I play bass and sing in an insanely tight band known as Soul Patch.  Seriously, we're good.  Following a brief hiatus after our first album (what's seven years among friends?), we finally released our sophomore effort at the beginning of 2008.  Feels like a great reason to party, so we're going to put in a rare live appearance.  Here are the details in case you happen to be in Colorado (or are such a devoted fan that you'd make the trip):

Soul Patch Summer Soulstice Concert
June 21 at 9:30
Redfish Brewhouse
2027 13th Street
Boulder, CO 80302

I've been practicing playing and singing at the same time (two things that I was thankfully able to do separately in the studio), and now I'm remembering just exactly how hard some of our music is to play.  That's also probably why we're so damned funky and fun.  In my (clearly) humble opinion, it's absolutely worth checking us out.

And, if you simply can't make the trip out to Colorado, we'll forgive you if you buy our stuff on iTunes or Amazon.   Go ahead, give us a listen.

Just a few weeks shy of my five-year anniversary, I did it.  I left Yahoo!  And it wasn't with an entirely happy heart that I did so.  A bit of background:

For the past five years, I led product teams at Yahoo!  In my time there, I enjoyed an amazing job and worked with some of the most dedicated and talented people I have ever met.  I was given opportunities to make tremendous changes that impacted the lives of millions on a daily basis.  Some of those changes were homeruns, some of them were massive failures.  But the changes of which I was most proud were the ones almost no one noticed -- policing and cleaning up one of the largest online communities in the world, putting pedophiles and other seriously bad people in jail when they abused our service, and protecting kids while keeping Yahoo! out of court and out of the press.  And, of course, I'm happy that I helped some righteously outspoken people be heard, worked on products so advanced they won't be available to the public for a couple years, and just generally made the Internet a more interesting, safe and fun place.  I worked on small teams and I also cultivated a team that topped out at more than 100 people worldwide, and together we built some great products.

And, then, I left.  It was clearly time to go.  I leave incredibly disappointed in both the corporate management and the board of directors, who let the opportunity with Microsoft slip away.  A deal like the one Microsoft proposed was a necessary step for Yahoo!, and its loss was the result of sheer hubris.  The arrogance I witnessed at Yahoo!, which is present in all big companies, reached a peak a couple of years ago - ironically just about the time our loss to Google was beyond question.  That fall from power as the #1 online service resulted in cross-company retrenchment as execs thought more about securing silos of power than about the good of Yahoo!.  That play-it-safe attitude led to Yahoo!'s current state, revealing what the entire investment community has now come to see -- that Yahoo!'s uppermost leadership needs a swift kick in the ass and the company needs to be bought.  With the exception of Connected Life (the last BU for which I worked), I believe that Yahoo! corporate has lost anything resembing a competitive edge.  To be fair, I applaud the work being done by several individuals across the organization, including those on the Y!OS team; however, I fear that it's too little too late.  Stepping back from the tactical, one can see that, when an upstart company like Facebook can rise up to be a worthy competitor for a storied giant like Yahoo!, it's time to start thinking about plan B.

So, I was (to my surprise) open to being poached.  And poached I was, by a tremendous opportunity.  I leave Yahoo! to head up product for a well-funded social gaming company.  As I watched the online community sector develop over the past 11 years, I came to believe that the traditionally difficult-to-monetize world of user interaction would ultimately be won in social gaming.  And Zynga is the right company at the right time to capitalize on that promise.  I'm pleased to join them as VP of Product Management, and I know that our products will evolve dramatically over the next year.

So, after five years of fighting every day to save the world (and one of the biggest global Internet brands) from itself, I ride off into the sunset.  Beyond the horizon, there are interactions and experiences that promise to be fun for everyone - just wait and see.

...and, even though I missed it by a few weeks, I was still given my five-year gumball machine.  Thanks and peace to all of the hard-working people I stood beside in those purple trenches.  It was a great experience every single day.

In their place, I mounted my Linn Tukans.  These are "bookshelf" speakers, only 12" tall.  I bought them the first time we lived out here in the Bay Area, and I have been carting them around ever since.  I'm pleased to say that I forgot how good these sound.  Even without a subwoofer (also out of the question given our little crawling cord-puller), they sound deep and rich.  They are mounted on either side of the new 52" Sharp LCD, and aside from the fact that they represent the only visible cables in the entire setup (a small bit of wire between the TV and each speaker), I'm pretty happy.

I'll miss my Martin Logans, but am having fun rediscovering these speakers that I bought almost a decade ago.

There, that's your audio geekiness for the weekend. 

I think that 149 New Montgomery St. in San Francisco must be a cursed address.  I worked there for a period of time, preparing for the IPO that was going to be the big blow-out at the end of 1999.  eGreetings had become a greetings and gifting site (thanks to a lot of torturous work from my team), and on the strength of a promising monetization story, we did the roadshow and filed to go public.

If you remember your bubble history, December of 1999 was not really a great time for an IPO.  We went out, rolled over, and died, and the rest of the industry followed.

One of our gifting partners at the time survived, however - they were Red Envelope.  I had a friendly relationship with the company going all the way back to my days at Excite.  I remember when Pete Baltaxe came in to the Excite offices to discuss his new venture, which was to become 911Gifts.  We had just launched the Excite Shopping channel, and Pete was looking for distribution.  It was during my tenure at eGreetings that his company's name changed to Red Envelope.  They wanted to continue to deliver on the last-minute gift promise, but didn't want the recipient to KNOW that the sender was sending something last minute.

Now I hear that Red Envelope has laid off most of its workforce and will likely shut down soon.  Oddly, they seem to have failed to embrace the lessons that the bubble taught us about growing a customer base inexpensively.  They moved into expensive but unproductive catalogs (which I remember receiving) and failed to aggressively acquire search-engine traffic to sustain flow to the site.

Looking at the stories of their failure, I was surprised to see that they'd moved into the old eGreetings offices on New Montgomery.  Word to the wise - it's a lovely location, but just don't move in there.  When times get tough, as they inevitably will, your designers will spend too much time envying the cool kids across the street at Academy of Art College and your business folks will skip out of work early for drinks at the Thirsty Bear.

Nike swoosh beneath the words "I'm so good, even your mom cheers for me."

Nike branding and a good old "your mom" made my day. 

A few good examples: the King James Bible is based on a Latin translation of a single Greek version of the New Testament (and a heavily altered Greek version at that).  Earlier Greek versions, among the "closest" we have to the originals, leave out some fairly well-known stories: the famous "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" story and Christ's sweating blood before he is captured to be crucified, to name a couple.  Also, scribes often tried to reconcile the gospels, which means we don't have to grapple with the question of whether Jesus was an imperturbable figure (Luke's story) or a bit of a moody badass with a message (Mark's original story!).

I have always been fascinated with history and love to study religions, so I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  Take a read through it, then go consult your Bible and see if it has a few of the incredibly well-researched footnotes that perhaps it should.  No version is perfect, but as for me, next time I want to read the Bible I'm likely to consult the NRSV.

The more I listen to Clinton, the harder a time I have rallying behind her.  She seems to have the depth and experience necessary for the job, but I'm not as passionate about her vision for america as I was for Bill's.  That's an unfair comparison, though, because Bill Clinton was the only presidential candidate I actually voted *for* (rather than voting *against* the Republican candidate).

Obama would be a strong candidate, but without knowing who his running mate will be, I'm not voting for him alone.  I assume he'll do what Kennedy and even Bush II did and bring on an elder statesman for a running mate.  That move would give his campaign the gravitas needed to win while still attracting the young vote.

I actually am fine with just about any of the four front-runners (and this is a wacko liberal speaking).  McCain would probably make Jon Stewart press secretary and we'd all have a ball with a surprisingly socially liberal Republican in the White House (kind of like what we have here in California).  And Romney doesn't really scare me.  Huckabee, on the other hand, that one would get me right out to the polls.

Add to all of this the fact that I have literally no opinion on the local initiatives (though I can't tell which set of Indian tribes are flat out lying to me in their point-coutnerpoint advertisements, but one side or the other is clearly fibbing), and I'm just staying out of this one.

So, to those of you who are voting tomorrow, I hope you vote your convictions.  I just don't feel the love this time around.

Here's where the confessional part of the post comes in - I had never before used BitTorrent.  Certainly I knew how the technology worked, but I'd never taken the time to make use of it myself.  So, I grab the BitTorrent-brand BitTorrent client and set about searching for South Park torrents.  Find the one I wanted and fire it up.  This probably means I owe someone somewhere the entire cost of creating every South Park ever in existence, so I'm not sure why I'm writing this.  Anyhow, once I have the finished package all pieced together, I pop it open.  Not a video in site, only .rar files.  Not only had the original been broken into torrent pieces, the original original was broken into a multi-volume RAR archive.  So now I'm off to try to find some shareware to combine these.  WinRAR does the trick and has a free trial period (if I use it ever again, I'll buy it - fine).  Okey doke, now we're off and running.  Files are combined and I get a single .wmv out the other end.  But it won't run - I get sound but no video in Media Player.  Back to the original torrent site, and I'm warned that most of the files here are probably encoded with DivX, but then again maybe another codec is used.  They suggest playing all the files with VLC media player to be sure I have all the codecs needed.  OK, so I download that.  Now it's working great - on my PC.  But I want to play it in the family room from my Mac Mini (here's where a Slingbox would come in handy, eh?).  I take a look at the stream info through VLC and, sure enough, I need DivX.  I bring the .wmv over to the Mac Mini (good thing I already have Flip4Mac installed there, which allows QuickTime to play .wmv files), and I grab the DivX codec off their site.  Then - success!  It works!!

I play the episode for Jenni and she laughs until she cries, too.  And I feel like a master of the fractured, incredibly non-user-friendly world of torrents.

• A display where the muscles were removed from and standing next to the skeleton of one donor. The plastination process makes the muscles firm enough to stand on their own.
• The fact that the kneecaps were always with the muscles, never with the skeletons (they're seriously embedded in the tendons and ligaments of the legs).
• An entire room devoted to embryo and fetal development, including a plastinate opened to reveal an embryo (as well as the black lung from smoking that, apparently, killed the pregnant donor).
• Embryos and fetuses at just about every stage of development
• The Exploded Man, which was a plastinate completely separated (individual organs, systems, etc.) and suspended and expanded to take up twice the normal space of a body.
• The various penises and vaginas (the latter both shaved and natural - don't ask why I notice these things) on the plastinates.  Jenni, in a moment of humor, covered Dani's eyes (the girl's 6 months old - I don't think I was warping her mind, dear).
• Incredibly thin slices of plastinates that made cross-sections (an entire body was shown in this way).
  
• And, in the center room, the brain itself.  Healthy brains, brains that had suffered from strokes and had blackened marks on them, and a brain ravaged by Alzheimer's.

It was a truly stunning experience.  I would recommend that you go, but if you live in the Bay Area you might be out of luck as it's closing at the Tech on January 26th.  If it comes to your city, take the time to attend.

Also would like it noted that Jenni and I are really pushing the boundaries of new parenthood.  I carried Dani around in a front-carrier the entire show, and she was a perfect angel.  She's such a flirt, she definitely made a few friends and garnered more than her share of smiles.  Cheers to a fun day out and a grand adventure in having a baby and enjoying the world.

Quick shoutout - for the second time in as many weeks I ran into Geoff Ralston.  He was there with his son to attend the show, guess they were just leaving as we walked in.  Hope you guys enjoyed it as much as we did! 

Photo courtesy of Body Worlds

It was not all bad (actually, it was kinda worth it ;) ).  The highlight of the week undoubtedly was hooking up with my good Colorado friends from Soul Patch, Ryan and Jason.  They're with Foundry Group, a VC firm in Boulder, and they were in town to see the latest and greatest toys.  We grabbed dinner, then headed to the suite at the Wynn where the guys from Slingbox were staying.  The suite was insane, and they had Rock Band hooked up to the Plasma.  We took our positions, Ryan playing guitar, Jason on the drums, and me on the mic (there was no second guitar controller for playing bass).  The song was Dani California, and if I must say, this tired set of bandmates rocked the Wynn.  I scored 100% on the vocal line, a feat of which I'm quite proud!  After that, of course, there were cocktails, people watching (by which I mean woman watching - good lord, Vegas brings out something in people...), and then a promise to meet again soon.  After parting with those guys, I ended up at LAX at the Luxor to meet my team mates - but that's another story.

Glad I went, glad to be home, hoping there's no permanent damage to my sleep patterns. 

Of the many lessons 2007 taught me, one stands out: I can be selfish.  Selfish almost to the point of being childish.  What's in it for me, how does this make me happier, what can I do to warp this situation to suit my needs of the moment?  Perhaps it's the only child in me coming to the surface in my adulthood.  Perhaps it's the "guy" in me who simply wants his way all the time.  2007 was about breaking down a petulant sense of entitlement, a year of examining my motivations and my goals.  It was painful, personal, and honestly not a year I'd care repeat.  While many wonderful things happened in 2007, both personally and professionally, it was also very sad and very scary.  2008 will be about understanding what is truly important, prioritizing those things above others, and following through.  Every day, every week, every month of this year, listening honestly and acting decisively with passion and compassion.

I'm glad you're here, 2008.  We needed you to come.