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Well, I guess the gig is up.
There was a time last summer, when I had finished my last big project at
Intel, but still had a week before I was out the door. Andy Grove's cube
was (literally) down the hall from me, and it was very important for me to
at least appear busy. This was the point when I decided to finally go
through all those emails I'd been ignoring as project deadlines came near.
I came across a forwarded bit from a friend that had the first two
paragraphs of an issue of NTKnow. I searched out the rest, and said "Damn,
yeah!" and subbed.
A few weeks later, back in school, back in the middle of nowhere NY (Ithaca
- where Rohit spent his early years, though I doubt he remembers how
insanely boring this little corner of the world is), I decided to pass the
time by putting together a little newsletter. The idea had occured to me
before, and I had been planning on taking up where a friend of mine, Brian,
had left off since graduating and heading of to Andersen Consulting.
However, NTKnow was a nice little inspiration, so I checked around their
site, and came across some little bit about how they'd prefer others not to
copy their idea. That was enough for me to copy their idea.
So, basically, I started putting together a cheap, less funny, US ripoff of
NTKnow and passing it along to friends. Subscribers grew, and it's
recently pegged at around 200, despite the fact, I haven't really told
anyone about it. I mentioned it here on FoRK back in December, and a few
folks subscribed. I never thought that Danny would find out about it,
'cause, I mean, the net's a big place, right?
Though, now I've gone and started building a web page around it (not done
yet), but the archives are still available at
http://www.techdirt.com/uptodate/ or at the older place (much more
difficult to remember URL which certainly didn't facilitate telling folks
about it: http://www.gsm.cornell.edu/students/clubs/tmc/uptodate/). So,
here's Danny, the man I've been ripping off for nearly 8 months now,
joining FoRK. What do I do? Hell, I've even got a cheesey name
Up-To-Date, that mimics NTKnow (though, I have to admit NTK is much cooler
than UTD, which has the problem of being a bit too close to STD for my taste).
Of everyone who subscribed, Rohit, was the only who felt the need to point
out the similarities between it and NTKnow. I've been trying (desparately)
to distance it from NTKnow as much as possible, but whatever. Anyway, I
had meant to bring the newsletter up here again, since it had been so long
since I last mentioned it, and so I guess this is the best time to do so.
The other item of interest, which Rohit knows about as well, is a
discussion list I've put together (sort of a FoMM - why is it I always end
up with the less catchy acronyms?) which focuses more on the business side
of all things technology related. That's the sort of thing that happens
when you go over to the dark side and decide to get an MBA - you start
talking about business. Most of the folks on it aren't particularly used
to discussion lists, but conversation has started to pick up. Soooooo...
if anyone's interested in joining that little segment of the net
population, let me know.
Okay. I'll await for the cease and desist letter from Danny's lawyers. In
the meantime, I'll get back to work stealing his best ideas...
-Mike
P.S. Yes, Rohit, now you can cross post to FoRK and Backstage. :-)