wllm

As usual, I've been too busy to keep up with my strict regimen of one blog post per month. I'll just summarize the past month quickly and move on to some more technology ramblings. . .
My father had surgery for his second brain tumor. He has glioblastoma multiforme, which is hardly a good prognosis, but so far he has beaten all the odds for survival, and we'll expect the same performance from him going forward. In all seriousness, it was great to go up to Idaho for a week to see him and always good to see family at a time like this. I also met a man who both owned the town of Grasmere, ID and an outhouse. He sold me a couple of gallons of gas to get me to the next gas station 100 miles away.
I've started on a venture with Rafi Jacoby and possibly one or two other partners that is somewhat less ambitious- at least technically speaking- than the startup that I've been thinking through for the past few months. The idea that we're prototyping is really good, however, and I will continue to monitor the business conditions for the second idea. The simple fact is that the idea were working on is very much ready for primetime, while the more involved idea has many dependencies that likely will materialize but haven't yet. Not the least of these is some acceptance of Semantic Web technologies. One thing that is very appealing about this startup is that our technical hand isn't forced by leveraging existing, relatively experimental libraries like Jena; we'll be happily banging away on top of Ruby on Rails as our choice web app platform.
Tonight is the first meeting of the Palo Alto Semantic Web (PAWS) group. The response during the formation of the group has been phenomenal (40 members and growing), and- needless to say- I'm looking forward to getting to know so many people who share my technological passions.
Well, that should be enough to hold you for a while. I hope to have more details about our prototype in the next few weeks- until then keep obsessively refreshing this page for the latest bits of news. ;)