Saturday, October 07, 2006

Who do I have to sleep with to get SlingPlayer/Mac? 

For a project I'm doing, I'm looking for a feed with photos, probably using the Media-RSS namespace defined by Yahoo. The pictures should be of current events, people, places and things that made headlines in the last few days. Yahoo has plenty of these feeds, but the pictures are tiny. I need pictures that can fill a largeish high-def screen with pixels. A high-def AP photo wire feed would be great. I'll share whatever suggestions I get. (BTW, Flickr feeds are perfect, but I want pictures of disgraced political leaders, warfare in Iraq, hurricanes, etc.) 

Class act in VC 

NY Times article on Sevin Rosen's decision to return the money raised in their latest round to investors. "If we really believe that there are fundamental structural problems in the venture industry, should we raise our fund and just hope that the problems will get better?"

I think some of the other VCs are "parking" money in their portfolio companies, investing more than the companies can possibly use, to make it appear to their limited partners that they are deploying their money.

There were some extreme examples of this at the tail end of the dotcom boom, for example, a company called Firedrop, that basically did mail list software, received $90 million. What became of that money?

Mac vs Toyota 

I thought, since I'm such a good customer, I'd save a little time and send an email to Apple, rather than waiting on hold for an indefinite period. This certainly saves me valuable time, and I imagine that it saves them time as well. Unfortunately I got a form mail back telling me that they hadn't read the email and didn't plan to. So I'm still stuck with a Mac that doesn't work and no clue when they might make it work.

I thought I would say that I'm still using the Vaio, and it's filling the role that the MacBook used to play, but it's not true. I am spoiled, Mac OS X is a much nicer OS than Windows XP. It's like the difference between driving a Ford and a Toyota, and I do drive a Toyota, but there is one big difference. When there's a problem with my Toyota, they fix it in hours not weeks. And they quite often pay for it, even when it's my error that caused the problem. (A long story for another day.)

Postscript: Shortly after posting this item I got a call from the local Apple Store asking me to bring my Mac down. It's in service now, getting a new heat sink. Should have it back in 4-5 days.