Two Dramatic Prarie Dog appearances in Super Bowl commercials. Feb 7, 2010 6 :52 via Twitter

Roasting up a bunch of coffee. Experimenting with a few blends and different roast profiles. Clearing room for some Kona. Feb 4, 2010 8 :28 via Twitter

Mixup knocked kalsey.com off the internet for a bit today. Awaiting an email reply from me? I might not have seen it yet. Call if urgent. Feb 2, 2010 12 :10 via Twitter

Must be a record. RT @mheadd Profile on LinkedIn “…has been programming continually since 1989” - really? Fingers tired yet? Feb 1, 2010 3 :59 via Twitter

My cofounder article is on the Hacker News front page thanks to @calebgilbert. Like it? Vote it up. http://j.mp/b9B3hB Jan 31, 2010 12 :05 via Twitter

Over at SacStarts: co-founders relationships are built, not created. http://sacstarts.com/2010/01/30/get-co-founder Jan 30, 2010 2 :29 via Twitter

RT @Tropo Win an Apple iPad from Tropo - http://bit.ly/9SXxPx Jan 30, 2010 10 :28 via Twitter

ShopSavvy’s latest update is unbelievably fast. Faster than the scanners stores use. Goodbye redlaser. Jan 30, 2010 10 :03 via Twitter

Answering “how do I find a co-founder?” yet again. You don’t “find a co-founder” any more than you “find a wife.” Jan 30, 2010 1 :23 via Twitter

Much better now. A couple of chapters into Ted Bell’s Hawke http://j.mp/9EOhHy and it’s very good. A different sort of spy thriller. Jan 29, 2010 10 :47 via Twitter

Over at SacStarts, I have piece up discussing a common question I get from entrepreneurs. How can I get investors to put money into my idea?

I often hear would-be entrepreneurs who have an idea for a product or a company and are looking for investors. My advice is always the same. Build something before you start looking for money.

Ideas are cheap. Everyone has them, and most have more than one. The ability to make something work is a whole different matter.

If you want to understand why investors aren’t jumping the chance to put money into your brilliant idea, read Investing in Ideas.

Over at the Voxeo developer’s blog, I’ve started a series of blog posts on building voice apps with the VoiceXML standard. As a web developer, building voice apps sounds like a complicated process. From the first blog post…

Before joining Voxeo, I wasn’t much of a voice guy. I’m a web guy. I was pretty sure that voice applications were created through witchcraft. Turns out, there’s no magic involved, just some standards and markup languages. If you can create a web app, you can create a voice app.

My goal at Voxeo is to reduce the complications behind building real-time communications apps. Voice, SMS, and IM are all easy to add to an existing web app, and I intend to show you how. To get started, read my first two posts on VoiceXML for web developers: the introduction where I explain what the options are and get a phone number set up, and Hello World where I create a simple VoiceXML application. Next up will be adding speech recognition and touch-tone input to the application.

Last night around 2am my dog was sprayed by a skunk. Again.

She’s a ten pound mini rat terrier, but she seems to think it’s a good idea to go after an animal that’s not only bigger than her, but has some pretty serious defenses. At least cleanup this time was faster, since I know what I’m doing now.

Skunk spray is a yellow, sticky oil. If you have a light colored dog, you’ll be able to see exactly where it sprayed. If your dog has long fur, you might find it easier to just cut it back so you have less to clean.

Mix equal parts baking soda, peroxide, and liquid dishwasher detergent in a bowl. Don’t worry about exact measurements, just dump about the same amount of each into your bowl. With your hands, scrub the mixture into your dog’s fur where the spray is at. Rinse it, and repeat. And repeat, and repeat, until you can’t smell the spray any more.

Don’t let your dog touch any fabrics you care about. The spray transfers easily from the fur to fabrics and is nearly impossible to get out. The shirt I was wearing the first time I cleaned up my dog had to be thrown away despite a dozen washings and scrubbings with the baking soda mixture. No matter what I did there was still a faint scent of skunk.

Quick Twitter marketing tip.

Sending someone a direct message automatically after they follow you and including an ad in it is crass. Someone expressed an interest in you and decided to read more of what you have to say. You respond by immediately start trying to sell them.

If you’re standing around at a party and someone introduces themselves to you, do you immediately shove a coupon into their hands? That’s exactly what the sales pitch via auto-DM feels like. People that you do that to in real life will quickly walk away and make sure they avoid you. On Twitter it earns you a quick unfollow.

The San Jose Mercury News is running a look back at the 1989 Bay Area earthquake. A California native, I was living on the east coast at the time, watching on TV as my beloved Giants prepared to play a World Series game.

Mark Purdy describes the stadium in the minutes after the quake.

And the cheering started. Lusty roars. Loud. The vibe was: “Hey, it’s a Bay Area series and this is cool!” But then reports reached the ballpark about the bridge and the fire. The scoreboard flickered out. Power was gone. Things grew quiet. I hiked down to the field and interviewed players, who were plucking their families out of the stands. A cop with a megaphone told fans to evacuate. The A’s team bus returned to Oakland via San Jose because the bridges were all closed.

And those bridges? Twenty years after the quake, they’re still undergoing work to make them safe for the next quake.

Debates about project design, location and aesthetics slowed the east span planning, adding to the cost. State officials initially figured they could fix the entire bridge in place, but later decided they had to replace the east span.

Political squabbles added to delays. When he was the San Francisco mayor, Willie Brown held up the east span between 1998 and 2000 as he objected that the Caltrans design for it would harm his city’s redevelopment ambitions for Treasure Island.

Twenty years and counting for the retrofit. I’d imagine there’s people who’s entire careers have been spent working on the bridges.

Not only do red light cameras not reduce traffic accidents, they actually increase the number and severity or crashes in an intersection.

This report from Ontario, Canada’s Ministry of Transportation’s concluded that jurisdictions using photo enforcement experienced an overall increase in property damage and fatal and injury rear-end collisions. The report also concludes that there was an overall reduction in serious accidents and angle collisions. However, a closer look at the data found in this government-sponsored report show that intersections monitored by cameras experienced, overall, a 2 percent increase in fatal and injury collisions compared to a decrease of 12.7 percent in the camera-free intersections that were used as a control group (page 21).

If they’re not solving issues, then why are they installed? To boost revenues to the local government, who collect an ever-increasing fine each time a camera fires.

A similar conflict of interest affects those entrusted with writing safety regulations for our traffic lights. The Institute of Transportation Engineers is actively involved in lobbying for, and even drafting legislation to implement, red light cameras. They are closely tied to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), which in turn is funded by companies that stand to profit handsomely any time points are assessed to a driver’s license.

In short, the only documented benefit to red light cameras is to the pocketbook of local governments who use the devices to collect millions in revenue.