Guy Kawasaki has a good interview with Mickos here.

My favorite:

Question: Have you had any kind of concerns that MySQL will be run like a "big company"?
Answer: I had those concerns even when we were a small startup! Complacency and arrogance can creep in without your noticing in any sort of organisation. To avoid it, we have taken some specific steps. We have released our software under the GPL thus exposing ourselves to the risk of forking. This keeps us running fast. We have also chosen to serve the fastest paced and fastest growing business in the world such as YouTube, Flickr, Zillow, and Nokia.

This also forces us to run fast. And we have a company culture of no-nonsense and of following The No Asshole Rule by Bob Sutton--pardon my French, but the book by that name is so good. For these reasons, there is no time for complacency. These aspects apply to Sun as well. And if for whatever unlikely reason we would ever encounter some big company behavior within Sun, we will do our utmost to help change it.

I want my daughters to grow up having good fundamental knowledge of things like basic electronics, plumbing, mechanical stuff, construction etc. I recognize that more and more analog things will be digital in her future, but it never hurts to know the basics.

To that end, I recently bought Gia, my three-year-old, her first electronics project kit. I researched this quite a bit -- I did not want anything overly complex, nor did I want anything too simple. Something that would be fun and get her to think and ask questions. I found the perfect kit -- Snap Circuits.

Although their website is horrible and ugly, their product is awesome. I got the SC-100 basic kit. It has about a 100 projects you can do using a battery pack, motor, speaker, music chip, alarm chip, resistors and a few other parts.

So far, we have created mostly projects that make cool sounds. I think Gia's favorites were the ones where the motor speed can be increased and then shut off causing the flimsy plastic wheel to become airborne. Another one is a water alarm where two wires have to be inserted into a glass of water to cause an alarm to go off.

Overall, I am pleased with Snap Circuits. It is helping me achieve exactly the goal I wanted while giving dad+daughter some fun things to do besides tinker with home brew computers.

In this picture, Gia is trying out a fun, motion-activated "Happy Birthday" tune player project.

Dan Farber's report that Flickr will support video in beta next month is welcome news. As I commented on Dan's blog, it is a big pain to share photos and videos of the same event (example: vacation photos) using different sites. If Flickr does a good job of making the user experience so it is context-sensitive according to the type of media (i.e. photo or video), then I would move my videos to Flickr and use it for sharing both photos and videos. On the other hand, if the UX requires that photos and videos be in separate Flickr buckets, then it is not so appealing.

Currently, I am using the slick PhotoSync for WHS (review) add-in to automatically share photos on my Windows Home Server with friends and family on Flickr. Having videos sync'd up to Flickr in the same way would be wonderful.

Tried to log into my Comcast account to check my account this weekend and discovered that I had forgotten my password. No problem...click the forgot password link and go through the email password reset drill, right?

Wrong! Comcast's site suggests re-creating my user profile instead. And when I do try to re-create the profile, it complains that the profile already exists. Well, DUH!

I cannot believe this stupidity. To make matters worse, I called the Customer Service number and described the problem. The first thing they asked me is why I didn't try to reset my password. Sheesh!

In late Sept. 2007, I ditched Outlook for good and switched to Zimbra. My experience with Zimbra has been great -- exceptionally stable, wonderful user experience and every feature I have ever wanted in a webmail client. That was until v5.0x was released. It had even cooler features and I decided to take the plunge.

Bad move...after spending almost a whole day in aggregate, my smooth running Zimbra server on a Linode VPS is toast. I mean the data is all there, but I cannot get the server to work right. I have spent lots of time on the Zimbra wiki and forums, scoured the documentation and tried lots of fixes -- bottom line, the new webserver Jetty that replaces Tomcat just does not work. It basically responds to requests, but does nothing...for infinity. I have done upgrade installs, clean installs, clean installs on a clean server...no dice...it just won't work.

Today, I finally admitted defeat...Zimbra has lost some of its lustre (but only on the server side). For the first time ever, I have my mail hosted on a server that I do not control. When I first started my Zimbra experience, I found 01.com to be the best Zimbra host out there, so today I setup all the family email accounts on 01.com.

So far the experience has been pretty decent. Everything works as advertised (although it's a bit sluggish...but maybe that's because I'm coming from a VPS). The only area I was underwhelmed by was support...it took several hours to get a couple of domain aliases added to my account...a pretty simple operation. But so far, so good.

Now, all I have to do is figure out how to get the message store from my server into my 01 Zimbra account.

[Update]

The VPS on Linode has a cool feature that allows you to purchase more memory for your server on-demand. On a whim, I did this and presto...my Zimbra server was back to normal operational status. I was running it on 1Gb, while the minimum requirements for Zimbra v5.0 appear to be 2Gb. After doing some research I found that this is only for the default settings. By making config. changes for how much the Java VM and MySQL consume, you can run it on 1.5Gb.

Now, I have all my email from my Linode transferred to my 01.com Zimbra mailbox (using IMAP). Even though I like the thought of having complete control on my mail, this experience has convinced me that for something as critical as email, delegating backups, upgrades and compatibility to a provider is a better option. I have been using 01.com's service for over a month now and am a happy customer. I even signed-up for the Blackberry OTA sync of emails, calendar, addressbook and tasks that they provide. It works great.

Glad to be enjoying Zimbra once again. The lustre is back.