Bullets

Time to sift through the sock drawer:

It’s been happening for a couple of years now, but really, I’m getting tired of executive assisstants of supposed Hedge Fund managers leaving me messages looking for insight into the online search & media business. They always throw words around like “totally confidential” and “independant,” etc, etc. Unfortunately, I can’t believe any of them at this point. My suspicion is that these are parasites who are either a) day traders posing as someone else or b) Wall Streeters looking for an edge. Either way, they’re not getting shit from me. Ever.

To that end, our phone system at work is totally awesome because you have to announce your name when you call me. So when I pick up the phone, I hear the name you’ve announced and then I decide if I want to take the call (press 1) or send it to voice mail (press 2). If I don’t know you, forget it. If it’s a potential work call and I don’t know you, you’ll leave a message anyway. Most of the time when people don’t announce their names to try and get around it, I’m not answering.

Does anyone actually have (or even want) an Amazon Kindle? As ugly as it seems in the pictures, I kinda want one. I love the idea of just buying books on the fly and being able to subscribe to newspapers and have the whole paper on the Kindle every morning (having time to read it – hah – that’s another thing). The biggest problem is that I can’t see one, hold one or use one unless I buy it or I know someone who has one. Right now, I don’t know anyone who has one. It looks like something from 1984, but there’s something luring me to it regardless.

Dell has an interesting new product out today. Apple rules the roost when it comes to sleek and stylish, but you didn’t think the others were just going to sit around picking their noses, did you? Very cool.

I love what Fred Wilson is doing for the Web 2.0 Conference Keynote speech in NYC this fall. He’s been asked to give the keynote and has set up this wiki to encourage the community to help him write it. I wish I had this option when I was in high school and college! Which makes me wonder – what percentage of college kids are pulling papers from the web? I was having a conversation with our babysitter, a 19 year-old college student and she tells me that just about everyone has laptops in class now. I told her about 1994, when I had a laptop at school, but didn’t drag it around, actually had to go to the library for research and NOBODY ever had a laptop in class. The whole “going to the library” thing was a relatively foreign concept to her! Odd. I didn’t even want to ask her if she knew what microfiche was!