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Come to Puttin on the Leash 2009

Saturday, April 25^th at 6pm is the 2009 - Puttin On The Leash Event to benefit the Humane Society of Boulder Valley. The event is located at the Coors Event Center on the CU Boulder Campus. Our goal for the event is to raise $300K for the programs and services that are provided straight back into the Boulder County Communities.

As some of you know I joined the board of the Humane Society of Boulder Valley a little over a year ago and have been lucky to see firsthand all the good work this group does year in and year out.

In 1904 the Humane Society of Boulder Valley was founded to protect those who did not have a voice to protect themselves. Each year this mission is supported as they counter animal neglect and cruelty and literally save the lives of thousands of animals.

The Humane Society of Boulder Valley is a private, nonprofit organization that relies on donations from generous supporters. The HSBV is not operated or funded by any national humane groups or governmental agencies and must rely on contributions to bring its services to Boulder and surrounding communities.

Here are some interesting Fun Facts about the HSBV.

1. The HSBV serves 8,000 animals annually.
2. The HSBV facilitates 5,300 adoptions annually.
3. 40% of the animals who come through the front doors of the HSBV need some type of medical attention through the shelter medicine program.
4. 150 Dogs received behavioral modification training last year, from food guarding to separation anxiety.
5. Average length of stay for dogs is 4 days, for cats 10, these are outstanding statistics!
6. Some of the services the HSBV provides include, Adoptions, lost and found, Veterinary Clinic, Behavior and Training Center, Humane Education, Pet Retail Supplies... 
7. The HSBV Live Release Rate, representing the percentage of animals who come through the door and are reunited with their guardians or placed with a new family is 89% - this is among the highest in the nation.

If you have never been to this event before, it's a really fun way to spend an evening in Boulder. Its basically a huge cocktail party with foods from 20 different restaurants in Boulder and over 600 silent auction items made up of goods and services all donated from local businesses and individuals. As you walk around the party, there are tons of Adoption Center dogs cruising the event (all of which ending up with multiple new families offers before the end of the evening).

At the end of the evening there is a live auction with an amazing list of stuff this year.

Dress is casual, although there will be people in Tuxes and others in space suits, its Boulder – it's all GOOD!

As you can tell I am very passionate about this cause, and generally speaking this is the Vernon families' major charity effort each year! My personal feeling is that this is a critical fundraising year because of the economy. If you have never been to this event and would like to go, shoot me an email – or tweet me @toddvernon and I will hook you up with a homeboy deal virtually guaranteeing you have a blast, and have enough money in your pocket to bid on some of the great silent auction items.

If you can't make it to the event this year, let me know and I would be ecstatic to pass along any donation that you could make!

Hope to see you there!

Jihad against toolbar, enablers

Anyone who has ever had to help their parents with their computers knows that their parents' web browsers have about 20 toolbars installed. All turned on, and none of them ever requested. These get installed when companies engage in poor judgment and install unrequested software into the browser of unknowing people when their unrelated product is installed on the computer.

In the example below, each subsequent installation of the Java Virtual Machine installs the Yahoo Toolbar by default. My parents don't know what the Yahoo toolbar is. They don't want the Yahoo Toolbar but they do trust Sun Microsystems.

When someone like Sun does this deal do they think about it this way? Or do they think about it in terms of $.01 an install?

I actually don't blame Yahoo at all for this. I will say they quite possibly have the most active business development guy on the planet however putting these deals together.

I do blame Sun however. Why would they ever do this deal? Why would they piss off their customers with this? Why would they do this for a revenue stream that surely cannot amount to anything significant for them?

This behavior really makes me mad, and tarnishes Sun Microsystems brand in my eyes. Not because of the Yahoo offer, but because by default it takes advantage of peoples ignorance of what is happening.

Java on the desktop – Accept, Decline or Irrelevant?

Brad Feld - Entrepreneurial Lifetime Achievement Award

Last night I was lucky enough to introducing Brad Feld at the Silicon Flatirons Mashup Event. Brad was being honored with an Entrepreneurial Lifetime Achievement Award. It was a lot of fun to go to the event and the video that Jason his partner put together was awesome.

Brad Feld - Lifetime Entreprenurial Achievement award video from Kendall Media Group on Vimeo.

At first I thought the concept of giving Brad a Lifetime Achievement Award was a little weird, for a couple reasons.

First, Brad is in his 40's and I no longer consider that old J Second, Entrepreneurial Lifetime Achievement doesn't really fit Brad in my mind. My experience is that entrepreneurs tend to be exceedingly good at making themselves successful but that doesn't always translate to those around them. Undeniably, Brad is by all measures a very successful Entrepreneur, but more importantly he is an amazing catalyst in the community helping make others successful. I think that will ultimately be the Brad Feld legacy (many years from now when he's old).

I think he should have been awarded the Entrepreneurial Lifetime Achievement Catalyst Award.

In my experience, regardless if Brad has a direct investment in your company, he will engage and help in any way he can. If what you do doesn't "fit" what he knows, he will tell you – but if he does have experience with regard to your situation, getting his perspective is always useful.

Congratulations Brad!

 

PogoPlug Review

Last week I finally ordered the PogoPlug from CloudEngines. I first saw the product back in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas.

I knew what it was, but kind of like the first time you played with a Tivo you weren't exactly sure if it fit any specific need you have. Yesterday it arrived so last night I dug in with the idea that if it took too long to get working I was going to bail out. Happily it installed in about 5 minutes.

Just to backup a bit, the PogoPlug looks like a brick power supply. It plugs into the wall, or optionally has a power cord if you don't want it hanging on a powerstrip. Other then the power connector it has only two other connectors, the first a Gigabit Ethernet connector (copper) and a USB2.0 port. Both cables are also supplied which is a nice touch. The instruction manual is three lines of text in the bottom of the box. Plug the network connector into your switch or router, Plug the USB connector into a USB hard disk (I used a thumb drive for testing), and plug the power into the wall.

Done, installed.

Once you apply power the lights go crazy for a minute and then it settles down into two green indicator lights. All that is left is to go to the website pogoplug.com, signup, and enter the serial number of the PogoPlug device you received.

After that, instant global hard disk!

You can get to the files via a web interface, or simply download a filesystem driver and mount the drive on any or all computer you have attached to the internet.

Pretty, cool and seems to work great.

You can mount and unmount the USB drive using the interface so you can have multiple media drives you can change out.

The real beauty of this thing is it just works. No firewall hacking, the filesystem driver for windows seems to know if you are inside your home firewall or out without any fuss. It just works.

The web interface has permissions so you set up access for other people to get to folders, etc.

Not much more to say, it's pretty cool. I am a pretty active emailer of docs to myself between work and home and I just stopped doing that now. I could get the same behavior with our VPN at work but that's kind of a pain and it doesn't work for media like music, video that would be cool to keep at home. I have read good things about the Iphone App to access the drive share but I don't use the Iphone so don't know firsthand.

The price went up a little from CES, its now $99. I have to say however, its worth it. I love stuff like this that doesn't rely on my desktop computer to work. My only wish is that it would work with Network Attached storage as well as USB storage.

Give it a try!