Day: January 30, 2004

Can’t keep a good entrepreneur down

I confess: I’ve been playing on Orkut. So far there appear to be three differences between this latest social networking app and its predecessors, Friendster, Ryze, etc.:

  1. Lots more blogerati are on Orkut.
  2. Slightly faster and easier to use.
  3. Did I mention it was backed by Google?

But I have been inviting friends on anyway, and in the process reopened communications with Paul Colton, whom I continue to touch base with about every other year. For those of you just tuning in, Paul was my high school friend who spent so much time in the high school computer graphics lab and at his afterschool job that we feared he wouldn’t graduate. He went on to found Live Software and write its flagship product, JRun, and to sell the company to Allaire, about a year and a half before its acquisition by Macromedia.

It turns out that he’s been working on not one but two new products. PhotoPeer is a photo-sharing peer to peer application, which is either the best way ever to get grandparents to use their computers or the best porn application ever. The other, Xamlon, is a runtime that will allow creating XAML-like applications that will run on the current .NET Runtime under Windows XP. (Jeremy Allaire pointed to this a while back but I missed it.)

I wonder if Scoble has seen this?

A singer once more

After last year’s time with the Cascadian Chorale, I took the fall off from singing. I had started to realize during my therapy last year that part of the reason I kept looking to singing groups was to feel needed, and I had to break myself of that cycle.

But this fall I really missed being in a choir. And I realized I also wanted to explore my faith more, and to be in a position where my singing meant more than just applause.

So I’ve joined the Cathedral Choir at University Presbyterian Church. It looks like it will be a good group, both vocally and spiritually.