Jesse, the English Bull Terrier

19 April 1995 - 24 April 2005

Goodbye, pal. You were the best. You're free now.

Lessons Jesse taught me:

Take the pain.

Always stretch as soon as you get up. Rolling around on the floor to scratch your back is optional, but not a bad idea either.

As soon as the door to the outside opens, it's showtime. Always be alert, always be your best.

Always give the benefit of the doubt.

Immediately forgive someone who steps on your foot or tail, as they most assuredly didn't mean it.

If you're feeling down, go for a walk. It always helps.

Breathe, sniff the world, enjoy.

Posted by brian at 02:01 PM | Comments (9)

New features in EVDB

We've been working on a bunch of new things in EVDB . . . including time zone support for events:

Among other things, a completely revamped add-new-event feature, and also the ability now (finally!) to edit events that you've created. You can also withdraw events if necessary.

Tons and tons more stuff coming. This is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg :-)

10 Years Young

Jesse makes it to 10 years old! 70 in human years.

Photo taken early this morning using my Treo (which I blame for the poor quality). He was half lying down, half sitting up -- seems when he lies down it's hardest to breathe. He wheezes all the time now. And yet, he's more chipper and frisky than he's been in months.

Caveat - Vendor

Jeez, the vendors are out in full these days. Ever since the press release, I'm getting calls all day long for this service or that service, be it IT, sales, marketing, search engine optimization, leasing, equipment, "asset management" (I'd forgotten about the "asset management" folks.... the boiler room types who call you up, and try to get you to invest in their scams and when you finally get a word in edgewise and say you're not interested, BAM they slam the phone down and hang up on you mid-breath).

Then there's all the folks trying to sneak around me and bother some other folks on the team. Ain't gonna work, guys. Nice try though. :-)

And the spam's cranking up, from vendors trying to get in through the email door. For instance, from the CEO of some sales consulting firm:

I've been following EVDB for a while. You’ve put in place dynamic concepts, and are better implemented than 98% of the firms in your category. It’s clear why you are growing. As you know, in the current market, these achievements may not be enough. Perhaps I can be of assistance. [Vendor name] works with growing businesses to seize revenue opportunities. We are not consultants or recruiters. We employ experienced senior level sales teams, as well as “on the street” reps, who know their industries and have established relationships with the high level contacts our clients need to reach.

Let's see. We've put in place dynamic concepts! And they're better-implemented than 98% of the firms in our category! Well, I guess that's pretty good, but it's not good enough. Which firms in our category have implemented dynamic concepts better than us? And, is it that their concepts are more dynamic than ours, or that they just have more of them, or what? Gosh, I'd love to know.

Jesse Update

For months Jesse's been stable - the medicine has worked. He takes a whole bunch of pills each day that have kept him relatively comfortable and able to function.

The photo at left is Jesse watching this weekend's C-SPAN interview with Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, proprietor of the popular blog The Daily Kos. He seemed very interested in this show. Jesse normally likes Star Trek, but for some reason, hearing about blogging politics was important on Sunday.

But since Sunday he's taken a turn for the worse. Got very weak, stopped eating and drinking, could barely walk, stayed in bed all day. We managed to get him drinking again and eating a little bit, but he wasn't getting better so we called the vet yesterday and took him in this morning first thing.

Jesse's 10th birthday is right around the corner -- April 19th. I don't know if he'll make it. We have some hard choices to make. The vet wants to run a bunch of tests including xrays and blood samples and then re-hydrate him and keep him at the hospital for a couple days and try to get his numbers back to reasonably normal.

Just the act of taking Jesse to the vet seems like an automatic $500. This time it'll prolly cost well over $1000. We're glad to do it, he's like a son to us, but, in the end, is this what Jesse wants? Are we just prolonging his discomfort, and at great expense? Who benefits? Should we let him go peacefully?

This is stuff on my mind today.

Meanwhile, I got a company to run. Not going to be much blogging for a while, I suspect.

EVDB inaugural board meeting

Flew up to Silicon Valley yesterday for EVDB's first board meeting. I'm honored to have a fantastic board -- Tom Sammon on my right; to my immediate left is Steve Jurvetson and next to him Josh Stein, both of DFJ; and Esther Dyson.

Interesting experience, getting up at 4:30, leaving for the airport at 5:20, standing in a huge security checkpoint line at the airport at 6:00, in the air at 6:50, board meeting at 9:30, back to the airport at 1:00 and back at EVDB's office at 4:00pm.

Hard to believe that it was only 39 days prior to this board meeting that I was in this very same room doing the entrepreneur's proverbial PowerPoint Pitch to all of the DFJ partners . . .

The surprise of the day: Esther uses MS Word to manage her calendars. Her dates seemed to be off by a day. We kidded her about that.