1000 Flowers Bloom

Pay what you want experiment

The folks who make World of Goo did a really interesting experiment to see what people would pay for their games if they could pay whatever they wanted. Worth the read!

My California DMV Woes

I had a very similar experience to Brad Feld this summer. I had swapped cars with my brother and gone to the DMV to fill out the paperwork and paid all the fees so everything was legal.

I got pulled over a year later and was told that my license plate didn't match the car it was registered to (similar situation to what you experienced). Luckily the officer understood that this was a DMV error and told me to clear it up with them.

The most frustrating part was then going to the DMV and having them accuse me of losing the paperwork and to "check with my wife" who was probably more responsible than I was. 2 days later the DMV sends me the paperwork that THEY had neglected to mail me earlier and wanted me to fill out.

$600 dollars worth of fines and 2 days of my life that I'll never get back but we finally got it resolved.

United breaks guitars

Wow this is awesome. United breaks this guy's guitar and then refuses to own up to it. Then, after 8 months he finally gets their attention by creating this video.

Kudo's to him for finally getting United's attention. If I had any musical talent I'd write the "United told me I could fly and then changed their mind" song. Ask me if you see me about it...

Dancing down the aisle

Ok this was hysterical - via Sara.

Must watch for entrepreneurs - Steve Blank on Entrepreneurship

Steve Blank has a terrific talk that he gives. It's a must watch for entrepreneurs.

His book (4 steps to epiphany) is a must read as well!We followed many of these processes in the early stages of Aggregate Knowledge.

Denny's commercial - Resist the machine

Sorry - couldn't help but post this funny commercial:

Google's New Profile Feature

So Google just announced their new profile feature. Its interesting but I'd much rather point people at my LinkedIn Profile rather than my Google Profile. Linked In just provides a much richer set of information.

The other thing that is strange is that even when I search for my name now - nothing new happens... what gives?

Changing Inertia - Secretary Gates announces major budget changes

I read what Sec Def Gates did today in proposing a budget that realigns the Pentagon spending with what the new priorities facing the Armed Forces are. You'd think that might be straightforward, but he's got a hell of a fight on his hands though, vested interests from both parties who have factories and companies in their states.

Sample response:

A bipartisan group of senators released a letter during Gates' announcement that urged him "not to allow deep cuts in U.S. missile defense programs that are critically important to protecting our homeland and our allies against the growing threat of ballistic missiles."

I applaud his efforts to realign his organization with the realities it faces. I hope that other

We do this on a smaller scale all the time at our startup and it's hard enough with a small group. I can't imagine how hard that fight must be for him!

Get Satisfaction gets it right

Well the folks over at 37signals certainly laid out a pretty harsh attack on Get Satisfaction.

What I think is awesome is the way that Thor and the team at Get Satisfaction handled it. They listened, took action immediately and helped address the biggest areas of complaint all in 1 day!

Impressive and amazingly hard to pull off in the harsh glare of the internet spotlight. Bravo.

Update: Get Satisfaction have posted about this on their blog and are doing a webcast about the issue. Excellent work.

Obama Townhall

Ok so this is kind of silly. Obama did his live webcast townhall this morning at 8:30 AM Pacific.

It's now 11:41 AM Pacific and I'm looking for the video to watch over lunch. I've checked the Whitehouse.gov site, youtube, google, the news sites and I get nothing.

Is it that hard to put the live videostream back up? Bizarre...

I hate it when that happens...

I've now had two other Chris Law's show up on Google Alerts for my name.

Luckily I still have the top rank for my search but I get the feeling that I better keep posting on my blog for that to happen.

A little less twittering for me...

My experience with the court system

My rant about the court system -- it's totally broken

I was the victim of an attempted robbery in San Francisco over the holidays. Three young black men decided that they were going to try and steal my laptop bag. They didn't succeed as luckily my brother in law and my next door neighbours heard me yelling and helped scare them off.

This is where my brush with the crazy bureaucracy that is our court system begins.

I get asked by DA to come in at 9 AM about a month later to testify. So I show up on time and about 9:30 AM the DA shows up and says, we're not sure when your trial will come up so please wait. She comes back at 10:30 and says we're still not sure so please keep waiting. At noon she says, aha - we know that it won't be today so you're free to go and please come back on Friday. ARGH - half a day wasted.

Come back on Friday at 9 AM as requested. Wait again until 9:30. DA is confident that the case will go today and they're waiting for a judge. 10:30 AM checkin - judge is on the way, but they were held up in another court. 11:30 AM - Judge finally arrives and decides that they're all going to take a break and wait until after lunch to get started at 1 PM. 2 PM - I finally get up to take the stand and testify. I'm done by 3 PM. My day is mostly shot.

My hope is that at that point it's done and I don't have to do anything more.

Fast forward a few weeks to end of January. Another subpeona to appear in court. This time it's for another one of the people that tried to rob me. DA says - please show up at 8 AM. I dutifully show up at 8 AM. 8:45 rolls around and the DA arrives. 9:30 AM - checkin to say that they're trying to set up a witness lineup. 10:30 AM comese and the DA says that they can't get the lineup done in time. Come back at noon. Go home, come back at noon and wait until 12:30 PM for them to set up the line up. Done by 1:30 PM and now waiting. Finally at 3:30 PM they come back and say that the case has been dismissed. ARGHHHH

Now keep in mind that this is not only my time that has been wasted. There was another witness there, his wife, the interpreter for them, the victim's advocate, the DA, at least 5 police officers and me. So a conservative estimate is 10 people who wasted 7 hours of their lives there.

The worst part is that it isn't even over. The case could still go to trial and they would drag me back in again.

I'm all for being a concerned citizen but the system needs to respect my time and the time of those participating. In fact, it would be great if people just wore watches.

The worst part is that everyone in the system recognizes the problem. The DA and the police officers that I talked to certainly acknowledged it and apologized but ultimately they can't do anything about it. In fact, no one can do anything about it.

The root cause is that no one is accountable in this system for making sure that it runs efficiently and smoothly. No politician gets elected or celebrated for solving that problem.

And so everytime a victim of a crime goes through the system they get victimized all over again.

The shrinking economy - a matter of perspective

So the NY Times says that World Bank says that the Global Economy will shrink in '09. realized reading it that it's all a matter of perspective about how good or bad this is.

It seems to me that the reality is that we OVER produced and OVER consumed in previous years, not just a credit bubble but an everything bubble. We're now just getting back to reality with both our production and consumption.

So yes, maybe the amount that we're producing and consuming has gone down. The question I have is, what is the right amount of production and consumption that can be sustained longterm?

The pain that is being felt right now in my opinion is being driven by people not knowing what the reality of production and consumption is. A bit of a vicious cycle, you don't know how much to consume, because you don't know how much of what you produce will be consumed. This is what happens when markets breakdown.

In my opinion the government actions like bank bailouts, stimulus package and budget are trying to stimulate demand to get people consuming again. They are trying to encourage the production/consumption cycle. Doing this could be exactly the wrong answer.

I tend to think that the right answer is to create enormous transparency about what the situation truly is so that people can have a firm basis from which to make good decisions about consumption and production.

Let's start with all these bank bailouts and their toxic assets. Let's remove opacity from the system by aggressively pricing the assets and letting things (like banks) fall out how they may. The uncertainty of not knowing if a bank is or isn't going to make it because of these assets is causing everyone to freeze up. Create transparency here so people can move on.

The government actions of distorting true demand by artificially "stimulating" it and not reducing uncertainty by propping up failing banks is prolonging the problem we will have, not fixing it.

The key economic insight of transparency and free markets works. We just need the courage to let that happen.

Watchmen

I watched the Watchmen (hah) on Saturday and I walked away impressed.

The graphic novel was one that I had enjoyed years ago but never believed could be made into a movie. I thought at best that it could be a trainwreck. I was doubly nervous when I heard that the director Zack Synder was the same one who had directed 300, which I thought was a pretty awful movie.

I was wrong.

The movie certainly has it's flaws and at 3 hours it's a LONG movie but it gets some things totally right.

One of the best lines from a movie comes when one of the vigilante heroes is arrested and put in prison:

"You don't seem to understand. I'm not trapped here with you. You're trapped here with ME"

The opening credits are also brilliant:

Farewell to Mike Homer

Mike Homer passed away on February 1, 2009.

I worked for Kontiki, which he founded, back in 2001 when I first came out to Silicon Valley. He wasn't always the easiest person to work for but he was crazy smart and a good person.

I am still good friends with many of those who were there with me and I'll never forget him or my time there.