I’d like to think that I’m not one to revel in the misfortunes of others, but that’d be just a lie. So ha ha Tom DeLay. You got what you deserved.

Corruption is one area where the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans. It’s just so hard to trust that our politicians are working for our own good. It’s what makes transparency critically important for our government. It feels like in the information age we may be able to understand how money and power flows and determine where the problems are. OK that’s probably unrealistic, but we can dream about it.

Speaking of power flow, someone pointed out that my old VP of Blue Martini Bob Brown works at a company called Visible Path which is a company that attempts to manage what they call “Relationship Capital”. They try and turn relationships and connections into something that a business can leverage and build upon(and presumably monetize). I have no idea if it is a company that can make real money(a quick glance makes me believe they sell software to scan through your corporate emails and figure out who know whom), but it’s kind of an interesting idea.

I’m testing some stuff with Google Ads on the right. Don’t worry, I’m probably not going to keep them, unless I make about 50 times what I expect to make(I’m expecting about $1/month), but I wanted to look around the Google Ads systems a bit. In a few days I’ll post an update detailing all the dough I am raking in.

A couple paper checks worth about two hundred dollars dropped out of my coat on the way to work today. Someone in my building was kind enough to return them to me. He went to the trouble of tracking me down by calling the person who wrote the check and then finding out where in the building I was. I wanted to thank him by offering him a reward, but I wasn’t sure if that was tacky or not and I had no idea how much would be appropriate. He works at a hardware startup downstairs so I’m guessing he doesn’t need the money. But I did want to thank him in some way, so here’s a shout out to you Andrew West, you rule.

I felt the baby kicking for the first time the other day. That was a pretty momentous occasion. Kinda hard to describe really. We’ve still got a long ways to go, so I bet baby is going to get pretty big and active. Now we’ve got to get some sort of childcare. Some of the daycares and nannies have a 4-6 month lead time. We’re still having some problems naming the kid. Although we have a short list it’s not really solidified, there’s certainly no clear winner yet.

I had a pretty successful run at Yacht-10. I was playing well and I won 6th. I only had one suckout(but it was a big pot all in preflop with JJ against KK) and I won $120. Unfortunately I didn’t do so well in the side game(.25/.50 and .50/1 NLHE) and lost $50 there. More disappointingly, no one wanted to play Habu. I think I intimidated them when I said I invented it, they didn’t want to play with someone who had actually thought they knew how to play it. I tried to sweeten the deal by offering to pay for their small blinds on the 3rd orbit, and then I sweetened it again by offering to pay their big blinds, but I think they just thought I was trying to hustle them. There were 2 or 3 tiltboys at the table so I thought they’d be up for trying it, but it was not to be. So next time, I’ll just say, I’ve heard of this great new game. But otherwise, Yacht-10 was a good time for all. I always look forward to the tournament because it’s such a friendly game.

I went up to Berkeley on Thursday to recruit at a job fair. While we were driving in to town, I had a bit of nostalgia for my old Michigan days living in a college town where you can walk everywhere and you could hang out with a lot of young, interesting educated people. Just as I was saying this to the guy I’m with, we drive by an old homeless lady who is pushing a shopping cart along the sidewalk with her pants down to her knees, and she is wiping her bare ass. Thus endeth my nostalgic reverie.

I discovered an interesting new company today called JotSpot. It is headed by Joe Kraus a former founder of Excite. They have an interesting business model. As far as I can tell, they are a hosted Wiki service that allows application developers to build on their platform to add value. They have free wikis for individual users, but they are small and have limited bandwidth, disk space and number of documents. They also have very cheap Wikis for small businesses. Larger companies will buy the JotSpot Wiki appliance so that they can protect their information behind their own firewall. The basic applications include simple information sharing Wikis with search capabilities, but there are more advanced features like group calendars and personalized features and an API.

It’s easy to see how they can make money. I’m sure a lot of businesses aren’t seeing the ROI they want on all their intranets. There are a lot of reasons for failed intranets: difficult to update documents, too many disparate sources of information, not enough user support, poor presentation. But with modern day Wiki tools, a lot of these problems can be solved. Think of it like a salesforce.com, but for building intranet services instead of salesforce automation.

It vaguely reminds me of a company called I think Zaplets from a while ago that would allow you to ship around mini applications called Zaplets. They failed I’m pretty sure, but I have no idea why.

I have to admit the ipod nano is pretty cool. Like most gadgets I want one, but I’m going to hold off because I get severe buyers remorse when I see prices drop so rapidly and a $200 gadget is worth less than half that one year later.

Because I’m doing some work with the Google Adwords API and the Yahoo(Overture) API, I checked out the ad results when it first came out. The results for a Google search for “ipod nano” and a Yahoo search for “ipod nano” were telling. The Yahoo system has a surprising limitation that every ad has to go through a manual review process which can take 24-48 hours to prevent advertisers from using inappropriate or deceptive text. The Google Adwords system can also reject or suspend your ads, but it does not require a manual review so as long as your content passes their filter it goes up right away. This means that the day the Ipod Nano was released there were 30+ ads on Google, and today 4 days later, Yahoo still only has 3 ads one of which is from Apple. So my two thoughts are: it’s amazing that Yahoo can’t automate this process because it must cost them tens of thousands of dollars in ad revenue per week, and there must be a way for an enterprising web developer to make some money off of this.

I’ve always had a special fondness for Jerry Rice, so I feel kinda sad that he’s retiring. He’s never been the fastest, flashiest, most talented receiver, but his intangibles and work ethic make up for it. You never have to worry about him being ready to play, and like any great player he makes the whole team better. His numbers are of course the best ever, though if Randy Moss plays twenty years(which I think is highly unlikely) he’ll surpass Rice’s. Rice’s 208 career TD’s is astounding by any measure. I have always felt that he is indeed the greatest NFL player of all time.

The most troublesome thing I heard about the rescue of hurricane Katrina survivors was the story of a man who left his flooded home because he heard a radio broadcast telling him to leave because they were going to open the floodgates in his neighborhood. The radio told him to proceed to the Superdome, but then a federal official said that they had no idea that people were going to head to there and so they were completely unprepared for people the thousands that arrived. There were obviously some miscommunication issues at high levels that caused the Superdome fiasco. Here’s an interesting article about the problems.