Hanging in my hood... Arlington, Virginia

I live and work in Arlington, Virginia, and as this hilarious video points out, it is the toughest town West of the Potomac and East of the Beltway.

The funniest part of the video for me was that I was sitting in a Starbucks wearing my brown flip flops when I first watched it.  Check out this video if you want to understand the inside humor here.  :)

July 11, 2009

links for 2009-07-11

  • The Obama administration is developing an initiative to take money from the $700 billion program for the banking system and make it available to millions of small businesses, which officials say are essential to any economic recovery because they employ so many people, according to sources familiar with the plan.

    The new effort -- which would represent a striking shift from the rescue program's original mandate -- would direct billions of bailout dollars toward a program that aims more at saving jobs than righting the financial system.





  • Here they are:

    1. We see a lot of ideas, all the time, week in and week out. Most say, if you make an investment in our company, we'll really be able to make progress on all fronts. Some say, we haven't had much money to date, but look at what we have been able to achieve with little money in a small amount of time. People that can make progress without money tend to be the ones who make the most progress when they have money.





  • Recently, a high school pal wrote me about a strange new Web site, adding the parenthetical comment "(69241)." Then, a typically typo-free writer assured me I could "becomee a reall filmm staar noww" and pointed me to a site in India. And a normally level-headed colleague passed along yet another strange address, followed by the exultation "Best store!!!" -- then resent the message a minute later.

    Okay, so my Facebook friends didn't really write those things. Nor did the co-worker who appeared to invite contacts on Twitter and Facebook to view a "private video." Instead, a virus did, hijacking their accounts to send messages steering friends to hostile sites.


    (tags: security)



  • Do you Twitter? Then you are more interested in sex than the average Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn user. Like LinkedIn? You're more likely to watch soap operas. Favor MySpace? You're probably not into exercise.

    Which social network you favor says a lot about you -- and you might be surprised just what it says. A new study by Anderson Analytics is helping identify users' likely interests, buying habits, media consumption and more for marketers. The survey studied the demographics and psychographics of both social networkers and non-users and found that "there are definite data-driven segments in the social-networking-site market, both for non-users and users," said Tom Anderson, founder and managing partner.



July 10, 2009

links for 2009-07-10

  • Some time ago I listened to this lecture by Spencer Ante, on his book Creative Capital, and have been meaning to blog about it.

    Q: When did the business model for VC take shape? In other words, when did people become convinced that money should be pooled specifically to invest in small companies developing products based on new technology? What were the first VC funds?

    A: Ante claims the first VC fund was Georges Doriot's ARDC founded in 1946. Judging from the size of funds raised even 40 years later, it took a long time for investors controlling large pools of money (i.e., pension funds, endowments) to become convinced about the model.


    (tags: vc)

July 09, 2009

links for 2009-07-09

  • Over the last decade we have generated new names for hundreds of companies, products and services. Here are some of the shortcuts, thought-starters and mental prods we've observed along the way.
    (tags: Brands naming)
  • In a ruling that could fuel debate about online privacy, a federal judge in Seattle has held that IP addresses are not personal information. "In order for 'personally identifiable information' to be personally identifiable, it must identify a person. But an IP address identifies a computer," U.S. District Court Judge Richard Jones said in a written decision.
    (tags: security)

Continue reading "links for 2009-07-09" »

July 07, 2009

links for 2009-07-07

  • Biotechnology start-ups have long relied on grants from the National Institutes of Health to fund the research-and-development process for new drugs, medical devices and disease treatments. Every year, the agency is required by law to set aside 2.8 percent of its research budget -- $650 million in 2009 -- for small businesses and the commercialization of technologies developed at universities. But when nearly $10 billion in stimulus funds went to the NIH, a last-minute change in the legislation exempted the agency from the requirement. That means the NIH does not have an obligation to reserve a portion of the money to small businesses.
    (tags: vc)
  • Since this is the time of year when we celebrate the founding of the United States as a nation on July 4, 1776 and since the Internet has become an ad-hoc nation of its own with over a billion citizens, it’s the perfect time to have a little fun and speculate about who the people of the Internet would choose if they could elect a leader. Others have joked about this idea in the past. Now it’s time to get serious — or at least as serious as you can for a mock election. I’d like to nominate four candidates for the fictional office of President of the Internet. All four are very talented individuals that have a vision of where the Internet needs to go and each would lead the Internet into an even brighter future.
    (tags: internet)

July 06, 2009

links for 2009-07-06

  • t Internet Retailer 2009 in Boston, TheFind announced that it is integrating the VeriSign Secured Seal into their search results. TheFind - who delivers a comprehensive shopping search engine with over 350 million products from more than 500,000 stores - is the first search engine to address online shoppers' need to trust merchants by incorporating the VeriSign seal directly into its search results.
  • A federal judge on Thursday tentatively threw out the convictions of a Missouri mother for her role in a MySpace hoax directed at a 13-year-old neighbor girl who ended up committing suicide. U.S. District Judge George Wu said he was tentatively acquitting Lori Drew of misdemeanor counts of accessing computers without authorization. Drew was convicted in November, but the judge said that if she is to be found guilty of illegally accessing computers, anyone who has ever violated the social networking site's terms of service would be guilty of a misdemeanor.

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July 04, 2009

links for 2009-07-04

  • A local teacher accidentally put pornography into a DVD that was meant to be filled with school memories from the past year, and nobody caught the error until after it was sent home, shocking parents and students alike. Parents of students who attend Isabelle Jackson Elementary said that the woman is a good teacher, but just made a mistake that may become the most embarrassing moment of their life.
    (tags: stupid)

July 02, 2009

links for 2009-07-02

  • Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is the culmination of nearly a year-long quest to build a browser for the next version of the web. And while it’s not perfect, it comes very, very close. The open-source browser is now available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux. Originally envisioned as a quick follow-up to 2008’s release of Firefox 3.0, Mozilla ended up packing in quite a few extra features into its flagship browser and spent months making sure that Firefox 3.5 was the fastest, most powerful Firefox yet.
  • Last fall, executives from Oriental Trading Co. read a product review from a woman planning her autumn wedding complaining that her order of fall leaves didn't look anything like the picture on the website. The execs went straight to the warehouse, pulled the product and compared for themselves. She was right -- it didn't look the same. The explanation: The company had recently switched vendors for that particular product, and the new vendor's version wasn't up to snuff. So the company pulled it.

Continue reading "links for 2009-07-02" »

July 01, 2009

links for 2009-07-01

  • Entrepreneurs never really retire. They move on to their next project. Just ask Linda Remeschatis, 60, a former prosecutor in Madison, Wis., who turned her passion for local food and art into a second career. In 1998, at age 50, she left the public sector to launch her own E-commerce business, Wisconsinmade.com, an online food and gift store selling products made in her home state by local artisans. She now manages five employees and three regular consultants. Since the business doesn't have a physical storefront, most of the employees work remotely or on the ground floor of Remeschatis's home, overlooking the deer and birds in her backyard. It took Remeschatis six years to turn a profit selling cheese, chocolate, and art online, and she still makes less money than she did as an attorney, but she enjoys the work. "You don't mind it as much because you are doing it for yourself and for your family and to grow business for our artisans," she says. "And we get to taste-test."
  • When Judge Denny Chin sentenced Bernard Madoff to 150 years in prison, he catapulted him into a small class of white collar criminals facing more than a century behind bars..

    The sentence far exceeded those in some massive corporate fraud cases. WorldCom chief Bernie Ebbers was sentenced to 25 years, Enron Chief Executive Jeff Skilling got 24 years, and Adelphia Chief Financial Officer Timothy Rigas got 20 years, but that was later reduced to 17.

    Other 100-year-plus sentences include:


    (tags: crime)

June 30, 2009

links for 2009-06-30

  • After weeks of anticipation, Google is finally accepting a limited number of new users into its Google Voice phone system. Google Voice allows you to unite all of your phones under a single number and then use a powerful set of controls to determine how calls are handled. It packs plenty of other impressive functionality, too, including voicemail-to-text transcribing and advanced call-screening. (Check out PC World's review of Google Voice) At the same time, though, adopting Google Voice as your communications commander introduces some potential negatives, ranging from privacy-related concerns to questions about reliability. Here's a breakdown of five pros and five cons to help you determine whether the service is right for you.
    (tags: google voice)

June 29, 2009

links for 2009-06-29

  • Users can preview two new Adobe products, Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder 4, starting today. Both programs aim to simplify the process of designing Web applications. Catalyst, which has never before been released to the public, is aimed at designers. Built to resemble Illustrator and other Adobe products, Catalyst allows a nonprogrammer to design working interfaces for Web applications. Builder, which updates a previous product called Flex Builder, is aimed at developers. Specifically, it's a tool for developers building Internet applications, and Adobe says that it has been improved to better handle data and to work easily with Catalyst.

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