Jason Calacanis, proprietor of a technical business, publicly throws his technical team under the bus.

We are not down today, but we are very—very—slow. The problems are getting solved, and our team at LogicWorks is trying there best to help us, but the results are still lame.

The tech team here at Weblogs, Inc. and LogicWorks are still not being proactive enough in my mind. We’re still stuck in this “I think we solved it” mode, which makes me crazy. Why not go above and beyond what we think might, if we’re lucky, result in us being up the next day.

I may be going out on a limb here, but, in my experience, publicly humiliating your technical team does not often lead to favorable results.

The Boston Globe has an article about Verizon’s new FiOS system, a system which is 30 times faster than my old DSL and 600 times faster than dialup. Because I happened to be moving at the right time, I was actually one of the first people in town to be hooked up to the new service.

It is pretty fast, but you won’t notice it as much while browsing the web as when downloading. If you’re copying a 30MB file, it’s much faster; if you’re just loading a 200k webpage, then the limiting factor is going to be your machine, not the line.

Still, it’s about the same price as Comcast, and a lot faster. Woo hoo.

Read these posts on The Job Blog and The HR Blog.

How you treat your employees affects your bottom line. Don’t forget that.

A Verizon lobbyist trying to prevent municipal broadband in West Virginia stormed out of a meeting because he didn’t get to write the legislation himself. Apparently, the legislators went behind his back and wrote their own legislation. The horror.

“You know all of our broadband providers are interested in it, and you secretly put out a bill to do this,” [Verizon lobbyist John Ruddick] said. “That is wrong.”

Committee Chairman John Unger, D-Berkeley, said he and others did consult with Verizon, Adelphia and other companies, but he made no apologies for not releasing the bill to them before it came out of his committee.

“The special interest groups think they ought to see the legislation before the legislators see it,” he said. “That’s where everybody’s got it backwards around here. They’ve got it backwards, because they think that the special interest group ought to draft the legislation and then show it to the Legislature, and that’s not the way it should be.”

Sometimes I wish I’d stayed at Amazon. I love my life here, but I envy the interesting things my ex-colleagues in Seattle get to work on.

They recently introduced SIPs, “statistically improbable phrases.” They analyze all the text in the millions of books they’ve scanned, and then pull out the unique phrases which most characterize each book. It works simultaneously as a summary of the book, an insight into its feel, and an automated folksonomy.

This is just hours of fun going through some of my books to discover their SIPs. Here are a couple of examples from a few books I highly recommend:

Kitchen Confidential: chiffonaded parsley, broiler man, manger man, feed the bitch

The Eyes of the Dragon: royal napkins, instinct for mischief, watery ale, ash bucket, two guilders

The Tipping Point: social epidemics, transactive memory, mouth epidemics, teenage smoking

Good to Great: sustained great results, unsustained comparisons, red flag mechanisms, profit per customer visit, confronting the brutal facts

John Sumser, whose trade newsletter for online recruiting I read even though I’m not full time with (the award-winning) BostonWorks anymore, brainstorms ideas for using this technology to slice and dice resume information. All sorts of interesting possibilities.

I’ve been off the grid for a few days, so here’s some stuff that’s caught my attention recently.

12 principles for fair commerce in software and other digital products
A manifesto against unfair end user license agreements and other corporate abuses.

How to start a startup
Strikes pretty close to home. A really interesting read if you’re an entrepreneur, or know one.

The missing caption for the little red book
Mao says: RTFM

Introducing Leina Cook.

It’s always nice to get a little external recognition. BostonWorks.com has been named best employment site (circulation greater than 250,000).

The move is mostly over. The kitchen is functioning, as are the baths. The cats have calmed down (a little).

Perhaps normalcy is just around the corner.

Jay and his Fast Food Fever website are featured in this month’s edition of FHM magazine.

Just about to move to suburbia. Launching a partner with LTV. A number of consulting projects in progress and in queue.

Lots going on. My writing schedule is suffering. Hope to be back on top of the game in April. We’ll see.

Dynamic data without refreshing the page
Neat PHP implementation of an Ajax framework.

What’s special about this number?
All sorts of mathy goodness, like 732 = 1^7 + 2^6 + 3^5 + 4^4 + 5^3 + 6^2 + 7^1.

Telephoto is for cowards
Long lens != good candid photos

10 ways to avoid getting hit up for expert advice

Stephen King on everything you need to know about writing successfully in 10 minutes
2nd draft = (1st Draft - 20%)

New Google Toy
Weather in Holliston = weather:01746

Blogosphere 2.0
This mirrors a lot of thinking I’m using in building Life Times Voice.

Ruby on Rails vs. PHP
[Ruby on Rails] may eventually replace PHP, which itself seems destined to the life of an over-implemented, omni-present scripting language embraced by new, overzealous programmers who create low-quality code they barely understand.

True, but low-quality code that does something useful is better than elegant code implementing an idea no one will buy.

LinkedIn moves to Craigslist model
Trying to turn a profit on social networking products.

On Bull[pucky]
It’s a process, not a product

Software developers working shorter hours
Not this software developer.

Why your broadband sucks
Larry Lessig on how the broadband cartel sues to prevent cities from providing wireless access to citizens.

The thin line between safety and tyranny
Papers, please.

Why WKRP in Cincinnati isn’t on DVD

Another reason I’m trying to keep Life Times Voice as simple as possible
“Some form of experience tailoring on the user’s part is fine, but only to a limited degree. When I see an endless array of options, it’s clear the marketer hasn’t defined a target customer and taken a point of view about her needs.”