My Entrepreneurship seminar instructor asks, “Are entrepreneurs crazy idiots?” His answer is, “Not necessarily, but some of them are.” It’s basically a risk vs. rewards calculus – if you have little to lose and much to gain, you probably should take the plunge, but if that’s not you, you probably should not. I think that [...]

Or rather, 230,000 of them? That’s the promise (and achievement) of Ning, the latest effort by serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen. The principle is simple: let people create their own social networks, for whomever and whatever reason. The results are amazing: the site is growing at 0.4% per day and aiming to host 4 million networks [...]

As I mentioned before, Sarah and I are in Randy Picker’s Tech Policy Seminar, which has so far produced three weeks of really good discussions. The last two weeks were spent discussing Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. It was a very interesting and provocative read. While I think [...]

I love this person, because he or she is incompetent in the most amusing way. One would hope that such blazing incompetence renders such people inept in their efforts to harm others, though for every con there is probably a gullible enough mark out there… Subject: 2007 Fiscal Activity – $2839,49 Refund From: “service@irs.gov”<service @irs.gov> [...]

Both Sarah and I are going to be blogging and commenting at Professor Picker’s Antitrust & Intellectual Property seminar blog (called, for some reason, the Tech Policy Seminar blog) this quarter. The current topic of discussion is Jean-Noël Jeanneney‘s Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge, translated from the French Quand Google défie l’Europe: Plaidoyer [...]

I had forgotten another wonderful byproduct of DST. Microsoft Outlook automatically changes all of my all-day or multi-day appointments to start one hour later. Why it would be true, now, that the Fourth of July holiday would start at 1:00 AM, for example… I have no idea. P.S. This doesn’t impact appointments that are not [...]

Most days, we use my phone as my alarm clock. It’s loud enough and persistent enough, plus it automatically compensates for things like Daylight Savings Time. Imagine my surprise when I discovered, however, that it had adjusted not only the time, but the alarm times, as well. So, at 2:00 AM, it apparently set the [...]

As I have posted before, the allegedly broadband internet service provided by MDU at Regents Park (my apartment building) is mediocre, at best. It just went from mediocre to unacceptably awful. First, the bandwidth has dropped off again – we’re back down to a level between dial-up and broadband speeds. So, we called to complain, [...]

There are a number of reasons voting machines currently used in much of the country should give us pause. Whether you’re an open source enthusiast, a conspiracy theorist, or simply a citizen concerned about the risks of human error and glitches, this should demonstrate that we have a long way to go in developing computer-based [...]

I don’t want to speak too soon, but it looks like the connection problems I mentioned before have been resolved – our internet access is truly flying right now. IM me or post a comment to let me know if you’re still having problems, and we’ll pass them along to the Regents and MDU people [...]