Shanti’s Dispatches

Sorry for the flurry of music-related posts. Just making my bi-monthly mix CD for some driving tunes.

Bumped into these guys through a NY Times article on bands that broke through web exposure alone. They are one of the most highly friended / viewed MySpace bands.

Their first album is now available on iTunes including this single for Beauty in the Breakdown.

While Googling around, I learned that one of their singers is an LDS Missionary and is currently on mission in Argentina. I won’t hold that against them, though.

Ever find a rare live performance on YouTube that you’d love to have the audio of in mp3 format?

Vixy.net allows you to do just that. Simply enter the YouTube video URL and vixy does the rest.

Alternatively, here’s another set of instructions if you’d like more control over encoding options, etc (also if vixy gets taken down)

Some Good Random Hits

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn4ovawULGo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLp5ygeD8co

http://youtube.com/watch?v=QpI90lGZA4E

http://youtube.com/watch?v=j4TnhemCEmc

Global Deejays - The sound of San Francisco (available on itunes)

Okay, this post might be a bit boring / narcissistic for some people’s tastes - but if you haven’t been to one of these shindigs here it is layed out from one dude’s perspective.

Tickets were $10 which I got from a Googler friend (shoutout to anxman) and drinks were free (woot woot).

Getting There

August Capital is about 30 minutes away from the city without traffic. The drive was quite pleasant — nice scenery, etc.

Google Maps told me to make a U-Turn at Saga Ln but you actually just make a left there and go up the hill to August Capital, Benchmark, etc.

The Line to Go #1

Taking a leak proved quite cumbersome. While I was entering the party, a guy who looked like Ross Mayfield (probably wasn’t him) in a hawaiian shirt was stepping outside, mentioning how he needed to find a bush.

While standing in the whiz line I bumped into Josh Knowles, a Phoenix-area Ruby on Rails developer who I had met previously at Refresh Phoenix.

Phoenix Connection

Next I met up with several other Phoenix entrepreneurs/developers:

Kimbro Staken and Sean Tierney, who were there demo’ing JumpBox and Joshua Strebel of Obu Web.

While we were taking a picture with the four of us, Julia Allison, heretofore unknown by any of us, decided she’d also like to be in it with us.

Of course we happily obliged. Sean says those pics will be up on Grid7.com at some point.

Snip: edited to protect the innocent.

The “Million-dollar Members Only” Episode

A bit later in the evening I was standing by the margarita station and saw someone who seemed a bit out of place for the party. Sporting a cool black jacket & british accent, he looked like he could be a member of a punk rock band, not a startup entrepreneur.

Upon introducing myself, another buddy of his showed up, who had two nametags on. I didn’t recognize their startup / company, but one of the nametags rang a bell — Alex Tew, creator of the Million Dollar Homepage.

Now, I’m sure this is kind of an awkward situation for this guy. For 99.9% of the planet, making a million dollars from, let’s face it, a pretty simple webpage, would be seen as an incredible accomplishment.

But for the TechCrunch party scene, it’s not quite as monumental.

I personally still think it’s really fuckin cool - the ~20 year old doesn’t have to work a day for the rest of his life, if he doesn’t want to. And being an entrepreneur with a million bucks in the bank must certainly be a different experience than when you’re starting a company right out of school and living off of ramen noodles.

He was also the first out of the gates with, in hindsight, an ingenious idea that was executed brilliantly.

I called over Joshua Strebel who I know would get a kick out of meeting Alex. A few minutes later Joshua led a 10-minute long conversation on Member’s Only Jackets, because, apparently, Alex was wearing a jacket that looked very “Members Only”.

I asked Mr. Tew what he thought about all of the knockoffs of his idea, e.g. 1000 tags etc.

Tew responded (paraphrasing):

They’re all shite. It’s the kind of thing that can only be done once mate, y’know?

So true, mate, so true.

Michael Arrington’s Followers

I’ve heard the Arrington line can get as bad as 20-strong. It wasn’t that bad last night — at most I saw maybe 5-10 startup entrepreneurs playing man-groupie to the ever-powerful TechCrunch Founder & Blogger, Michael Arrington.

Hey — I don’t blame em. Web 2.0 lore is rife with stories of startups being featured on TechCrunch and subsequently getting inundated with calls from Venture Capitalists. (Scribd, for one, launched that way to phenomenal success.)

Photo credit: “Scott Beale / Laughing Squid” - laughingsquid.com.

Apparently a very attractive asian lady was in Arrington’s tow throughout part of the night as well. (not sure if that’s her pictured above or not…)

Other People I Bumped Into

Trip Adler - co-founder of Scribd

Babak Nivi — co-writer of Venture Hacks, a must-read blog for any startup entrepreneur

I’ll definitely be attending next time if I can get my hands on some tickets. The free-flowing drinks and bumping into some old pals definitely made the trip down to southbay worth it.

Just checked my Sprint PCS / Nextel bill and discovered that it rang in at an impressive $281.03. For a guy who normally uses a few hundred out of 900 anytime minutes, that’s a pretty incredible accomplishment.

Backstory

Recently my phone broke and I had to get a new one; the nice people at the local Sprint PCS store here in SF by Powell/Mission streets told me that I could simply signup for a new line without any extra charges or monthly fees. The old phone would get a new number, they’d activate a new (free) phone with my old number.

In retrospect, it sounds totally shady. They acted like they do this every few minutes or so, no big deal. Another scary memory: someone was coming in at the time and it seemed they were complaining about this exact same issue that I’m having now.

Fraud or a Simple Big Company Mistake?

This isn’t just bait and switch… this is outright fraud. Of course, the best way to get what you want in these situations is to be as nice to the employees as possible in the hopes that they will somehow grease the wheels in their giant corporate monolith.

Of course… what you really want to do is hurl bricks through the window, file reports with the FTC / FBI, sue the parent company for civil damages and take the employees to court for criminal malfeasance. But that never solves anything, now does it?

I’m sure this won’t last, but for now all 13 of my picks are in the money on their first day of trading:

The first 11 are short sells, meaning of course I make money when the stock goes down! (shock, awe, gasp, disbelief, “people can do that?”)

Those are more long-term plays in the subprime mortgage & home-builder markets. I wrote recently that I’m not that into Schadenfreude (in the case of celebrities getting unjust deserts).

However I have no problem with “semi-gamblers” / investors getting what’s coming to them when the market turns (be it real estate, equity, forex, etc).

Reason for the real-estate short selling: people have been getting some crazy mortgages that they just can’t afford + foreclosures are way up these days.

Next up: massive move into AAPL (long) for the day with the rest of my fantasy cash.

I guess I’ll see tomorrow morning how FSX handles after-hour trades when the stock has gone way up after-hours. I placed an order right after market close for 23M worth of AAPL shares & it’s already up 13% since then!!

So, Akismet works great. But I still get about 10 spam comments that get past Akismet filters each day. Not a huge deal, but I’m sure for bigger sites it could be more like 50-100+.

Could someone build an Amazon Turkish (perhaps using that service itself) + WordPress Plugin to completely automate away having to deal with spam comments?

I’d pay maybe $5 / mo. for a service like this, for a simple personal blog. Perhaps $15-20 or so for a commercial blog or much more for a high-volume site.

If you are fortunate enough to have health insurance through your employer (must see: Sicko), you’ll know that the HMO provider’s website offers little in the way of feedback on the physicians available through their service.

Googling the name of an M.D. in the available list returned this page.

Many people in “old-school” professions (physician, real estate agent, etc) fear newfangled interweb technology. (see this post by Joshua Strebel on a fearful real estate agent)

Once there are enough reviews on sites like Yelp, etc, doctors, laywers and others in so-called “elitist” professions will not be able to hide behind a web of anonymity. The cream will rise to the top, the rest will hopefully be weeded out or see their bookings dwindle and the feedback loop will be complete.