Today marks a very spooky Friday the 13th. There must be some good literature pointing out why 13 has been annointed the scariest, most horrific day of the month.
Last night I saw the Ting Tings at Popscene. In high school, I recall attending Popscene in awe as I saw all these hipster kids dancing around to Depeche Mode and early Stones beats. Most of the kids were in their late teens/early 20’s back in the day. This age demographic has not changed, but I have added about 8 years to myself. Of course there were the obnoxious drunks, but more importantly there were techy dweebs.
In line I actually was twittering when the guy behind me from Wellington New Zealand showed me (rather I noticed) his WWDC wrist band from Thursday night’s BareNaked Ladies concert. So what does one do in social situations? Naturally we became instant twitter buddies. Check out Brock.
The Ting Tings were great. I had never heard of them previous to last night. I felt kind of like I stumbled upon something awesome. I am not sure who their lead singer is, but I can tell you she is smoking hot and has an amazing little voice. That probably helps record sales. I am about the 54 thousandth person to take notice of them on myspace.
Did I mention that I have been waking up at 6:30 everyday? Why you might ask yourself? Because it makes me feel like an adult. Like I have things to do.
1 month ago
Everyone has something to say about the 3G arena. From what I am hearing through MacRumors.com - there are some pretty awesome milestones being reached with the new iPhone.
-300 hours talk time
-$199 8Gb Starting price
- Offered in a bunch of countries very shortly
Twitter is supposed to be following this well. Hope it doesn’t go out during the keynote. But knowing them…you never know.
1 month ago
It was a great weekend in SF. Bright, sunny and warm I really enjoyed myself. Spent Friday at Jelly with Amit Gupta. Thanks Amit. It was awesome hanging out with other techies all day and learning about the various startups and projects that people around the Bay Area are working on.
Met a designer from LinkedIn and was introduced to some people from method (a eco-friendly product company).
Saturday I took a ride over to Fort Point and looked up at the GG Bridge. It actually inspired me to watch “The Bridge” which is really depressing. So maybe don’t see that flick - its about suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge. They even interviewed a survivor. Pretty crazy.
I ended up at Dolores Park to meet a high school buddy of mine. It is pretty funny how the park self-segregates itself into three cantons. There are the hipsters on 18th-19th along Dolores and then there are two additional Mission/ San Francisco groups maintaining the Upper and Lower portions of the park between 19th and 20th Streets. The Upper portion is mainly gay males and the Lower portion is mostly lesbians. My high school girlfriends said it was okay for me to be in the lesbian area as long as there weren’t more guys than girls in our BBQ.
Did we really go through all this equality and gender fighting just so that an awesome park could be divided? Oh well, I wasn’t there to ponder the strives that California has made in the last 30 years
Yesterday was the 31st Haight Street Faire. The streets were incredibly crowded in Upper Haight. I could barely walk. Lots of food, hippies, tourists and sidewalk food.
I almost forgot to mention that the EuroCup has started yet again. UEFA Euro 2008 to be exact. Matches will run from Saturday, June 7th through June 29th. Not sure who to throw my support behind. Denmark is not even in this tournament. Sad face:( But Germany, Turkey and Sweden deserve my support.
1 month ago
Last week I got the travel bug and decided that a quick week long trip to NYC was in order.
Two of my buddies, Mark and Ben were having birthdays on Friday night. I found cheap (maybe cheap) tickets on Virgin America for $380 round trip from SFO to JFK.
It was awesome landing in NYC without a place to crash and receiving an outpouring of accommodations from my buddies. I ended up staying with Cullin and Audrey, my old flatmates. It was cool to see the changes they had made to my room. Now its an office with a bunch of junk and furniture all over the place (note: I heart them both dearly).
Dinner Friday night was at Pala on the corner of Houston and Allen Street. It was good food, but directly after dinner (around midnight) I felt the need to switch over to Ben’s birthday party in at 40 Avenue C. He did not know I was going to be showing up, so it was an awesome surprise.
The weekend consisted of seeing old friends and spending time running around town. I went to the MET with Britta (new friend from Odessa). The Superheroes exhibit was really cool. Michele Pfieffer’s Cat woman suit was on display as was Batman, Spider man and a bunch of really weird haute courtier designer outfits from french people.
Tuesday I was able to sit and chat with Howard, Jay and some founders from start-up companies we have been working with.
Buddy Media’s Kass and Michael were in full Lazerow force, as were the founders of Geezeo - personal finance website. There is a beat to NYC that I miss, but there is an equally large one pumping away in SF. You just need to know where to look.
1 month ago
Most people agree that passwords are extremely important in protecting your identity.
One thing that really riles me is that for every damn website in the world we have to register. Just the action of giving my email address feels out of bounds. But to register for a site you have to give a little bit of yourself away each time you join a new site.
Today was no exception. Upon reading that Outside.in raised a third round from Union Square Ventures, I thought it was about time for me to check this thing out.
After filling out their form with my name, email address, sex, age, whatever. I was told to get a better password. Apparently my little six digit code is not good enough. This really pisses me off. I don’t even get the chance to start using this site unless I come up with an “easy-to-remember” password.
Do these people even have a clue how many websites I am registered for? (that would be a rhetorical question)
The barrier for entry is one of the biggest problems we face as web native beings. How do we get people to use our products, visit our sites, read our blogs without causing stress or losing functionality. Having to remember different passwords is stressful.
There is the password I have for my bank accounts, the password for my brokerage accounts, my email accounts have different passwords and then there are my junk passwords. I think most people have a de facto junk password. Something easy to remember for websites that you either do not trust or just do not want to think about. Take Outside.in for instance. If their service is so good and my personal information on the site was something I valued than I would probably put a different, harder to crack password. But as it stands I do not really feel like creating a new password. There are too many things that I have to remember, let alone a stupid password for just another one of the hundreds of websites that I have tried out and stopped using.
OpenID and similar services that are meant to streamline the login process are awesome. We need more people using them.
1 month ago
