“Hotel Yorba” just finished blowing out my eardrums and I’m awfully psyched and thought I’d pop my head up out of the laptop and review my last couple days.  I’m sitting at Victrola, coding a bit against Twilio’s uber-awesome API, doing a small amount of people-watching and a fair bit of reflecting on the weekend just about to pass.  It was (typical for me lately) a study in contrasts; black-and-white paint spattered on the canvas, but patterns are starting to emerge, themes and riffs and reoccurring choruses and moments of sunshine and the reappearance of cloudbanks that I know I’ve seen before.  My analytic brain tries too hard to pattern-match, to put things into boxes with labels and yet my creative brain, the one I’ve begun to understand and love in ways I never knew before – even though I’ve always considered myself to be the creative sort — likes to sort of hang out and observe and watch things unfold and draw loose associations and connections that arise abruptly and surprisingly from my subconscious.

This morning I ran twelve miles.

That sort of deserves its own paragraph because I seriously don’t think I’ve ran that far since college.  Earlier this month I signed up for this crazy relay in July called the Ragnar relay and I met a couple of my relay teammates for the first time this morning at Greenlake and we ran.  Twelve miles.  I’m proud and tired and happy and realize that what I thought are my limitations are not my real limitations.  That’s powerful.  Chris and Leslie, the two people I ran with this morning, were supportive and encouraging and I had a really great time.  Did I mention it was twelve miles?

A couple great meetups this weekend, reaffirming my sense that I feed off of, and am made happy by, time spent conversing with smart, engaging and passionate people.

The weather in Seattle this weekend was A-fucking-MAZING.  That was the macro story; the thing on everyone’s lips.  It’s February but feels like we’re deep into springtime.  I didn’t get out as much as I would have liked, but what time I was able to get out and enjoy the weather was spectacular and memorable.

I hope you had a great weekend as well.

Marcelo Calbucci posted a link to a TechCrunch scoop broke the news this morning on Seattle 2.0 that Right Side Capital announced that they will be investing seed-stage startup money in 100-200 startups a year.  That’s a lot.  Marcelo links to this Tech Crunch article, which gets into a lot more detail about the announcement and the context in which to place it.

Already startup types are starting the debate about whether this (a) is game-changing after all, (b) will work, or (c) misses the boat on some other criteria.  For the most part the reaction is positive – an evolution / revolution in the classing funding model seems overdue, especially given the drought we went through in the last couple years.  And a  new approach driven more by metrics and less by relationships is … well, interesting, if not necessarily a sure thing.  It will be fun to watch during the lead-up to the funding announcements this summer, and then see what the growth and recapitalization requirements of the original set of companies looks like.

Putting this announcement in a personal context, what would it take for me to get Crowdify off the ground?  Four months of funding?  Six months?  Twelve?  It’s so hard to say, since I have yet to do the hard grunt-work of proving out the market with real live interested customers.  It could be that the first three brand managers I talk to all love it and want to throw business my way.  It could also be that it will take a year and thousands of phone calls / e-mails to get to my first five-figure deal.  Traditional VCs would want to know that the market was there to capture FIRST, before putting any money in, and I can’t fault them.  However, we’ll see if Right Side Capital’s new approach will work, and if it does, what it means to other “idea entrepreneurs” who need time and space to execute.

Interested in your thoughts.

I wonder how many of the following items apply to you?  What would be on your own list?

TEN THINGS THAT MAKE ME HAPPY
(no particular order)

1. Stimulating conversation
2. A good book
3. Fog
4. My babies’ sleeping faces
5. Playing soccer
6. Affection & intimacy
7. Challenging myself to go outside my comfort zone
8. Anticipation
9. This song
10. The sound of rain

Me at Greenlake Zoka, February 20th, 2010.

I’ve been doing a ton of Vista updates in preparation for my any-day-now move to Windows 7, and one of the updates hosed my Daemon Tools Lite installation.  I kept seeing this error:

“This program requires at least Windows 2000 with SPTD 1.60 or higher.  Kernel debugger must be deactivated.”

I had no idea what SPTD was, but this site tells me that SPTD is a sort of hardware abstraction layer.  OK, fine.  I have no idea what version (if any) of SPTD I have installed; supposedly you can find out from the Daemon Tools program, but it won’t launch.

So, I downloaded SPTD 1.62 directly from duplexsecure.com.  Upon running the downloaded installer, I see this:

Did I inadvertently download the 64-bit version?  No, I don’t think so…the file name indicates that I’ve got the x86 version.  Hm.

So, after Googling for a bit (did I mention I’m the world’s best Googler?) I found this forum post on the Daemon Tools support site that describes my exact problem.  I follow the second method and download the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit, then run the command INSTSRV SPTD REMOVE:

I note in passing that this command removes the registry key HKLM/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/SPTD/.

Then reboot, followed by a reinstall of the Daemon Tools Lite 4.35.5 install (supposedly containing SPTD 1.62).  During the install, I see that SPTD 1.62 is indeed installed:

When the install finishes, I’m prompted to reboot, which I do.  The shutdown hangs, which I’ve noticed occurs consistently after I install Daemon Tools Lite on Vista.  I hard-boot and when the system comes back up , Daemon Tools starts up in the background, which I can tell by this:

Finally!  A good Daemon Tools reinstall.  Hope this helps others of you running into the same problem.

Marc Nager of Startup Weekend just sent me this today – I thought I’d repost (most of it, anyway) and get the word out about the next Portland Startup Weekend.

Hey there!

We wanted to let you know that Startup Weekend is coming back to Portland!

Check out the amazing lineup on the website. We have Matt Compton (venture partner at Madrona and ex vp at Yahoo), Rob Wiltbank (venture partner at Montlake Capital and professor at Willamette U), Eric Doebele (Founder/CEO Reliable.remodeler.com), Nitin Khanna (Founder/CEO of MergerTech), Doug Fieldhouse (CEO of Vesta) and of course the guys from Mugasha Akshay and Justin will be there!

When: March 5-7
Where: NedSpace Old Town
More info: http://portland.startupweekend.org
Looking forward to seeing you down there!

I’ve been to three Startup Weekend events in Seattle, but have not made it down to Portland yet.  If you’re in the area that weekend, and are a startup junkie, you should consider attending!

Remember this name, if you haven’t already heard it: Eric Ries.  He’s got a great blog called Lessons Learned that has a ton of great material for startups, coming at the topic from a lean/agile/fail fast angle.

This post on Minimum Viable Products was recommended by somebody on the Seattle Tech Startups list, and is a good sample: just-bigger-than-bite-sized, chock full of information, well supported with evidence.  Sample quote:

MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. If your goal is simply to scratch a clear itch or build something for a quick flip, you really don’t need the MVP. In fact, MVP is quite annoying, because it imposes extra overhead. We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration. In a lot of cases, this requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics.

The post contains an embedded video from a talk Eric gave at Lean Startup Circle.  Bookmarked.  Enjoy!

First rule of Twitter etiquette: there is no such thing.  In my opinion, if you don’t like something that someone is doing, you can unfollow them anytime you want.

Having said that, what are some of the new themes in Twitter etiquette that are worth commenting on?  Let’s take a tour.

#hashtags: Hashtags are those words prefixed by the pound sign (“#”, also known a hash sign) that you see in tweetstreams.  They supposedly provide context and metadata to tweets, but in practice, I see them used mostly for emphasis, and that’s how I use them.  It’s slightly painful to see well-meaning twitterati try to coordinate hashtags for an event when everyone has already started using different ones.

Blog posts: Normally people are pretty good about noting that they are linking to one of their own posts by prefixing their tweet with [blog] or [post] or something similar.  Bloggers who repeatedly spam their own posts get blocked, period.  Twitter in my mind is a lifestreaming app, not a one-way push mechanism.

Retweets: Twitter recently fucked up the retweet function on their website, and not only don’t allow you to edit tweets for length, or add your own prefix comment.  Luckily most other tools still allow you retweet and  keep your sanity.  A couple tricky issues with retweets:

• How much editing is too much?
• If an item has been retweeted before it got to you, do you have to keep the whole chain of retweeters?

I have no hard-and-fast expectation for either.  If you want to edit the retweet, go for it.  If you want to chop out multiple retweeters, go for it.  Try your best to keep original attribution, but don’t go all haywire applying severe rules to a fluid medium.

Grammar: A lot of twitter grammarians have already checked themselves in to inpatient psych wards, so this problem is less of an issue than it used to be.  Twitter grammar sucks.  People type quickly, they type while driving, they type while roller skating backwards and locking lips with their significant others.  Bad grammar happens.  Even if bad grammar chafes (as it does me), you can learn to deal with it.  People are messy. So is Twitter.

Rickrolling:  Rickrolling is like heavy drinking; every now and then it can be a fun break.  Do it every day and people start to shun you.

Protected Updates: My favorite phrase on this question is “protected updates make baby Jesus cry.”  Don’t protect your updates and still pretend that you’re “doing” Twitter.  Get over your fear of the Wayback Machine, live your life authentically, and don’t worry what some future boss/friend/spouse might think about something you tweeted back in 2008.

Inanity: Sometimes tweets make no sense.  In my opinion, that’s part of the fun of Twitter; you get to see people as they really are, without a lot of filtering and polishing and pre-planning and run-this-by-my-publicist checking.  Tweeps who are too polished are boring, IMHO.  On the other hand, if you like the  corporate flavors, feel free to unfollow someone who tweets about the junk that their cat just threw up.

Anything to add?  Things you love or hate about Twitter?  Write it in the comments!

Whew.  Yesterday was a busy day.  It started before dawn, at Zoka, working on the laptop.  I’m trying to finish this mini-project this weekend and except for pushing the bits out to a server I think that I’m done.  That feels good.

Then a great coffee meetup.  I really enjoy meeting new people and getting to know them in real life, especially tweeps.  Zoka was so busy that the coffee meetup ended up being sans coffee, but I still had a really enjoyable conversation with a potential new friend.

Then, a walk around Greenlake with one of my oldest friends (in duration, not age!) – and even thought we got rained on, it was, as always, a great talk.    Ran into my friends Marina and Nathan, who were walking around the opposite way.  Then a nap.  Then some FA Cup soccer – the Southampton / Portsmouth derby, which was quite the exciting game.  More coding.  Then to the gym, where I erupted in a frenzy of I-haven’t-worked-out-in-four-days energy.  I’m pleasantly sore this morning, which is yet another nice feeling.

Last night I went to a Seattle 2.0 party, ostensibly a going away party for Twilio’s Director of Marketing, Danielle Morrill, even though she’s effectively already left Seattle for San Francisco already.  It was a low-key affair at Vessel, which is a hip and aggressively trendy place that serves extremely good-looking drinks.  I was surprised by two things: 1) They didn’t have any beer on tap.  Is that really “full bar”?  2) They didn’t have any non-alcoholic beers; one of our group asked and was denied.  Apparently I’m not the only one that has had their eyebrows raised by this place.  Anyway, it was nice to hang out for a few hours and meet Jen Cabala of the SMC board, and get to know her a bit.

I’m excited to get back on the blogging wagon at Seattle 2.0 and contribute some new ideas that we can put into place.

Overall?  Feeling a little burnt out.  You know the feeling; like you’d like to prop your feet up in front of the fire, put on a movie, and veg out for a couple days.  Tomorrow’s a holiday, so maybe I’ll try to recover some of that feeling before going back to work on Tuesday.

Happy Valentine’s Day, wherever you are!

For once I’m speechless.  Am I?  If so it would be a first, as normally I can vomit all over the page with whatever inane bullshit winds its way stealthily past my limbic system.  But right now I’m deep in reflective thought.

I pose the question:  Mirror, mirror on the wall, what is important to me?

That’s a tough one.  It’s sort of related to the eternal über-question: why am I here?

On the one hand, it’s important to have some sense of the answer, in order to guide your actions, to live a purposeful life.  On the other hand, obsessing – especially in times of crisis, or transition, or uncertainty, or self-doubt – isn’t much help.  The theory there is to tread lightly, keep your wits about you, and the answers will begin to take shape.

So – this speechless thing.  Not sure, but I doubt it will last more than a couple hours and I’ll be back to my normal voluble self.   In the meantime, I’m enjoying the reflecting.