Business Week: Venture capitalists are betting on tools that power blogs.

My mother pointed this out to me: telephone poles all over Holliston bear signs memorializing those who’ve died during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The signs, a temporary memorial that will be up until Sunday, have become a sight all too familiar in town. This is the third time resident and veteran Bobby Blair has created the display to remind passers-by of the human toll of war.

I’ll try to get pictures of this when I’m out in Holliston this weekend for my father’s birthday.

Jay’s new focused product-review blogs: Kitchen Contraptions and Shaving Stuff. These build on the successful template for Single Serve Coffee and Fast Food Fever.

Why cartoons that look too lifelike are really really creepy.

Stupid trademark abuse: Monster Cable sues Red Sox over Green Monster seats, among other in no way competitive users of a common word.

Microsoft’s Robert Scoble: Must the industry always be “us vs. them?”

Tonal languages promote perfect pitch.

This is a gleefully off-color rant against our friends down south. Don’t click through if you don’t enjoy salty language.

The next [jerk] who says, “It’s your money, not the government’s money” is gonna get their [rear end] kicked. Nine of the ten states that get the most federal [goshdarn] dollars and pay the least… can you guess? Go on, guess. That’s right, [pal], they’re red states. And eight of the ten states that receive the least and pay the most? It’s too easy, [chief], they’re blue states. It’s not your money, [chaps], it’s [really] our money. What was that Real American Value you were spouting a minute ago? Self reliance? Try this for self reliance: buy your own [lovely] stop signs, [gov’nur].

Have I ever mentioned how much I love the Hiring Hub? Great content, useful tools, pretty design.

It’s one of things I’m proudest of from my Boston Globe tenure.

Mary Helen Gillespie in the BostonWorks Hiring Hub tells us about “the worst-kept secret in town.” Everyone is looking for a new job.

After years of sitting tight in a wishy-washy economy, folks are no longer reluctant to make the first move when it comes to their careers.

There’s a definite buzz in the air. Phones are ringing, and e-mails are dropping. Our informal networks are chattering away about new opportunities. For many managers, the ability to recruit talent, as well as lose it, has once again become a priority. And it is truly about time, because there is also a great deal of not-so-quiet whispering about how awful local workplaces have become as a result of New England’s harsh economic pattern.

As I’ve been saying for a while, those companies and managers who decided it would be great fun to abuse workers during the employment downturn are going to get their comeuppance. Hard.

Life Times Voice has been in a closed beta one period for a few weeks. I’m about to go into beta two, and I’m looking for a few more betatesters to play with the product.

If you’re interested in online communities, nonprofits, and weblogs/social software, and you are interested in beta testing, please drop me a line and let me know.

Thanks!
Jason

Here is MSNBC’s list of history’s 10 greatest entrepreneurs.

Not that I would ever consider this myself (unless of course the check was really really big), but more and more startup founders are defining success as acquisition, not IPO.

Once upon a time, venture capitalists defined success in the companies they backed as an eventual initial public offering. No longer. In today’s world of churning and uncertain stock markets, an IPO is the exception, not the rule, for most fast-growing private companies. Increasingly, venture capitalists invest in companies with the expectation that they will be acquired by a major corporation or an investment group.

So, the new business is doing pretty well; so well in fact that I’m spending most of my time selling instead of building. So, I need a little help of some of the engineering and development.

Before I go to elance, I wanted to make sure I gave you folks a shot at it. I’ve got a decent amount of chunked work (about 10hrs or so per week for at least the next couple of months.) in PHP and MySQL.

If you’re interested, or know someone who’s pretty good, please drop me an email so we can talk.

Thanks,
Jason

Wow, this looks really really good.

Mark Cuban analyzes the music industry.

This is the only industry in the world that can see thousands of its retailers close, reduce the number of products it sells via cutbacks in artist rosters and albums released, cut back marketing and promotional dollars and then blame a reduction in sales on someone or something other than themselves.

Trying to intimidate critics into shutting up generally backfires.

This is a case where a person set up a website to complain about a company’s shoddy product. The company calls up the lawyers and tries to intimidate them. Person doesn’t cave, and the company gets lots of bad publicity.

Companies have threatened scores of criticism sites with trademark infringement and have lost many of the cases that have actually gone to court, Seltzer said. But most of the time, she said, the site owners simply agree to stop before a lawsuit is even filed. Thus, the boundaries of their rights are never tested.

The t-shirt makers are on the ball.

As many of you know, my friend Dan Dunn ran for state representative for Arlington on the Libertarian ticket.

He didn’t win — as you might guess, Arlington is a bit of a Democratic town — but the Arlington Advocate lauds the quality of his campaign.

Dunn especially was a welcome addition to the race. A Libertarian running in a decidedly Democratic town, Dunn featured a campaign of ideas - not rhetoric.

Take 30 seconds and read the whole thing.

“Oh…oh, gosh…you know, I’m not much on speeches, but it’s so gratifying to leave you wallowing in the mess you’ve made. You’re screwed, thank you, bye.”

– Deposed sanitation commissioner Ray Patterson upon being asked to come back and fix the mess, “Trash of the Titans“

Here’s a handy guide to your election night tv schedule.

Plan your bathroom breaks between :50 and :58 of each hour. By agreement of the networks, no state can be “called” (the networks love horse-racing analogies) until all of the polls have closed in that state.

Plus, CNN has some nifty maps. You can also see how Holliston and Cambridge vote.

Ohio voter suppression blog. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

I seldom get angry, but this is horrible stuff. I hope all the dirty-tricksters in this campaign get their comeuppance.

A. and I just walked down Brookline Avenue to the polling place and voted. I hope we have a clear decision tonight.

My 10th-grade French teacher is off the hook.

Richard Melpignano, 58, of Bellingham was cleared after Framingham District Court Judge Robert Greco ruled that the poems’ contents did not measure up to the legal standard to convict him of disseminating harmful material to a minor.

Make sure to check out the text of the poems, excerpted in the article.

The size of each state is distorted to emphasise its share of electoral votes.

Repercussions of Amazon entering DVD rental business.

Allow people to use a credit card to borrow against their 401(k)s?

Prepare to get screwed by digital rights management

A nice story about a biotech company renovating an old Holliston building to be its headquarters.

Rock’s 10 wildest myths.

“We always assume that our emotional states will last much longer than they do.”

Interesting advice on buying a car from an ex-salesman.

Now that the Red Sox are done, I can change all the radio stations in my apartment from WEEI to WBUR.

Woo Hoo!

We live on the top floor of an apartment building populated by MIT grad students and young professionals. So, we were a little surprised when there was a knock at the door last night at 7:30.

“Trick or Treat.”

“Uh uh.” Scrambled around the kitchen. Saltines? Pecans? “Here you go!” I said, handing over a 3-box of Pop Secret.

“Uh, thanks.”

“Happy Halloween!”

At about 6:30 last night, A. and I were watching the Patriots game, a little confused. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves when the Patsies were getting blown out.

I guess the sports gods were never going to allow us to have both the Red Sox and the Patriots on top of the world at the same time.

Very exciting! This spring will see Habitat for Humanity’s first-ever project in China.

Oh, I wish I go on this trip (timing’s bad, though). I’d love to see how China’s changed since the last time I was there, in 2001.

Philadelphia Daily News: Was that so hahd?

Boston.com compiles Red Sox championship front pages from newspapers around New England.

And New York.

Still pretty speechless.

Looking forward to sleeping again, though.

For the first time in five years, I actually came in dead last in my strictly-for-entertainment-purposes-only football guessing game this week.

I used to be good. What happened?

What a nasty cold/flu. I’m finally back to a reasonable facsimile of health, and my brain has almost re-engaged. I hope to be an actual productive developer tomorrow.

We’ll see.

So, I’ve been out for the past couple of days with a horrible cold and fever. I’m guessing that the lack of sleep over the past two weeks has not helped much.

Pennant fever. Catch it!

Dirty tricks in local elections

About 30% of my readership lives in my hometown of Holliston, so I thought this would be interesting, especially if you got one of the mail pieces.

In the last two weeks, 300,000 voters in Framingham, Natick, Ashland, Holliston, Medway, Hopkinton, and Franklin have received four different post cards from the state GOP accusing Spilka of voting to protect sexual predators in the schools. It would be a shocking revelation about any public official. It would be especially alarming news about a lawyer and a mother of three who began her professional life as a social worker investigating child abuse and neglect cases, about a lawmaker honored last spring with a “Friend of Children” award by the state Department of Social Services.

It would be, if it were true. It is not.

The mailings, featuring disturbing black-and-white photographs of menacing men and crying children, are as dishonest as they are cynical.

Oh yeah.

Our doctors kick [butt]. Our universities kick [butt]. Our football team kicks [butt]. Our fried clams kick [butt]. And now our baseball team is kicking [gosh darn] [butt]. I think I’m going to implode.

(Thanks to Jess for the pointer)

Here is a far-too-true description of what life would be like if architects had to work like web designers. Pretty funny, if you’re in the biz.

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Of course, I’m on both sides of the conversation with the new business. I have no one to yell at but myself…

Bring on Game 7!

That was a little closer than I’d like….

At one point last night after Jeter’s double, a certain wife of mine likened our plight to being stuck endlessly in The Empire Strikes Back.

To which I replied, “Yub yub! Ortiz! Yub yub!” And soon thereafter celebration broke out throughout the galaxy.

We’ll see what happens in half an hour when Schilling takes the mound.

Random side-thought: Pedro is now like George Lucas. They’ve both lost enough off their fastball that, while you hope they came come through big, you’re really just hoping they won’t embarrass themselves.

ESPN’s Bill Simmons does a great job describing A.’s and my creeping dread followed by joyous exultation.

These weren’t just baseball games. They were life experiences. They broke you down in sections. They made you question God, the meaning of life, whether sports should possibly mean this much. On Sunday night, I stewed in my seat vowing never to raise my kids as Sox fans. On Monday night, I skipped out of Fenway wondering if any other team could possibly mean this much to a group of people.

More people have watched the Stewart/Crossfire clip on the Internet than watched it on CNN. Math.

Here is a Quicktime movie of Stewart’s Daily Show monologue from last night.

Make sure to listen until the end. Fun with Churchill!

One of the more subtle issues at play in this election is the fate of the Supreme Court. The next president will likely be able to make three nominations, deciding the direction of the court for the next twenty to thirty years.

President Bush ducked the question in the debates, but some worry about what will happen if he picks more justices like Scalia and Thomas.

Justices Scalia and Thomas have urged their colleagues to reverse Roe and “get out of this area, where we have no right to be.”

If Roe is lost, the Center for Reproductive Rights warns, there’s a good chance that 30 states, home to more than 70 million women, will outlaw abortions within a year; some states may take only weeks. Criminalization will sweep well beyond the Bible Belt: Ohio could be among the first to drive young women to back-alley abortions and prosecute doctors.

If Justices Scalia and Thomas become the Constitution’s final arbiters, the rights of racial minorities, gay people and the poor will be rolled back considerably. Both men dissented from the Supreme Court’s narrow ruling upholding the University of Michigan’s affirmative-action program, and appear eager to dismantle a wide array of diversity programs. When the court struck down Texas’ “Homosexual Conduct” law last year, holding that the police violated John Lawrence’s right to liberty when they raided his home and arrested him for having sex there, Justices Scalia and Thomas sided with the police.

We just got home from our 6-hour game.

We are mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted. But happy, oh so happy.

We’re off to Fenway to see Game 5.

I only hope that when we get back there’s still baseball to be played.

It’s kinda hard to do software development on a remote server when your DSL line keeps going down.

Grr.

For those of you viewing this on the site, you can see my new banner image at the top of the page. This was taken in Jasper, Alberta a couple of months ago.

If you’re reading this in an aggregator, you’ll need to click through to see it.

Love the trees.

I don’t know if it’s the whole wedding thing or not, but I have been atrocious in my strictly-for-entertainment-purposes-only football guessing game this year.

I couldn’t hit water if I fell out of a [goshdarn] boat.

Dan Gillmor writes this week about the future of radio.

Howard Stern’s jump to satellite and Podcasting’s rise are stirring the radio waters. It’s fun to watch.

Since I am nothing but a Jon Stewart shill this week, I might as well point you to an excerpt of his Rolling Stone interview.

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart showed up on CNN’s Crossfire show yesterday and made co-host Tucker Carlson froth with indignation. He refused to “be their monkey” and actually proceeded to go after their entire format in a blistering indictment of their flavor of screaming partisan hackery.

As a member of Stewart’s “stoned slacker” audience, I found it great fun to watch.

What most of these shows don’t realize is that we are smarter than they think. Stewart had it just right when he told Carlson how he asked Daily Show guest John Kerry about Cambodia, but really didn’t care about the answer. The question is irrelevant. Bush’s suit bulge is irrelevant. Dick Cheney’s daughter is irrelevant. Whatever the hell Bill O’Reilly is doing is irrelevant.

We don’t care about these things, we care about actually getting this country on the right track. All we want is for leaders and journalists to actually speak honestly and intelligently, without resorting to pandering and rhetorical distortions. Believe it or not, we were raised to be media-savvy; we can see through the smokescreens and we can figure out the parlor tricks. Stop insulting our intelligence. We realize the issues are complex and multi-sided, but we are capable of understanding. Have faith in us. Speak clearly. Please.

One good thing: this election is mobilizing Generation X’ers to rebel against the existing politics/media mess. Life will be much simpler when they realize that we’re not stupid; we just refuse to pay attention to inanity. You might remember the old line from the early nineties: withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy. Today, we as a generation have much more power than we did 10-15 years ago. The old-line dismiss this at their peril. Apathy is no longer our sole option.

We’re not going to be their monkeys.

Here is a link to the CNN transcript of the show. If you’re on a broadband connection, you should download the video and watch it yourself.

Wal-Mart is taking on the record labels, forcing them to lower their prices so that Wal-Mart can sell CDs for less than $10.

I can’t believe I have to root for Wal-Mart. I feel so dirty.

Whacko broadcast company orders its 62 television stations to air an Anti-Kerry film on the eve of the election, pre-empting the normal programming.

That’s a pretty big abuse of the public airwaves. Here are some things you can do.