

She asked the AT&T rep if she could speak to a manager, got a deep sigh and the rep hung up on her. Of course she didn’t get a name.

…she’s sitting across the way from me right now singing “…every rose has it’s thorn” And amazingly she’s about to try a third time to activate her phone.

She’s not alone. Googling for AT&T iPhone Nightmare yields thousands of miserable customer stories.

People are quick to blame AT&T but in my humble opinion Apple are complete bastards for partnering with the crappiest network in the USA – and for turning my gift into a curse.