Continuations

bijan:-Data transfer. Since I just went through a data migration just a few weeks ago, I was lazy and thought I’d roll the dice and try Apple’s Migration Assistant. Appls, data, everything. Guess what? It just worked. The only thing that didn’t work was the printer drivers for my office but that was easy enoughQuite the contrast with my experience setting up Vista this morning on my mother-in-law’s brand new HP. Just to get everything set up was a 2.5 hour process not including any data trans...

In 1970 George Akerlof wrote a seminal paper called “The Market for Lemons” which describes how the market for used cars can seize up if there are enough bad used cars (“lemons”) out there and if prospective buyers can’t tell lemons apart from good cars. In that situation there may be no price low enough for buyers to want to buy a used car and the market goes away. Used cars were simply an example for any market with a strong information asymmetry (this is what Akerlof, Michael Spence and Jo...

“If your office uses Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 or 2007, iPhone 2.0 software will allow you to wirelessly push company email, calendar events, and contacts over Wi-Fi or EDGE networks to iPhones.” - Apple - iPhone - Enterprise

My trusty Panasonic CF-W2 is now 5 years old and I am worried that the disk will give out any day (backing up frequently). I tend to buy computers a bit ahead of the curve – even though that means paying up a bit – and then keep them until they start to fall apart. My next machine will have a solid state drive for sure. Finally no more moving parts and hopefully no more disk failures. I am seriously considering switching to a Mac now that there is finally a lightweight machine. I wish that Pa...

I have been playing around with Microsoft’s Office Live. It seems rushed, is very rough around the edges and of course works properly only with Internet Explorer (in Firefox you don’t get the button that lets you actually edit the document). But having said that, the integration with the native office applications is attractive. The open and save dialogs can now access shared workspace documents as if they were on a local drive. The key thing I want to see next is how conflicts between differ...

A couple of years ago we more or less stopped watching live television. Instead we use a PVR supplied by Cablevision which works more or less on the “Tivo” model, i.e. you have a limited amount of recording space and need to decide upfront which shows you want to record. For my birthday a few weeks ago, I got a Sonos. While I have a bit of a music library the main way I have been listening is via Rhapsody, i.e. completely on demand. It’s made me convinced that this is a far superior access mo...

As a fairly recently naturalized citizen I am excited to be participating in my first set of primaries and in the fall my first presidential election. I grew up in Germany where the Chancellor is elected by the Legislature instead of in a vote by the people. Since members of the Legislature generally vote along party lines this means that the party with the majority in the Legislature effectively nominates the Chancellor. The parties in turn determine their candidates at a party convention ge...

This is the first post in an occasional series on negotiating. Imagine yourself in a situation where a clear bid and ask have been established on an important and potentially contentious deal point (e.g. vesting of founders shares). Now the other side proposes a compromise. The best strategy here is to listen to the compromise proposal but not react to it immediately unless you are 120% certain that the compromise works for you. Why? Because agreeing to a compromise and then coming back with ...

That’s how I think of myself. I am excited to be living in a time when we are making tremendous progress on understanding aging, fighting cancer, developing clean technologies, and so much more. This is not to say that I automatically assume that technology by itself will solve all our problems (I guess that would be a “technology pollyanna”). Instead I believe that – over time – we as a society figure out how to use technology to actually improve our standard of living. I for one am sure gla...

This blog is titled Continuations because I did not want to call it Closures. If that makes absolutely no sense to you, then some of my geekier posts may not either. You may still want to stick around though because I plan to write about many different things, including venture capital, sailing, skiing, politics, movies and whatever else comes to mind. At some point in the future–when tumblr has this as a feature–I am planning to provide RSS feeds by category.