Every year at Yahoo, the founders (Jerry and David) buy a gift for all the employees. Jerry and David walk down the aisles and hand them out personally to many of the now 12,000 employees.

Usually it’s some kind of clothing item, but this year David showed up at my desk with an envelope. Inside was a “check” for $100 that I could give to any charity I wanted. Cool! Never do you have $100 that you can just give away without even wondering what you might have done with it yourself.

There are literally thousands of choices and I had no idea what to choose. I briefly considered The Human Fund. 🙂 The other night I was having dinner with my friend Tom and he mentioned that an acquaintance of his was involved with the Heifer Project.

Heifer? As in cows? Yup.

It’s actually pretty cool. They give animals to people in poor parts of the world that help them sustain themselves, kinda like teaching a man to fish… except the fish is a cow. Or a goat. Or a llama.

The catalog of animals you can buy is amusing. For my $100, I’m getting a flock of ducks ($20), a share of a llama ($20) and 3 rabbits ($60). The Heifers are a bit pricey at $500.

Personally, I hope they ship out some ducks from around here. Have you been to Redwood Shores or Oakland lately? These ducks and geese are make a total mess of things.

I wonder if, like sponsoring children in 3rd world countries, I’ll get letters from my mini-zoo. Probably not.

Back when I worked at LAUNCH, I had a boss named Alex. Alex was a very interesting guy. A bit crazy at times, but still a good guy.

I eventually transferred up to the Sunnyvale campus of Yahoo so I no longer worked with Alex, but I kept in touch with a lot of people down there.

One day I heard a rumor that the Secret Service showed up at the office and escorted Alex from the building. It turned out to be true. Alex never came back to work.

Recently I thought of Alex again and looked him up. His website is still running and on it is his interesting telling of what happened with the Secret Service. It’s a hilarious story in Alex’s signature character, so give it a read.

lazy (laa-zee)
ADJECTIVE.

1. Resistant to work or exertion; disposed to idleness.
2. Slow-moving; sluggish: a lazy river.
3. Conducive to idleness or indolence: a lazy summer day.
4. Depicted as reclining or lying on its side. Used of a brand on livestock.

Purely Hypothetical Example:

Signing up for and installing Skype on your laptop to make a local phone call because you’re lying in bed and too lazy to get up and grab a real phone.

Well, another season of the Amazing Race is done. It seemed to me that the winners this season were the most deserving of the 3 teams left this time around.

What was most strange about this season is that they visited countries that were the original homes of several engineers I’ve hired. India (no surprise there), Ukraine, and even the tiny island country of Mauritius, the last home of the Dodo bird.

Hopefully I’d like to have the chance to visit all these countries, just not in a nationally-televised competition. 🙂

I’m looking forward to All-Star season starting in February!

Ever since I moved to the west coast, I’ve longed to find a good donut shop. I don’t know what’s wrong with the places around here, but you can’t get a decent cruller. Even after Krispy Kreme arrived, I prefer Dunkin’s, of which there are none in California anymore.

A few months ago someone mentioned on a mailing list at work that there was a place in San Jose that used to be a Dunkin Donuts and hadn’t really changed much since. On the way to buy a Christmas gift this morning, we stopped at Sunny Donuts, on the corner of Union and Camden.

Anne immediately recognized it has a former Dunkin’s, even though I hadn’t told her why we were going here. The counters and tables were pink and the menu was in that familiar bubbly font that they used to use. The menu even called the donut holes Munchkins! We ordered a dozen Munchkins, a french cruller and a jelly donut.

The verdict? Close enough! They tasted a little different than what I’m used to when I go back to New England, but it’s 90% the same. Mmm, mmm, good. Finally, a real donut shop in California!

I’ve been a fan of Zhorn Software’s Stickies for Windows, but now that I’ve switched to a Mac, I need to get all those stickies back.

First I had to find the stickies file on my Windows Laptop, located under C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR NAME]\Application Data\stickies\stickies.ini. I copied that to my Mac and wrote this little perl script to convert the stickies file to a bunch of little text files.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w


mkdir('stickies');
$i = 1;


while (<>)
{
s/.*\\fs20(.*)\\par\^M\}\^M$/$1/;
s/\\par\^M/\n/g;
# s/\r\n//g;
s/\\\{/\{/g;
s/\\\}/\}/g;
s/\\f[01]//g;
s/^\s+//g;

open(NOTE, ">stickies/$i.txt");
print NOTE $_;
close(NOTE);


$i++;
}


I ran it with

perl stickies.pl < stickies.ini

Then I ran Stickies and went to File > Import Text. I selected all files in the stickies folder and hit open.

Tada! My surrogate brain is back.

You have to be careful what you wish for. A few weeks ago, my Windows laptop (provided by Yahoo!) was feeling kinda slow. There were little problems that I couldn’t seem to fix with the OS and I began to feel like it would be a good idea to wipe it clean, reinstall Windows and start fresh.

A few days later, my laptop wouldn’t start up. I brought it to the IT guys and they figured out the problem. One of the clips at the top of the screen broke off in the bottom half and got stuck inside. This happened some time ago, but eventually that clip got loose inside and shorted out the motherboard. Apparently it’s fairly common.

Well, I got my fresh install of Windows and had to go through the process of reinstalling all the apps I use. That brought up the question of what apps do I really need? Over the years I’ve found a bunch that are essential for me to feel productive. Here they are in order of priority.

1. Thunderbird – Email is still the killer app, and this one really gets how I deal with all that junk (and the real emails too)
2. Firefox – The most extensible web browser ever
3. Yahoo Messenger – This is how work gets done
4. Palm Desktop – Pretty much required if you have a Treo
5. Slickrun – By far the most useful Windows utility. Type in quick shortcuts to run programs, go to web pages, anything.
6. Mapsource – This is how I view all my maps and transfer waypoints to my GPS.
7. PuTTY – The best free terminal program out there.
8. Stickies – I don’t know why Windows doesn’t come with one of these like Macs do.
9. Winamp – A simple audio player that plays just about anything and doesn’t get in your way.
10. NoteTab Light – An excellent little replacement for Notepad
11. ExpertGPS – The killer feature of this one is being able to take any map as an image and calibrate it with GPS coordinates so you can overlay waypoints on it and create custom hiking maps.
12. RealVNC – This is how I fix my parents’ computer. 🙂
13. WinSnap – A great application for doing screen captures. Capture a region of the screen, save it to a file, print it or email it.
14. TreeSize – Gives you a map of where all your disk space is going so you can free it up.
15. Profont – A good monospaced font is hard to find. This one is compact, clear and free.
16. VLC – This video player will play just about anything.
17. Gaim – For those times that I need to speak to AOL or MSN friends, this client is far less annoying than the official ones.
18. Flickr Uploadr – The fastest and easiest way to get photos on Flickr
19. SlingPlayer – Gotta watch those Red Sox games

Tomorrow I pick up my brand-new MacBook Pro, so I guess I’ll have to start making a new list.

On October 17, Yahoo! announced that its long-awaited new ad system, “Panama” was live. I’m not sure if this meant it was live for everything, but starting that day, the revenue from my Yahoo Publisher Network ads went up significantly.

Comparing the 17 days before and after the Panama upgrade, my revenue went up 114%! That’s more than double what I was making before. I run some Google Ads too just to make sure I’m not missing out on anything and they don’t get close to that kind of return.

Now, this is not the kind of amounts of money I’ll be retiring on or anything, but it’s a nice little check to get every month. Go Panama!

For a long time I’ve thought it would be fun to go to The Bridge School Concert. Lots of big name acts in short sets, kind of like an artist sampler. I told Anne about it and she began checking for tickets.

When it was announced, the only seats available were $70. $70!?? That’s too much for a concert I thought. A few weeks later the lawn “seats” were released and Anne snapped up two without even waiting to confirm with me about it.

Last Saturday was the concert. We had just enough time after our Segway ride to get home, grab some food and chairs, and head over to Shoreline Ampitheater. That’s a venue we had never been to, but wanted to since we’ve lived here. Another place to check off the list, I guess.

Parking was quite a distance away on the SGI campus (they’re still around?), but we had nice walk with our beach chairs and food to the concert. It was a pretty hot day – up in the 80s. Our spot on the lawn – pretty much dead center left, right and up and down – was uncomfortable while we waited an hour for the concert to start.

I had heard that the lawn seats at Shoreline are pretty good; I’d tend to disagree. We couldn’t see the stage really at all. The incline seemed to be too low for really anyone to see except those at the very front. If anyone was standing in front of us, we definitely couldn’t see. I guess that’s why they have all the big projection screens.

At 4 pm, the concert started with a blessing by an indian chief. It was then that I started to really understand the audience here. Lots and lots of hippies. This was this concert to benefit the severely impaired kids who attend The Bridge School and there were no corporate sponsorships anywhere. Just a bunch of hippies getting together for a concert where they have a raffle to raise money. Crikes, even Woodstock had corporate sponsorships. Note to self: when planning a charity event, target groups of people who have lots of disposable income.

Neil Young started off with a short set. I only knew “Long May You Run”. Then some guy I’ve never of who looked like Jesus played off. His backup band had no name.

Gillian Welch was next. Never really heard of her either, but I guess she’s out there. Neil Young came out for the last song to keep everyone interested. Gillian actually looked a bit annoyed that Neil showed up and usurped her.

The most annoying thing for us was the 20 minute-plus set changes between acts. I’ve never been to a concert where bringing a book is a good idea.

Next up was Death Cab for Cutie, which I thought Anne would enjoy. She did. It reminded me that we hadn’t put in any new music on our iPod in at least a year, and it sure would be nice to hear music from 2006 here in October.

Around this time, people around us started smoking. I’m not really used to secondhand smoke anymore, moreso in California. Even moreso when it’s not from cigarettes. Most of the people smoking it were way older than us. When we got home we both had painful headaches.

More bands: Foo Fighters did a lame 3 or 4-song set, most of which I spent waiting in line for some $4 french fries. Pearl Jam was good but would have preferred that they didn’t substitute “Crazy Mary” for “Last Kiss”.

Trent Reznor admitted that he had no idea how he was going to do an acoustic concert. He showed up with a couple of cellists and and violinist. He played everything about 4 times slower than normal. It was weird. He did turn around and perform one of his songs facing the bleachers of Bridge School kids though, which was cool. Thankfully, it wasn’t “Closer”.

Brian Wilson really got the crowd going with classic Beach Boys song, but I felt bad for him. He was old and his voice surely wasn’t what it used to be. His backup singers did all the
falsetto for him. A couple of times he missed his cues and looked confused as he sat on a stool behind the microphone. He did last through 10 songs though. I just think that he should just go home and rest at 64 years old.

I thought Dave Matthews would be great to see, but by now I was just so damn tired I didn’t care. The lawn was completely full. There were no aisles, just a sea of people. As the night went on more and more people showed up and we were packed more and more tightly in. To get in or out you had step through a gauntlet of sleeping and otherwise disoriented people. If it wasn’t for the group in front of us that had decorated themselves with glow ropes, I probably would have never found my way back in the dark.

Dave’s throat was sore, so he jammed endlessly instead. That’s normally, fine, but not when it’s not 11:30 pm and I’ve been sitting in a beach chair for 9 hours. Get on with it.

We lasted, then started gathering our things at midnight as Neil Young’s set change proceeded. We waited near the exit for a few minutes and then he came on. We stayed for a few songs and felt like we had enough after he played “Harvest Moon”. We started the long walk back to the car while we could hear the concert conclude with “Rockin’ in the Free World”.

My conclusions: I’ve never been to a concert before that required you to bring your own furniture, 2 meals and a change of clothes. Yeah, there’s festivals like Cochella, but you’re actually staying there and there’s multiple stages. Here you’re in one spot – for 10 hours. Next time, $70 bucks doesn’t sound that bad for seats. It would be a lot more comfortable and we can show up an hour or two in, skip the bands we don’t care about, and still get the same seats.

Quite simply – everyone is paid to love Google.

Bloggers love Google because it pays their bills. AdSense makes it easy for anyone to set up a blog and make money.

Corporate websites love Google for the same reason. AdSense is a huge business.

Know-it-alls love Google because they get paid for surfing the web.

Shopping Sites love Google because they’re subsidizing purchases.

Investors love Google because their stock is up 560% in 2 years.

Employees love Google because they get free lunch.

Mountain View and San Francisco residents love Google because their internet access is now free.

Everyone else one loves Google because all their products are free. Why should I buy a copy of Outlook, Word or Excel? I get comparable functionality on Google for free. That saves me a lot of money, especially if I used to pay for these software or services before.

Even if all of your products except one has failed to gain significant marketshare, it only matters that you have one mega cash cow to fund it all. For Microsoft, this is Windows and Office, but even they don’t run the rest of their businesses without a model that makes money.

So the question is: when competition heats up and you’re expected to keep growing at 80% a year, how long can you afford to pay everyone to like you?

Update: The Google Myth Pops