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August 31, 2005

Reggae Run Half Marathon

We ran the Reggae Run Half Marathon in Santa Cruz this past Sunday.

The start and finish lines were at the new Depot Park, near the Boardwalk. Approximately 300 people ran the half. Based on the fact that the race started 25 minutes late, I would bet this was the inagural event. Luckily, the weather cooperated and temperatures remained cool until about Mile 10.

The race course was very scenic - we ran past the Lighthouse and Steamers and then north on West Cliff Drive. The course wound through Natural Bridges, which was short, but beautiful. We then went along a County road, out to Wilder Ranch and back.

Overall, here's how the run rates in my book:

Organization - The race was not put together well (missing Mile markers and a very late start); however, it was clearly marked/staffed. Grade: D

Course - About as scenic as it gets. Grade: A

Aid-stations - Located as billed - each had water and Gatorade. The Gatorade was waaaaaaaaaaayy too strong - it had to be diluted with water. No Gu/gel available. Grade: B

Swag - Great short-sleeve shirt, nice Finisher's medal. Grade: A

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Posted by davehod at 01:47 AM | Comments (0)

August 26, 2005

Upcoming Halfs

A bit of running craziness has descended on my house. Without realizing it, I've been signed up to run 3 halfs in the next 3 months.

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Posted by davehod at 01:50 AM | Comments (0)

Google Sidebar/Firefox?

I've been test driving the Google Sidebar for a few days.

It is interesting from the standpoint that it has a pluggable architecture with available API's (Brad thinks this is good :-)) The "out of the box" Sidebar items are fairly vanilla and include widgets like weather, news, etc. Several of the widgets, including "Quick View" and "Web Clips", sniff IP traffic to monitor sites you have visited and RSS Feeds among other things.

The Quick View widget works pretty well for IE traffic, however, for some reason it refuses to monitor anything I visit in Firefox. The Sidebar image shows Firefox views, so it must be me. Anyone encountering a similar issue?


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Posted by davehod at 01:27 AM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2005

Mother Hips - Everyone Knows This is Nowhere

One of my favorite bands, The Mother Hips released a download-only (with great artwork) show where they play Neil Young's "Everyone Knows This is Nowhere" in its' entirety. The sound quality is fantastic; make sure to get the FLAC version :-)

In a big picture sense, I wonder how this works for them. They don't have a deal with a major label but they are able to still get music out to their fan base. A good long-tail example.


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Posted by davehod at 03:00 PM | Comments (0)

BarCamp:Friday Night (Day One)

I attended BarCamp Day One (Friday night) -- very cool. Too bad Marc Canter wasn't there as it was about as unconference as it gets; he would have loved it. The interests were quite varied - everything from Web 2.0 to "Old Macs".

I met several entreprenuers who are completely bootstrapping their startups with open source and teams that are remote (i.e. working from their houses). Some people seem a bit squeamish about admitting this, until I tell them that MessageCast (and Bloglines) did the same thing. We didn't move into our office in Redwood City until we had been at it for more than 2 years. The new paradigm - embrace it.

Thanks to Ross Mayfield and SocialText for hosting us in their (very) new digs. Barcamp goes through Sunday so stop in if you are in the area.

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Posted by davehod at 01:13 PM | Comments (0)

BarCamp

I'm heading over to BarCamp tonight - the list of attendees has grown all day. Who knows, Gnomedex redux?

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Posted by davehod at 08:19 AM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2005

Radio Commentary from Doug Kaye

Doug Kaye has a great post today about the "Future of Radio". One quote that stood out to me was this one:

The future of public radio may not be podcasting, but it will certainly be based on much lower-cost methods of producing and distributing most programs, and as incumbents in the industry, the WGBHs of the world are unable to cannibalize their own operations to the extent they must to survive.

I saw this first-hand when I was on John Furrier's PodTech.net show. Using a laptop, a mixing board, two mics and an iRiver, John had his own portable studio. Total cost, including the laptop, was under $6k. One (of many) reasons that podcasting has grown so rapidly; it is "open source media" at an accessible price point.


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Posted by davehod at 07:34 AM | Comments (0)

Podshow gets funded

Private Equity Week is reporting that Podshow has closed an $8.85m "A" round with KP and Sequoia.

The sound you here is podcasting, launching into the stratosphere. iTunes adds support and now KP/Sequoia team-up on Podshow. Congrats to AC, you (along with others) had the vision to see how to use enclosures to bring us time-shifted media. Sometimes great, sometimes crap, you've changed the way I interface with content.

Update
Jason has kudos/questions
Odeo announces their own deal


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Posted by davehod at 01:17 AM | Comments (0)

August 08, 2005

Google Adsense

I dropped in the required Javascript earlier today to enable Google Adsense. A bit of poking around tells me that there is quite a bit of tuning to be done to maximize things.

My first thoughts are not so great - the ads took hours to show up and when they did, they are all for garage doors! (probably taken from my URL http://www.davehodson.com/garage/) I'll be monitoring this closely over the next few days to see if the ads become more contextual based on the actual content in my blog.

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Posted by davehod at 02:31 PM | Comments (0)

Post-vacation Payback!

You think I would have learned by now - fresh off a week vacation (the first one in a while) and I fire up my email. Gee, only 1012 unread messages If I plow straight through, I should be caught up by Friday or so...

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Posted by davehod at 07:36 AM | Comments (0)