Derek Scruggs

In re: my previous post about searching Google for Tianenmen, a couple people pointed out that in China they don’t use the English spelling of the word, and in fact don’t even use Western character sets. The simplified Chinese version of Tianenmen looks like this: 天安门
(Mainland China except Hong Kong uses the simplified character set.)
So […]

…before checking out Chewbacca’s blog. I warned you.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that there is a war going on. It’s easy for me, a high-tech yuppie living in a beautiful place with a view of the mountains out my office window - and no close friends in the military - to just see the war as a series of duelling straw-man […]

When a newspaper or other publication makes a mistake, they typically run a correction a day or two later in a section of the paper that no one ever reads. Usually it’s out of context: the reader probably no longer has the original story at hand, so they can’t re-evaluate what they read in light […]

The  blogosphere has been abuzz of late about Google’s apparent caving in to the Chinese government’s request that they censor their search results. I’m of mixed feelings about this. Being radically moderate and having spent time in China, I think it’s silly to have a binary view of how things should be done there. (Though […]

There’s an interesting thread going on between Doc Searls and Rick Segal about the need for innovation in the VC industry. I wrote a somewhat snarky comment arguing that it’s silly for VCs to try to innovate around the notion that entrepreneurs are their customers. They should recognize the entrepreneurs are their raw materials and […]

I saw variations on this meme linked all over the place today: people ignore facts when making decisions.
The study focused on politics, but something tells me a similar dynamic is in play in the stock market, except that there are too many facts. People hold on to stocks too long, sell them too quickly and generally […]

Interesting that:

The Rocky Mountain News runs a letter from Ward Churchill’s brother Dan Debo on publisher John Temple’s blog, not the editorial page (though it may still run there)
Such an apparently lefty, alternative-type person as Dan Debo goes to the mainstream media, not blogs, to get his opinion out

Beside the fact that he’s […]

My primary computer is getting a little long in the tooth. It’s over three years old. It was one of the fastest non-specialized computers on the market when I bought it, but time has left it behind.It’s exacerbated by the fact that I’m one of those nightmares for corporate IT – always downloading and installing new […]

Sorry to interrupt you, but just in case you know someone who might be interested, and assuming you didn’t already see it on Craigslist, my wife and I are selling our 1997 Lexus LS 400. Details are below, but the short description is, it’s everything you imagine when you think of the word “Lexus.”
Price: $14,280
Smooth […]