bhall

Ooh boy!  we had fun in the snow today with the kids.  The snow kept coming down last night and today, so we decided to meet up with friends over at the park for some sledding.  The route there was a sled pull by Brian with Edie x-country skiing over to Frink park in Seattle.

We met Molly O’Mara (and Jeff), Cate Cordell (and Frank and Lesley), plus saw Ivy, Greta, Park, and Eric Lagerberg at the park.  We saw friends Cam Gravrock and wife Amy (4.5 months pregnant we found out) plus Dave and Jill Alles (stuck on a road) on the way back.  The whole neighborhood was out.

Jeff and Edie decided to get their workouts in pulling sleighs, and we made a first snowman for the kids (traditional carrot nose and non-traditional oreo eyes and buttons that maggie our dog ate later).

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Barty had been talking since last night about taking his sled out behind his ATV.  He had been infatuated for the last couple weeks about a one horse open sleigh from grandma’s house, and decided that he wanted a one ATV open sleigh to get going outside our house.  here’s the hook-up.  special thanks to uncle keith and aunt nikki for last year’s present:

Barty got the sled going behind his ATV…

and then proved that he has the same level of intuition about snow driving as most seattle drivers.  When stuck, keep accelerating..

Very fun day!

best ... video ... ever.  ok, maybe not, but I think it's fantastic.

Good Yahoo article by Saul Hansell.

Yahoo’s Starting Point: A Clearer Strategy - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

Geosign had just gotten $160M for a "significant minority stake" when they effectively went bust on google changing adsense terms.

http://www.financialpost.com/magazine/story.html?id=324817

the best paragraph is here:

While no one at American Capital would comment for this story, sources say it was well aware of how Geosign made its money and what it was planning going forward. It was, in other words, placing a bet that Google would not take steps that would alter Geosign's lucrative business. "Since we didn't know Google like we do now, the question always was, ‘Is someone really going to shut off the kinds of dollars we were paying them?'" a former Geosign employee says. "It turns out the answer was yes."

In the grand scheme of things, I think Google is hands down doing the right thing for the last bit cleaning up their clicks.  There has been a lot of news about it hitting their financials or advertisers not liking it.  But the most important asset for them is users who see the links as value add, and back clicks condition people not to click in the future.  They only make money from clicks.

I'm in Moscow right now.  Fascinating trip to Turkey and Moscow (as an aside, couldn't find more different markets for my Microsoft job - e.g. Messenger is essentially used by EVERY internet user in Turkey and our country manager is pretty much "Ms. Internet".  2.2B messenger sessions a month and 26M users in a country of 80M people with more than half not online.  In Russia, we're nowhere with local players and ICQ owning all categories - but an unbelievable esprit de internet corps around opportunity).

But I have to say, Euro hotel TV is the worst

First, the vast majority of stations are the stuffy news stations.  CNN, BBC, Bloomberg, etc.

But wait!  There's a sports station!  Maybe that will save me from hearing about JC Penney having a bad quarter. 

And then we have: sprint cycling, curling (yes, lots of curling), billiards, soccer interviews about leagues I really don't understand, and then a very fun looking sport that is an olympic trials.  But I don't even know what it is?  Literally, I've now had it on for 15 mins, Germany is up 15 over 13 to sweden.  It looks like a ton of fun with women running down the court chucking balls towards a net.  And I THINK it's handball, but they havent' said that at all and I always thought handball courts were the size of squash courts or something.  So confused.

Mariners opening day is on Monday.  I'm in international next year priority setting meetings.  conference rooms with low lights and powerpoints.  lots of buzzwords that sound horrible but oddly mean something: motions, drivers, alignment models, blueprints, accelerators, etc.  I would so love to escape and go to the game with my wife and kids.  I love mariner games.

And all of this bad TV I'm watching is while the NCAA swim meet is happening in Seattle and a kid from Yale went a 19.08 in the 50 free to take 2nd place.  My old coach is in town celebrating this and I can't even buy him a beer.  This kid is my new hero.  and even crazier, a brazilian who goes to auburn went an 18.58 or something INSANE like that to win.  Huh?  .5 seconds between 1 and 2, and something like .2 seconds between 2 and 3 in a 50 free?  I would pay $50 to see that race on TV right now.

So all this is a long way of saying sports are really weird.  Why do I think these fun sports on europe TV are totally weird and unwatchable, but I want to see guys in skimpies churn water for 19 seconds or grown men in long socks hit little balls for 3.5 hrs? 

that was random.   but isn't that what the net is for?  bring on the comments.