One of my all-time favorite bands is Steely Dan, and one of my all-time favorite venues is Red Rocks in Morrison, Colorado. When I heard that The Dan was playing at Red Rocks, with the added bonus of the amazing Michael McDonald sharing the bill too, I knew I had to see this concert. In fact, I even scheduled my move date to Boulder around this show, which took place last Monday, July 31st. And thanks to the efforts of my colleague, fellow musician, and good friend Jason, we were able to obtain excellent seats (eighth row) for the event. Jason and I used our two extra tickets to bring along our new Boulder friends (and fellow musicians) Tom Higley and David Haynes.

This was one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen: the quality of the live sound and the level of performance and musicianship exhibited by the band were incredible. Becker’s and Fagen’s legendary perfectionism were evident in all aspects of the show, and they went through their (extensive) catalog of hits and even played a few I wasn’t expecting to see live, including Aja and FM as well as my personal favorite Steely Dan tune, Kid Charlemagne, which contains (IMHO) one of the best rock guitar solos ever recorded. Larry Carlton recorded that solo back in the day, and he has even stated publicly that it is his own personal favorite solo as well.

The only two complaints I can offer was that I found guitarist Jon Herington’s solo on Kid Charlemagne to be a bit of a let-down relative to Carlton’s masterpiece. Generally, when I see a live show, I prefer an improvised guitar solo, but sometimes the better choice is to cop the original note-for-note. And while I was very happy that Steely Dan played a broad selection of their hits, I was surprised that no material from Becker’s or Fagan’s solo albums nor the band’s most recent works appeared in the set list.

Fagen’s Kamakiriad is another one of my favorite albums, and I was also hoping to hear Cousin Dupree given the recent tongue-in-cheek brouhaha that has erupted between Mr. Dan and Owen Wilson. Finally, while poking around the blogosphere as I sat down to write this post, I found a couple great reviews of the show that are well worth a read, one from Steve’s Round Midnight, and the other from the Lefsetz Letter.

Steely Dan’s music heavily influenced the evolution of rock & roll. They brought a new level of performance and musicianship to the genre and seriously expanded rock’s harmonic and rhythmic palette, borrowing liberally from jazz and R&B, while also extending the universe of subject matter for lyrics, owing to Fagen’s erudite and wry word-smithing. Steely Dan helped move rock & roll from a “guitar, three chords and the truth” to a horn section, half a dozen chords (including the muMajor), and an acerbic dose of ironic-postmodern commentary.

As we sat and watched the show, our group (all music nerds) often exchanged awestruck glances after particularly acrobatic bit of performance, and we scratched our heads trying to figure out what makes Donald Fagen’s mannerisms and stage-presence so, um, unique. As he sang and played his keyboard while wearing dark sunglasses, he jerked from side to side and displayed a pair of rather large canines when he opened his voluminous mouth wide to belt out a high note. Mr. Fagen is truly a weird looking dude. And when he stood up to walk around, his odd gait and arm motions were vaguely reminiscent of Bela Lugosi. Then it hit us: Donald Fagen is the Transylvanian Ray Charles. You heard it here first.

Technorati Tags: Colorado, Michael McDonald, Music, Red Rocks, Steely Dan

The fine folks at Namaste Solar just finished installing a 3.01 kW grid-tied PV system consisting of fourteen SunPower panels on the roof of our garage behind our new house in Boulder, CO. Now I have to wait a couple weeks for inspections and for Xcel Energy to tie it in to the grid and install the net-meter, at which point this system will be generating enough clean, zero-emissions electricity to cover a significant portion of our home’s energy needs. I would have loved to have completely cancelled out our electric bill, but we used all the south-facing roof space we had available to us, and ran out of room for additional panels.

Fortunately, Namaste was able to get their hands on the highly efficient SunPower SPR-215 panels, so we were able to maximize the wattage per square foot on our limited roof space. And thanks to Boulder’s 300 days of sunshine per year, we’ll be getting good bang for our buck on this system, which should pay for itself in about ten years, or substantially sooner if energy prices rise more than 5% annually, which I think is a pretty safe bet. And to think that all this power used to just heat up the roof and interior of our garage. Now it can keep my beer cold. Pretty cool.

For the stat-obsessed, here are the basics on the system:

• Electricity production: 4268 kWh/year
• CO2 emissions reduced: 8741 lbs/year
• Equivalent reduction in vehicle miles driven: 9561 miles/year
• Equivalent number of trees planted: 336

If you’ve got the sunshine, roof space, money and inclination, why not install one on your house? There’s a $2000 Federal Tax credit available, and several states now offer substantial rebates (Colorado included) that can cut the cost of the system by up to 50%. Before I decided to move to Colorado, I was investigating putting one up on my house in California, where the payback was even quicker (about seven years) due to the higher energy prices. As energy costs rise and as new technologies become available that make PV cheaper and more efficient, the payback window will ultimately shrink to the point where it would be a bad idea to not install a PV system.

Technorati Tags: Boulder, Clean Energy, conservation, Green Energy, Renewable Energy, Solar

We’ve made the big move from Silicon Valley to Boulder, Colorado. Here’s the view from our back deck. It is nice to be back in Colorado after seventeen years in the Bay Area. And maybe someday, I’ll even be able provide a link to our house on an online map. But for now, our home doesn’t exist in cyberspace.

One of the more annoying aspects of using a cellphone (beyond dropped calls and bad reception) has to be dealing with voice mail. I understand why there needs to be a least-common-denominator interface into voicemail, so it is accessible from any phone and from anywhere, but let’s face it, a touch-tone user interface is a terrible way to deal with voice messages. There are two huge improvements to voicemail that I’d like to see the carriers offer. I’d probably switch to a carrier that made these things possible.

First, I’d like to be able to set my voicemail system to automatically forward voicemails I receive as a .WAV or .mp3 attachment to an email account of my choice. This would be extremely simple for any carrier to enable. I use an effective little service called MaxEmail that does this for my home phone number, which I have forward to my MaxEmail number if I don’t answer at home. This allows my wife and I to receive voicemails and faxes as attachments on our Sidekicks or email client of our choice. And my Cisco phone system at work does this as well. But the annoying missing link is my mobile number, where I actually receive the most voicemails.

The second feature I’d like to have would be a voicemail client that runs directly on my phone that downloads all voicemail messages to my phone in the background and would allow me to easily navigate my voicemail queue without resorting to the tortured call-in touch-tone interface. Phones have more than enough memory and local processing power these days to pull this off. With data-capable phones as common as they are, I resent the fact that I need to call-in to get my messages.

Of course, I can think of a reason why the carriers aren’t interested in doing this: airtime charges. Every time I call in to my voicemail system, I am burning off the minutes in my plan. If I make enough calls into voicemail (and who doesn’t do this at least once a day), checking my messages becomes a revenue opportunity for the carrier, especially if I am traveling and they can tack roaming charges on top of those minutes.

So I’m not holding my breath for my wireless carrier to suddenly adopt a user-centric attitude, but at least I can dream, right?

Technorati Tags: Feature Request, Mobile, Voicemail, Wireless

In the 21st century the new equivalent excuse to “the dog ate my homework” has become “sorry I didn’t reply to you — your message got caught in my spam filter”. I often find that the overzealous spam filter in my Outlook/Entourage client has a serious false-positive problem. In contrast to my MSFT mail-client, as a user of Postini’s excellent service, and as an investor in the company, I’m happy to say that I seldom find messages that shouldn’t be there caught in Postini’s quarantine area, which has an extremely low false-positive rate.

But on occasion I’ve had to use (truthfully) the excuse that I’ve not seen a message from a colleague because it was caught in Entourage’s Junk E-mail folder. And since it has happened to me, I know it must happen to others too. So maybe “it got caught in my spam filter” is an even better and more plausible excuse than “the dog ate my homework”. Not everyone has a dog, but almost everyone has a spam filter. If I don’t reply to your message, now you know why. Honest.

My wife and I just bought a new home on Pine Street in lovely Boulder, CO. It is a recently remodeled 1921 Craftsman in an old historic district called Mapleton Hill. It may be on one of the nicest residential streets in Boulder, but it has one glaring problem: the major online mapping services don’t know where it is! In fact, eight entire blocks of Pine Street in Boulder, Colorado do not map correctly on Google Maps, MapQuest or Yahoo Maps. (I’ve shown them accurately here using intersections, rather than street addresses, in order to illustrate the blocks in question.) I know that Boulder is very protective of their historic districts, but keeping eight blocks off the internet is ridiculous!

OK, so the problem does not lie with the city of Boulder. It is actually a problem with the back-end data provider to all of these services: NAVTEQ. Now, to be fair, the major map sites bear some responsibility because they default to taking the user right to the location they deem most relevant, based on relevancy scores returned when they query the NAVTEQ data. Microsoft’s MapPoint actually lets me choose between two possible addresses, while Zillow.com gets it right the first time, presumably because it is using additional real-estate transaction data to determine that my address is probably the most-relevant one for the query. But the fundamental problem lies with the underlying data provided by NAVTEQ.

About 14 miles away up a windy mountain road (about a 37 minute drive) there is another Pine Street, presumably still within Boulder County, though not in Boulder proper. Mapping any address from 400 Pine Street to 1299 Pine Street will bring the user to this remote (and sparsely populated) road. Starting at 1300 Pine Street, the mapping services will take the user to the “correct” place. Certainly the discontinuity between 1299 Pine Street and 1300 Pine Street is a bit odd, as is the fact that the mapping sites actually show that there are one thousand valid addresses on a remote stretch of road in the foothills. Though I haven’t been there myself, I seriously doubt that there are a series of monster apartment buildings up there. To summarize, eight blocks of Pine Street in downtown Boulder, starting at the 400 block and ending with the 1200 block, all map to this doppelgänger Pine Street outside of town, but starting with the 1300 block, the mapping sites take the user to the place the average user might reasonably expect.

There might be a handful of people who live on this other Pine Street, but there’s eight blocks worth of residents who live in Boulder whose homes cannot be properly mapped with the dominant mapping services online. While fixing the problem might negatively impact the few who live on this alternate Pine Street, far more people would benefit if this problem were to be corrected in favor of the eight in-town blocks of Pine Street.

And before you think that I am complaining about an insignificant problem free of anything but cyber consequences, consider the fact that the previous owners’ moving truck arrived at the wrong location because of faulty geo-data and wound up appearing two hours late. Or that Comcast never showed up to install high speed internet during their generous four-hour appointment window last week because their truck rolled to the wrong place. And I’m sure I’ve got many botched furniture deliveries and missed meetings with tradespeople in my future because of this issue. Hopefully the fire department and the police aren’t relying on NAVTEQ’s data.

The helpful folks at deCarta (a Mobius portfolio company which powers Google Maps, among others) explained that the problem is with the backend data from NAVTEQ. They do provide a form for victims of bad data to submit corrections, but the NAVTEQ site makes no guarantees it will correct the problem, and even if they do, it can take six to nine months, though the folks at deCarta tell me eighteen months is a more realistic timeframe. I’m hoping that complaining publicly to the world at large about this problem will spur NAVTEQ into action sooner rather than later.

Technorati Tags: Geocoding, Geotagging, Mapping, Maps

My wife and I went with our friends Craig and Kristin to see An Inconvenient Truth last night. In our case, Al Gore was preaching to the choir, since we needed no convincing that global warming is a very real and very urgent issue. Yet the movie still had a big impact on me. It is extremely well done and will spur people into action. Go see the movie, you’ll be inspired to act. Children will thank you. And while the problem is huge, it is not intractable, as Gore points out. There is no one thing that will solve the problem. Instead, lots of little things need to happen.

What can you do? Plant a tree — a single tree will absorb a ton of carbon dioxide over its lifetime. Drive less. When you drive, keep your tires inflated and improve your gas mileage. A gallon gas saved keeps twenty pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Have an energy audit done on your home and reduce your energy consumption. Energy conservation is the low-hanging fruit when it comes to making a dent in emissions, and it will save you money.

Write to your local congressman, and urge them to support clean energy and conservation measures. If you’ve lost faith in the political process, then vote with your dollars as a consumer, which in today’s world may be the most powerful vote you can cast.

If you must own a car, go buy a hybrid. I am a happy owner of a Toyota Prius and a Lexus 400h. If you are able, install a PV system at your house. Today, I just ordered a 3kW SunPower system that will be installed on our garage roof by the fine folks at Namaste Solar in August. This system won’t zero-out our electric bill (we don’t have enough roof-space for that) but it will reduce it by about 30% and will keep over 8,000 pounds of carbon dioxide out of our atmosphere every year.

If you are looking for a smaller-ticket item, replace your light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs and keep 150 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the air for each incandescent bulb you replace. Donate, so that someone else may see the movie for free. Use a carbon calculator to determine how much carbon dioxide emissions you are responsible for, and then purchase offsets that will fund clean energy projects and enable you to have a carbon-neutral or carbon-negative impact on the world. Purchasing offsets is not akin to buying indulgences to assuage one’s guilt, it puts real money towards real clean energy infrastructure projects.

Cooking the Earth in our own exhaust would quite literally be the ultimate (and final) Tragedy of the Commons. Go do something about it. Go see the film. Then go throw your time at the problem, throw your money at the problem, throw your influence at the problem, but do something about it. It is the RIght Thing to do.

(Thanks to Joi Ito for the link to sharethetruth, and to Acterra for their carbon dioxide statistics and suggestions on ways to help stop global warming)

I’ve decided to start a series of posts that I’ll call Feature Request. I’m going to gripe about things that bug me with existing devices, services, sites, life, etc. and also wonder aloud why certain features (or entire products) don’t exist. If anyone can point me to a product that solves my problem or knows about someone working on a solution to this problem, please let me know. This was partially inspired by Joshua Schachter’s rant about bad alarm clock UI. (Credit goes to Om for direction my attention to this.)

If you were to observe my daily activities, you might conclude that I am a professional emailer, phone caller and meeting attendee. Many meetings I attend virtually via conference call. Untold hours of productivity have been sapped by the idiotic machinations involved in setting up a conference call on a Polycom. Dial the number, wait for the annoying audio instructions, enter the conference ID incorrectly, hang up, dial again, enter the code properly. Are you the moderator? Enter the moderator password incorrectly. Lather, rinse, repeat. Oops, accidentally hung up the call reaching for the volume button on the Polycom. Lather, rinse, repeat. Shoot me.

I want to walk into a conference room, sit down, press a single button (heck, I’d settle for three or four) on the Polycom and be connected to my conference without having to listen to any voice-menus or enter any codes. One-button conferencing. (Obviously I also want the same functionality on my cell phone, office phone, directly from my laptop, etc). Who can give me this?

There are clearly many pieces that need to be put together to make this work. Maybe VOIP/Skype-enabled conferencing services and VOIP/Skype-aware Polycom phones? Skype can give me a four-user conference call, but I want the ability to have an unlimited number (within reason) of people come to the same “place” with no advance planning, but the current reservation-less conference call services are just too cumbersome and force everyone into lowest-common-denomintor touch-tone interfaces.

Technorati Tags: Feature Request

Several of the gadget blogs I read yesterday pointed to this cool video than an early-adopter user posted of his brand new Motorola Q running the new SlingPlayer Mobile client. Get a Slingbox, a Motorola Q and a TiVo, and you’ll be the coolest kid on the block. This blog post was also an excuse for me to embed a YouTube video in my blog for the first time.

If you’re reading in an aggregator that doesn’t support embeds, here’s the link.

Update: thanks to Michael Oryl at Mobileburn.com for the video and the link to the new version.

Technorati Tags: Broadband, Cellphones, Gadgets, Slingbox, TV, Video

I just read Fred Wilson’s Texting Home post. Fred details the shortcomings of landline phones versus what is now possible with mobile phones. Despite the dropped connections and inferior voice quality, he is ready to abandon his landline because, as he says, “all I really want is increased functionality”. Me too, as soon as I move away from my home in Portola Valley where I have no cellphone coverage.

There are other examples of trading quality (which might have an obsolete definition in a new technological context) for functionality in the digital (and networked) realm. Cell phones are much better than land lines because of PIM integration, ability to text/email and (obviously) their mobility.

Convenience also beats “quality” for print, photos, music and video in the internet age. Visually, photos and text in print media are higher resolution and easier on the eyes, yet I consume 99% of my news online, and I cannot think of the last time I sat down and looked through somebody’s 4×6 photos from a recently developed roll of film.

I’m a musician and an audiophile (with a very high-end system in my recording studio) and I can definitely hear the shortcomings in MP3 and other lossy compression formats, yet I am more than happy to trade the loss in audio quality for the convenience of carrying around thousands of albums on my iPod, having rich meta data to go with my tunes and the ability to download music and stream music from any number of giant jukeboxes in the sky.

And this holds true for video as well. Videos from the iTunes Music Store are pretty lo-res, but I’ve still bought some of them. I can’t stream high-def signals from my Slingbox (yet), but the ability to watch my TiVo from my office, my excercise room at home, or at some hotel when I am on the road more than makes up for the less-than-perfect video quality.

I’m sure the publishers of commercial encyclopedias have plenty of arguments why Wikipedia is of lower quality than their product, but I’ll take Wikipedia over old-school encyclopedias any day.

I’ve touched on the obvious media types here, yet I’m sure there are other good examples of applications where users are more than happy to trade lesser quality (as defined in a pre-digital, pre-networked analog context) for additional functionality enabled by networked digital media. I’d love to hear other examples if people have them.