Venture Geek

Tonight I had a spooky experience — a 419 scam was attempted via AOL Instant Messenger. Someone using the screen name “taylornelly2″ claiming to have found me through MyBlogLog started out with small talk but quickly moved into the whole story about being from Africa and having lots of money that they need a foreigner to help them retrieve. I have seen hundreds (thousands?) of these emails in my life (thanks to Thunderbird and Gmail I finally have my spam under control), but to have it happening in real time with another person on the other end was a bit chilling.

I ended the conversation by simply pasting in this link:

http://www.fbi.gov/majcases/fraud/fraudschemes.htm#nigerian

A few minutes later they typed, “but i’m not nigerian i’m liberian and i don’t know what that means. i really need your help please find a place in your heart to help me please”

That was the point where I blocked the account from sending me messages and moved on with my life.

I am told I have the distinction of being the first person to blog about the fantastic (and free) service OpenDNS (created by the inimitable David Ulevitch). If you aren’t using OpenDNS, you should be — it will make your Internet browsing faster and more secure.

Tonight I heard about yet another reason to be a fan of OpenDNS: shortcuts. Shortcuts in OpenDNS allow you to, for instance, set your OpenDNS account to send you to the Wall Street Journal web site when you type “wsj” into your browser. You can also set up shortcuts that take an input — for instance, I have the shortcut “domain” set up to check for the availability of any domain (where I type the domain I want to check for after I type “domain”). I have used shortcuts in Saft for a while, but I am often using several different browsers on more than one computer throughout the day, so it’s great to now have this functionality built right into my DNS.

I think the shortcut feature could really be interesting going forward if the OpenDNS folks allow people to expand it to a richer command-line interface ala yubnub because it’s “right there” in your network no matter what browser you are using.

I was trying to explain this comic from xkcd to my wife, but I couldn’t explain what it means or why I thought it was amusing.

I think if you both understand this comic and find it at least mildly amusing you are clearly a geek (whether the inverse is true is an exercise I’ll leave to the reader)…

I wrote last August about the launch of Yardbarker, a social-media sports site created by my friends Pete Vlastelica and Jack Kloster (along with Jack’s brother Jeff and Mark Johns). This week Yardbarker announced additional financing from such notables as Russell Siegelman, Ron Conway, Steve Blank, and several others.

I have worked with Pete and Jack on a previous startup effort, and I can say that Yardbarker is a business that comes from the heart. They were kind enough to let me write a case about their very early days as part of my post-graduate gig at UC Berkeley this year, so I can’t help but give them a little link love.

Many organizations have adopted the unfortunate philosophy that repeatable processes lead to success, yet in reality what you really want is repeatable results (that is, the delivery of a high-quality system). The quest for repeatability often leads to templates, and because each system has its own unique set of issues, these templates have a tendency to grow over time into all inclusive monstrosities that do little more than justify bureaucracy.

– Scott Ambler in a Dr. Dobbs article about Agile documentation strategies.