I’ll forgive him — I’ve done my fair share of stealing as well.

Together with my original duct tape wallet, I’ve got two thin wallets that “fit the bill” perfectly. Each wallet holds about eight cards, has space in the middle for cash, and has an extra pocket for storing receipts — even with all that they are still very thin.

Jen liked the new version so much, she requested one of her own, so I wove one out of red duct tape for her.

Now I’m considering making one out of black duct tape for dressy affairs.

Joe Kraus and Paul Graham gave the most interesting talks, though they summed up roughly the same advice as the other speakers did, which is the same advice you always hear for starting a company, technology-based or not:

• Be dedicated
• Solve a problem you have
• Listen to your users
• Hire smart

There are other pieces of advice that are thrown in, but those are the keys. Sounds so simple, doesn’t it?

Om Malik’s talk was the most entertaining, as he started off by contradicting Paul’s final thesis on how starting a company is not about money, but instead about respecting time (make a living quickly, so you can have the rest of your life to yourself). Om put it quite simply: “It is always about the money.”

The second talk of the day was given by Paige Mailliard, an attorney from Wilson Sonsini. She spoke about the legal ins and outs of starting a company, how equity should be structured, why you need a lawyer from the start, etc. Given what would typically be construed as dry material, her talk was actually rather interesting, and she came off as the most approachable lawyer I’d ever spoken, too. Sadly, her colleague who spoke later did not leave me with the same feeling.

Chris Sacca, the head of special initiatives (whatever that means) at Google, gave a passionate speech coupled with entertaining slides about the state of the startup world, but it really came across as just a plug for recruiting at Google and a plea for people to send him email, even though he already gets 1400 a day.

It was great to hear Tim O’Reilly speak. He has always been a luminary in the technology world, and I’ve always figured he have good things to say. He spoke about how to look at the future, and used examples from O’Reilly Media as illustrations. His points were interesting, but I felt like he was doing PR for O’Reilly more than necessary, given that everyone in the audience owned at least one of his books.

The final speaker of the day was Joshua Schachter, who fits the “geek” mold to a “t.” This is not a bad thing, but for a guy who sold his social bookmarking company to Yahoo! recently, after having dedicated a little less than a year to it, I was surprised to see such large sweat rings under his arms. I mean, seriously, “You’re talking to a group of mid-twenties geeks just like you were. There’s nothing to be nervous about.” That said, he did have the single best piece of advice for the day: keep a log of all your ideas and revisit it once in a while to review ideas that may have seemed bad at the time but could be great now.

All that said, I’m glad I went.

Warning: preg_replace_callback(): Unknown modifier ‘|’

Knowing very little about PHP and trusting the good net citizens out in the world (well, those on the web at least), I did a quick Google search for the error string and found some interesting results in Google’s cache. Expecting to quickly find that an upgrade to PHP caused an issue with the Markdown plugin in WordPress (which was the issue and had been fixed in a newer version of Markdown), I instead found that a lot of people were having the same problem I had, but no one wanted to discuss it.

So I went to the register with the album in hand, and upon seeing my selection the clerk said, “Finally someone is buying a good record.” I joked with him, “Who?” (which he didn’t really get). He told me he hadn’t been able to catch their shows when they were in town a few months ago, but his girlfriend saw both. Then he went on to tell me about the ol’ Canadian sound and how there is another Canadian band with a similar sound that apparently shared studio space with Wolf Parade. I promptly forgot the new band’s name as the clerk told me how they new band has what you’d consider a “Brooklyn sound” with Casio keyboards and a drum machine, even though they have a drummer too. More experimental.

If only I could remember the name, I’d be totally ahead of the curve this time around.

“That thing” turns out to be the most functional, reliable, sturdy and slim wallet I have ever used — and it happens to have been make by me out of duct tape. It was in stark contrast to my friend’s name brand supple leather wallet, which I imagine was purchased with at least a smidgen of ego involved (not that there is anything wrong with that.)

The oddest thing about me being different from my friends is that I live in a city of total wackos — freaks of all shapes and sizes — and so in comparison, I am quite easily clumped into my friends’ apt yuppie pigeon hole. But I don’t mind. I do enjoy declaring that I don’t listen to the radio, and therefore have no idea who the current Brittany Spears is; I flaunt the fact that I, as a software guy, despise reading from a computer screen and much prefer taking notes in longhand; I am proud that I did not collapse under the pressure of the Harry Potter phenomenon.

But do I do these things on purpose to be different? No, it’s just who I am. And so be it. My mom will still love me no matter what music I listen to.

Right?

• Hibernate
• Spring
• Tomcat
• Tiles
• Velocity
• ActiveMQ
• Javascript/AJAX
• XStream

The last one is an XML object serialization engine produced by ThoughtWorks, a consulting company led by some of the most well-respected names in software engineering. Their XStream library is sadly under-documented, which frustrates me beyond belief. My struggle Friday afternoon was trying to get their library to play nicely with Hibernate’s persistent collections. My solution was to throw in a new converter that ignored all of the Hibernate data. It works, but it makes me feel so dirty.

The most frustrating part of all this is that I feel like I could be so much more productive if I were doing things “my way,” ignoring these silly libraries that are supposed to make things easier for you.