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Yes folks soon I’ll be traveling to Bombay, India for a 6 month gig. I’m excited about the opportunity to work in an emerging market and one that is my home country. I know a ton of people trying to get to India for one simple reason – it’s THE place to be for the next several years without a doubt. Granted there is also China, but to be honest I love chai and samosa’s any day over Chow Mein and Chop Suey.

I was cleaning up my place and came across some old mixed tapes I’d made in the past and saw the cassette liner from the very first one i ever made. It was right after i came back from India during the summer of 1986, below are the songs on that tape:
Side A:
West End Girls – Pet Shop Boys
Vienna Calling – Falco
Urban Tropical – Falco (??)
Let’s Go All the Way – Sly Fox
Rock Me Amadeus – Falco
I Wanna be A Cowboy – Boys Don’t Cry
All I Need is a Miracle – Mike & The Mechanics
I Can’t Wait – NuShooz

Side B: Something About You – Level 42
Power of Love – Huey Lewis and the News
Miami Vice theme – Jan Hammer
Sleeping Bag – ZZ Top
Spies Like Us – ??
Take on Me – A-Ha
Sun City – Various Artists – song to fight apartheid
Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go – Wham
Head over Heels – Tears for Fears

On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs of Apple delivered the commencement speech to the Stanford gradutes. Several people had e-mailed me the link before, but i got busy and never read the text because it was so long. However, I finally got around to it and damn…it’s very, very inspirational. I would recommend reading it and the bookmarking it then refering to it every so often. He talks about 3 stories from his life; the first story is about connecting the dots, then about love and loss, and finally about death. The story about connecting the dots I think is the best one as it happens so often in life. You are faced with adversity and think the situation is the worst possible thing to ever happen to you, however years later you realize it was the best thing that ever happened. Commencement Speech

One of many reasons I love Los Angeles is the shear volume of bad ass cars that run around the asphalt of SoCal. Take today for example, I was driving west on Sunset Blvd and at the same intersection the following cars were there:
- Ferrari 575M Maranello (515hp)
- Ferrari 360 Modena (400hp)
- Audi S4 Cabriolet (344hp)
- BMW M3 Cabriolet (333hp)
- Porsche 911 Carrera (320hp)

Today felt like a flashback to the dot.com era of yesteryear…Skype announced it was being bought for USD $2.6b ($1.3b in cash and $1.3b in stock) and an additional USD $1.5b in performance bonuses by eBay. Downloadable preso [PDF, 78 pages, 3.5mb]

Skype has three main assets – users, brand name and networking gear. eBay has a great brand name and a ton of users as well. Skype probably has $200m-300m in networking gear, make that $500m-600m for those blue Cisco boxes. It would seem more cost effective for eBay to have built their own VoIP platform from the ground up. Google released their new VoIP platform just a couple of weeks ago and my guess is if eBay screws with the Skype community we’ll ALL jump ship to Google Talk. Anyways, congrats to the two founders of Skype, Niklas and Janus. They just bagged a deal that most people thought would never happen at such crazy valuations.