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Dave Cohen and the guys at TechStars always make me feel far more loved than I deserve. As a result I’ll fly to the moon (or at least Boulder) and back for them. I’ll be in town March 5th for the TechStars For A Day event, hoping to learn a few things from the real stars of the show: Ryan McIntyre (founder, Excite), Darren Crystal (founder, Photobucket) and several founders from the first TechStars class.

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For the longest time I thought the plane wouldn’t take off. And then a couple days ago read an analysis that thoroughly changed my mind. Up until that point, I had forgotten that the wheels are free-wheeling, i.e. they’re not responsible for the plane’s acceleration.

I think the plane will take off tonight.

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Ian and I chatted today about a hypothesis floated between he and Jeremy Liew: if crappy games do so well on FB, think of what real games would do.

My take:

• Most of these are game-like.
• They are basically ads for themselves. They’re memes.
• Most dies fast, but a few Energizer bunnies and old women screaming, “where’s the beef!” will last for years.
• As soon as you try to monetize them through sales, you are screwed. This is beyond casual, this is inertia.

Occasionally, 100 words really sucks, so I’m cheating. Chat transcript on permalink
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Pottery Barn sells mass-produced MDF furniture at craftsman prices. As a lazy yuppie bastard, I shop there.

Last year I bought a charging station, which broke during installation. I finally called customer service; they promptly sent a replacement and asked me to send the old one back in the new unit’s packaging.

The replacement just broke and I never returned the original. Called customer service:

• They’ve scheduled UPS to pick up the first broken unit tomorrow.
• They’re sending another replacement.
• Upon arrival, they’ll schedule a UPS pickup for the second broken unit.
• I’ll keep buying Pottery Barn.

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Recently bought a new iPod and can once again listen to mixes in my car. These are two of my favorites, and while they differ in style, they share the fact that they can’t be played near the kids.

Elektric Cowboy puts together a straight-ahead crunchy dance mix. It starts out a bit weak, but gets hot by track two. The Blondie and PIL mashups really shine.

Dopplebanger mixes a supermellow package, mashing Gooom artists like M83 and Villeneuve with hip hop acts like Missy E and Eminem. Reminds me of the Kleptones’ “Yoshimi Battles The Hip-Hop Robots“.

Download and tracklisting are included on the permalink, streaming mp3 is embedded below.

Elektric Cowboy – December 2004 Mix:

Dopplebanger – Dark Side of the Gooom:

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It’s been years since I’ve seen a stadium show, but I decided to break my “no venue larger than 2,500 people” rule for the Foos. I bought four floor tickets for my birthday and am planning on hitting the Oakland Arena early in order to get close to the stage.

Send me an email if you want to come.

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I’m not talking about the one-term Illinois Senator thing, either. After his election, Lincoln famously appointed to his cabinet all three men who had bitterly campaigned against him for the Republican nomination.

There are two types of leadership – one based upon a sense of one’s own infallibility, the other on an ability to seek and synthesize the opinions of others. I think we know where the former gets us.

I would not be surprised to see Obama appoint McCain to Secretary of State if he takes office in 2008. That’s the type of leadership this country needs right now.

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In the last year or it seems that most sites have stopped publishing trackback addresses.

What do people do now to get themselves involved in the “global conversation”? At MyBlogLog it was practically impossible to get someone to update a blog post with factual corrections; what are chances someone will manually add a link to your followup story to their post?

Seriously, the trackback was one of the coolest parts of the blogosphere. Without them, I’m at a bit of a loss on building readership. Drop some knowledge on a man?

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It’s been a long, long, looooong time coming and I am so proud that the guys stuck to their guns. People are saying that it could be a game changer. See Kent Brewster’s demo and make up your own mind.

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Bijan Sabet gave me some link love today, and in his post asks that I consider Tumbr next time. I nearly chose Tumblr over Wordpress, and my my thinking lined up like this:

WORDPRESS
Pros: Complete layout control. Loads of third party plug-ins.
Cons: Technologically complex.

TUMBLR
Pros: Simple to use. Built to aggregate lifestream from the ground up.
Cons: Unstructured data + limited layout control = ugly.

I chose Pain In The Ass over Ugly. But hey, the first time I met Om, he said he loved MyBlogLog but wouldn’t use it because it was “too fucking ugly.”

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