Day: April 18, 2007

Top Ten VC Lies

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

Too good to pass up… from Paul Kedrosky’s blog tonight.

The Top 10 VC Lies…

10. We’re all on the same side here.
9. A lower Series A valuation is good for you too.
8. We’re not funding XXXX companies anymore.
7. I liked it. Really. But we just don’t have the bandwidth right now.
6. We don’t do deals we can’t drive to.
5. Come back when you have a lead investor.
4. Absolutely, we know top people at Google and Yahoo well.
3. Absolutely, we know people at Sequoia and KP well.
2. We love your CEO.
1. I liked it, but I couldn’t get it past my asshole partners.

Enjoy.

Google Reader, Meet the Mac OS X Look & Feel

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

Now this one is a lot of fun…

I moved my blog reading from My Yahoo to Google Reader about 6 weeks ago.  It has been tough to adjust to the new habit – my instinct is to always go to My Yahoo.  But My Yahoo just wasn’t scaling for the number of blogs I like to keep tabs on (now over 100),  and I noticed that a majority of the people reading my blog were now using Google.

Thankfully, Firefox has made this easier.  The ability to quickly change the behavior of “adding a feed” to Google from My Yahoo made the transition simple for new feeds.

For exporting my old feeds from My Yahoo to Google, I found a nifty tip online on how to export an OPML file from My Yahoo and import into Google Reader.  Just spent a few minutes categorizing all my feeds, and I was ready to go.

Well, today I discovered a new trick.

This post shows you how to skin Google Reader using CSS to look like Mac OS X.  It’s really neat, although it’s a little weird that the author’s name is Adam Pash.

On Firefox, you basically want to go here and download Stylish.  Stylish is an add-on that lets you customize the CSS for any website.

Then, go here to download the Mac OS X theme for Google Reader.

Once you unzip, open the CSS in a text editor, and copy & paste it into Stylish.  On Mac OS X, I had to do this manually by opening the Add-Ons dialog, and open the Stylish preferences, but I got it to work.

It’s pretty neat, and I like the new look & feel of Google Reader.  It’s also pretty neat to see CSS as a form of “lightweight plug-in” for websites.  I’ve got to show this to some of the front-end folks on eBay Express – we use CSS heavily, and I bet you could come up with some pretty neat skins for the site using Stylish.

US Coin Melting Ban Tightens… Check Your Baggage for Change.

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

The Coin Collector’s Blog reports today the US Mint has finalized the melting ban on US coins, particularly pennies and nickels where the copper and zinc content now exceeds the value of the coins.  They clearly want to avoid entrepreneurs buying pennies by the ton, shipping them offshore, and melting them down.

I posted about this phenomenon last yet… the value of Zinc and Copper have skyrocketed.  The penny, despite its color, is mostly Zinc these days.  Nickels, despite the name, are mostly Copper.  Who knew?

The press release from the US Mint is here.

Here is some detail you may not have caught.  Besides melting, it is now illegal to take a large amount of coins out of the country.  What is a large amount?  Try $5 worth.

That’s right.  Check your suitcase.  If you have more than $5 in small coins, you might be set up for a $10,000 fine per violation, or up to five years in federal prison, or both.  Ouch.

Fortunately, you are only liable if you knowingly violate the regulation.