It would seem that Michael Arrington has a thing for bashing TheFunded.com. His post today was overwhelmingly negative but I actually disagree completely. TheFunded is a great resource for early stage companies to get a handle on the good VCs and the bad VCs out there (and there are plenty of both). As a founder, the one thing you have very little of is time and to waste it chasing a fund that is never going to invest is nearly the worst thing you can do. It can take your company down if you don’t watch it.

Now I’m not usually a fan of online reviews as they tend towards either very negative or very positive and hence uselessness but in this case the network on TheFunded is rather specialized (only CEOs need apply) and having watched postings there for about six months, I can say that for the most part the experiences being shared are spot on based on my own experience pitching for money.

I’m a fan even if TechCrunch isn’t.

Thanks to CrunchGear for posting this video. Wish I knew how they did it…

Maybe this was common knowledge and I just missed it (entirely likely), but while trying to convince Google that even though I’m currently physically in Mexico, I still want to search in English, I discovered that you can actually tell the Google search engine that you want to converse in “Elmer Fudd“.

You’ve got to give a company credit when they allow their programmers to implement functionality like this. Other options included “Bork Bork Bork!” (the Swedish Chef), “Hacker” (didn’t get it - lots of random numbers and letters…maybe I need another character font installed), “Pig Latin” and of course given the density of engineers at Google, “Klingon“.

I expected to see binary as well but perhaps there wasn’t enough screen real estate to handle it.

A short post as I’m actually on vacation this week but I caught an article in the San Jose Business Journal that profiled a new solar roof that eBay has installed across a number of the company’s buildings. It is a 649.6-kilowatt installation consisting of 3,248 solar panels.

Very cool. I’ve been looking for an excuse to put solar on my house for years but the financials just don’t work yet. I guess that is the difference between living in Boston and San Jose.

I stumbled upon an interesting article written by Robert Cringely at PBS in January of last year. It is a decent presentation of the argument about why Google will eventually power most of the Internet based on an analysis of the dark fiber that they have under contract.

I read the article, thought for a moment and concluded that the argument was plausible if a little 1984. Google is pretty dominate in a lot of areas, although they’ve failed pretty miserably in others like social networking. They have also bought a lot of their capability (e.g. YouTube) when their own efforts came up short. In other words, they are acting a lot like a well run large company - spin out something cool every so often from internal R&D and buy the rest using the cash flow from their mainstream operations. Microsoft is the same, as are most large, growth oriented corporations.

So maybe we will all be running our lives on Google infrastructure a decade from now. I wouldn’t bet on it though. Big growth companies have a habit of turning into… big slow growth companies. And big companies have a hard time attracting innovative, risk takers who start new trends. Google is no different.

This post has absolutely nothing to do with Internet strategy but this issue has caused me so much grief in the last 18 months I want to make sure anyone else out there who runs into it can try this solution.

When I’m on the road I carry a MacBook Pro running Leopard and Windows XP via Parallels and I use a Verizon EVDO card for network access. After years of being a road warrior and using laptops from pretty much every manufacturer (they pretty much all sucked except for a ThinkPad T42 which was acceptable) I can safely say this is the best setup I’ve every had. It is light, powerful and I can run all my favorite Mac and Windows programs pretty much seamlessly. Plus I get to use Final Cut Express HD to edit video when I’m on vacation.

I use a Cisco 1811 router on my home network which gives me access to everything I need remotely via the tried and true Cisco VPN client. I like the Cisco gear as very few (none?) of the other router manufacturers that have price points for a small office or home network properly support the Mac OS.

My issue has been that no matter what I tried, I could never get the Cisco Mac VPN client to connect to the router. The Cisco Windows VPN client always worked from within Parallels but not on the Mac side of the computer. It drove me nuts and Cisco engineering support could never figure it out. They ultimately just said they don’t support any Macs that are also running Parallels (very lame) and tossed it back in my lap.

The developers over at Parallels support finally gave me the missing pieces of information today and I am now back in VPN connectivity heaven. So here is what I did to fix the situation:

1. Uninstall Parallels (you’ll get your VM back so this is pretty safe but backup everything just in case). I downloaded the latest build and used the uninstaller that comes as part of the disk image. Just dragging it to the trash doesn’t work.

2. Uninstall the Mac Cisco VPN client if you’ve got it on your machine. Use sudo /usr/local/bin/vpn_uninstall in Terminal to do it. Again, dragging it to the trash doesn’t work.

3. Reboot

4. Reinstall the Mac Cisco VPN client

5. Execute the following commands in Terminal:

sudo /sbin/ipfw flush

sudo /sbin/ipfw disable firewall

6. Try to connect. It should work at this point.

7. Reinstall Parallels

8. Go to System Preferences / Security and re-enable your firewall. I use the option to control access and permit the VPN client access to the Network.

There is another good post on this issue on Chris Barber’s blog but I could never get his solution to work as the Verizon EVDO client changes the network configuration on the machine somehow and things didn’t match up.

Incidentally, if you’ve recently upgraded to version 4 of the Verizon EVDO Access Manager and it stopped Parallels from connecting to the network via shared networking, you need to uninstall and reinstall Parallels to fix it. The Verizon Access Manager install hammers the Parallels settings somehow and kills the Parallels NAT drivers. Don’t call Verizon support…they are clueless on this issue (I tried). Even Parallels support doesn’t seem to know about it yet.

I love my Mac but Apple has got to work on their networking support layer. Every issue I’ve had with Leopard has been a result of it not playing nice with either Parallels, EVDO or Cisco. It is just way to complex…even when you know what you are doing.

UPDATE:

Some further testing has determined that the firewall disable command isn’t required. It is the flush that solves the problem. I’ve also figured out that if you are using the current version of the VPN client (4.9.0.1.0100) over an EVDO connection it will drop after 5 seconds if wifi is enabled. If wifi is not enabled it will work. According to Cisco, they have fixed this issue in the next release of the client.

Ok, this post has nothing to do with the Internet but is suitably geeky enough that I couldn’t resist. Those who know me know that my home is continually under renovation. The main reason is that I tend to buy dumps and then slowly rip them apart and put them back together but also because I enjoy working on something physical as an alternative to the virtual stuff I do for a living. Nothing like a little drywall sanding or plumbing to push the brain in a new direction.

I’ve been adding electronics to my house lately - specifically built in speakers and mini-split air conditioners as I don’t have central air - and was surprised to find solutions in both spaces that you can hide behind artwork.

The speakers I figured were out there as there has been so much buzz lately about flat panel audio solutions. The ones from Decor Audio look seriously cool and I plan on coming up with a way to use them. I was also amazed to find an air conditioner that you can hide behind pretty much any artwork you like as well. That one is already ordered for a new room I built.

I do love house tech. Now if I can only get the air conditioner to talk to the house server…

Between my own local contact book in Entourage, LinkedIn, Facebook, my iPhone and three or four different email accounts that I use, I am guaranteed to never have the latest contact information for anyone in the place I need it.

Which is why I’m so looking forward to seeing Soocial get out of closed Beta. If it works, it will keep everything in sync. They even support Mac…you gotta love it.

Please send me an invite…pretty please?!?

So you don’t really realize how much you rely on a device until it dies on you. This evening I finished up a call on my iPhone and put it down in my hotel room, ate some room service and Skyped with my daughter and then picked it up again. No dice…the screen wasn’t responding. After figuring out that this is somewhat common, I resigned myself to the fact that it needed to be replaced.

But of course I’m in New York City tonight, the land of the 24×7 Apple store. So with a mixture of dread and relief I jumped in a cab and 20 minutes later was walking down the steps into the main Manhattan Apple store.

For those who haven’t experienced the Genius Bar in an Apple store, conceptually it is pretty cool. You walk up to any Mac in the store and you can book an immediate appointment online and your name shows up on a big scheduling screen on the wall. They they call you and they will help you with whatever you need.

Unfortunately this was New York and when I entered in my name, the screen told me the next appointment for iPhones was 11:20pm…and it was 8:30pm (and the store was packed). Instant angry customer. So I made some noise and bugged all the “geniuses” walking by and 20 minutes later I jumped the queue and they set me up with a new iPhone. Note to self - annoying customers get serviced faster.

So it took three hours but I’m back in business. A B+ job from the folks at Apple but better than most. It would have been a A+ except for the silly three hour scheduling wait they tried to put me through. Bit of a brand issue there and they might need a few more geniuses.

I just hope this one doesn’t die. It felt like I lost a limb.

For the last year or so I’ve been attending demos and playing with websites that promise to break the connection I have with my computer (or in my case computers, I tend to collect them - nine in my house at last count). I currently derive a lot of frustration from not having all my various machines in sync - so much so that I actually do a lot of my development work over Windows Remote Desktop (from my MacBook Pro no less) to a Windows XP machine that sits on my home network behind a firewall that I get at via Cisco VPN.

I know, it sounds complicated but it actually works. I can use the exact same machine every time I want to write some code and it is always completely up to date with everything I need. Plus the large databases I normally need to access are on the local LAN so they are as fast as if I was sitting in my home office, even if I’m in an airport half way across the country waiting for yet another delayed flight.

That being said, I haven’t gone totally virtual as it just didn’t seem like it would work. Vauhini Vara at the Wall Street Journal tried it though and ran into all the problems I figured would present themselves. The article is worth a read for anyone who thinks the days of the desktop are numbered - there are a lot of problems to solve between then and now.

Boy it would be nice though.