Have You Been Pizzled or Kizzled?

Jon Callaghan, Co-Founder of True Ventures, wrote a funny post about being “pizzled” – as Jon writes “this is the feeling you get when someone you’re talking with is Blackberry obsessed. It’s a combination of being puzzled at why, at that particular instant, someone decided to interrupt an otherwise good conversation with a glance at his/her Blackberry and being pissed that he/she did so.” I’m a Venture Partner at True and we’ve solved this problem in a sophisticated way – yes that is my little baby on top of the pile, symbolically left at the door.

Sphere’s team is located all over the globe (Berlin, Vancouver, New York, Seattle, Denver, San Francisco, Phoenix, Boston) making us a so-called “virtual” company. We rarely see each other, so “pizzled” doesn’t really apply to us. We have a different yet quite similar challenge called “kizzled”. That is the moment in a team call when you hear someone pounding away on their keyboard. Worse yet, sometimes you actually get an email in your in-box during the call from someone on the call that has nothing to do with the call. Hmmm. What to do – :).

Middle Earth Journal

If you haven’t read MEJ, give it a try. Putting politics aside, I like how Ron Beasley has pulled together a group of friends from different geographies (a virtual blog) to contribute thoughts and opinions. According to Ron, here is the cast:

“MEJ is the project of Ron Beasley a retired engineer who is now a digital artist, freelance philosopher and pundit located in Portland Oregon . Bill is an old friend living in the Washington DC area who reads the newspapers for me and sends links to the good stuff. Jazz Shaw is a former Republican living in New York and a guest pamphleteer at MEJ. Xenophon is a democrat kind of a guy, a liberal, a union man, with some experience participating at the precinct, and county caucus levels. “

The other thing I want to point out is that we’re starting to play with some new ideas on how to make an integral part of the blog template. The end result is a more customized look & feel of the widget than in the past. In this case, we picked up the graphic of Ron (assuming that is Ron), looks like a “mini me”. Check it out and let us know your thoughts.