I’m been fighting through one of the worst colds I’ve ever had.  I started feeling crummy on Friday, spent the entire weekend in bed, suffered through work on Monday, and had the entire experience crest with the worst headache and one of the longest pain filed and sleepless night ever.  I finally am feeling better today, but man that was a nasty 27 headed viral monster.

I’ve never been a fan of handshakes.  While I get the formality of it, I hate germs and – in a parallel universe – would probably spend all my time with my extremities wrapped in saran wrap.  I’ve had a running joke of it with some friends, including Paul Kedrosky, who also thinks handshakes are stupid.

Today, Paul and I decided to start a movement – “No More Handshakes in ‘09"’.  Fist bumps, elbow bumps, and hugs are fine – just no handshakes.  Join us!

I do this every year just because it’s a pet peeve of mine.  It’s now officially 2009 – time to update all those copyright notices if you haven’t turned the ending year into a variable.  What’s the point of these stupid copyright notices on the bottom of every web page anyway? 

Kudos to Matt Blumberg at Return Path for (a) reminding me about this and (b) having his copyright notices automated.  Google – not so automated.  Microsoft – not so automated (although Live appears to be).  Yahoo – automated!  Ask – not so automated.  Ebay – not so automated.  IBM – not so copyrighted!  I could go on but it’s time to go have lunch with my partners.

Oh goody, they are here.  Every magazine, newspaper, and most of the online publications known to man are putting together their “2008 year in review” and their “2009 prediction” editions.  What a fucking waste of human energy.

This has been one of my pet peeves for 20+ years.  For a while I managed to ignore them completely.  At some point I started getting asked for my predictions and succumbed to my ego for a few years and participated in the prediction folly.  At some point I realized that there was zero correlation between my predictions and reality and that by participating, I was merely helping perpetuate this silliness.

The energy that goes into the “year in review” and “prediction” stuff seems to be significantly greater in “extreme” (both good and bad) times.  The prognostications become stronger and bolder.  The analysis by hindsight intensifies.  I don’t think this benefits anyone.

Over dinner recently, I was having a discussion with a friend. The conversation took place in a very full and busy restaurant.  At some point the discussion turned to the sentiment throughout the United States right now and how the level of anxiety, negativity, pessimism, depression, and downright panic seemed at an extremely high level and appeared disconnected from general reality.  We talked about what “general reality” meant for a little while – both “our realities” (which are different) as well as our view of the “actual general reality in the United States.”

As we rolled through some of the discussion, I made the offhand comment that I thought much of the sentiment that existed started near the end of the summer a few weeks before the DNC.  As I thought about it more, it made sense.  For the 90 days prior to the election, all we heard and read was “things suck in America.”  Oil hit $135 / barrel and was going to go to $200 / barrel (it’s $35 / barrel today.)  Gas was going to be $10 / gallon (it’s under $2 / gallon in Colorado today.)

I was on vacation in England the week Lehman went bankrupt, AIG melted down, and Merrill Lynch got bought by Bank of America.   Amy and I rarely watch TV on vacation (other than movies) but since CNBC’s Closing Bell was on about the time we were crawling into bed, we watched it as though it was a sporting event.  Over the course of the week, we must have seen 100 different people predict 500 different things.  485 of them were wrong.  Oh – and I read Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable during this week and just could stop bursting out with cynical laughter each evening.  Over the 90 days we heard over and over again how much America sucked.  How many problems we had.  How everything was totally screwed up.

Of course, the financial markets have been a disaster in Q3 and Q4.  The housing bubble has finally officially exploded (doesn’t explode sounds more dramatic than burst.)  Unemployment is rising.  Credit is frozen.  Retail sales are massively off this Christmas.  All companies except Walmart are having a tough Q4.  Blah blah blah.  And now come the 2009 predictions.

My prediction for 2009 – the vast majority of the 2009 predictions will be wrong.  Ignore them. Find a Dharma that fits your Karma (more on that when I review Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement (Columbia Business School) by Bill Duggan, which I read last night.)  You get a finite number of years on this planet – make the most of all of them, no matter what is going on around you.

Matt McAdams has a clever blog up titled Up next: telesoftware!  He discusses the rise of our favorite new buzzword (hint: it’s "Cloud Computing") and spends some time harkening back to its origin (hint: it’s the "Application Service Provider.")

I was around at the birth of the ASP as the co-chairman of one of the early ASPs (Interliant) which started out life in 1996 as a "web hosting company" (how passe) and evolved in 1997 into an Application Service Provider.  I clearly remember the tech media latching onto the ASP label at the end of the 1990’s right alongside prefixing everything with a lowercase e and postfixing everything with ".com". 

The cynics were simple minded – they simply referred to the ASPs as the return of mainframe – or even better – timesharing.  Interliant enjoyed rapid growth and a brief period of what looked like success before being decimated during the collapse of the Internet bubble.

Platform-as-a-Service has emerged suddenly with a vengeance.  IBM System/370 anyone?  The S/370 had this nifty thing called "virtual memory", which evolved into VM, which lives on today as the great new "virtualization" trend.

Telesoftware?  Nah – that sounds too much like Telemedicine (what ever happened to that one?)  I think we are going to be talking about "planetary computing" once "cloud computing" runs its course since "Sun computing" has already come and mostly gone.

I have seen my lifetime supply of slides like the following:

My good friend Bruce Wyman – the Director of Technology at the Denver Art Museum – has a thoughtful post up this morning titled Simplification of Things, Part 1 of Some.  In it, he shows us a better way to communicate what this slide doesn’t.

I have a handful of chronic grammar problems.  I received the following email yesterday:

You seem like an intelligent guy.  But you insist on referring to your friends as, "that."  If you’re not just trying to fit in by using bad grammar (as everyone else seems to do), show everyone how smart you really are.

"To all my friends that are . . . ."
"Since they are the ones that . . . ." 
"(Name) that is . . . ."

How about using the word, "who" instead of "that" when you refer to people?  "My friend who will be . . . ."  "To all my friends who are . . . ."  "Since they are the ones who . . . ."

To which I responded:

I have 12 grammar problems.  Then / than, who / whom, accept / except, …., and that / who!  Thanks for calling me out on it – I’ll try harder but given that I’m 42 and can’t seem to get my brain wired for these few things, I’m probably screwed for life.

Thanks oh vigilant grammarians for keeping me on my toes.

While I’m usually amused by the copyright gaffes I see, I laughed out loud when I saw that Google News was still Copyright 2007 (thanks to dschwartz for the tip.) 

Dear Mr. Google: It’s almost February 2008.  Oh – and make the date a variable! 

I guess I should be nice since I’m sure some of the companies I’ve funded haven’t fixed (or variable-ized) the copyright dates on their site.

I almost managed to not to write my annual "please update the copyright on your website" post.  Matt Blumberg even called me out for being off my game this year.  But this morning, after seeing the 5,323rd Copyright 2007 message of the year, I decided I could no longer resist the urge to shout at the top of my lungs: "It’s 2008 – update your copyright."  Oh – by the way – you are a software or web company – there’s a way to do this so it gets automatically updated – it’s called "using a variable for the year."

This has now been a pet peeve of mine since 1980.  Did you know that the use of the copyright notice has been optional since 1989 as a result of the 1988 Berne Convention Implementation Act?  Think of what you could use all of those pixels for.

I spent 45 minutes this morning desmegmafying three new Xbox 360 controllers, three new Wii controllers, a Wii charger, and a bunch of videogames.  Thanks to everyone that suggested Wii and Xbox 360 games to me – BioShock ate my morning (after I got the controllers out of their packages.)

My experience reminded me of Mark Cuban’s brilliant post from 2006 titled Seagate Leaves me bloody…  My right index finger is now sliced, my left palm has a cut on it, and my left index finger is still bleeding a little – five hours later.  But I’ve liberated the controllers from their plastic jail, inserted the batteries, and gotten my butt kicked at Wii Table Tennis.

When I looked at the damage I had done (including scraping up over 50% of the brand new controllers I’d gotten, including one particularly gruesome two inch long scratch in the black plastic of a brand new Xbox controller), I pondered the pile of crumpled and useless plastic that will take 154,792 years to decompose.

I spent some time on Wikipedia trying to figure out the type of evil plastic that is used for this stuff and got bogged down in common plastics and their usages.  I now know more about polycarbonates, polystyrene, and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene than I thought I’d ever want to know.

Why, oh why, do consumer products companies insist on using this shit?  There has got to be a better way.  I’m sure I would have done better at Wii Table Tennis if I hadn’t damaged my hands.

I hate buzzwords.  They make me nauseous.  I just got an email to the link of The Office 2008 Web 2.0 Buzzword Forecast which includes such beauties as search moptimization, wombagging, friendiligence, converstations, social mediation, we-bargaining, greenlashing, shamsparency, credlining, facelifting, blog groveling, world war 2.0, microtubing, and lipsmacking.  I’m going to go lipsmack about buzzwords after I go vomit in my carbon neutral bathroom.  (Thanks Greg.)

Charlie Wood reminded me in his comment to my post The Purpose of Numbers on a Y Axis that Greg Reinacker’s first pitch to me had a revenue graph lacking Y Axis values.  For those of you that don’t know Greg, he’s the founder / CTO of NewsGator, a company that I was the seed investor in and am very proud of.  Here’s that graph from the first presentation.

Fortunately (for both me and Greg), he had plenty of other slides in that first presentation, including the money shot that was the vision slide.

This was spring 2004.  I didn’t know what RSS was, nor did the vast majority of people who know about it today.  Greg was way ahead of the curve, explained it to me in a way that helped me overlook his lame revenue chart, and resulted in our investment in NewsGator in the summer of 2004.

While this demonstrates that I can get past my pet peeves, please put numbers on your Y Axis.

Every day I get a fresh pile of emails containing executive summaries and powerpoint presentations (keep them coming by the way) inquiring whether I’d be interested in exploring an investment.  I try to quickly look at them all and decide immediately whether or not I want to spend any time considering investing in the business.

There is an endless list of nitpicky things I could suggest that would improve these executive summaries and powerpoint presentations.  I’ll spare you those.  There is also an endless list of substantive things I could suggest.  For example, what is wrong with the following graph?

Um.  Not useful.  I got that you’ve had relative growth but you are missing the numbers on the y-axis.  If you think I’m a total buckethead, you’d assume I’d be impressed by this growth.  However, my first question is “so, what is the 2007 revenue?”  I looked at the next few pages in the presentation and it was nowhere to be found.

If you trust me (or are interested in me) enough to send me a ppt unsolicited, please at least give me the real quantitative data for me to react to – assuming you think it’s an important part of your presentation.  If it’s not an important part of your presentation (e.g. tiny numbers so far – nice yoy % growth, but tiny numbers) don’t include it!

At least I got a blog post out of this one.

I did very well on the math part of the SAT but not as well on the verbal part (I did ok, but I was definitely more MIT than (or is it “then”) Harvard.)  Since the phrase “unique” crosses over nicely between the math and verbal sections it belongs in my Pet Peeves universe.

Today I was in a meeting where someone mocked the phrase “very unique.”  I smiled since I’ve heard this one so many times.  His next statement was “unique means one of a kind – that means something can’t be ‘very’ unique.”

I knew I’d seen an interesting rant on “very unique” on the web somewhere and I was uniquely pleased that Google didn’t fail me.  In addition to the “pro very unique” argument, I found some “anti very unique” and “definitive there are no very unique” people.

Don’t forget to get your domains straight.

There are a bunch of verbal tics that people use that drive me crazy.  “Honestly” and “to tell you the truth” are the two that I dislike the most. 

Another one that I hate is “that’s a good question” as the immediate response to a question.  I know this is just buying time to start to formulate an answer, but it always annoys me.

Today, one of my partners (who heard me coach a CEO on this the other day in preparation for a presentation) told me that I had just said “that’s a good question” three times in a meeting we were in.  I looked at him with my normal incredulous “huh?” look and said “really?”  He didn’t respond with “that’s a good question” but responded, “I don’t mean to be an asshole about it, but really.” 

I guess I’ve been promulgating one of the verbal tics that annoys me.  If you notice me doing this with you, please admonish me appropriately.

I’ve been traveling a lot lately.  A lot.  So – I’ve gotten to experience airport security in many different forms throughout our beautiful country. Today’s experience in Boston reinforced how silly this whole thing has become.

Amy and I are heading to Washington DC.  The line is short as this part of Logan is pretty empty today (not many US Air flights mid-afternoon on a Saturday.)  As a result, the TSA guy has come up with a few new rules and he’s repeating them as steadily as your favorite metronome.  “Put your shoes, liquids, and bags directly on the conveyer belt.  Do not put them in the plastic trays.  If you have a drink, you can you drink it on that side security but you must throw it away before you come through.  Put your id’s away.”  Over and over again.  Instead of getting through security in three minutes, it took about ten as everyone forgot to take the purses, their liquids, or their shoes out of the little plastic trays.

All I could think of was my Acela train trip from Baltimore to NY.  We bought a ticket in the train station, zero security, bought some drinks in the train station, and walked on the train.  There were more people on it than on the airplane I was on from NY to Boston on Thursday night.  Our ending point was Penn Station.  No security – go figure.

I also thought about John Corzine’s (the NJ Governor’s) horrible car crash yesterday and how easy it is to either have a random (or deliberate) car accident.

Our government is spending an incredible amount on airport security and I’ve yet to feel fundamentally more secure than I used to.  Maybe it’s just me and I’m cynical, but this pet peeve gnaws at me.