plaxoed!

I’ve been quiet here on my blog for quite a while now because this past weekend, I took a short vacation to Austin and San Antonio, Texas with Rose. Rose is from Texas and went to University of Texas so she was able to show me around the place. She also has a ton of friends in the area still, so we got to hang out with a bunch of them too. A special shout out to Erin, who hosted us while we were in San Antonio

We flew into Austin on Friday and headed straight to San Antonio for Niosa, a fun night festival that had tons of food and music. It was super crowded, but they had food of all different cuisines - i had roasted corn, beef on a stick, fried chicken on a stick, shrimp quesadilla, some strange deep fried meatball, and a German vanilla pudding eclair thingy all within a few hours.

The next day, we started off at a fun TexMex restaurant called La Fogata. Both the food and drink were excellent

The weather was decent and we were able to sit outside where they had an interesting fountain. It was cool to sit outside, but they had hanging plants and when the wind gusted, little pieces of plant would fall all over our table and into our food! Ah well, extra flavoring I guess…

Strange thing is, I hear Texas is usually burning hot, but while we were there, it was relatively cool. Perhaps Rose and I brought the relatively chilly Sea/SF weather with us.

After lunch, we went to play at the Riverwalk in downtown San Antonio. We followed the man-made river around the bend and found ourselves at the Alamo!

Now, I’ve never studied Texas History (apparently, this is a required class in middle school there), so I had no knowledge of the story of the Alamo. But if you’re into history, this is definitely a fun place to go. They have a lot of neat relics and everything has an information placard next to it. They even have guides that tell the story all day long and big displays that trace the entire history of Texas.

AFAIK, there isn’t anything like that in Michigan. I guess some states are just cooler than others…

The next day, we went to Austin and checked out Liquid. The main pastor, Gideon, is an old friend from Michigan so it was great to see him again. They’ve got quite the post-modern thing going on, so if you’re more artsy (or, in my case, if you think you are artsy), it’s a great church to check out.

After church, Rose showed me around campus. UTexas has lots of cool buildings and facilities, but the strange thing is that sometime in the middle of the 20th century, they decided not to follow the master plan. Thus, you have a lot of ugly 60s looking buildings in the middle of the nice Spanish architecture buildings. If you ever visit, you’ll notice what I’m talking about. Here’s us at the UTexas stadium gate:

Finally, as any local will tell you, no visit to Austin is complete without a trip to a BBQ place, so we went to The County Line.

The BBQ was quite good, especially the brisket and the beef ribs. Plus, the bread + honey butter was to die for. Mmm… I’m getting hungry just thinking about it. Time for a midnight snack

Looks like I’m in the BusinessWeek cover story article about blogging.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Two weeks later, Google fired Jen. And that’s when the 22-year-old became a big story. Google was blogbusted for overreacting and for sending an all-too-clear warning to the dozens of bloggers still at the company. A Google official says the company has lots of bloggers and just expects them to use common sense. For example, if it’s something you wouldn’t e-mail to a long list of strangers, don’t blog it.

Not to beat the point to death, but how do you define common sense? A bunch of people are saying how their companies have “blog smart” policies; but my question to them is: how do you define common sense or being smart? Without any clear definitions, what do you do when someone violates your subjective definitions?

On that note, here’s a draft of the public communications policy we’re putting together at Plaxo. Please leave feedback and help us improve it. Oh, and if you’re also putting together a policy for your company, feel free to take what we have and repurpose it.

By the way, if anyone from BW is reading this post, send me a copy please! (You can find my address in my Plaxo profile )

I’ve been reading the Mini-Microsoft blog for a while now and the author makes some very good points. I don’t think any of the suggestions will ever get implemented, but hey, someone’s gotta point out the emperor’s new clothes.

The latest post includes this little tidbit:

As folks left for start-ups, Microsofties would give them a cheery goodbye and (if they were good) say (once they were out of earshot), “They’ll be back.”

Now folks are leaving to relish the passion of creating and shipping great software. And I haven’t heard anyone mutter, “They’ll be back.” I’ve seen far more moments of wistful envy.

When I left Microsoft, quite a few people told me straight up to my face that I’d be back - they didn’t even wait until I was out of earshot . Indeed, one day, I might be. But in the meantime, I’m loving the experience of working at a fast paced, nimble start-up.

On a related note, quite a few Microsofties claimed that although start-ups seemed to ship software faster, the Microsoft way is the most effective, having been refined over almost 30 years. They may be right on that note as well, but I’m not the type that just takes someone else’s word for it.

I do see a lot of promising stuff coming out of MSN though; I’m an avid watcher of the MSN/Google/Y! war, may the best solution - or at least best marketed one - win!

Engadget reports that someone has hacked a version of Tetris that runs on the PSP. Sure, it’s a JavaScript version that runs inside the hacked browser found in Wipeout Pure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not kick arse.

Tetris is by far my favorite game of all time so this actually makes me want to buy one of these things.

Note that this came out of a PSP/DS hack challenge and no one submitted even one DS hack. What does this tell me? There’s no enthusiast community around the GameBoy DS; if I were working at Nintendo, I’d be pretty concerned right about now…

Update: Engadget also reports that Nintendo isn’t going to show their next generation console at E3 this year. If I were working at Nintendo, I’d be straight up crapping my pants right now.

Cover story for Fortune this issue sheds some light on the competition heating up between my two most recent former employers. Fred Vogelstein does an excellent job writing it up and got some really neat perspectives - including mine! I met Fred a few months ago after my Google incident and we chatted about the state of the technology industry in general. For coming from a non-technical background, I thought Fred was quite well versed in current tech. Of course, I guess it is his job…

I love how much tech industry coverage is in Fortune nowadays; it actually makes the magazine relevant to me. I think it displaces GQ (Men’s Health was a close second) as my favorite magazine

It looks like post-merger, Flickr has come out with a new pricing scheme. Along with the price decrease, they gave pro subscribers a extra year free and two free pro memberships to give out for free! Earlier this year, when I found out about Flickr, I bought Rose a pro account and she’s had a blast with it. Now, maybe she’ll gift me one of her free pro memberships

Now this is how you run a successful service! Give your existing customers more, drop your prices and gift some freebies. After all, once someone’s had a pro membership for a year, who would be able to bear going back to the basic membership? Their plan is pure genius…

It’s always neat to see your name in the paper.

Seriously though, the intersection of the blogosphere and the corporate world has arrived. IMO, it’s great to live in interesting times. Why would people think it’s a curse? I’d say the opposite would be more of a curse…

Anyways, for NYT readers, here’s the draft of Plaxo’s blogging policies. If you’re thinking of setting up your own policy, feel free to take any or all of it for your own purposes. Isn’t freely sharing information for the betterment of society great?

My pubsub picked up this semi-recent post on Plaxo by The 463. All I have to say is: Amen!

I know many people get the heebee jeebees when they find out that Plaxo helps them keep their contacts up to date. It’s easy to see why. Tons of services out there ask for your contact information and promptly add you to spam lists. Everyone’s been burned by a shady e-tailer, online offer or some cool new service.

Plaxo is legit. We are not in the business of spamming, identity theft or selling information. We have an address. Contact me if you’d like to visit.

It’s upsetting to see all the naysayers who didn’t get all the facts first. By the way, for the conspiracy theororists out there:

• Here’s how Plaxo makes money
• Here’s how we protect your data
• and, we even have a contingency plan for if we get acquired or go under

Want to see how Plaxo stacks up? Check out our privacy matrix and judge for yourself.

By the way Judith, David Coursey changed his mind about Plaxo

UPDATE: Apparently, Judith changed her mind too, I only found the negative post in my Google search. Sorry Judith, my bad

Evan (of Blogger fame) reports that his GMail account has a new feature. Looks kinda neat, unfortunately, you can’t customize the feeds shown in this “Web Clips” section. Also, it’s a little sneaky that they interleave ads in there; they get your attention with info you want to know and then show you some ads. Pretty clever if you ask me.

I wonder how many people will be able to tell the difference between news headlines and ads considering that most people can’t tell the difference between ads and search results.