Martin Gordon's Blog

Can't say I want to write anything too substantive on these links, but I do want to get them out there anyway because they're cluttering up my tab bar.

Monsters of the Programming World is a neat little poster anthropomorphizing common programming errors. I've been meaning to pick this up for our office.

Jeffrey Friedl has developed a Lightroom export plugin for Flickr. I haven't had a chance to test it out yet, as I've shamefully not uploaded any pictures to Flickr this year, but it should shave off a few clicks in my workflow if it works well enough.

Ken Rockwell on How To Afford Anything. The great thing about this article is that Ken isn't a personal finance guru, he's a photographer. This article isn't coming from a "I want to be rich" perspective but more from a "I want cool cameras" perspective, which appeals to me greater than the usual run-of-the-mill personal finance article.

Fraser Speirs on his photo editing workflow. Fraser uses Aperture, so his workflow is a bit more flexible than what is allowed (or rather suggested) by Lightroom. Still, some of his ideas carry across between any such application. I particularly enjoyed his rating process, something I currently do without much thought.

I'm working on listening to all of Fred Wilson's Top 10 Albums of the Year. Music recommendations from a VC, who would have thought? Fred's musical tastes are a bit off from mine and listening to his picks is an interesting experience. I haven't gotten through the entire list, but I did grab a copy of the Kings of Leon's Because of the Times, his number one pick. There are some songs I can't stand to listen to, and although the album as a whole isn't memorable, it is very catchy. That is, I can remember parts of songs but I can't identify which song it is or if it's the same part of another song. My biggest disappointment has to be the lyrical work. There's just not a whole lot going on there unfortunately.

Technorati Tags: links, programming, bugs, poster, art, Flickr, Lightroom, photography, personal finance, Aperture, A VC, Fred Wilson, music, Kings of Leon, Because of the Times

Our favorite product pricing company, iSuppli, just released a report stating that the iPhone is carrying a 50% margin.

My prediction: There will be some yelling and screaming about how Apple is taking advantage of consumers. Come June, the same people will gobble up every last iPhone available, thereby justifying Apple's pricing.

Remember, kids, it's a fair price for someone if they're okay with paying that much. No one needs an iPhone, so Apple can choose whatever price they want for it.

[via Engadget Mobile]

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, iSuppli, cost, price, price gouging

As I continue discovering new ways to put off studying for my Venture Capital final that's tomorrow at 3, Wharton grad, Half.com founder, and venture capitalist, Josh Kopelman, has posted a link to the Blueprint Ventures' 2006 holiday card. It is available on YouTube as well. So while it won't help me learn how to value Participating Convertible Preferred Stock, the break-even valuation for a Series F investment, or what a real option really is, it does show me what I can look forward to if I do learn those things ;)

Technorati Tags: Venture Capital, FNCE 250, finance, VCFI, Andrew Metrick, Josh Kopelman, video, funny, VC, YouTube, holiday, school, Wharton, Penn, University of Pennsylvania, UPenn

Sorry about the hiatus, finishing up the semester and job-hunting (and Zelda ;)) have taken up way too much time and something had to give. Luckily not a lot has been going on over the past two and a half weeks. Now to get back into it…

TechCrunch reports that Jason Calacanis has joined VC firm Sequoia Capital as an "Entrepreneur in Action". Congrats to Jason!

This move is another data point for the idea that to become a VC, one needs industry experience first. Guy Kawasaki also talks about this in a recent post and even came up the VCAT, the Venture Capital Aptitude Test. I'm curious to see how Jason would score? Famed VC Mike Moritz didn't do too well, but I'd still want to see how a brand new VC scores.

Interestingly enough, the news broke almost 2 hours ago and its still not on TechMeme. The first Digg story showed up an hour and a half ago and the most popular one 45 minutes ago. Hmmm…

Technorati Tags: VC, Venture Capital, Jason Calacanis, AOL, Weblogs Inc, Sequoia Capital, Mike Moritz, Guy Kawasaki, VCAT, entrepreneurship

Hey everyone, long time no post. I've been really busy this past week. During the day I'm at work as an equity systems intern at DuPont Capital Management and at night I was busy moving out of the West End and into the fraternity house, where I'll be for a week until our new lease starts on the 1st. And finally, I bought a 17" iMac Core Duo so I've been busy playing around with that as well. Suffice to say that those three haven't left me much time for posting.

Now that I'm done moving furniture and boxes and my iMac is set up for the most part (waiting on a gig of RAM), I'm back. I don't know if I'll be able to post as frequently as I did last summer because I don't think I'll have much time to surf around scouring for post ideas and news.

Work so far has been alright. I have to be there at 8, so I'm out of here by 7:30. I thought it was going to be terrible waking up so early, but once I adjusted my sleep schedule, it was alright. I prefer working 8-5 rather than 9-6 because I can stretch the morning out to 5 hours and then the afternoon slump doesn't have much time to kick in. I've been mostly programming Excel/VBA macros to format data and now I'm starting to work on another macro that will automatically create charts from data pulled from FactSet, a financial data/research application.

The iMac has been spectacular so far. I was choosing between the iMac and both MacBooks to replace/supplment my aging Aluminum 1.25GHz PowerBook. I decided on the iMac, at least for the time being, because I'm not too sure I'll need portability over the summer. Once school starts I'll re-evaluate and possibly sell the iMac and get a Merom MacBook Pro. The MacBook was out because of the lack of dedicated graphics and the premium of $500+ for the MacBook Pro with specs similar to the iMac (not to mention the heat and whine issues) disqualified the MacBook Pro as well. Even with just 512MB of RAM, everything seems to be faster than my PowerBook with 1.5GB RAM. The iSight and FrontRow are welcome additions and while I don't think I'll use them every day, having them there when I do need them is a plus.

I'm thinking that a 30GB BootCamp partition (for gaming) and an 8GB Parallels VM (for apps I might want to run but don't want to restart for) will be good as a Windows solution. As per my last post, I've downloaded Office 2007 as part of the public beta program. I haven't had much use for it yet (and running it inside Parallels with only 128MB RAM dedicated to it was painful) so I haven't had a chance to take it for an in-depth test drive. The little I have used of it, however, I've been really impressed with. As someone who has spent a lot of time using previous versions of Office, I've gotten pretty used to the old-style toolbar and don't have much trouble finding the right button to push to do what I want. After using the Ribbon, I don't know how I'll ever be able to go back. Microsoft definitely got it right with this. Live previews are excellent and the larger buttons are much easier to hit as well. Bravo, Microsoft.

Technorati Tags: DuPont, internships, college, iMac, Core Duo, Mac, Intel, Excel, VBA, Microsoft, FactSet, finance, capital management, BootCamp, Parallels, Office 2007, Ribbon

The folks at Marginal Revolution have a post on the melting of pennies and the discussion that follows is excellent (partly because I can follow all the finance-speak :))

Technorati Tags: money, pennies, zinc, copper, currency, precious metals, finance, economics, bullion, Marginal Revolution

Saw an article in the Financial Times today (FT.com requires a sub, but I found it here for free) about how zinc and copper prices have shot through the roof in the past few weeks/months.

Zinc, in particular, has seen an astronomical price increase (55%) in the past three weeks. If it increases by the same amount again ($550 per ton), a pound of pennies (160 of them) will be worth $1.61 and you could get more by melting them down and selling the metal (in theory).

So what does that mean? Will our pennies no longer be pegged to the dollar? If the metal in a pound of pennies were worth $3.20, would our pennies be worth 2 cents?

Either way, it's time to start stocking up on pennies.

Technorati Tags: money, pennies, zinc, copper, currency, precious metals, finance, economics, bullion

I recorded most of Venture Capitalist Ted Schlein's talk last Thursday here at Wharton. Mr. Schlein has been with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers since 1996, when he joined to manage their Java Fund. He spoke about his experiences in working for Symantec and his earlier experiences at various startups. He also talked about VC in Asia and the challenges VCs face in going over there.

The audio quality is markedly better than the Kevin Smith talk, partly because of better acoustics and because I was sitting a lot closer to him.

Direct link to file.

Technorati Tags: Wharton, UPenn, University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School, Ted Schlein, KPCB, Kleiner Perkins, business, business school, Penn, finance, venture capital, vc, speech, talk, audio

Google Finance was unveiled today. Leave it to Google to make an information-dense page look clean.

There's some nice little AJAX things going on. Switching between indices on the main page is done on the fly and the little popups of key management with pictures is a really nice touch.

I didn't necessarily like that Flash was used for charts at first glance, but that's because I'm using the Flashblock extension in Firefox so it required an extra click. Flash can be overdone a lot of the time, but here it is used nicely. The UI for the chart is unlike anything I've seen, with a 5-year timeline above the full chart which allows for users to select an arbitrary range of dates. The news items to the right of the chart also change in realtime to reflect the range of dates selected on the chart.

Google Finance is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition (even my previous favorite, Yahoo! Finance). The problem with Y! Finance is that its too ad-ridden. While I expect Google Finance to add ads eventually, they'll probably be unobtrusive text ads. On Y!F, however, we've got standard ads all over the place as well as links to "payment required" news stories.

Technorati Tags: Google, Yahoo, Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, finance, news, stock market, capital markets, AJAX, Flash, Web 2.0, charts