Tony Perkins (above) and Tom Byers kicked off the Stanford Summit tonight. Tony Perkins talked about ‘discovery’ on the web, a space he describes as wide open.
He also talked about old and new media brands extending into old and new forms. Another topic was green tech which is the #3 category for VC money, according to Mr. Perkins.
Tony thinks VC is back, and going global. There’s a new generation of investment bankers, as well, also good news.
KPMG then announced the AO 100 list drawn from 600 nominations by VCs. Off to a good start….
AlwaysOn’s Stanford Summit starts this evening: we’ll be going over tomorrow to blog live from the scene. Supposed to be about a thousand attendees… some very interesting sessions, too…
It’s been a couple years since we’ve attended AlwaysOn’s Stanford Summit. Tony Perkins was kind enough to offer me a blogger pass this year, which I’ve accepted, and already have a couple of interesting invitations from innovative startups. So, stay tuned for some surprises, starting July 31….
Linda decided that she has had it with our patio: it has served us well these last 17 years IMHO, a big outdoor room where we have meals in summer and linger over Sunday morning breakfasts. So, in her typical type A way, she quickly found a landscape designer, Danna Breen, who whipped up what I think is a very nice design of circular beds and stone mated with brick and a strip of lawn (according to Sunset, circular beds are ‘in’ this year).
Rather than contract the whole thing out to a landscaper, Linda then took the plan to our gardener Felipé for a quote. This worked well about 5 years ago when we needed to re-do our front and side yards, except that I was the ‘designer’ last time around. Felipé was very reasonable: we probably would have spent well more than double with a contractor.
Five years ago, our lawn was rootbound from city trees that border most lots hereabout, that I thought Felipé would bring in a Bobcat or other machinery. Nope. Felipé brought a guy, maybe 19 or 20 years old with an axe, a hoe, a pick and an iron bar. He labored hard throughout the day, breaking only for lunch, and in 2 days had pretty much dug out the old yard.
Indeed, he worked so hard that half a dozen neighbors came to the door and asked for Felipé’s contact info. Anyway, the patio is getting the same treatment – no machine, just 2 young men with sledge hammers and Felipé wielding wheelbarrows to load his truck with the debris. Boy, do these guys earn their money… we’re also going to re-do dotcom garden after the new patio goes in…
We did get the AMD 64-bit machine tucked in to the cheesy crate as planned, and have decided that Fedora Core 7 – at $9.95 from Linuxcentral.com – is a better OS choice than Vista, which comes in at a minimum of $215. Vista will probably have more drivers for cams et al., but I’m guessing I can get Fedora to work with everything I care about, and anyway, I’m mainly loooking to connect to Google online resources – Docs, Apps, Calendar, Picassaweb and my new experiment, a Micro-Stock photo site (Gulker Labs redux) built with Lightroom and Google Apps.
The AMD machine currently won’t boot, as far as I can tell, and I’m not quite sure why – I thought we had SuSE or something on it previously. Hopefully the boot disk for the Fedora installer will get us up with a new OS and away we’ll go. I’m wondering if I can get the machine configured to do the podcasts I’m hoping to add to the micro-stock site along with Google ads…
Our eldest G5 Mac – a 1.8 GHz single-processor machine – doesn’t seem to want to stay connected via its USB ports on the back. The single front port works OK, but it keeps dropping things – keyboard, mouse, KVM switch, card reader et al. that connect to the two ports in back. Anybody got a clue why? Just a bad bus on my machine? Or maybe I’m missing a firmware upgrade….?
Well, no sooner does moi appear on the cover of Wired, but the very next month, there’s my domestic hero, Martha Stewart, gracing the same editorial real estate. Martha is ‘geeking out’ in the annual Wired DIY issue offering advice on everything from digicams to a DIY financial empire. Hmmm… better to take Martha’s advice, especially about DIY financial empires, than mine…
Here’s gulker.com’s LAN rack after the new Iomega 500 GB NAS drive went in. The Iomega shares the top shelf with a couple of switches, while the shelf below has the old, full, 250 GB Western Digital NAS drives, along with the 2 Gigabit switches that make up the core wired network.
Next up will be integrating our AMD 64-bit box back into the mix. I think there’s a way to squeeze it into the ‘cheesy crate‘ that organizes the left side of World HQ. There’s an open port on the KVM, so we’ll be able to wire it in nicely if we can get it tucked into a new home.
Measurements show that there should be a way to do this, if I can move some AC connections around in the crate. Patience, wire snips and cable ties…
The Bay Bridge greeted me as I crept out from under the covers this morning. Sweet spouse Linda, knowing we had late medical appointments at UCSF, booked us a room at Hotel Vitale, across the Embarcadero from the Ferry building. While Linda jogged six miles downt to AT&T park and beyond this morning, I cruised the farmer’s market, winding up at the Market Bar’s patio, where Linda joined me for a delightful breakfast (an organic vegetable omelette). We’ve come home with all the fixings for organic ratatouille this evening.