Leave it to The Onion to bring me a good laugh today.

Link: The Onion

Vast has been getting a decent amount of buzz today, especially given the TechCrunch story .

It’s Naval Ravikant’s new deal. I like the idea of content aggregators and I like Vast, but my very first search using the product demonstrates some of the inherent challenges with their approach.

They make structure out of unstructured data by assessing what they find during crawls of web sites for things such as auto listings from a dealership website. They essentially create a normalized view of things for sale.

Try searching in the Cars section for BMW as the make and 2002 as the model. The intended result would show me BMW 2002’s (the model) from the 60’s and 70’s. Instead, I get BMW cars and motorcycles that were built in the year 2002.

These types of problems are not insurmountable and don’t indicate a completely flawed methodology, but exposes some basic challenges with any product that attempts to make uniform presentation out of data that’s inherently unique.

I’m in Vail again. I was just here in late January for a late winter vacation and now I find myself back for business this time. Sorta strange, considering that I have never been here before either.

It’s also strange on another front. It’s also going to be my last gig with EMC. My last day with the company, after nearly 10 years, is Friday, March 17. It’s been a great experience, but I feel compelled to enter the startup world. Though I came from acquired companies, I have tremendous respect for the company and the leadership team running the EMC Software Group.

I was hardly old enough to drink when I started in 1997 with OTG , the company acquired by Legato in February of 2002. I was about as green as one could be when I started. I listened and learned quickly though.

In October of 2003, EMC completed the acquisition of Legato. In the same month, EMC also announced the acquisition of Documentum. I was lucky enough to work in both organizations and as a result, I know quite a bit about the markets and technologies.

I understand the Storage and Content Management markets as a result of thinking very hard about some of the problems. Anyone who has read some of the posts regarding Enterprise Search and Storage can now understand why I feel as passionately as I do about the areas.

I have a good idea and I’m going to aggressively pursue it. What’s the focus of the idea? I can’t publicly say yet for obvious reasons. I can say that I have spoken to some very smart people about it and they were very bullish.

Being a first time entrepreneur (and a CEO at that) will be interesting. We’ll see…

Amazon announced a storage offering for third-party developers to use. They will offer no client UI of their own, so it will essentially be “black box storage” for developers who would rather not invest in the expensive infrastructure involved in buying equipment and software.

Personally, I like it. They’ve reduced one of the larger barriers to entry for developers that need highly-available storage. Developers are no longer remanded to purchasing expensive storage systems while in startup mode without sacrificing the need for high availability.

There’s a ton of new services that can come out of it. It really does change the game considerably.

1995 and 1996 were massive years in terms of recorded output for Robert Pollard and company. This is also when the sound takes a shift from the old school pop-rock classics found on “King Shit And The Golden Boys” to the equally adored, but signature sounds found on “Under The Bushes Under The Stars.”

Here’s a tracklist:

Guided By Voices - Game Of Pricks - Alien Lanes (1995)
Guided By Voices - My Valuable Hunting Knife - Alien Lanes (1995)
Guided By Voices - We’ve Got Airplanes - King Shit And The Golden Boys (1995)
Guided By Voices - Fantasy Creeps - King Shit And The Golden Boys (1995)
Guided By Voices - Greenface - King Shit And The Golden Boys (1995)
Guided By Voices - Scissors - King Shit And The Golden Boys (1995)
Guided By Voices - He’s The Uncle - The Flying Party Is Here (1995)
Guided By Voices - Drag Days - The Flying Party Is Here (1995)
Guided By Voices - Atom Eyes - Peel Sessions (1996)
Guided By Voices - Jabberstroker - Sunfish Holy Breakfast (1995)
Guided By Voices - The Official Ironmen Rally Song - The Official Ironmen Rally Song (1996)
Guided By Voices - Cut-Out Witch - Under The Bushes Under The Stars (1996)
Guided By Voices - Bright Paper Werewolves - Under The Bushes Under The Stars (1996)
Guided By Voices - Atom Eyes - Under The Bushes Under The Stars (1996)
Guided By Voices - Don’t Stop Now - Under The Bushes Under The Stars (1996)
Guided By Voices - Big Boring Wedding - Under The Bushes Under The Stars (1996)
Guided By Voices - It’s Like Soul Man - Under The Bushes Under The Stars (1996)
Guided By Voices - Redmen And Their Wives - Under The Bushes Under The Stars (1996)
Howling Wolf Orchestra - I.B.C - Speedtraps For The Bee Kingdom (2000)
Robert Pollard - Release The Sunbird - Not In My Airforce (1996)

To play with iTunes:
1. Download iTunes version 6 and install it
2. Select Advanced, Subscribe to Podcast, and enter this into the dialog:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/internmentcamp/loudspeakers

LoudSpeakers At InternmentCamp.

Alternately, you can play the mp3 here.

I wrote some quick thoughts in September about applications like Onfolio. I didn’t quite get it and still don’t, but apparently Microsoft does. Parts of the new version of Onfolio will be a part of Windows Live.

Not that I have ever thought about expensing a visit to a “gentleman’s club,” but someone did. And got caught. On his corporate AMEX at that. $221K. Hope it was worth losing his job.

I’m amazed that the situation in Sudan isn’t getting more attention. I constantly wonder how many more people have to die until the world takes action. A proxy war is taking place between Chad and Sudan and the largest casualties belong to the civilians.

It’s one thing to have pedestrian victims when your government is at war, but it’s another situation entirely to be the target of attack. The latter is the situation in Sudan. More succintly, genocide is before us and external intervention by NATO is required.

China’s interested, not in the humanitarian needs of the Sudanese people, but only because the Sudanese government is quick to supply the energy hungry Chinese with plenty of oil.

Not that China would ever consider intervening in Sudan considering their own lousy record and the possibility of losing access to oil. As self-described “people of the civilized world,” it’s time for NATO to focus on the fact that 300,000 civilians have died in the most recent violence and many more could suffer the same.

“Bake it in” is one of the more common cliches heard from companies that sell multiple parts of a solution. The cliche stems from the concept of baking a cake for instance. Add all of the ingredients — some necessary, some not — and the result is that you can’t discern one ingredient from the other in the final product.

People usually “bake in” individual line items in a deal to hide the very existence, but usually it’s to create a grey cloud around the price of the item in question.

Creating solutions this way is not always a bad thing nor should it be alarming necessarily. Some customers don’t care about the actual process to completion as long as the end result is what was negotiated.

As long as the individual ingredients have no long lasting ramifications, “baking it in” isn’t such a bad thing.

South Dakota has just created a huge waste of time and money by signing a bill that bans virtually all abortions. Regardless of your opinion on the subject, this does not help the anti-abortion lobby politically speaking. Precedence is hard for a court to ignore.

Link: South Dakota’s abortion error

I don’t really pimp bands in the sales process too much, but the Band Of Horses record is so good that it deserves to be mentioned. I just pre-ordered the vinyl, but the CD is available as well. If you haven’t had the opportunity to hear the record, you’ll be blown away when you do.

Pre-order here

Not all Arabs are terrorists. Not all Arabs are even Muslims. Arab Jews are not uncommon. And anyone who was afraid of having a Dubai based company run some of the US ports can stand down. The CEO of the largest Israeli shipping company just endorsed the Dubai company in question.

It is undoubtedly xenophobic as hell for anyone to question the security of the ports when in fact security itself won’t change hands.

I take photography seriously, but I like to have fun with it as well. Taking photographs of my dog(s) is one of my favorite ways to have fun with it. We lost a dog to cancer nearly 2 years ago, so photographs of him remain near to my heart.

I just stumbled across an Indian photographer named Natasha who apparently also enjoys photographs of her dog. From what I assume, she is a professional photographer for the Hindustan Times. Some of her dog shots not only have beautiful perspective, but they’re filled with humor as well.

I was blown away when I stumbled across her work today. You must see.

God bless the only-in-America irony. She’s been on the Administration like a hawk over Abu Ghraib. From reading the article, I can tell that I am instantly a fan. Link courtesy of my younger sister — the other fiesty Bala.

Last month, American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Amrit Singh fired one of her trademark zingers at the Bush administration: New documents obtained from the Pentagon suggested senior U.S. officials are to blame for the systemic abuse of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, she said.

“These documents confirm that the torture of detainees and its subsequent cover-up was part of a larger clandestine operation, in all likelihood, authorized by senior government officials,” Ms. Singh charged in an ACLU news release. “Despite mounting evidence…not a single high level official has thus far been brought to justice.”

Ms. Singh’s dogged pursuit of U.S. government information has subjected the Bush administration to withering criticism of its treatment of suspected terrorists.

But among the ironies of the post-Sept. 11 world is the fact that this particular critic of the Bush administration is also the relative of one of its newest friends. Amrit, 36 years old, is the youngest daughter of Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India. Mr. Singh, 73 years old, will host President Bush at a summit in New Delhi early next month.

Link-o-rama: Prominent Bush Critic Is Also Daughter Of India’s Premier
(registration required)

I’m bullish on America sharing civilian nuclear technology with India for many reasons. But I probably would be given my occassional quasi-nationalistic feelings towards India though I was born in America.

I have always felt that India is more than just a “counter balance” to China. Politically, there are clear reasons for America to be aligned with India. As the world’s largest democracy, it’s a shame that America hasn’t been closer considering India’s dominance and leadership in the region.

Link-y: Joining The Nuclear Family