Oh Brian!

I play poker online. I watch the World Series of Poker on ESPN and the World Poker Tour on the Travel Channel. I don't watch it all the time (no matter what my wife says). It's a game that combines some skill with some chance. I find it a lot of fun.

I should also point out that I have played poker at few casinos. To date I have played in cash games or tournaments at casinos in Atlantic City, Connecticut, New Orleans, Las Vegas, and San Jose California.

I got started online after seeing advertisements for poker sites online. I can't say I am an early adopter here because by the time I decided I want to play online I could not use a credit card. Visa and Mastercard have both adopted policies that prohibit the use of their branded cards to put money into accounts at online poker sites.

How will online poker and Internet gaming in general evolve? Will there ever be any money in Internet gaming if the credit card companies don't relax their policies? Will new channels for funneling money into online gaming challenge the credit card business? Right now most Internet poker sites use a proprietary agent (some program that a user has to download and install). Yahoo games accomplishes this via an Java applet. How secure is this technology? I think these are all good questions that I think about.

Even though I took lots of notes while I was there; I was glad to see that the presentations and recordings of the Startup School have been posted at the Startup School site. Listen close and you'll hear a number of my questions.

While all the content was great, if you get a chance check out:

Paul Graham's "Ideas for Startups",
Chris Sacca's notes (posted in his blog they're better than the original slides), and
slide 9 of Olin Shivers "A Random Walk Through Startup Space".

I installed Ubuntu Linux v5.10 as a VMWare machine. The initial install went very smooth. Ubuntu doesn't ask a lot of questions during the install process. After Ubuntu install finished and the image was running I installed VMWare tools via the (VMWare) v5.0 interface.

Using the "VM" menu option VMWare places a folder containing the needed files of the Desktop. In the folder there are RPM and tar directories. The RPM option doesn't work in Ubuntu. I extracted the tar files into the folder and ran the "vmware-install.pl" script. Ubuntu was able to provide the install script with enough data so that many of the questions (what directory are various functions located in) were answered with the default.

Before the device drivers could be installed the install script needed to gain access to gcc (C compiler) and the system make files (to recompile the Ubuntu Linux kernel). Using the default install Ubuntu; gcc is not installed.

I did a Google search looking for hints as to how to complete this install (and found lots of poor info). After a couple of attempts I figured it out. I needed to execute:

"sudo apt-get install build-essentials"

which installed gcc (and a few other things). After that I re-executed the VMWare install script and had no problems.

After that I spent a couple of hours working with Ubuntu. It seems like good stuff. Finally a Linux that doesn't install every possible application, tool, or toy during the initial install.

I was exploring Google Labs the other day and happened upon the Google Reader. This is a web based RSS reader that the folks at Google are developing. My first impressions are that it's pretty great. Google continues to show that most of the functionality I've become used to seeing exclusively on my own computer can be transferred out on to the Internet.

I especially like the fact that I can catch up on my RSS feeds without having to power up the PC at home were I use Thunderbird to read RSS feeds. This is a great solution for reading feeds on the road during travel.

There is limited integration with other Google tools. While reading at an item I can select a "Blog This" or EMail the item (or selected text).

Hugh over at Gapingvoid is sometimes just too funny.

Last weekend I had the very great pleasure of attending Startup School.

This was an absolutely amazing event. I've attended VC workshops and conferences before but none had the depth of speakers and the enthusiasm of the audience of this event. In fact; nothing that I have seen or heard of so far can even come close.

Startup School was organized by Paul Graham and his company Y Combinator. Paul is what I call a serial entrepreneur. He's been down the venture capital road several times and based on what I learned had some good success along the way. He does much more than start companies as evidenced in part by his essays and books. Paul comes across as an Internet age Michelangelo. Y Combinator is a very early stage venture capital (VC) company that seems focused (based on the presentations by the group of people they recently funded) on Web software applications.

What made Startup School great?

It was free. I got up at 3:00 AM on Saturday and drove to Boston to attend this. I drove back home to Long Island late that night (arriving home 22 hours later). It was well worth the lack of sleep, the mileage and other expenses.

The quality of the speakers was amazing. Hearing from Woz was exciting but listening to and getting the chance to ask questions of finance guys, lawyers, and VC partners was valuable (and also entertaining).

The energy and the enthusiasm of the speakers and the participants was outstanding. Instead of thinking "if" I left Startup School planning for when.