I’m very pleased to announce that Tubes’ newest advisor is Adam Kalsey. He was the founder of Pheedo and more recently Feed Crier. Kalsey is a web guru so he’ll be a very valuable tech resource for us. Welcome!

Rob Levin was a great guy, and intentionally lived under relatively poor living conditions because he was dedicated to what he did. Part of Rob’s work/passion invoved running the Freenode IRC Network, where he was known as “lilo.” Freenode is important because it’s where you can find nearly all of the IRC channels for open-source projects and technologies. I’ve had some great chats with Rob but we never met in person. Sadly Rob passed away at age 50 due to injuries from a hit-and-run on September 12th. He will be missed.

We’re in the right business.

I’ve been to all previous Sacramento Executive events, and there’s another one coming up September 20th in oldtown Sac. Everytime I’ve gone to these things I’ve met some really cool people, gotten lost in great conversations and ended up missing the food and drinks. No more I tell you! This time I’m making up for the lack of alcohol consumption, and any and all good food will be in my belly. Speaking of food take a look at the restaurant’s website. If you’re around the Sacramento area then you don’t want to miss this one, and you might even want to consider the trip if you’re in the Bay Area.

A lot of the investing and business community gathers at these events, and the Sacramento Executive events in particular. I think it’s because the only people that know about it are already involved somehow with investors or companies in the area. If you’re an entreprenuer looking for investors, management, advisors, etc, or an investor looking to find that special startup with crazy potential (like mine!), then get your ass to this party. Come to have a good time and meet people who might be able to help you, or people you might be able to help. I’ll be there, you can find me near the buffet table. Details and registration info are at the top of the front page at Sacramento Executive.

I know I’m late to the table with this one, but that’s what happens when I don’t get lots of comments. Maybe if my readers threw a word or two my way then I’d be much more likely to talk about dumptrucks… I mean Tubes.

If you haven’t already heard, Senator Ted Stevens recently shared his very unique view of how the Internet works, and it involves not just one, but a whole series of tubes. What he failed to share is that they’re actually Music Tubes.

This whole mockery has obviously been very traumatic to the Tubes team, and we’ve had to shut down 3 out of our 10 research facilities due to bouts of depression.

Hopefully this whole thing blows over soon and we can keep our name, and I can focus my energy back on M&A activities.

Go ahead and watch the videos for yourself, but don’t think for one minute that those aren’t Music Tubes because they are. Either Ted Stevens is a deceptive little bugger or he’s a $%^&*(&^%$#$% liar.

Jon Stewart on Net Nutrality (incl Ted Stevens)

Also related and which may be of interest, is a very informative piece on how TCP/IP and packet switching works. You can watch that here:

The Daily Show Revisits Net Nutrality

Not really, but there are no girlfriends around the Meetro HQ. Last time I checked women weren’t too fond of urine stains on the couches Okay kidding aside, this is a great article on how the employees of social IM company Meetro live and work. I know Paul Braigel because we talked a bit about stuff before they moved out here to Cali. He’s a cool guy and I really do think that Meetro is ahead of it’s time. When the Meetro-style functionality reaches a critical mass it’s going to be MySpace all over again, at least I hope. I wouldn’t mind meeting the single women who live down the street from me Props to Dan the Tubes designer who sent me the link for the article which you can read here.

I apologize for not blogging much lately, I’ve been spending every waking hour coding. Today I took a short break to read my feed reader which I haven’t done in about a month, and I got completely stuck on this one blog. It’s called Creating Passionate Users and there looks to be about 4 writers, all authors of Head First books. I’ve actually been subscribing for a while, but it just really caught my attention today. Most of the blog’s content seems to be a mix of articles about marketing, usability, management, code, and psychology. I really had to make myself stop reading because I have to get back into the code, but the last article I read is worth mentioning.

It’s about a new diet called the Shangri-La Diet, and the idea is to trick your body into not thinking it needs to store fat. I think. Part of the hypothesis is that even though we live in this modern society, our minds and bodies still know that we don’t have to watch for tigers and make sure we’re fat enough to survive the coming winter. I’ve been trying to get into shape with mixed results for a long time, so I’m intrigued enough to get the book.

Read the article here.

This is a very well done film by Canadian Julien McArdle. Links to torrents and other download sources can be found at the Celcius Studios website, or you can just watch it here.

Very recently formed is this new organization comprised of Canadian musicians, who all disagree with how the music industry is treating their customers. It’s called the Canadian Music Creators Coalition and members include the Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, Chantal Kreviazuk, Sum 41, Stars, Raine Maida (Our Lady Peace), Dave Bidini (Rheostatics), Billy Talent, John K. Samson (Weakerthans), Broken Social Scene, Sloan, Andrew Cash and Bob Wiseman (Co-founder Blue Rodeo). They’re against the lawsuits filed against downloaders, and against copyright laws that affect when and how fans listen to music via Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies talks about the coalition in a video interview here.

Part of what we’re doing with Tubes is creating a new model of digital music distribution and marketing, in an effort to solve many of these issues. I went into a bit of detail on a friend’s blog, so be sure to check that out.

This new coalition is great and everything, but where the hell is Rush on that list?

Baidu is a highly successful Chinese search engine, basically the Chinese equivalent of Google (who is also invested in it, more details here including market share). A couple of days ago they released a wiki encyclopedia called Baidu Baike (via China Web 2.0 Review). It seems to be growing fairly quickly so this will be interesting to watch. FYI China has supposedly blocked access to Wikipedia, so Baidu Baike is the only option for many people.