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Tuesday, September 4, 2001
Timing 
| | I can't get today to work. So I'm continuing to write in yesterday — or at least just enough to say I gotta go to the dentist. Back later. |
Still, half a garten is better than none
| | Turns out kindergarten is just 3 hours a day. Not exactly a big deal school experience. |
| | It also means we have Jeffrey hanging around looking for stuff to do while Joyce and I are still working. Gotta figure that one out. |
Fool Fuel
Working at the physical layer
| | Phone service is out while the installer crawls around under the house, emerging every so often to grumble about the antique state of the incumbent phone wiring. None of it is CAT-3, which is the current phone standard. All of it is old 2- or 4-conductor wiring. "I found some CAT-5 in your office, but I don't know where it goes," he just told me. I said it went between two hubs for the house network that isn't quite working yet. "Oh. Well, I hope I plugged it back into the right hole in the hub in your office." He did, only now the two hubs don't pass data any more. For awhile this morning the boxes on either hub could get into the boxes and printers on the other hub. Now they can only see the boxes and printers on their own hub. Very frustrating. |
Hello Houston? Um, sir, we have no Houston...
| | By the way, if anybody has anything quotable to say about what this merger will mean for Linux, lemme have 'em. |
Nerds to their own rescue
| | VCs don't appreciate that the electronics revolution is built on the backs and brains of engineers, not of executives. Moore's law and engineering talent drive the electronics revolution. Tremendous market pull for its products builds momentum. The pull is so great that the revolution is indifferent to the talents and decisions of its executives (legendary blundering causes only ripples), but it depends on the talent and the work of its engineers. The engineers are the creators of wealth; the VCs are the beneficiaries. |
| | The conclusion is worth thinking about — assuming, of course, that enough engineers are still out there sitting on riskworthy money: |
| | Engineers should band together to form venture funds. Start-ups need more angel funding and they need better-organized angel funding. I'd like to see a dozen or so $100 million venture funds run by nerds. These nerd-based venture firms would work at the seed round and at the next funding round (called the A round). They provide initial funding and advice and they, with the benefit of professional financial advice, represent their start-ups in future funding negotiations with traditional venture firms. |
| | Here's a third suggestion. I'd like to see an engineer-run start-up whose goal is to raise $100 million in a public offering. The money becomes a fund for sponsoring start-ups. It's a public venture firm and it sells shares to raise money. Investing in start-ups wouldn't be exclusively for rich people; anyone who could buy stock could be investing in start-ups. Ideally, the public VC firm would be managed and run by nerds with empathy for nerds in the start-ups. |
Best tech support in the world, it turns out
| | Thanks again to Jason for recommending that we download and run the 3.0.1 drivers for Joyce's Farallon Skyline wireless card. I just installed them on her Lombard, and after ten minutues of trouble-shooting, it's fine. Seems to have about the same range as the Airport card in the Titanium. Works upstairs, in the kitchen, on the back porch (where I just measured 2.6 megs down and 280 kbps up)... everywhere but my office and the bathroom leading into it. That corner of the house is a Faraday cage, I think. K-SRLZ, the .25-watt FM transmitter we use to distribute music through the neighborhood on an unused channel, can't penetrate the office either, even though I can pick it up a quarter mile up the road in a car. |
| | Anyway, now we need to get that hub-to-hub thing fixed. |
I love it when he rants like that
| | When Bob says "We must allow for a marketplace by preventing players with interests opposed to connectivity from controlling connectivity," he's not far from what Larry Lessig said in a recent keynote: |
| | Well, shit. For some reason I can't copy from inside a .pdf file that helpfully appears only inside the browser. I hate that. |
| | Larry, please turn the .pdfs on your site to .html documents, okay? That way we can easily quote from them and link to them. |
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