Lee Devlin's Weblog

The EntConnect conference is scheduled for March 23-26th, 2006. It has been going on for over 10 years in Denver and it centers around startups and entrepreneurship. I've been a regular attendee and always find it valuable and fun. The conference started with a magazine called Midnight Engineering that was all about running bootstrap businesses. Sadly, the magazine is no longer in print, but one of the original conference organizers, John Gaudio, continued to host the conference and a loyal core group of regulars continues to meet each year.

The conference includes a day of skiing in Colorado's legendary champagne powder (which is optional) followed by several days of informal meetings and presentations about various topics of interest to entrepreneurs. Some topics covered in the past have included entrepreneurial law, marketing, blogging, company valuation, search engine optimization, and much more. I usually find the personal stories behind each of the attendees' businesses the most enlightening part of the conference.

The cost of the conference is $199, but if you sign up early (by next Tuesday 2/28), the cost is only $99. The room rates are also very reasonable.

The webpage for the conference can be found here.

Jack Krupansky, one of our regulars, also has a page on it that has some photos and links to previous years' conferences here. It can help give you a flavor for what the conference is like.

Labels: entconnect

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I'm trying a few new things here. First I'm using the little blogger button in the Google toolbar to launch myself into the Blogger composing screen. I've never done that before. It looks like it would be good for short entries, but it's missing some key features.

I have a new guestbook on my main site. The old one was based on some ASP code I found on the Internet and lately it's been getting hit with spam like crazy. The script had no authentication code. This new one is based on PHP and has some nice features I've been looking for, namely:

• sending me an email when I get a new entry
• a place to put a link to the homepage of the person signing the book
• an easy way to delete entries
• an auto-generated random authentication code
• no more messages from IE that the guestbook contains 'suspicious code'
• reverse order layout to show most recent entries at the top
• multiple page layout
• capture of IP address of poster

The 4-digit random code needs to be typed in that should defeat the spambots from inserting tons of spam links. I've been getting them every day all pointing to where to buy drugs on line. I'll kind of miss the old one, because it had a lot of entries but it had outlived it usefulness and it was tiresome cleaning it out every day. Capturing the IP address of the poster is a nice feature that should discourage manual spammers and pranksters.

Go ahead and make an entry in there, it's always fun to see who's been reading the website.

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I was listening to Slashdot Review this morning and heard Andy McCaskey mention that he was on his way to a 90th birthday party for his dad who has written somewhere around 600 words a day for the past 74 years. In other words, he's an original blogger. I visited his blog and found that he's got an excellent writing style. I really admire people who actually write blogs. It's so much more interesting than the 'newsbot' style blog, i.e., a collection of links with barely any descriptive text. In a newsbot blog, a link might be set up with almost no supporting text, just a 'check this out', or 'this is really cool'. I think links are important, but they need to be set up a little so I'll have an idea of whether I'd be interested in visiting the link.

I enjoy the topics covered in Slashdot but I can't read the comments for more than a few minutes without getting irritated. It seems that the only comments that get moderated up high enough to appear are those that are cutting, rude, and sarcastic. Sometimes, a comment filled with errors will get moderated up as 'interesting' or 'insightful'. Andy is able to select the most important Slasdot articles and give a quick summary so I can avoid the heartburn associated with all the armchair punditry that goes on there. His podcast is 10 minutes long with a song at the end from and independent artist. I highly recommend it.

I actually met Andy McCaskey at CES when he came up to talk to me with his microphone and recorder. Andy made an excellent set of podcasts while he roamed the floor of CES. He wanted to get some words of wisdom about competing HD DVD formats, a politically charged subject, but my employer doesn't really like the idea of non-PR people giving interviews. There's little potential upside and lots of potential to mis-speak or be misquoted, so the policy is somewhat akin to them telling me, 'Shut your pie hole and let us do the talking'. Well, a PR person wouldn't put it like that. They'd say it much nicer than that, but the effect is the same. ;-)

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A few months ago I posted about our cat Bailey, who had passed away after 14 years. It was pretty sad around here since Terri and I had grown so attached to him. Our household seemed to revolve around him. Shortly after that, our veterinarian told us about a local cat whose owner could no longer take care of her and encouraged us to take a look and see if we wanted to adopt her. After a string of 3 male orange tabbies, I guess we were ready for a change. Now that we've had a chance to get to know her, she's becoming like a new family member. Technically, she's a tortoise-shell cat, but her previous owner called her 'Calico', which isn't really correct, since a Calico cat has some white spots along with the dark and orange, whereas a tortoise shell is all dark. But it would be cruel to change her name after she's had it for 9 years for a simple technicality. We just call her Cali and it fits her.

When we first brought her home, she hid in the basement under the basement steps and seemed somewhat afraid of us. I suppose that being taken from her familiar environment scared her a bit. We began to wonder if we were going to have one of those cats you only know of because of the missing cat food. But now she's gotten to know us and goes wherever she wants and no longer hides in the basement. She follows us around everywhere we go.

An essential duty for any cat in this household is to be a good mouser. Terri doesn't like mice and will scream at the top of her lungs if she sees one, especially if it's alive. So it was quite gratifying to know that this new cat will catch, kill, and eat the little monsters. We let her in the garage where some mice have taken up residence thanks in part to an ample supply of birdseed that they like as much as the birds do. The birdseed is there to feed the birds that visit the feeder outside our window. The birdfeeder is really there to entertain the cat. So there's a certain symmetry to this whole food chain that all stems from a desire to entertain cats and make sure they don't get bored.

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Wordpress, once remarked on a Podcast that his blog used to be really lame where he'd write about his cat or what he had for dinner, so it's not that I don't know writing about one's cat is lame, it's just that with a blog you can do whatever you want and, if I want to write about my cat, I'm going to do it. With a blog, one day you're a tech industry pundit, the next you're baring your soul, or at least disclosing personal information about your pets. And that's what makes a blog personal.

But I'll refrain from writing about what I had for dinner...