Listening to: Belfast Child - Simple Minds

Listening to: Jared Diamond - The Long Now Foundation

Silverstripe have gotten some really well deserved coverage of their stunning success.

Listening to: Broadcast - Strawpeople

It’s great to see that the VortexDNA guys are finally getting some coverage:

At a home nestled in the heart of Christchurch surburbia five men have mapped the structure of the human consciousness.

It allows predictions to be made about people and who they are, which could have huge ramifications for the insurance and advertising industries, says VortexDNA director Branton Kenton-Dau.

Listening to: Yellow Ledbetter - Pearl Jam

Listening to: So Far Away - Dire Straits

The Mindscape guys kicked off just as I was leaving Provoke (happy birthday guys) and as it has turned out they are doing some seriously cool work in the .Net world. Check out the feature highlights for their 2.0 release:

1. LINQ everywhere – LINQ to LightSpeed means .Net 3.5 users can leverage the power of LINQ when writing their queries but still use the performance features that we are known for (like Named Aggregates)

2. Designer support – Full modeling support for your domain models directly from Visual Studio 2008. Drag and drop your tables onto the design surface, have associations automatically set up, easily setup validation attributes on model properties and much more.

3. Database support – SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite are all supported. This means that LightSpeed 2.0 will be one of the first data access frameworks that provides LINQ to Oracle, LINQ to PostgreSQL, LINQ to MySQL and LINQ to SQLite!

4. Command line tools – Some folks prefer using command line tools to generate simple model classes so we have included this as well as the Visual Studio integrated designer support.

5. The simplest, fastest and most lightweight O/RM for .NET – The right balance of power vs. complexity has always been our focus with LightSpeed and this hasn’t changed for version 2.0. There has been considerable work done to tweak, optimize and enhance much of LightSpeed

As I was waving au revoir to the Microsoft world LINQ emerged - a seriously cool concept. The Mindscape team is onto a real winner by providing that facility over the leading open source database systems. Nice work!

Listening to: Never Give Up On Love (featuring Tiki) - Concord Dawn

…well you could do a lot worse than following Rod’s 6 part series on this topic. It’s good to have one of the experienced serial entrepreneurs share their experiences in an NZ context. Trust me, context matters - I have the grey hair distinguished look to prove it.

UPDATE: A link to the whole series.

Listening to: Miracle Sun - Don McGlashan

I popped my NYC cherry on Wednesday. The first 30 mins was pretty scary. I had taken the train from Boston and was unceremoniously spat out into the humid and teeming Penn Station. It was very disorientating. After some time I saw these in the window of a furniture store and it felt a little like home.

David Trubridge Lamps

They are lamps by David Trubridge and that little connection to home transformed my perspective of the city.

Listening to: Lovin U (Bonus Track) - Alicia Keys

For the first week I was here I was lucky enough to have the moral support of three groups of Kiwis. The first were the Ponoko team that joined me at TC40, the second was Flight of the Conchords (*) and the third was Tim Norton. Tim has presented his work at DEMOfall and is getting much deserved love. Nice work Tim and the rest of the PlanHQ team.

(*) No, Jemaine and Brett weren’t there holding my hand, but I am amazed at how much of a presence they to have amongst the crowd I was mixing with. I bumped into the CEO of a company here - he opened his jacket and his t-shirt had “That’s why they call them business socks” written on it. That sort of thing has happened a couple of times. Initially, it felt odd, but as a friend highlighted - it’s better than being known for Hobbits.

Listening to: Better Than Change - Dallas

Ever since kicking Ponoko off I have started to discover a whole range of great rapid manufacturing projects here in NZ. Wellington, especially, is a hot bed for this work. I had a really amazing experience today … I was able to walk down to the VUW Design School to check out the 3D printers created by the students … I can’t tell you how exciting it is to see this sort of thing literally down the street from my home!

Listening to: Move On Up - Curtis Mayfield

HBO have posted the whole first episode online … the scene in the New Zealand “Consulate” is hysterically funny (and almost a perfect piss take).