A tip of the hat to Scott Epstein for digging this one out of the archives. Scott and I had lunch a few weeks ago and he brought this along for me after seeing my post of the old Excite TV commercials. Sun ran this ad promoting their server and our search engine after Excite’s multi-million dollar purchases of Sun hardware to power the launch of Excite.com in October 1995.

If memory serves, the server we purchased from Sun to handle the search traffic during the launch of Excite was an eight-CPU box with a gig or two of RAM, which cost around $250k, of which $50k – $70k was the price for the RAM alone! Happily, Mr. Moore has been hard at work since then, bringing the price of a gig of RAM down to around $30.

And, better late(r) than never. Between our compulsion to relentlessly polish the songs and tweak the mix, our day jobs, getting married and having children, half the band moving to Colorado and starting up a new venture fund, sometimes I feared we’d never get the thing done.

But we did. I’m excited to announce that my band, Soul Patch, has finally released our second album, aptly titled Sooner or Later, over six years after the release of our first album in 2001, Summers in Rangoon. We’re extremely proud of how it turned out, and it brings together our eclectic influences into a cohesive sound that is reminiscent of Beck, Steely Dan and Phish, yet is also uniquely our own. We actually got the CD back from the duplication house a couple months ago, but waited to publicly announce it while it worked its way through the tubes of the internet commerce system until it was widely available. You can now find it on CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon and many other spots online.

In addition to yours truly on lead guitar, my partner at Foundry Group, Jason Mendelson, plays drums on the album, Nick Peters is my partner in guitar-crime, and a guy I’ve worked with (at Excite, back in the day) and been friends with and played in bands with since seventh grade, Scott Derringer, is the bassist. We were also lucky to have one of the most incredible players I know, my longtime guitar guru Chris Rossbach appear on a song, and, finally, the very talented Kevin McCourt (the one guy whose day job is actually being a musician and who plays with the likes of Stevie Wonder) on keyboards. Each of us share vocal duties and songwriting credits. This album is a true product of the digital age, with different instrumental tracks recorded in my old studio in Portola Valley, CA, my new studio in Boulder, Nick’s studio in Palo Alto, and Kevin’s studio in Los Angeles, and with final mastering done in Austin, TX. Finally, I should also give props to the talented Lawrence Hamashima for his excellent cover art.

If you are so inclined, please become a fan on our Facebook page or iLike, where you can sample the music, or come visit the Soul Patch website for even more background on our band, including lyrics, our first album, our blog, and the requisite paraphernalia like t-shirts and coffee mugs. If you like what you hear, buy a physical or digital copy of the album, and if you are a blogger and dig the tunes, please post about it, like our friend and Big Time VC Fred Wilson did a couple of weeks ago.

I love my new MacBook Air, but yesterday I discovered a design flaw: it is just too small. I left it in the seat-back pocket on the plane I took from Denver to San Francisco. Brad blogged about this yesterday and kindly kept my identity (and absentmindedness) out of his post, but I felt compelled to blog about it today because United actually recovered the missing laptop for me.

I made Jason get up early and drive with me from the Hotel Vitale to SFO (we had meetings on the peninsula) so I could check with United’s lost items desk. Amazingly, they had recovered the laptop and even checked my mail client to figure out my identity — they had narrowed it down the owner to one of two people, either me or Jason, so it was good he was with me. Since I often gripe about United in my tweets and blog posts, I thought I’d give them credit where credit is due. Thanks United, you guys saved the day! I certainly thought my Mac was gone forever.

As an aside, I told this story to someone I met yesterday, and he said I was the third MacBook Air owner he’d heard of who had lost his machine. One other person also left it on a plane, but the third guy had his Air in a stack of magazines and newspapers, and his wife put it out with the recycling! The thing is so small and light, I think it might be getting lost more than the average laptop.

I’ve always enjoyed word games of all sorts and compulsively rearrange most words and phrases I encounter to see if there are any amusing acronyms to be found within them. In college, I even wrote a Boggle-playing program in LISP with my friend Martin Reinfried.

Naturally, I’ve spent time on the internet anagram server (which, beautifully, is an acronym for I, rearrangement servant) in order to find acronyms for words and phrases that are too long for me to do easily in my head. Just as ego-searching is popular on Google, I’ve used the server to find my favorite anagram for my name. Previously, the best anagram I’d encountered for Ryan McIntyre was My inner Tracy. Today, thanks to Pete Warden, I have a new favorite anagram for my name: Tyranny Crime. Should I ever release a solo album, I now know the title.

And while I’m on the subject of fun word sites online, I should point out Wordie.org, sort of a Digg or Flickr for word enthusiasts. My word-feed of favorite words can be found here. Thanks go to Ben Casnocha for pointing out Wordie to me a year or two ago.

Check out the post I just authored on the Foundry Group blog about our interest in the evolution of the man-machine interface beyond the somewhat long-in-the-tooth mouse/keyboard/windows-GUI paradigm. We call this thematic area of interest human computer interaction, or HCI for short. This is an area we’re watching closely as we look for new investment opportunities at Foundry Group.

I was in Vegas for a couple days last week at Microsoft’s MIX08 conference, with lots of interesting people and tech on display. I also had the good fortune to participate in a panel moderated by Don Dodge which included me, Kimball Musk, Dave McClure, Kevin Rose and Robert Scoble. It wound up being a good discussion. Don’s blog post on the panel covers some highlights pretty well, so check it out if you are interested. An audio recording of the panel is also now up on the MIX website, if you are interested in listening to it.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, MIX08, Panel

As I sit here in my office listening to a car alarm go off for well over a minute, I am highly annoyed. But the alarm also caused me to reflect on just how useless car alarms are — perhaps when they were first on the market and only a very small fraction of cars had them, they were effective. But now that they are near ubiquitous and clearly prone to false positives, everyone ignores them, so they no longer are useful; they just disturb the peace.

I think the utility of car alarms are an example of an inverse Metcalfe’s Law, which basically states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes/devices/users in the system. Telephones and fax machines are a good example of this, as is the internet — one fax machine or telephone is useless, but when there are billions of them, things get really interesting.

But car alarms are just the opposite — the more widely deployed they are, the less valuable they become. Does anyone else have examples of things that become less useful the more widespread they are?

Technorati Tags: Bad Design, Metcalfe’s Law, Car Alarms