Last night I had the big Java final exam. For me taking an exam has the unfortunate consequence that I try to study for the exam and define anything other than studying for the exam as procrastination. This period generally lasts from one to five days before the exam depending on how unprepared I feel I am for the test. In this case I began my hermitage on Sunday morning for a Monday evening test. I had to turn down plenty of offers for more fun activities than studying like Lisa’s friends performing at the Burren, watching NFL football, open mike night at ImprovBoston, and Hillary’s holiday party. It would be fun to replay my weekend and have done all the fun stuff other than studying but unfortunately you only live once and I lived to learn how to make Duke move in an applet under my mouse this weekend. I think I passed the test although I know that I got a couple of questions wrong that I thought were unfair because they covered obscure situations that we had never covered in the book.

There will probably be another java class rebellion after the grades for the final are distributed from the people who failed specifically about problem#3 involving inheritance of a variable X from class A, B, and C. We never talked about inheriting variables, just overriding methods. I also wasn’t fond of a question about whether a class was an instance of an interface that it implements since that also was never clearly defined anywhere. In general a test should cover knowledge that you actually have learned from the course. So I applaud the rebelling Java forces and hope they successfully overthrow the evil java overlord.

Sarah and I went over to Kate and Matt’s to watch the Patriot’s/Miami game after the test. We went straight there and because it was 9 PM and I had been powered by only a pair of Snickers bars and some frozen macaroni and cheese we picked-up some slices. Kate was home but Matt was in Gloucester purchasing holiday gifts from local artists. Some of the gifts had metal frames that had been sitting outside that were so cold that upon holding them I felt like they were sucking the life out of me.

The game was a total debacle. The Pats threw away the game even though they had an 11 point lead with 4 minutes to go in the game. Brady threw four interceptions and was deflected sacked and otherwise turned into a blob of pretzel bits on plenty of plays. The worst play of the game was an interception Brady threw while he was getting sacked and all the Pats needed to do was punt and run out the clock. Rodney Harrison took too many shots of adrenaline before the game and was penalized for unnecessary roughness and a pass interference call that let the Dolphins score a winning touchdown. Sarah slept through most of the game on the couch and had to move her head off my lap because I was cheering too loud for her to sleep.

Kate noticed signs in the end-zone being held-up by individuals advertising a company called Goldenpalace.com during the field goals. These signs have been made because the Goldenpalace.com folks have been paying people to market their products at Sports venues. They were responsible for the streaker at the Super bowl last year that they never showed on television and have been engaged in doing almost any thing that get people’s attention so that they can direct folks at their online casino. While I think that online casinos are generally a tax on the stupid I do like that the tax goes to pay for weird forms of entertainment. For example Goldenpalace were the buyers for the grilled cheese with an imprint of the Virgin Mary and the first ghost ever sold on eBay was sold to them. So at some level I spent a part of my walk to the T this morning hoping that Goldenpalace.com might pay me to do weird things like base jumping off of the Statue of Liberty or buy a pumpkin from me in the shape of President Bush. Maybe my destiny is to be hired by an Internet casino to do random stunts? It would be better to do them as a multi-billionaire owner of a conglomerate like Virgin like Richard Branson but I see plenty of room for fee for services weirdness in the world and I would hope that I could fill some of that vast hole in weirdness placements. Maybe this will become a booming industry of weird people doing weird things in the name of advertising offshore businesses.

I had a rather not weird day but I was suffering from post Patriots loss to a crappy team depression. It wasn't bad enough that I wanted to drown myself in the Charles but I wasn't my normal chipper self. I went to VMS this morning for the monthly meeting. People presented a bunch of progress reports and introduced the new companies who would be joining. In particular Greg Erman gave a very interesting report about a company where the founders were introduced into one of his industry contacts and through a bumpy ride they found their product might not be marketable to a big market, they decided to take full time jobs, but the product may live on through some great twists and turns. I can’t say much about the details other than that Greg is a great story teller.

At one point during the meeting someone said that we should be able to help our mentees answer questions we know how to answer cold like How to get a patent without a lot of costs? I don’t have good answers to such questions. I did hear that one company was selling 40,000 units of a desktop product and it added up to $400,000 dollars. That reminded me that desktop software takes a lot of sales to make money at $10/sale. Imagine selling 40,000 units of Enterprise software. It’s gotta be pretty necessary to sell that much and you still make the equivalent of one enterprise sale. That was sobering.

I sat across from Jeff Behrens and we were chatting because we looked familiar to each other. I asked him who he knew and he just laughed because we both know too many people and wouldn't know where to start. I looked at his shirt and it was an advertising specialty for a puddle-hopper airline in Alaska. So I asked him if he knew Brad Feld and Jenny Lawton. (Hi Brad). As it turned out he had been visiting Brad in Alaska.

Note to self: Go to Alaska and visit Brad and Sarah Falkoff before the opportunity passes. Alaska is among the best places in the world for weird individualists. Sarah Falkoff and her husband had a party there where they wore white outfits and covered themselves with paint then bounced off the walls of their house. At least that is the story I heard.

At the lunch I sat with Vicky Wu the founder of FrogHop I accidentally called her company FrogLeap. She is doing great with a middleware product for multi-user games. She also is involved in several non-profits. I thought she would be a good person to chat with Jorey so I’ll try to introduce them. Jorey is interested in the VR worlds stuff and is going headstrong into non-profit start-up mode. The other woman across from me had recently had a diet-coke can explode all over the interior of her car to the point where stalactites of diet-coke were hanging from the steering-wheel and coat hangers. She was ready to send a letter to the Coca-cola Corporation. In the past she had sent a letter to a tuna company about what looked like glass in a can of tuna that she opened. She got no response until a few months later when someone delivered a case of tuna to her and let her know that occasionally the tuna forms a crystalline object in the can. Vicky and her were talking about being women entrepreneurs in a male dominated world. When Vicky had gone to Korea to a meeting one of the korean men in the meeting was laughing heavily and was asked why he was laughing. The Korean man explained that he thought it was funny that the American man had to bring his girlfriend to the meeting. So Vicky's employee had to explain that Vicky was his boss.

We were chatting about movies like Charlie Kauffman films. The woman with the coke can problem thought that I would like Reconstruction, a Danish film, because I liked Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind so much. Strangely Reconstruction has the same name as Reconstruction, a film by Irene Lustzig, one of Lisa’s friends from Newton North about her grandmother. I thought Irene’s movie was a little slow and she was a bit too close to the subject making the content feel self-indulgent but it was good enough to get into the Boston Independent Film Festival. Sarah will not be pleased to watch another foreign movie but with our Netflix queue you snooze and you lose. I am convinced that the reason why we have a box full of clementines sitting in our kitchen is some form of subliminal advertising from the Charlie Kauffman movie. It was all about tangerine colored hair and the female lead was named Clementine. Someone else mentioned that it is worth re-watching Dr. Strangelove. I can’t even recall what it was about.

Robert gave me a short account of his trip India. Highlights of his trip included the three day 1200 person wedding with 50 entertainers and seven ceremonies, being food poisoned causing his eyes to swell monstrously, and addressing an assembly of 1500 school children after being presented with a white rose signifying a desired peace between India and the United States. I am hoping Robert will release the footage of his speech as well as provide some additional information and a photo journal. One of the more interesting stories is that the wedding was crashed by a group of hermaphrodites who appeared wearing suits and bearing cellular phones. They apparently are beggars who will invade a wedding or other occasion in coordinated groups and do not leave until they are paid off. It is a common practice by these ostrasized people who live in groups similar to a leper colony to do this at events and to get paid well to leave.