McCain thinks he has 4 houses, maybe... (that's so gangster)

    Barack Obama lashed into John McCain during a campaign stop in Virginia on Thursday, ridiculing the presumptive Republican nominee for being painfully out of touch on the economy and not even knowing how many houses he owns.

    "Yesterday, [John McCain] was asked again what do you think about the economy, he said I think the economy is fundamentally strong," said Obama. "Now this puzzled me. I was confused what he meant. But then there was another interview where somebody asked John McCain how many houses do you have and he said 'I'm not sure. I'll have to check with my staff.' True quote. 'I'm not sure ill have to check with my staff.' So they asked his staff and they said, 'at least four.' At least four. Now think about that. I guess if you think that being rich means you make $5 million and if you don't know how many houses you have then it is not surprising that you think the economy is fundamentally strong. But if you are like me and you've got one house, or if you are like the millions of people struggling now to keep up with your mortgage payments, you might have a different perspective. By the way the answer is John McCain has seven homes."

(via Huffington Post)

Compare/contrast Snoop Dogg in "2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted"...
    I got a house out in the hills right next to Chino
    and I, think I got a black Beamer


Snoop Dogg thinks he has a black BMW, possibly -- McCain thinks he has 4 houses. The dynamics here are fascinating. Not only do they have a lot of money (aka scrilla), but they don't CARE enough to even know definitively how many they have. In a way, this is incredibly inspiring, as they've transcended the maxim "Your stuff owns you." Either way, they're RIAACCHH BIAACHHHH!!!

John Lennon drops wisdom

"In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace... Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon's every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. "

John Lennon's words ring so true even today. Amazing video built around a such a moving audio interview.

via Rebecca via swissmiss

YC Cambridge Event -- Good times to be had by all.

We converged on Tommy Doyle's Irish Pub in Harvard Square tonight to talk about YCombinator, startups, and how to start a tech business.

Paul Graham spoke at length about the YC app process and what has driven him to build one of the most successful early stage venture firms ever created. Kevin Merritt, founder of blist.com, talked about his experience building a startup to a successful exit (recently acquired by Microsoft), as well as his experience raising $6 million in Series A earlier this year for blist.com. Nabeel Hyatt of counduitlabs.com spoke a bit about how to decide whether to continue with your startup -- how you know to continue vs. call it quits.

Many thanks to the fellow YC startups especially Anyvite.com for organizing and putting so much together tonight. It was great meeting friends old and new for drinks and good conversation. Slinkset, Startuply, Anyvite, Ticket Stumbler, Popcuts, and many of our other friends turned out to make the night a memorable one.

Free subway rides for life! (Banned Defcon Hack PDF released)

Three undergrads from MIT working with Professor Ron Rivest (the R in RSA!) have cracked the Boston T's CharlieCard and CharlieTicket systems. The insane thing is they show how the stored value of the card is actually stored in plaintext encoding right there on the magnetic stripe. Isn't that basically the most absurdly insecure way to make a magstripe ticketing system work? I would have guessed at least they would have considered a basic cipher. Better yet, just make your card really a token that maps to some value you retrieve from the MBTA secure fare database.

Now MBTA is going after these white-hat hackers with an injunction and lawsuit (Wired Blog). A commenter on Wired mentions: "Why go after the people who are obviously on their side? Do they want more of smart chaps wandering to the black market, where the chances of this bullshit is low, and the pay is high?"

MIT's The Tech has published the banned slide deck of the talk on their site:
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf

Hat tip to Hacker News... HN rocks, you don't readily see news like this break anywhere else.

Mitch Kapor speaks at Y Combinator

Mitch Kapor, the creator of the modern spreadsheet application and software industry luminary, came to speak at YCombinator last Tuesday. He was a childhood hero of mine. Some kids looked up to Batman or President Reagan or something... I looked up to the founders of Apple, Microsoft, and Lotus. He was incredibly well spoken and talked at length at what he's seen as a founder during the early days of the PC revolution, and later his experiences as a VC, angel, and advisor to startups. Incredible story, and it was fantastic to hear his lessons first hand. Part luck, and part pluck, really.

He emphasized how important it was to be at the forefront of a major market theme. Greg McAdoo has spoken about this previously at YC Startup School and that's generally Sequoia Capital's guiding light when searching for the next big startup hit. As an entrepreneur, you have to ride a wave -- you are not God. You can't create it. And often times, when it comes to computing or networks, you might not own the wave you're riding on. Mitch Kapor's first company, Lotus, essentially bet big on the x86+DOS architecture and won. But eventually Microsoft, who owned the most exciting ripcurl of the wave (the operating system), decided to enter their space. As a result, these days we use Excel.

There are similar waves happening today. The Facebook platform. The iPhone platform. Even the Adobe Air platform could be seen as new disruptions. Certainly Flash Video made an entire class of online apps possible. But as Mitch Kapor pointed out, "Nobody is clairvoyant." Nobody really knows what's going to happen in the moment, but as long as you have some skin in the game and your wits about you, good things can happen.