Oh how Condo Fire Alarms and CityPlace Sucks.

Firealarm keeps going off again and again.

This is insane. This happens multiple times a year. All night.

I can't sleep.

I am going to have to look into moving to a non CityPlace building.

Does anyone know of fire alarms that allow you to adjust the volume (within reason) of their alarms? (our speakers are unnecessarily loud... you could hear it though 10 foot walls)

Does anyone else have stupid fire alarm problems with their condos due to poor design (our alarms go off usually due to condensation in the piping or breakage of pipes in the sprinkler system somewhere...)?

Furthermore... I'm surprised I wasn't able to find a good source of info about condos. Like a Yelp/epinions of Condos. Anyone know of a well done one? I'd sure as hell contribute to it. The challenge I guess would be filtering out the noise/realtors/astroturfers. Which I guess could be eliminated with the use of some sort of identity/trust system (facebook connect?)

Crazy Awesome & Other Random Midnight Rantings

Sometimes, when you feel like the whole world is against you, or you wonder why you're doing whatever its is you're doing, or you just don't feel like you're up for it -- something pops into view that changes everthing.

Today I saw two things that inspired/motivated me.

1) Seeing Will Wright's newest baby: Spore being played/demoed to me by an office mate for the first time (on a 30" monitor no-less).  Wow.  It is so insanely cool and genre demolishing that it left me mostly speechless. 

2) Seeing my name publically recommended by Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) as one of three people that would make for a good speaker for a conference.  I remember having only met Reid once many years ago in my eariest days of building BubbleShare, and sought him out early as even then when he was recongized as a respected early stage investor.  Damn.

Random Sidenote #1: I read in an interview that it took Will Wright 7 years to create The Sims (best selling PC game in history), and it took him 7 years to create Spore.  One of the things that I had immediately stubled into was -- given the option, would I pick creating two very good products/business in 7 years or one great product every 7 years.  While it would be great to have a world changing product in 7 years -- and its easy to pick the option that grants you "greatness" -- it really does take a ton of skill, courage AND patients to work on one thing for 7 years.  As someone that's used to seeing things happen in 2-3 year cycles, I think one of my personal goals as I enter into my 5th venture will be try to take a longer and more patient view.

Random Sidenote #2: Ironically, one of the people Reid had kindly told me to follow up with (from years ago now), and someone that I should have kept in touch with, was BJ Fogg.  BJ directs the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford. Now years later, he was the professor behind the first Facebook only course at Stanford along with my friend Dave McClure.  Which of course I was interested in given my invovlment with Kontagent.  BJ as we later found out after our chat with Reid, was at the time (circa super early days of BubbleShare ~2004) was experimenting with voice inputs/recording on the web as an alternative group communication and social networking method.  BubbleShare at the time was one of the first to use voice clips with photos several years ago, and later I found out that BJ was experimenting with voice + web as an altnerative asyronous communication method)