Matthew's Weblog

Reviewed by Slashdot, Project Arcade looks to be interesting… even just as a buying guide…

Technorati Tags: arcade, MAME, fun

from a career DOJ lawyer, a scathing op-ed piece about the Bush administration.

via Isen.

Technorati Tags: politics, bush, doj

I hadn’t heard of it, but it sounds like a good idea for a startup.  If you’re giving restricted stock, you give it with an attached right-to-repurchase at $0.01/share, and then the company’s right to repurchase is periodically canceled on fractions of the transaction.

Why good?  (at least as far as I understand it) The dev gets the shares when they’re worth pennies on the dollar and is taxed on that basis, and then any improvement in the price will be taxed as capital gains… better for the dev in the long run.  It’s also a smaller hit to the new company, since the value you’re giving away is minimal.  The only challenge would be using this strategy at an established, publicly-traded company… where the stock may have enough value at the start that it could be a big tax hit for that initial grant.

Technorati Tags: options, payment, vesting, taxes, startup

A synopsis of a snip from Stanford’s iTunes U, The Secret to Successful Negotiations lecture:

The three components of trust in a person are:

1. Character – do they have values and respect them?  And yours?
2. Competence – if they can’t do what you trust them to do, it’s a foolish, naive trust.
3. Capability (empowerment) – if you ask them to do something that is not in their power, they won’t be able to get your task done.

I’m only on the second of these lectures and I’m really enjoying them – good insights and applicable to my job.  Now, on with the lecture!

(approximately 16 minutes into the lecture, if you want to jump to this part of the discussion)

Technorati Tags: Stanford, lecture, negotiations, trust

from Fast Company #115-

“I had basically made a prototype which worked fine for a couple of million users,” he says. “But we needed to really rebuild things if we were going to scale.” He says his board and investors “didn’t get Friendster and wouldn’t focus on something boring like fixing the technology.”

This is the danger of expansion without a firm handle on the tech side…

I’m liking the new plastic-film solar cells progress, enabling two wavelength captures in one composite material, and the new possibilities in battery packs for autos.  The other fun stuff is energy from vibrations and an across-open-space power transfer process… where if the first doesn’t power up your cell phone, you could just toss it on a shelf and it would fill up automatically.  It’s very attractive to not have to plug in cords!

in an article from Slate: The West is still Winning.  This is why fake security mumbo-jumbo bothers me so much.

Many times I have been asked to create reports that only show a certain set of rows within a query to keep a webpage from getting too huge. It’s relatively easy to do by pulling the entire set of data and segmenting it in the application but that is not always practical with large data sets or limited application memory. I have finally been led to a possible solution in an Ask Tom Oracle article where he refers to a nested query to trim off the unused data.

Now, to try it…