Archives / July, 2008

Lucky Pierre Marcolini

Back in May, I spent a long weekend in Belgium with my friends Jason and Martin. The mission: drink beer, eat fine food and acquire fine chocolate. I am pleased to report that the mission was a success, and I posted photographic evidence of all the beers were able to sample as we skipped from…

Cow Magnets: Who Knew?

In the “you learn something new every day” category, I was at the hardware store (McGuckin’s, of course) and came across cow magnets . At first I thought this product name was some sort of hardware joke, sort of like Duck Tape brand duct tape, which really isn’t used for (or on) ducks at all….

Two Great Weeks of Music

I just looked back on my calendar for the past two weeks and realized that July 2008 has been a good one for me in the live music department. It started on July 7th with a great solo performance by Shawn Colvin at Chautauqua, followed a few days later with a Friday evening show with…

Cloudy, with a chance of words

My friend Carl pointed out a cool site to me called wordle. It makes very pretty word/tag clouds. The one here is a rendering of my del.icio.us tags. Captures my interests pretty well, I’d say. Another fun word geek site with a name with only one character’s difference is called wordie, and it is sort…

I’ve Been Inc’d

OK, so it doesn’t appear to draw as much traffic as when one of my posts was dugg, but apparently my post about the stupidity of car alarms amused the folks over at Inc. Magazine and Inc.com. Thanks for the props, Inc!

Sharp’s Dull Service / My eCommerce Nightmare

Warning: long rant ahead, but I just concluded the worst and most protracted customer-service nightmare of my life and feel compelled to share it, since my experience was just preposterous. The subtitle of this post should be why you shouldn’t buy a big-screen TV online, even though it is so much cheaper than at your…

Culturegraph and Steely Dan

I’m a big fan of the site Culturegraph. Basically, readers submit pop-culture influenced gags that take graphic form — usually charts and graphs of some description. I’m also a fan because they’ve accepted a couple of my submissions (one Sting-related and one Michael McDonald related). The one that wasn’t accepted is probably only funny to…

Guitar Face!

There’s nothing like watching a musician’s face when they are deeply engaged playing their music. When Ian Rogers saw Soul Patch play a few weeks ago, he mentioned that I had a lot of good GuitarFace™ moments, which inspired me to look through the photos from that gig and previous gigs, which indeed confirmed that…

Topspin, Baby!

I’ve recently joined the board of an incredibly cool company called Topspin Media, via Foundry Group’s Series B investment in the company. This is an investment literally a decade in the making. I met Topspin’s co-founder, seed investor and Chairman Peter Gotcher about ten years ago while he was a venture partner at Redpoint, via…

The Declaration of Independence

I’ve been on a bit of a history kick lately and recently read great biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, men whose actions in large part helped birth our country and define the structure of our government and free-market economy. As our nation struggles today with the consequences of the last eight years under…