Embracing Chaos

The UW Business School recently got a name: Foster. Michael G. Foster to be exact. Although just “Foster” is perhaps more fitting since 3 generations of the Foster family have contributed to making this possible. Just how much does it cost to get a prominent business school named after you? About $50 million. Here’s how it went down. It all started way back in 1928 when Albert Foster graduated from UW Business School. Not too long later, he founded the brokerage firm A.O. Foster & Co. which was successful enough to enable his family to get into the philanthropy business….

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I spent Saturday hanging out with about a dozen hackers building Tagmindr: Remember the future. Here’s the site’s self-description: Put any bookmark in a time capsule and we’ll send it to your future self. Give us your del.icio.us username and we’ll feed you anything that you’ve tagged as: “tagmindr” and “remind:YYYY-MM-DD”. We’ll remind you via RSS, SMS, Email or IM, so long as it’s RSS. (SMS, Email and IM coming later.) The use case is that you find a page about a product or service that you’d like to look at sometime later so you tag it into del.icio.us thinking…

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My talk about Venture Capital Term Sheets that I mentioned earlier has been accepted for the next Ignite Seattle which is tomorrow night at the CHAC. If just you want to come hear me talk, I’ll be speaking sometime after 9:45 PM. But the rest of the night (schedule here) looks fabulous so I plan to show up at the beginning at 6:30 PM. I’m doing my best to make this talk slower and more sane than my last talk. I hope to see you tomorrow!

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“The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!” -Steve Martin in The Jerk Steve Martin was very excited to get the new phone book because his name in it meant he was somebody. But in 2007 when 10 pounds of dead tree show up on my front porch, I’m just annoyed. The phone company wants to deliver this to me because their advertising rates are based on the number of phone books they deliver. It doesn’t matter that there is zero chance I will even open the thing. I take it straight from my porch to…

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The nice folks at Ignite posted videos for the rest of our talks from the second Ignite night, including my presentation on Why only Geeks and Hippies can save the world. Watching it, I see that it’s a lot rougher than I remember. The text as I intended to deliver it is available here, which might be a bit more coherent. Anyway, here’s the video: Enjoy!

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[Here is the full text of what I practiced for my talk at Ignite Seattle last night. I didn't manage to cram it all into the 5 minute presentation, largely because the audience was reacting a bit too loudly in places. IMHO that's a good thing. You can download my slides (slightly updated from the presentation). Video coming soon -- check back.] I’m here to talk about a system of morality that’s based on the upcoming end of society as we know it. I’ll explain why only geeks and hippies can save the world. I’m serious — I’m talking about…

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So I’m preparing my slides for my Ignite Seattle talk tomorrow night (tonight? Tuesday night) and I go over to my friends’ place to practice with them and I am reminded that the format is not 15 slides for 20 seconds each but rather 20 slides for 15 seconds each! So now I’m trying to split each of my slides into four thirds and rejigger all the timings. Fun! I’d like to take a few moments out of my busy schedule to apologize in advance to anybody expecting a polished coherent lecture from me. I decided to take an extra…

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Next week I’ll be giving a talk at Ignite Seattle about Transhumanist Morality. It’s going to be a fun challenge to summarize my thoughts on the next thousand years of human history and how it forms a basis for a system of morality in 5 minutes or less! But I’m up for the challenge. The real question is if anybody else will get anything out of it. ;) The last Ignite Seattle event was tons of fun and highly educational. A really good crowd of people — a great way to meet like-minded geeks in town that you didn’t know…

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I’ve had my own system for interpreting that “chance of rain” numbers that meteorologists use to predict weather. Along the lines of how people say eskimos have 137 different words for snow, here in Seattle, rain isn’t a simple yes/no thing. I wrote about it here a little while ago. The basic idea is that the % chance of rain is actually the % chance that a random person on the street would consider the current weather to be “rain.” I’ve also long believed that in Seattle it’s impossible to get over about 98% chance of rain because some die-hard…

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Some people complain that the holidays have become too commercial. That the holiest of christian holidays has become an excuse to accumulate material things, and that the true meaning, whatever that was, is being lost. I disagree. I think now is the time to Buy More Stuff! I have to give props out to all my friends who have been dutifully going down to Westlake center on the weekends to spread the good word. Someday soon I hope to have time to join them. The only thing that really surprises me about this is that some (clearly unamerican) people argue…

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