In June of 2012, Brad Whitaker and I started discussing the ideas that turned into Tugboat Yards’ business plan. Collectively he and I have spent many years building publishing systems in the media, blogging and social worlds and both of us understood that what used to be difficult — publishing... Continue reading

In 2007, I wrote a short piece for Wired’s GeekDad blog. I had mentioned my use of Apache as a teaching tool to one of the editors and he thought it worthy of a piece for the then nascent site. It was fun and I got some good feedback at... Continue reading

This camera gets a lot of lion traffic but this is the first time we’ve seen a side view — usually the cats are walking directly towards the camera. Our guess is this one is about six feet long and probably a male. Continue reading

These advanced concepts are so much easier to understand when you put it that way. Thanks New York Times! According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. Particles wading through the field gain heft the way a bill going through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming ever more ponderous. Without the Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, all elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like... Continue reading

Curt Schilling has apparently lost his baseball fortune in a bad video game company investment. No one told him about the sacred concept of Other People’s Money. “We didn’t raise capital. We didn’t get private capital. At the end of the day, when you look at all the things that we did, I put all the money I said I’d put in, I guaranteed the things I guaranteed from a loan perspective, I never took a penny out, and we spent the money exactly how we defined it in all the documentation with the state. And the one thing that... Continue reading

I’ve been a long-time My Yahoo user, in fact it is probably the only Yahoo property I use regularly. Sure, I Flickr occasionally but really nothing else at Yahoo is habit anymore. But I doubt I’ll keep that habit much longer. Here is why: It is not because there are ads on the log-in screen, that has been common on Yahoo and many other sites for a while. But within the last few months, Yahoo has started to force me to log-in much more frequently. I don’t know exactly how often, but I would guess at least once every two... Continue reading

I seriously love the Business Insider headline writers. Blah blah blah Pando blah blah blah disclosure. Continue reading

It’s been interesting reading all of the press around the outing of Mike Daisey’s “coverage” of Apple’s manufacturing issues and specifically the retraction by This American Life of the content behind its most popular episode. John Gruber did one of the better take downs of the hypocracy behind Daisey’s story. SF Weekly also stands out getting to the heart of the matter — Daisey has probably done more to make people doubt the veracity of any story about Foxconn going forward. But I think Jeff Yang of Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog has one of the most interesting points-0f-view, comparing... Continue reading

We moved the camera that took these shots about 50 feet west to get a better view of the clearing where we’ve seen a lot of deer and more than a few mountain lions. Today, we collected a series of shots from around 7pm last week that I was able to turn into a video of sorts. The mountain lion walks in, plops down, gets up, lies down again and then walks away. Our guess is that it’s a male about 30 inches tall or so (based on size comparisons to people in the same place) but we really have... Continue reading

I just love Quora. The infomercial shoot came around and I spent 14 hours in an old warehouse in downtown Los Angeles doing all sorts of crunches as a background model while the spokespeople for the exercise videos read their lines. It was fun because two of the co-hosts were actresses from Baywatch. After probably 3,000 sit ups while maintaining a goofy grin on my face the shooting was over and I went home for about a week of recovery. I wanted to laugh at myself for agreeing to get lubed up in vegetable oil and participate in something so... Continue reading

I’ve always been a baseball fan but nothing reinvorgated my love of the sport more than the 1986 World Series. And no one was more important to that Mets win than Gary Carter. He will always remain a favorite, may he rest in peace. Continue reading

“...I think there should be some more respect for capital.” Janice Hester-Amey, CalSTRS Corporate Governance portfolio manager, lectures Mark Zuckerberg how to treat his new set of friends Continue reading

Earlier today, long-time friend Sarah Lacy launched her new site PandoDaily. As was covered in many places, I am one of the angel investors in the round Sarah raised to help start her company. In addition, I am going to join the board of parent company PandoMedia along with Michael Arrington and will be pretty actively involved in helping Sarah build her company. It is an exciting time in the web media space and Sarah is one of the most talented journalists I have known. The strength of the team she was able to bring together before even launching a... Continue reading

I set up more cameras on our property in the woods a few months ago and over Christmas weekend caught more shots of our local mountain lions. Unfortunately they walked a bit too close to the camera so I didn’t get the best shots (I’ve since moved this particular camera to a better vantage point) but still these are by far the best mountain lion shots we’ve gotten yet. Best we can tell, this is a mother with two one-year or so old cubs. I’ve included a few shots from the series. Continue reading

I’ve been watching and buying a lot of video on the Apple TV over the holidays and musing on the convergence of web company creation infrastructure with video production. An app on my iPhone and a video program on my AppleTV are increasingly looking like two sides of the same coin to me and as I worked my way upstream from that thought, incubators like Y Combinator quickly become the Endemols or Bad Robots of our web world. I’m just not sure that building a consumer internet company is too different from launching a video franchise anymore. I don’t have... Continue reading

People who know me know that I have — at best — a casual relationship with fashion. I find something I like and tend to wear it until it’s about five years out of fashion. Turns out, the general hoarder behavior is not unique. Who knew? At the risk of perpetuating sex stereotypes, the archetype may have been Steve Jobs. When Mr. Jobs died in October, he left behind not only a peerless legacy, but a closet full of identical black cotton turtlenecks by Issey Miyake. “If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them,” his sister,... Continue reading

One of the nice things about being older is that you get to hear the story about things that used to be top secret in your time. I remember watching the 60 Minutes story about spy satellites in the 1980’s that referenced this particular spy satellite program. It was dubbed “Big Bird” and it was considered the most successful space spy satellite program of the Cold War era. From 1971 to 1986 a total of 20 satellites were launched, each containing 60 miles of film and sophisticated cameras that orbited the earth snapping vast, panoramic photographs of the Soviet Union,... Continue reading

“Endurance is not a young person’s game. I thought I might even be better at 60 than I was at 30. You have a body that’s almost as strong, but you have a much better mind.” Diana Nyad, on picking up long distance swimming after a 30-year hiatus Continue reading

Found while updating my profile info. Continue reading

How can you not want to read this article in Food Republic? “...[Y]ou literally chose the coolest liquor in the world to insult. And guess what? Whiskey doesn’t care. That’s what makes it cool. The only other liquor that’s anywhere near as cool is Tequila. But Tequila’s always been too crazy to really be cool. Tequila will cut you for looking at its woman, then laugh while the cops drag it off to jail, and spit at you during the trial. And trust me you don’t want to pick on Vodka either. Dude doesn’t have much of a personality, but... Continue reading

A recently viewed advertisement on LinkedIn: It feels so personal. Continue reading