Since a couple of you are wondering what went on last night, I’m going to blog it in a way that doesn’t single out one person. This is actually a disappointing trend that I’ve been noticing lately, and I want to capture it in a blog without really railroading a single person.

The #1 thing people like about me is my passion and energy. (Technically, those may be two things, but with me, they go together.) Although I do have my down moments (and sometimes days), in general, when you meet me you’ll meet one of the most enthusiastic, passionate people out there. I’m always excited about something. I’m blessed to be an idea person, which means that I will spontaneously throw new ideas into a conversation, and I’m able to see obvious gaps in a market that you or I can exploit to make money. This is what my friends love about me. Some of you really get into the energy that drives me every day and have committed to helping me see through my ideas. My favorite of you are the realists who know me well, but also know when to shoot down an idea. Here’s a great example:

This weekend, I went to IBI. Of course, IBI is full of idea people, so we toss around tons of stuff. One of my more recent ideas popped up there. What if I did a lunch club, with no more than 10 or 15 people, and we targeted small business owners and entrepreneurs? Have 2 people come in and pay $100 each to be speakers and be guaranteed personal connections and networking with the 10 other people, who get a free lunch. Cool, huh? I gave this idea to a couple people at IBI and everyone agreed this was a neat idea, but it wouldn’t be big enough for me to really explore. At most, I’d make $150 a week after paying for everyone’s lunch. This is a great example of the kind of stuff I go through on a daily basis. (I’ll try to blog more of these as I have them so some of you can pick up and explore ones that resonate with you.)

I love the energy I get from other idea people. I feed off it. Often, we end up at a whiteboard, furiously drawing circles to represent market segments and calculating how much money is involved. Of course, being around only idea people and generating ideas all the time is exhausting, and that’s where the team members come in… the execution will rest on their shoulders, and they’ll take an idea and run with it. The idea people and the execution people are totally different people; idea people often have a hard time focusing and we usually have 3 or 4 business ideas in various stages of execution at a time. The execution people are here to make sure the really good ideas do stick to the wall by actually forcing us to sit down and set goals instead of moving on to the Next Big Thing. C is a great example of an excellent execution team leader; he brings some reality back into my life by telling me to settle down and get on with it instead of bouncing around like crazy.

Hardcore geeks and idea people don’t always mix. Geeks tend to be very negative about anything new or changing, and they also tend to have a really tough time gauging the size of a market. Furthermore, they like to use rational analysis to shoot things down, as this proves how intelligent they are. (It doesn’t matter that sometimes they’re dead wrong about what they’re shooting down, or they have no personal experience in a specific area.) For instance, remember when the iPod came out? Slashdot was full of geeks saying “Lame!” Guess what… the iPod has been, unquestionably, one of the most successful MP3 players out there.

In a similar vein, there are a few people out there (I hesitate to call them “friends”) who seem intent on shooting down every idea I have with “That will never work”, “If it was so easy someone else would have done it already”, etc. Inevitably, every person I know like this also happens to be a hardcore computer geek — of the type that runs some variant of Linux on his home PC, thumbs his nose at major corporations, etc.

Realistically, I know not every idea I have will be a million-dollar money maker. A lot of my ideas aren’t even necessarily money-related; I like to evangelize things like my Treo, for instance. I’ve gotten a lot better recently about only evangelizing to people who would really benefit from my ideas. The next step I need to take is distancing my ideas from those who are overly negative about them, because all it does is throw me into a depression tailspin. Unfortunately, my predisposition to picking up energy from other people allows me to pick up negative energy as easily as positive energy. When I am around those with a negative disposition about something, or those who are skeptical about everything that isn’t already working for them, I become negative as well. This isn’t a healthy state.

Hardcore geeks and idea people, it seems, don’t mix. Perhaps I should state this as… hardcore geeks with an extremely skeptical persona (and we all know some people like that) don’t mix with idea people. Note to self: Hang out with entrepreneurs more and Linux geeks less. 🙁

I’ve got someone I would consider a friend (at least an online friend, if nothing else) who just outright refused to tell me his last name. I’m sorry, but that’s just lame. How can I consider you a friend if you don’t even want to give me your last name?

I guess for me it’s a trust issue. If you won’t trust me with your last name, why should I bother telling you anything about me?

SlashChick’s first review of her new Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC.

My tablet PC arrived today (Monday) after being shipped out from SoCal a couple days ago. (I knew that tracking number that said it would be delivered on Friday wasn’t telling the truth.) I unpacked it to find it lighter than I had imagined (it weighs in at somewhere around 4.5 pounds, which is definitely a step up from my 3-pound Thinkpad, but worth it.)

I opened it up, and to my dismay, pretty much the entire surface around the keyboard was covered with garish red stickers advertising different capabilities of this Tablet PC. I spent the next 10 minutes picking off stickers (3 Toshiba stickers, 1 Nvidia, 1 Energy Star, 1 Intel, and 1 Winders.) Once all the gunk was gone, I plugged it in and turned it on. I went through the Windows setup, clicked Next a bunch of times, and was dumped into XP. XP did detect my wireless network, but it’s not like it’s that challenging — it’s an access point called “default” with no encryption or security of any sort. It then prompted me to install a bunch of updates (thankfully, it comes with XP SP2 already installed) and reboot. After rebooting, I finally got my first experience with the Tablet PC interface.

The first thing that hit me was that this makes computing a lot more interesting. Along with “interesting” comes “learning curve”, as you have a pen that can perform several different functions, as well as several different (and some very weird) butons along the side of the screen. You can use these buttons in Tablet PC mode. I was too tired to figure them all out, but one of them acts as a mini-joystick, and one closes the window that’s in focus. There are also a bunch of pen motions you can do while holding down the button on the side of the pen to do things like Alt-Tab, Maximize, and New Document. I wasn’t quite expecting such a new way of doing things, so it threw me for a bit.

Back to the laptop itself. The screen is very bright (much nicer than the Thinkpad) and the 1400×1050 resolution is definitely nice. I’ll have to bump up the text to Large Fonts to really work with it, but that’s OK — that’s what I do on my home desktop too. I had a very positive experience with the keyboard. I love the tactile feel of my Thinkpad, but the darn Ctrl button isn’t in the lower left-hand corner like it should be (no, some genius at IBM made that key “Function”.) I was worried that the keyboard wouldn’t be as nice as the Thinkpad, but in fact I feel it’s even nicer — the Ctrl key is in the right place and they’ve moved the Windows key out of my way. (I use an IBM Model M “clicky” keyboard here on my home PC, and it has no Windows keys at all. I wouldn’t have it any other way!) The keyboard keys are spaced nicely and it’s really a joy to type on. The slightly bigger form factor really makes for a much nicer keyboard layout. I have small hands, but even I felt cramped on the Thinkpad sometimes. No such problems exist with the Toshiba.

I flipped the screen around and it flipped into portrait mode. This is a pretty cool feature — for those of you who are not familiar with how a convertible Tablet PC works, you grab the screen, turn it to the left, and it folds down and snaps on top of the keyboard. Toshiba’s software then orients to rotate the screen so it’s like you’re holding a real paper tablet. This is where those nifty buttons come in handy… the little joystick lets you scroll up and down, for instance. I played around with entering website URLs with the pen, and although the handwriting recognition was good, bookmarks will definitely become a lot more critical on the Tablet PC than they currently are on my desktop. Once the website was loaded, however, surfing was easy and intuitive with the pen interface and the little buttons.

My first impression of my new Toshiba M200 Tablet PC is thus summarized as follows: It has a bit of a steeper learning curve than I expected, but it looks like a great product overall. It’s definitely unique and will be very fun to take to meetings and such. The fast processor and great screen will also make it worthwhile as a standard laptop. I’m not regretting the decision to upgrade. I give it a 9/10 based on my first impression, and I will update later with additional information as I continue using it.

A few days ago, I was not feeling that great, and I decided I was sick of my current laptop.

A bit of background: A little over a year ago, I ordered my first laptop since I left Sun in 2002. I had a beautiful little Toshiba Portege when I worked at Sun, which was left over from when I worked at Cobalt. I loved my Portege while at Sun, so I figured the next logical step was to get an itty-bitty Thinkpad X-series. I got a refurbished one from PC Connection for an incredibly low price, and voila! I had my own laptop again.

However, ever since I got my second flat panel at home (I run 3200×1024 here with dual 17.3″ SGI 1600SW flat panels), the little 1024×768 12″ screen on the Thinkpad wasn’t cutting it. It just seemed so… small. Small in that disappointing way. I knew I didn’t want a 10-pound laptop, but I constantly struggled with the Thinkpad. FG had a Thinkpad T-series with a 1400×1050 (SXGA+) screen, and that worked much better for me. Still, something was holding me back from upgrading to a T-series.

I was cruising the Toshiba website a few weeks ago when I saw their new line of Tablet PCs. Tablet PCs have always appealed to me, mostly because I find a mound of sticky notes accumulating on my desk at any given time, and am constantly going through them to find phone numbers or to look at my to-do list. For some reason, a pen has always felt more natural to me than a keyboard and mouse. I’ve played with the Tablet PCs before, but until now, they’ve been stuck with low resolutions and wimpy processors, which just didn’t appeal to me.

Enter the Toshiba M200 tablet PC. The one I bought runs $1800 and includes very nice specs like my prized 1400×1050 screen and a Pentium-M 1.7GHz processor with 2MB cache. It doesn’t have quite as impressive battery life as my Thinkpad (4.5 hours vs. 5.5 hours), but it’s still long enough to work for 90% of what I need. I bought a brand-new one with a 3-year warranty instead of going refurbished like I did with the Thinkpad. The great thing is that I can sell my Thinkpad for $1000 or so and not feel too bad about splurging on a new laptop. 😉

I definitely feel like it was the right time to buy a new laptop. Whether I’ll really use the Tablet PC features remains to be seen. According to the tracking number, it should arrive tomorrow, but as the tracking statement does not contain detailed information on where the laptop actually is on its path to California, I have my doubts. I’m hoping it arrives in time for the weekend, but we shall see!

By the way, thank you for all of the emails, phone calls, and comments. I am feeling much better. I sent out a detailed email to our potential investors today about the direction I want to go with Simpli, and I believe this will make Simpli a multi-million dollar company. Another “we shall see” there. 🙂

Well, I know a couple of people said I shouldn’t post personal stuff in my blog. I didn’t post any personal stuff for a while. Now it’s time to post personal stuff again, so here I go.

N broke up with me. I think most of you already knew that, but let’s get that out in the open. That means, for one thing, that the T-shirt business has taken a leave of absence. So sorry to those of you who needed T-shirts. It also means that, once again, I am upset, confused, angry, and depressed.

I think my depression stems from the fact that I know there’s really no one in a 1000-mile radius of me who really cares what happens to me. I could drive the Miata off a cliff tomorrow and people might not know for days. Even then, I think most people’s reaction (including some of you I’d call friends) would be “What’s going to happen to Simpli?” not “What happened to Erica?”

It really hit me hard tonight, like a punch in the stomach. Simpli had an outage, and people were calling me left and right, demanding to know what was going on. I didn’t have any answers for them, as at the time, I didn’t know what was happening either. At the same time, I was trying to halfway enjoy a night in San Francisco at a bar with someone who would probably be considered a friend (see last paragraph) and one of his friends.

It was on the way home that I felt something snap inside of me. It was just like a tree branch that has bits of snow pile up on it, and it takes it and takes it and takes it until one day, this big pile of snow falls down from above and whuff…. SNAP. That was exactly what it was like for me. I called my friend in somewhat of a panic, thinking I’d do something really stupid if left alone to contemplate all the emotions I was having. Halfway through the conversation, I realized he didn’t really need me anyway, as he sounded like he was having fun without me and he didn’t really care that something major had just happened to me, and so I hung up, embarrassed. I spent the rest of the drive home crying, and at some point, the depression sunk in like a black hole. I’m angry. I’m angry that my company had a major failure tonight. I’m angry at N’s decision to break up with me. But most of all, I’m not sure the world sees me and Simpli as two different things, and I think that’s what drove me off the edge tonight. It dawned on me that a lot of the people I consider friends are really just business associates. They host with Simpli, or some of them don’t, and they ask me about my business, and I ask them about theirs, and that’s great, but when it comes down to it, I don’t really matter to them. Tonight was a stunning example of exactly what matters about ME in people’s lives… and that is, mostly nothing. I don’t think these people (friends?) really know anything about who I am. Not only that, but they don’t really care, as long as their websites stay online and I smile and nod at their polite conversations.

The sad truth is I don’t have very many true friends — the kind of people where, even if Simpli failed, they would still call me and tell me that I’m a cool person to hang out with. That, even if I decided to move to some faraway country, they’d still call and come visit me. I think I have 2 people in my life who would do that, and neither of them live in California. And, when I’m faced with coming home to an empty house at 1:30AM after one of the roughest nights of my life, and I have no one to call and tell this to, that hurts. It really does.