Across Weirdish Wild Space

Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital has a fabulous presentation to scare the bejesus out of their startups on what the current financial crisis means for their fledglings.

While I don’t agree with all of it, it’s got some excellent economic analysis in it of the real reasons there is a very real and serious problem at the moment and why it’s going to be hard for new companies to borrow and in general why we’ve all had perverse economic incentives to take on debt rather than save (I notice it missed deregulation in there, but hey, no one’s perfect).

It’s good and explains some very complex issues reasonably simply (hey, you didn’t want someone with an economics background like me presenting it, trust me) and if it doesn’t make some startups batten down the hatches, start cutting expenses and try to eek it out for a while, I don’t know what will.

Their bottom line : It’s not a normal downturn and recovery will take quite a while. I love the slide, Get Real or Go Home as a conclusion.

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I’m not sure I really believe Sequoia really thinks things are this bad, but having the presentation out there probably has put the fear of God into some startups whose burn rates have been something like it was in the 90’s.

Interestingly, the most inadvertent reaction came from VC watcher TechCrunch who had the Post line “Profit Maximization V. Survival Maximization.” While the article was focusing on the role and blame a lot of VCs have (I believe) incorrectly pinned on VCs for the downturn, I thought the headline was a more basic question that I thought a lot of companies should have been asking themselves a while back. Sure, you need a balance of both, especially if the question of shareholders enters the picture, but the fact is a lot of companies have been, for a while now, confusing profit maximization with survival maximization and a lot of them are probably going to be treated unkindly by the increasingly likely recession coming on.

Long term view, stick with the three rules of why you should be starting a company :

1. You can do something no one else can do
2. You can do something better than anyone else can do (and defend your ability and advantage to do so)
3. You have a particular insight into consumers or businesses you can capitalize on better than anyone else

You’ll notice that these are all based on survival maximization rather than profitability.

OK, I have no idea why more people aren’t more furious about this, though I guess it’s just evidence of what everyone suspected all along.

And, ok… sure, the people who listen to Fox are the ones most likely to believe what the White House says in any case (or that the Dems do the same thing anyway), but this seems beyond that. As the commentator in this segment points out, there is a difference between saying “The White House today sent us a briefing saying… “ and “We think that… “

It’s the difference between propaganda and journalism or acting as a party mouthpiece and agreeing with a position. And while I don’t think anyone in the waning days of the Bush administration will be surprised to see that more cracks are appearing in the wall of an administration that would support torture, arbitrary detention and lying to start a war, but the degree to which the administration seems open to brekaing rule of law whenever it suited their agenda is a little bit frightening and should be a scary morality tale for all those governments (and journalists) who followed their lead on so many things so blindly.

Anyway, I hope it does create some incentive around a return to true journalism in the US. The Fox news model of opinion as journalism has provided a chilling effect on proper news reporting in the US and a “if it bleeds it leads” epidemic which I think ultimately hurts us all and makes it seem like we live in a much more violent and fearful world than is actually true. I’ve completely stopped watching US news programs since they seem so amazingly biased compared to their non-US counterparts (though still read the feeds for the NYTimes and the Washington Post).

I probably should have realized htere was a serious problem when the macbook crashed a few times. Let’s face it, macs rarely do that. Anyhow, the machine froze and would not reboot. It just kept spinning looking for something to boot up into. I tired safe mode booting, shell, Disk utlity repair from a Install CD boot… hell, even target mode thinking I could maybe just get all the data off and be a happy puppy. Kind of had a bit of a freak when the repair gyu said the drive was a total loss. They couldn’t get anything from it.

I’m a bit annoyed I have to admit. Quality control definitely seems to have gone down at Apple and you realy notice it in the consumer line. When I bought the macbook to replace my 12” G4 Powerbook I knew I’d had problems with the iBooks but seriously, a DVD failure and a full on HD failure in the first year ? Ok, I’m not Joe Normal user, but still.

It’s also very sobering after holding onto a Macbook Air last week for testing purposes (this comes to you courtesy of an IBM X300 laptop we have in for testing running Ubuntu 8.04 which is a sweet piece of hardware though had to compile sound drivers for it and mic in still isn’t working properly making Skype not so useful… still, though… ). Guess I probably should be sticking to the pro hardware.

It has made me realize how heavily dependent I’ve become on OSX and some of the applications it has for doing things. Not having Quicksilver or its integration with things like addressbook, mail and calendaring has been driving me a bit nuts actually. I really do feel half to a third as produtive. And the whole idea of my work and personal life being integrated on this machine, as nice as it is, seems strange without the effortless apps that make that possible.

It looks like my backups are all ok. Things like photos and writing and mail appear to be in place though since I hadn’t been backing up my music collection I’ll have to re-get all those files from the iPod I’ve got and the database which lists all the songs.

Cross your fingers. Should have the macbook back on Monday if all goes well.

Never play with looping code connected to a mailer before disabling all mail sendouts but the terminator. About a week or so ago, I got a clever brainstorm to massively reduce the amount of code in a small app I am working on that sends out mails for a certain piece of functionality without checking to see that the array was being reduced by the removed elements. And I had it connected to the local mailer on my dev system.

I spammed myself with somewhere in the neighbourhood of 2000+ emails to a couple of my test accounts before realizing that the reason the fan on the laptop was suddenly whirring up fast enough to make the thing fly was because of all the mails it wa generating and sending. I had to kill all mails with a postsuper -d ALL to postfix on my dev lappie. Ugh…

Anyhow, someone has obviously pretty much done what I’ve done in the past since they had the very clever idea of creating this simple SMTP auth dummy server called MailTrap .

Handy for those of us doing a lot of Rails work these days. Probably not going to use it on this project since will not be messing with the mail code anymore but handy for my next project.

Update 7 Sep 2007 : OK, so the fact is the problem was not with MacTheRipper at all which you’d get from my below post, so I heartily apologize for casting doubt on the makers of an excellent piece of freeware that has ripped many a rental for me. This seems to be what happens : Whenever you burn a CD or DVD it does something to the drive which then makes it not want to mount DVDs so you can watch movies. Resetting the PRAM (ie. Command-Option-P-R on boot does not help, atleast in my case as others have suggested. But this is how I got to watch movies again. Make sure you have something which erases all your parameter files when you drag an application to the trash. I personally think AppTrap is great. Dump something like MacTheRipper in the trash and remvoe files (ie. do not leave them) when it asks you. Now, re-install the software again from a dmg or by downloading. Now set it to be the application that opens DVDs when they are inserted in the Systems Preferences | CDs and DVDs preference panel. Insert the DVD that wouldn’t ount before and the application should open and the DVD mount. YMMV, but this definitely worked for me.

I was a little distraught when I got my new macbook and started having problems almost immediately with the optical drive on it. Something I had actually bought it for as the optical drive on my powerbook G4 12” had gone.

It was maddening and there were plenty of other people in forums with the problems but mine was kind of intermittent. Occasionally, some things would work but other wouldn’t.

Anyhow, i finally seemed to have discovered the pattern. This worked for me, so I’m posting it for other people to find. YMMV…

The problem seems to be that, if like me, you rip most of your DVDs as soon as you get them so you can watch them later on your computer before deleting them, you used the excellent MacTheRipper to get them onto your hard drive. I would do this, play something with VLC and then the next time I needed to mount a new DVD it wouldn’t even show up on my desktop. The drive would spin up three times and then unceremoniously eject the disk.

What I think was happening was that the rosetta emulation necessary for the app to work on Intel and make it think it’s a PPC chip is doing something.

I installed the new version of Handbrake (which not only rips, but encodes and compresses the DVD file as well – it rocks), and set it as the application to trigger when a DVD is inserted.

So far, problem solved, so if you stumble upon this entry, let me know if it works for you.

OK, so the iBook had a complete logic board failure. I mean, I was pretty sure that was the case, but I am a bit annoyed as the logic board failed in March 2005 and was replaced. And in fact, that was a little over a year since Apple replaced my ailing G3 iBook (admittedly one of the ones with a logic board problem that Apple finally admitted) with a brand new iBook G4. So, I’m a little miffed. Though perhaps Apple should use me to stress test their laptops. I do seem to be pretty good at killing off at least the consumer line.

So much so that friend was actually questioning why I’d be so stupid as to buy another one if they fail that often and are more expensive citing the fact her Windows laptop had lasted ages.

Of course, it’s a flawed comparison (though I still think Apple owes me something for the fact another laptop failed on me). It’s like comparing someone who drives to work and back once a day to a cab that is operated 7/24. And the fact is, I don’t care about the hardware really. I use a mac because it allows me to get things done. Full stop. I figure I am at least twice (if not three times) as productive on a Mac as I am on Windows. I see and feel the difference and I’m not going back now I’ve switched if I can possibly help it. And I enjoy using it as it gets out of my way and let’s me concentrate on the things I need to get done.

Because things both at work and personally are kind of busy right now, I couldn’t really wait to see what interesting New Year’s toys Steve has in store for us come January 6th whether he’s releasing Intel iBooks orPowerbooks so really it came down to how much I was going to spend on a new one.

The 15” Powerbooks are nice and I have to admit the screens look great, but I really, really like the 12” form factor. It’s portable, I can take it everywhere and it sorts well with my nomadic life of planes, trains and automobiles (ok, taxis and buses). I honestly don’t know why every executive feels he needs one. Most of the people I know using them aren’t fiddling with high end video or photo work (which I can understand), so not sure why they’re buying it but I guess it’s kind of like a porsche or something.

I did get them to max out the memory to the 1.25 GB you can get on the 12” which means that it is twice as fast as my old iBook, has twice the memory and a hard drive 4 times as big. If I hadn’t had to worry about my data I could have walked out of the store right there, but it was nearly 6pm and they wouldn’t be able to haul out the old hard drive and do the transfer till morning.

Even then, they used the Mac’s migration feature so when I came in, virtually everything had been migrated that wasn’t some BSD/Unix change I had made above the level of my user directory. I have to admit, i was super impressed as I had figured my afternoon was a write off installing programs and getting things back to working the way I needed them. As it was, I simply signed in and away I went.

So, all’s well that ends expensively I guess. I intend to bother Apple and hopefully at least get them to pay for an AppleCare 3 year warranty so that the salvage value of my laptop is somewhere around where it would have been. But all in all, other than the fretting over the shelling out of a lot of money right after a Christmas spending binge this has to be some of the most painless downtime I’ve ever had. Considering that we were unable to even recover data from a less serious Windows crash my parents had in October and they lost a whack of email and numerous other important data I feel pretty smug about the whole thing though could have avoided the out of pocket costs.

My trusty 12” iBook which began acting quirky the second I got to Kelowna has been having some very serious issues now.

Whereas before it seemed to be not waking up properly from sleep and turning off randomly some of the time, would usually boot fully and then randomly turn off sometime hours sometimes minutes after I started working; it now appears to have a serious issue.

I’ve reset the NVRAM with 4 chimes and the PMU (with the Shift-Option-Apple-Power) but the machine still has a serious problem.

Sometimes is starts up with a quick fan whir, a chime and then goes to a dark sleep screen during startup (though it is still on and I need to turn it off by holding the power button down for 5 seconds or so) or it turns on and the fan whirrs noisily without the machine actually starting up. In nearly 10 tries the machine only made it to the logged in state after I typed in my password once and then shut down spontaneously (though again, needed to be forced off with the power buttong held down for 5+ seconds).

I think it must be a logic board/PMU problem, but thought I would throw this out to anyone who might have some more insight. I’m kind of hooped and it comes and a terrible time as we are still more than a week away from a new Apple Intel laptop announcement (PowerBooks or iBooks :-( ). Arggghhhh…

At least the data seems ok. Any help appreciated if anyone has an idea. It’s going to take a while to get back up though the data on the drive seems fine and I’ve got a full backup from last week at home in case things go south quickly with this machine’s recovery.

Anyhow, if I owe you email or anything else, bear with me while I get it fixed or replaced.

OK, the laptop is back and while it seems to have a sudden desire not to go to sleep when I close the lid is back in working order again. Phew… Huge relief. I have so much stuff to catch up on though. I think I need to think about a backup laptop for events such as these.

Ok, perhaps it’s simple hubris the gods have hit me where it hurts after my little victory dances about the job and the new digs—my laptop had a total logic board failure Wednesday night shortly after I managed to get my wireless internet up and running.

Thankfully, Apple has graciously offered to replace it despite the fact it is about 15 days over warranty (thank you Apple ! – though it should be ponted out this is the 4th logic board failure on an iBook I’ve had in 2 years… though the first one in a year and on a G4 instead of the logic board problem prone G3. The G4 that failed is a replacement for a failure prnoe G3). They really want me to buy that Powerbook when get a chance.

Despite excellent planning on my part, he laptop failing was what I was using for phone (via Skype) until my cell phone arrived which was supposed to be today but it is nowhere to be seen, so instead I am madly running around mailing my new banker, friends and people I am supposed to meet who will now be unable to get a hold of me.

Still, after spending the morning with the very nice and understanding people at MacStation downtown, I spent a uncharacteristically lo-tech day walking around the seawall, going to the library, reading in the sun, grocery shopping, writing, and taking a fantastic rollerblade around Stanley Park in the sunshine.

If this is as bad as “bad days” get in Vancouver, I think I’ve got it made…

So, don’t expect much in the way of blog updates until Monday night or so when I get the laptop back. Then maybe a few backdated posts as well.

(from a weird little Internet place on Robson St. with Hangul keyboards…)

Just can’t win today.

Left on time for my gym session and a post-gym meeting this evening and slid the car gracefully into the ditch going downhill to the bottom of the mountain. Wasn’t even going fast, just turned the wheel to the right as I started to go downhill and the car continued to go in the original direction despite the steering wheel. I must’ve slid about 200 metres down the hill, ending burying the car in a snowbank at the side of road in this really huge shower of snow as the nose of the car ploughed into it. If I hadn’t been trying to wrestle the car back onto the road I could have really appreciated what a cinematic wipeout it actually was. I imagine it was quite visually stunning from the outside with all the snow flying everywhere.

Anyhow, no damage done and I just felt incredibly stupid over the whole slow motion slide into the verge. I couldn’t reverse out as the nose of the car was buried in the packed deep into the snow well past the front wheels to say nothing of the fact only my right back tire was the only one still on the road.

A truck driver who saw me go in gave me a ride back to the house and I asked a nice neighbour with a big truck to yank me out which took all of one try once we got the chains connected. But decided to call it a night. The freezing rain coming down has now been made a weather warning for the entire region and it is obviously very icy, so I’m skipping the steering committee meeting tonight and the getting back to the gym after the flu can wait one more day till tomorrow.

First time I’ve ever gone in the ditch despite years of winter driving.

Special thanks to my neighbour MI and the good samaritan truck driver Chris who gave me a lift back home to grab help.