I awoke this morning with Ami still in the apartment. We had talked about cooking breakfast with an elaborate plan to make eggs and have fresh bagels. So we ventured out into the world and stopped into Brueggers to get the frest bagels. We then proceeded to try to undercut the Brueggers highway robbery price on Lox by going down the street to Trader Joe's. Unfortunately for us Trader Joes isn't open until 9 am in the morning so we had to stand in front of the store waiting for it to open. It reminded me of when mothers used to wait in the morning when Cabbage Patch dolls would come into the toy stores so that they could rush the aisles to make sure their dearest could have a Cabbage Patch doll for Christmas. Instead of an overpriced semi-unique doll Ami and I just wanted lox and tomatoes.

So we successfully procured the food after the long wait but it was a warm morning and the time always passes quickly with Ami as we pass stories back and forth about things. We had an animated discussion about bringing bialis to Brookline. I had gotten Ami's interest in the Frozen Man festival mainly because we were talking about how everyone could stay warm in a giant igloo that we could all build together. He thought that Ilana could get behind such an idea because she loves winter even though she hates to get cold. Maybe I can get some of those San Francisco russians to make the pilgrimmage to Boston in order to help establish the first event. Malchik was mentioning that the russians at Burning Man were going to make a hot tub for late at night. Wouldn't it make more sense to make one in Boston?

I was glad to hear from Sasha Malchik with his comment on my post about Sasha Vladimirov's role in Burning Man. I generally am somewhat uninformed and sadly to be used as an accurate news source on events that I didn't attend is probably not a great idea.

So the day picked-up it's pace as I finished breakfast with Ami. We had gotten to talking for too long and I was trying to help my father's office asisstant to figure out how to stop my car alarm from going off at the office because I had asked my dad to bring the car in so that I could get to Burlington and back later in the day. So I was late leaving for the VMS meeting.

The VMS meeting was interesting and informative. I learned a new vocabulary word. Basically to remember how big companies act around small companies the general mode of operating is to show sudden high interest then stall. This can also be referred to as giving you the SHITS. It also seems to be generally how most men react to women.

They also went over a venture that includes a jacket that provides self-defense for women by shocking potential attackers with 80,000 volts. I volunteered for the mentoring team. I love a challenge although I don't know much about the self-defense industry.

I also went to the VMS lunch presentation which was a very interesting event. The presenter there had made a new kind of fiber optic cable that is hollow in the center and has a mirror on the inside instead of the normal silica center. The application of this is that they can transmit almost any wavelength since there is no material to absorb the light passing through the fiber. This happens to be useful with infrared light that is produced by lasers for surgery and with a fiber optic guide they can do minimally invasive surgeries. It looks like they are going to be very successful. Before the presentation I was chatting with folks around me and I felt that I could easily explain what ChannelWave does and why it is important with both the commerce product connected to distributors and the PRM product connecting to VARs. I was sitting across from a man who was employee number three at the Boston Beer company so we chatted about the beer market.

I had to rush out of the event to get to my meeting with Aaron Abend. It was in Burlington and I picked-up the car that my dad had dropped off. I had biked into MIT. I didn't have the directions so I kept trying silly things like using my Blackberry to link to the directions that Aaron had sent in an email and reading a map book in traffic to determine whether Burlington was North or South on 93. It is North. Why I don't know or remember this yet is beyond me.

Meeting with Aaron was a fun experience. We chatted a lot about old war stories as CRM entrepreneurs. He had known some people like Keith Barnette, a very agressive ex-IBM sales rep who started a sales outsourcing company called AIMM. He also was a former New England Patriot. Aaron has built over the past two years a product to help people to organize their email. The product is called ViaPoint and solves some problems I have always had with Outlook. The first problem is that I often need to retrieve email from someone from a certain company and Outlook doesn't sort that way. With the ViaPoint tool you get all of your emails and contacts related to a company automatically applied into virtual folders that you can look at and the time to pull them up is instant instead of reading through tons of emails to find the right person, file, or phone number. It makes the unstructured email much more easy to use as a business tool. I also liked that it was possible to see things within a company like people who were on a cc: list for an email sent to you. For example - One email appeared under ChannelWave that was actually because Irene Howard, a ChannelWave employee had also been cc'd:. I'd recommend people download it and send their comments back to Aaron and his partners. They have worked quite hard to build a useful product and just launched it last month.

The objective of the meeting was to see how they might add a person like me to their team since they are looking to really drive adoption of the software and build the market around it. I thought it would be a welcome relief from the deep marketing of enterprise software with eight month sales cycles but you find different problems in every market. We did get plenty of chuckles just talking about the past.

I drove back to MIT to drop the car off for my dad so that he could get home and then I biked home. Because I had cooked eggs with Ami in the morning I had a Sudden Interest in cooking so I decided to make meatloaf. Jeremy actually did most of the work to make the meatloaf while I did the shopping to get the ingredients and focused my energy on cooking the bacon to put on top of it and making the mashed potatoes. The best feature of the meal was that we put a lot of garlic, onions, and fresh grated parmesan cheese. Yum.

We ate while watching the epic movie "An American Tale". Actually that is a cartoon about mice. We really were watching a movie called "Once Upon a Time in America". It is on 2 DVDs where the first one is 120 minutes and the second one is 104 minutes. It is about jewish mafia folks in the thirties. I am liking it although we have only just gotten to the intermission at about 150 minutes into the movie. Almost every movie with Deniro in it is very good though!

One highlight includes a beautiful girl who a young Robert D. child falls in love with who flashes him a glimpse of her naked backside while he is peeping at her from a hole in a bathroom wall. The settings are really great like a prohibition pub all styled in Art Deco with radiators that server alcoholic drinks. A young girl who is quite loose and chubby and eventually runs the brothel tells the boys that she will have sex with him if they bring her a charlotte rousse. I am not sure what it is but it looks like a Strawberry shortcake with a cherry on top. What is interesting is that the Charlotte Rouse isn't an unfamiliar word to me because my grandmother Louise who lived in the lower east side during that same time frame used to work in her father's candy shop as a young girl. Her job was to put the cherry on top of the charlotte rousse. I could see her being the slightly wild young girl with hopes and dreams of moving out of the New York jewish quarter. So the movie had some added significance. It clearly is near the Grand Street apartment where my father grew-up and I lived in when I worked at NYU.

We stopped the movie at intermission so that I could get my review from Sharon for my Improv class. I had been assigned the 11PM slot because I was unable to respond during the email flurry for sign-ups as I was driving to Burlington and reading a map. One less task and I might have pulled it off. I biked over and almost hit a stream of drunk young women as they were streaming out of a party bus into a bar in Central square. One of the friends told me not to hit the tiara clad girl I nearly rammed with my bike because it was her 21st birthday. I thought about making a special stop for the party bus full of 21 year old attractive women but decided instead to continue on to my review.

The review was fun. I had a nice good long chat with Sharon. I don't get the electronic copy until later but I will have it soon enough. A real improv report card!

So I have shown sudden high interest in cooking, improv, vms, jewish foods from the 30s, viapoint, party busses full of 21 year old women, blogging, and Sarah. Now with so much going on it is time to stall.