I love it when I discover that a friend has done something insanely creative for no other reason than to be creative. This is why I am proud to be friends with Micah Laaker. He does stuff like this.

This weekend, one of the best outdoor music festivals in LA is happening a stone’s throw from my backyard: Sunset Junction.

I don’t think I’ll make it there.

I already missed my buddy Matt Kozlov’s band Radars to the Sky this morning. Congrats on the gig, Matt! I hope it was a blast! I’ll be missing Broken Social Scene tonight too. Tomorrow, it’s likely that I will experience no !!!, Beachwood Sparks, Germs or Black Keys. (I know The Germs are the subject of a new doc…but is it really possible for the The Germs to be The Germs without Darby Crash? And if you are reading this before tomorrow, you really should go see !!!. They are insane live.)

Why?

Today, Molly and I have made up for being out of town last weekend with a day of domesticity. We washed our cars. We got an oil change for her car. We did some yard work. We did laundry. Tonight, we’re going to Pasadena to go see Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the new Woody Allen movie that is “…a rueful comedy about two young American women…“. And it was a really nice day together, even if my description above makes it sound a bit like Will Ferrell in Old School:

Tomorrow, it is just work, work, work. I have to do two things, in particular:

1. Need to prepare syllabus and materials for the USC semester, which starts on Monday. I’ll do a longer post soon on the program that I’m teaching and what the semester entails. It’s great stuff, and really nice program for anyone interested in changing careers into consumer online product management and Internet entrepreneurialism.
2. I’m drafting a “manifesto” on “openness” for work. Yahoo! is really taking the “we’re opening up” thing seriously, to the point that I’ve been asked to work on a document which internal teams will be able to use as a guidepost when planning and making decisions. There will be plenty more from me on Yahoo! and openness on this blog.

That’s it for now. Off to the movies!

Cheers,
-c

Over the last eight months, while on a self-imposed-too-busy-to-blog-well-so-don’t-
blog-at-all-and-instead-just-lurk-and-occasionally-twitter hiatus, I followed this meme between two of the more innovative and online-community-minded (can I really get away with two hyphenated strings in one sentence?) entrepreneurs with whom I have had the pleasure of working: Todd Sampson and Eric Marcoullier, the co-founders of MyBlogLog. Todd accurately describes exactly why I felt I needed to hit the pause button on my blog.

I was just too busy.

I was teaching a course at USC on Thursdays and Saturdays, and I was traveling three days and two nights a week from LA up to Sunnyvale with Yahoo! while defining, pitching and securing funding for the Y!OS vision. As a result, my blog was just looking pretty lame.

Well, I recently passed the one year anniversary of traveling to Sunnyvale three days a week. It has been well worth it; we have had a whole bunch of exciting things going on and coming up on the Yahoo! front. (And at the very least my now hefty Southwest Rapid Rewards and Starwood Preferred Guest account balances will combine to allow me to spend some much needed quality vacation time with Molly at some point!) Outside of Yahoo! on the USC front, this coming Monday marks the start of my second year, with all new students and projects coming in with the new fall semester.

So in other words, I am going to continue to be overwhelmingly busy again this fall. But this time, I’m going to make every effort to open a dialogue about things here as they happen.

Oh, and while I’m busy reattaching the kidsallright mouthpiece, I think I’ll go ahead and use it right away to give a serious shoutout to Ian and Bob at Topspin. It’s not every day that you can say that your friends just put out the new David Byrne and Brian Eno record in a way that is redefining how the music industry works! Stream or buy the whole album below. You’ll be happy you did.

Brb!
-c