Rough Drafts

It happens every December. The holiday season brings with it hordes of online shoppers, and — despite having months to prepare — many websites aren’t able to keep up. Learn how you can avoid this fate in my latest column for Business 2.0, The Santa Slam.

Vic Norton, a mathematician (and my stepfather), has published a paper on how you can use a weighted Sharpe ratio to optimize your investment mix and beat the market. I don’t have the mathematical chops to evaluate Norton’s approach, but it looks pretty good: If you had used this investment strategy

This week’s New Yorker has a banjo cartoon.

Former Oracle business analyst Mei Lin Fung reflects on a bit of Oracle’s sales history, circa 1990. “After five to eight years — with the benefit of distance, hindsight and detachment — it eventually worked its way to my consciousness that we had changed the way things worked in one part of the sys

Some Features you may Need on your Computer.

The Onion: FAA Considering Passenger Ban. “In every single breach of security in recent years, whether it was an act of terrorism or some other form of crime, it was a passenger who subverted the safety systems on board the aircraft or in the terminal,” FAA administrator Marion Blakey said. … “We re

Webloggers are discovering the subtleties of journalistic ethics, bit by bit. First lesson: Disclosure. If Microsoft pays your way to attend a product preview in Redmond, you might want to disclose that fact before raving about their products in your weblog.

Last night I watched the video release of Startup Dot Com, last year’s documentary about the rise and fall of GovWorks, a New York-based dot com. Interestingly, the founders, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman, have gone on to start a new company specializing in helping other companies wind up busin

Steve Gillmor: “LAST NIGHT I HAD a strange dream. The DRMocrats have just been re-elected, sweeping all three houses of government in a virtual landslide.”

Dan Gillmor notes that personal computing pioneer Doug Engelbart will be visiting a group of federal government IT executives this week, on a mission to raise their collective intelligence. Gillmor also posts a Howard Rheingold essay on Engelbart.

Lots of bloggers covered the DigitalID World conference in Denver last week, posting live transcripts, notes, and reports from the front of what turned out to be a very exciting conference. However, Jon Udell’s post is the first one that really boils down the conference and extracts some interesting

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott (1994). Susan gave me this book a few years ago and I just reread it in preparation for Nanowrimo. It’s amazing. Lamott manages to be inspiring, funny, wise, practical, entertaining, and encouraging all at once. And she writes with