Today's mobile office is the coffee shop. I have two coffee shop meetings for today and one meeting in a real office. The real office meeting was with my personal finance guy to figure out our plan for 2005 and because I am anxious about paying estimated taxes late. I shouldn't use the possessive but it looks right. Peter's eight-year-old daughter bumped into their architect and she introduced the architect as “my architect”. It didn't jive well with the architect to be possessed by an eight year old. The real office is on the 24th floor of a building on Federal Street overlooking the harbor and the airport. Bankers tend to have a nice view. If it weren’t for the banking part of what they do I’d opt for their offices. They are in stark contrast to a non-venture start-up office. They generally look a step up from a crack house and have views of a parking lot.

Larry showed me a Monte Carlo analysis of my future assuming that I lived until ninety. I could see myself shriveling into a Yoda like state at 90 ready to hop into the grave. It showed that I could survive on 7% annual increases on my portfolio, which looked cool in the charts but didn't appear to mean that I had to do much differently. It did appear that it would be helpful to have children to take the extra money when I die. The way to go for me is apparently to diversify into International bonds. I don't have enough of them. I also will try a bull call strategy with Merck because they took a big hit from the Vioxx recall that they will probably rebound with. I'm interested to see how it works. It is like a covered call strategy but you don’t hold the stock. Instead you buy options on the stock at the low end and sell calls on the high-end. I still think I need to pay estimated taxes and luckily the Intuit people sent me a CD to upgrade Turbo-Tax that arrived yesterday. Those guys at Intuit sure have good intuition.

I had biked through the city downtown. The traffic was terrible on the city streets so I opted for the esplanade on the way back. The problem with the esplanade is that going from downtown to Brookline in December is against a massive headwind of arctic cold air. Going the other way I could fly at sixty miles per hour without pedaling but I was fighting the wind the whole way back without any gloves on and had to gasp for breath because the cold wind was choking me as I fought it. I did stop to take a picture of some chubby squirrels but they ran away every time I tried to catch them so none of them captured the true chubbyness of the squirrels. The problem with portable cameras that fit in your pocket is that they don’t zoom deep enough. Some optics genius should solve that problem. They made contacts much thinner why not make some solutions to the pocket camera zoom. They are also a hazard when bicycling since you can try to bike and click while chasing squirrels. It is a real problem.

Jorey and I met at the Starbucks in Coolidge corner. We had planned to meet at the Pete's Coffee but there weren't any seats so we moved on to the evil empire. I try to avoid the Starbucks in general because whenever I enter my glasses become completely fogged over and I can’t see for a minute. That's exactly what happened. I had been discussing lots of entrepreneur ideas with Larry in the morning. He thought that a tool that could aggregate financial services information from blogs as a site would be excellent. He cited the Drudge report that gets 2 billion hits per year and just aggregates financial content from newspapers with links as evidence that there is a market for financial services content aggregation. I could imagine ways to do it along the lines of what allconsuming.com does with books. It seems that a lot of people are interested in the future of content, how it is getting produced and how it will be distributed.

Jorey and I discussed some of this. In the back of my mind I was pondering the switch from Netflix back to Hollywood video. The local video stores have struck back against the mail a CD model. They are offering a $10 for three months three movies out at a time and then a bump to $15 per month. The difference is that the video store is a few doors away so that could be basically infinite movies compared to the three to five day lag from Netflix. The movie rental business will eventually go all digital downloads but until then I am thinking of switching back to the local video store to save some bucks and see more movies. It is a silly all around since I barely have time to watch movies anyways.

Jorey is still pushing onwards for his voter education web site that collects and presents key facts to voters for open information about the candidates. He is probably going to call the project “Project America”, the same name as the project that he started in college with a different mandate. He is contacting Michael Dukakis and Bob Dole because they are both ex-politicians to get some support. Sounds like fun to me. Go Jorey! On another angle he had a bad experience with a VC when he approached them with the idea of being an entrepreneur in residence. The VC told him the way to get into being a more advanced entrepreneur would be to take a job at a company at a B or C round and make the company successful. That doesn’t make any sense since it is like telling an inventor to go work at a company with a shipping product to figure out how to invent something. But it isn’t likely to stop Jorey. He was talking about a technology looking for a problem. There are so many technologies looking for problems. This one does semantic web searching by trying to understand what the user is looking for. Google got around this problem by ranking sites higher when they got links from other sites. I suppose it’s still a problem to find information efficiently as the content volume increases on the net. We were distracted a bit when a woman from my dad’s lab came over to chat with us even though she hadn’t gotten sleep the night before. Kathy thought I didn’t recognize her because she hadn’t had time to wash her hair. I really didn’t recognize her because I have a bad memory for faces and names and relationships. I didn’t recognize Robin Williams when he was chatting with me and petting my dog. That’s a problem but people are normally quite willing to introduce themselves.

Coffee shop meeting number two was scheduled for the Central Square Starbucks. I walked into the shop and my glasses immediately fogged up. What is it with these people at Starbucks? Is there a mandatory humidifier in the franchise agreement? Do they use more steam to make the cappuccino’s than other people? Luckily Starbucks was too busy so we moved across the street to Au Bon Pain, which didn’t fog my glasses at all. The crux of the discussion with the Viapoint folks is that we still haven’t figured out what the user needs to do with the tool. It unfortunately does fall into the category of a technology looking for a problem. Most people download it and think to themselves – what am I supposed to do with this now that it is installed?

I am tempted to post a database to store real problems on the web like the one I have with my digital camera for anyone who may have a technology that could solve them. It could categorize them so people who are supposed to invent solutions to real problems could quickly find a problem or just see a random problem. I could even search blogs for problems if I could use a semantic search to find them. It would be like the design challenges posted by the government except from real people with real problems. For instance a real problem is that when my parents walk their husky in the woods off the leash he doesn’t come back. Someone is working on a Lo-Jack for dogs that isn’t released yet but there are plenty of problems out there if we could just collect them and give them to the folks who are making technologies that can’t figure out what problem to solve. The funny thing is that the first problem I would put into it would be the problem of finding a problem for an interesting new technology that has already been developed. The site may or not be the solution.

Sarah and I watched the first half of The Station Agent. It is about a dwarf who is a trainophile who inherits a building in a small town by train tracks. My mom recommended it. The movie does a great job of using the expressions of the main character as he is faced with plenty of ignorant treatment by people because he is a dwarf. It made me want to take a trip with my dad, just my dad and me, to ride some of the great trains in the world, like the Zephyr, a train that goes through the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. I thought it would make a sappy movie to film a man and his father finding time together to ride trains together flashing back to a child with a train set, a father’s train set, and then really riding trains and having adventures exploring the world together. I’ll have to put that on my to do list. Ride trains with my father and make a movie based on the experience. I had rode the train to Cambridge but I biked home.