Had the proverbial feast yesterday of course. It was wonderful.

Finished the light. Now to put the walls back. Sprinklers made it through the power test.

Hit me with your best shot... the best that Al and his Quedas can come up with after a year of planning is to blow up an Israeli tourist hotel in Kenya? And fire a stinger at an airplane? Ooh. You've got me shakin' in my boots dudes. Then again, why oh why are all these Israelis in Kenya anyways?

Meanwhile behind the scenes congress cleared all the remaining beauracratic challenges to creating a national police force under the president's control. The legal elements have been in place since Roosevelt. Everything's now in place. Still curious why the FBI and CIA weren't included explicitly. Oh, wait - they have to answer to congress. Now I get it... the president gets his national army and congress gets theirs. This is starting to look like a recent Star Wars episode.

Strange start to the Xmas season. I'll have twenty people in the store, sell maybe a pack of guitar strings and they all slowly saunter away and it's quiet again. Oh well, the real shoppers are at the malls today. They'll wander down here during the Xmas luncheons next couple of weeks.

The plan 'B' guitars came in. So did the plan 'A' guitars. Sigh... I've got a lot of cheap electric guitars. With a few minutes tweaking, some of 'em aren't too bad either. But dang, I'm running out of cases. I've got guitars in the cellar, guitars in the attic, guitars in the bathroom. But not enough cases to last more than about two days.

Never quite understood the appeal of the Fender Stratocaster. That's basically what most of these cheap guitars look like. Even counting the fact that Jimi played one. They were designed to be cranked out of factories by the millions for about 50 bucks cost to manufacture. The most influential of the bolt-on neck style, based purely on cost. Sometimes you have to take the thing apart to change a string. Bad design. Still people want 'em and the factories are still cranking them out, but the factories are on the other side of the globe these days.

The family room light turned out to be a much harder task than originally envisioned. Between the light switch and the light (i.e. where I have to run all the wires) turns out to be a very complex structural component of the house. I'm gonna' haveta' chisel a small groove on the side to run my wires. But the process of discovery led to huge chunks of wall being removed in the laundry. That'll all haveta' be re-done before all is well again.

Kill the wasps in the attic. Re-grout the tile in the hallway. Hook up the new sprinkler cicuits. Spend a few more hours on the family room lighting, well ok - patching up the walls so that someday I'll really have family room lighting. So much for a day off.

The other day my little girl asks... Daddy, where you work... Are you like the boss? I swelled with pride. Why yes honey - I'm the boss. Go tell all your friends. Their mommies and daddies slave away the weeks working for a big bad boss. Your daddy is the boss.

Now they find Saudi involvement in 9-11, as if that was any big surprise. Recall that the bin Laden family are aristocrats in that particular nation. Starting to look more and more like a war against Islam... Meanwhile we admit a new NATO member, increasing the size of the Christian army a bit more.

It's starting to pop up more and more in my customers' conversations. The 'G' word. As in Gift. Yeah, I've got some of those...

Another few days to revel in the luxuries of bachelorhood. The girls are away for a few. Yeah, right. The luxuries of bachelorhood. I can put on some AC/DC (*) and walk around the house naked with a gerdawful hard-on and spit vodka and leave the seat up and not care about offending anybody. No thanks. Think I'll fix the light fixture downstairs. Guess I'm getting old.

(*) 'Let me put my love into you' comes to mind.

Found out what happened to the cheap guitars. Received a letter that they won't ship until I reveal my books to this company and sign away part of my store as collateral for future credits. I didn't ask for credit. I just want a bunch of cheap guitars and have a check or VISA card to pay for it. I'm not signing my store away. This company was claiming to be anti-cartel. But they play cartel games. Hmmm. Time to switch to plan 'B'. These distributors are starting to get nervous about me, because I have no brand loyalty. Too bad. They're missing the point. The guy/gal on the street isn't their customer. I am. And most of them do the same things that Microsoft was convicted of. We'll sell you two of these guitars, but you have to buy 6 of these also. And you have to spend XX thousand dollars or we won't sell to you at all. Maybe ve von't anyway unless you sign zee papers. If I treated my customers like that I soon wouldn't have any.

That aside, I look around the store and there's some cool stuff. Everywhere. I want one of those, and those, and one of those... Contrast that to a year ago when it was more of hmmm, how am I gonna' sell this stuff? There wasn't much that a serious musician ever wanted. Sold a multi-effects board yesterday, first one. Got 'em three days back. It's five hundred bucks, but the serious guitarist has to have one. I know that.

Gadzooks, that's a lot of tee-shirts. Oh well. The laptop bags are cool. Got music? The shelves are starting to bulge with Xmas goodies. Now where are those cheap electrics? Ordered 'em at least a week ago. Oh well, if they don't come through in time I'll buy 'em elsewhere. Doesn't matter what name is on them, doesn't matter what color they are - as long as they're cheap.

Huge truck drives up outside the store - backwards. We're talking huge. The driver jumps out and starts running down the street. Another truck pulls up, blocking the other side. He jumps out and starts running. I'm ready to duck and cover at a seconds notice. Then a third truck comes around the corner. Ohmigosh. It's an 80 foot crane, right behind the first truck. Now I'm puzzled. The first driver runs back and jumps in and drives off. OK, I see. These two trucks helped to block traffic so the crane could get around the corner. Everybody honks and drives away. Excitement is over.

Hmmm... Let me re-think that. The sheet music. If I put it all in alphabetic order it only takes twenty-six slots. A bit under two feet of floor space. That's a nice space reduction - and I can still display it, and it's the first time it's ever been in some kind of order where you could actually find a title you were looking for. Now to make room for the tee-shirts. Should land tomorrow.

It only took a little over eleven months. Finally I've got real rock-n-roll amplifiers. Woohoo! No, I didn't get the one that goes to eleven. That'll have to wait. These still aren't slouches. You can do some serious ear damage in a medium-sized dance hall. The big guy will just give you ear damage - period.

This leads to an interesting business dilemna. I've got no room on the floor for amplifiers unless I move out something else. The individual sheet music is gonna' go. I've got about 30 square feet devoted to it and it generates maybe five bucks in revenue every week. The problem is you have to display all the titles and you never have the titles people are looking for anyway. Such is life. I might sell only one big amp every year, but it will generate hundreds of times more revenue per square foot than the sheet showcase.

I'm still waiting on several of my Xmas suppliers, but the customers sure aren't waiting. I've been humping my tail off trying to keep my shelves from running out - and theoretically the rush hasn't started yet. Oh well, I will say no more. Don't want to jinx the wheel of fortune.

Lots more work on the yard. Another sprinkler line in place. The ground is tilled. Ready for seed maybe next week or two. My back is in agony, and I presume Amanda's as well.

Looking for a tech job? Granted there aren't many around. So y'all need a nitch. I'll spell it any way I want. Here's the scoop... How many millions of information workers aren't at their desks anymore? The jobs are gone. Every one of them had a computer at their desk. Millions of computers, enough to flood the used PC market for ten years. Somebody's got to go in and clean them all up and re-format them to get rid of all the confidential information. Stack 'em in a warehouse for a new set of workers someday, or sell them. Somebody's got to do this job, and there're enough around to support a bunch of people doing it.

The guy looking at folk music. Just like anybody else, except I just happen to know that he's the CEO of one of the largest companies on the planet. That says a lot about the times we're in now. He's got time to read music books. Doesn't mean that running his company is any easier now than it was a couple of years ago, but he's taking time to do more relaxing and enjoyable things.

The Kid Rock is playing at Shoreline and somebody in the band needs a blues harp - in 'D'. Whew - just got those in day before yesterday... Wonder if this has anything to do with my new Yellow Pages ad. They never would've shopped here before.

Boy it's sure name-dropping day today. Just sold a vintage Gibson. The guy is taking it over to get an Aerosmith autograph somewhere.

A sax tumbled from the top shelf. Didn't survive. Ouch. Costly little accident. Where's that stock boy? I'd fire him right now except I think he's related to the boss.

I'm just not seeing the November slow-down I was warned about. That's fine with me. Sales clipping along at a good pace so far - knock on wood.

Xmas goodies continue to trickle in. Drum machines, stomp boxes. Tambourines. Train whistles. All those elves are hard at work. Wait a minute... you suppose that Santa is operating out of mainland China these days? That's where all the toys are coming from.

Saddam is stocking up on atropine. And he's set free all his killers and madmen. Bush may be the leader of the larger country, but that Saddam guy probably has the larger cajones. And the worrisome part is that he's completely unpredictable under pressure. Nerve gas isn't very pleasant stuff to send boys into. Think of it as a giant can of Raid that works on people just like the little can does on bugs. You've got literally seconds to jam this needle of antidote into your thigh whilst your synapses are exploding. Hopefully our military leaders won't wreak too much misery on whoever they feel they have to send in.

Programmers are like mathemticians, lazy. We always are looking for the best and easiest way of doing something. Yeah, I was gonna' build a community forum application - even have some sample code lurking about. But somebody else did it quicker. And it does pretty much everything I want, and it's free. And if it doesn't do what I want, I've got source. Cool stuff.

It's been pretty interesting here on the street the last 24 hours. The furniture store is now empty, naked, vacant. A tree toppled last night two doors down from me and crushed a car. This morning the entire first block of Castro is blocked off while they put out a fire which pretty much wiped out one of the Asian restaurants, not that they'll be missed in a street with about 50 of the things in a three block stretch.

Time to make some more room in the store. The boxes are starting to pile up. Not many shopping days left for me.

Another sobering reality check. The furniture store scross the street (in my store's original location) looks like it's going out of business. They've only been there a couple of months. I'm incredulous that they came and went so quickly. On the positive side, the store will soon be vacant again. And they even removed all the floor tile from when it served as a tile outlet and gave it a fresh coat of paint. If I ever end up there, that just saved me some money.

Cool, a fresh batch of idiots out of the elections yesterday. Now we get to engage in our favorite national past-time - turning them into mince meat and raking them over the fire. That's how we entertain ourselves.

So I'm going over all the Mozilla code trying to figure out where to plug in those cool view filters that came out of my old Stanford research lab. In fact, Bill Yeager gets the credit. My contribution was taking them and being the first to put them into a program (ML) that didn't crash every fifteen minutes (xlview, which actually came from Scott Brock but that's another story). And, and, somebody already did it. Day before yesterday. It wasn't there when I looked the first time. Dang - it's almost all there in Mozilla and almost working.

Another thing which showed up in the source is a Bayesian spam filter. Bill also worked on something like that (before there was spam), but it never quite made it to prime time. I could explain it, but it would make your head explode. Basically, it's a vector-based probability engine. It finds things that are kinda' like something you supply as a model. Think of it like a dial. With the dial at '0', you only see the original document - your sample. If you turn it all the way up, you'll see every document. But somewhere towards the low end of the dial you'll start to register documents that contain the same words, phrases, or grammatical structure, a few more every time you move the dial up. Cool, huh?

Friggin' phone company. Once again they throw some mystery configuration into the works and I can't send any email. My home computer declares that my work computer is a forger. They screwed up the DNS again. To fix it, I have to provide my home computer with the address of the work computer and basically allow it to send spam. But the address always changes. Until they fix their servers I've got to tunnel in through the firewall and type in the address every time I want to send mail and restart the mail server. Fun. Great fun.

Christmas shopping is fun. I get to do it ahead of everybody else. The first box came in this morning. I faxed in the order yesterday. Musicorp rocks. The guy came back with the pretty shirts and music folios. Guitar laptop cases. Violin baseball hats. Cool. Order a few of those. Might even stuff a few stockings myself with the stuff.

Saturday wasn't too shabby, so I've got some pocket change to do some Xmas stock orders. Let's see if the market stays green a few days - otherwise all that stuff I sold is going to come back.

Nintey-seven bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-seven bottles of beer... Yup, finally got the wicked brew bottled. Turned out to be a real funky steamy beer. No problem, will suffice for the holidays. Don't think I could bottle a hundred bottles of beer without help from a curious five-year-old, now doya'? Not a chance. But hope she doesn't share the experience with the entire kindergarten class. At least I left the labels for another time...

The big anitrust case is apparently over. Both the guv'mnt and McSoft claim victory. How can that be? Didn't somebody lose? Well, yeah. You and me. Now little Netscape can go ahead with its suit for damages. 'Xept it's now big AOL-Time-Warner. Fat chance, but then I start wondering who will get the money if they win. Certainly not me. Not any of the other geeks who proudly wore the big 'N' and busted their butts to try and change the world and bring down the dark empire. Not that any of us deserve anything. We knew what we were up against.

Then look back and see what Netscape accomplished. SSL. They created e-commerce. It didn't exist prior because the internet was almost completely insecure. You're still not protected from rogue hackers but at least your transactions are. When the browser landed, everybody had to have it. And with it, internet access and email. Prior to that people and companies had no data access to the internet, which had evolved sufficiently to greet them with cool stuff. Not a bad legacy...

But today we're in a different world. The cool stuff is buried in the din of the mega-portals. There are new software opportunities. Why? Because a lot of little niche vendors vanished completely in the tech slump. There are a few niches out there to be mined. Competition? Only McSoft is left. As long as you don't make too much money they'll stay out of your way. That's the key. If you make more than a million or two they're gonna' take the big piece of the pie from you. Stay under the radar and offer a unique service and you could probably feed a few employees for a few years. Make money on the web? Sure, I should probably do that too. Long as you have something to sell and can get it to people. But it's a cut-throat game in most any of the commercial markets. The only way to keep business flowing is to make less profit than the other guys - and they're working out of their bedroom and drinking Coors.

After a few rough starts, I got my old mail program back. I mean compiled and working. Talk about a blast from the past - it's been what about seven years now. I designed it to process all your daily barrage of information feeds in about ten minutes. Course that's back when information feeds were all text, but it still seems to work quite well. A few window system glitches since it's written to old and not well supported interfaces. But it works. Wanna' see how many penis enlargement emails I get a month? A little filter and oh about 26. A bit less than one a day. Nuked. Friends, family, work, vendors, info, - and junk; all different views of what's in your mailbox. Each view is just a click away. Everything today. Everything this week to the info line that hasn't been responded to. Everything you wrote to 'xyz' this month. You can create a gazillion of these little agent puppies and just pop up the results whenever you want. And they're all still there in your mailbox. These are just different ways of looking at your mailbox.

Happy Birthday Amanda!

Oh yeah, happy halloween too, but I find myself more and more celebrating tomorrow; the day of the dead. It has a better theme to it than running around the streets begging for sweets. Not that I have any complaints...

Month ten of my startup draws to a close. It was also right around a year ago that this whole venture came about to begin with. I started dropping by the store daily and learning the ropes in December, so I've almost seen the whole cycle now. everything but the traditionally dead November. It's been a long education.

Accounting irregularities. Hey, Mikey. Why did you add this column? It shoulda' been that column. Oh well, honest mistake, but it looks like we'll have to re-state earnings for the investors. What? The new numbers are good? And we didn't cook anything? Mikey, woohoo!, we've got profit and dividends. Double digit percentage dividends. And they're real. OK, we already spent 'em, but that doesn't matter. Cool, I guess I won't fire you today.

Started looking at some more of that old data. The email program I wrote at Stanford. Tried to build it. Ouch. Linux has changed since then. My code won't compile. Well in fact it wasn't my code that's broken. It's this message library from UW that I once relied on. Double ouch. Don't rely on somebody else's code. Over time it will either change to adapt or it won't - and either way you're screwed. Too late now. It's a real mess to try and get it working also. And its useful lifetime was over 3-4 years ago. Rather than waste a bunch of time working on it, think I'll just see if I can add the cool stuff I miss into Mozilla. So here I am compiling web browsers between sorting sheet music...