Three things are interesting about the Google IPO from my point of view:

• The bankers are taking only 3% of the transaction, instead of the usual 7%. This might not sound like a big deal to the uninitiated, but 7% has long been a hard-and-fast rule for IPO business. The perception that Google's offering is a guaranteed blockbuster and the relative draught in the underwriting business the last several years has given them a strong position, which is no doubt why they were able to negotiate such favorable terms. Perhaps this will set a precedent for future IPOs.
• Google's float is being sold through a Dutch auction.

  There is nothing genuinely new about this structure. WR Hambrecht & Co. have been performing dutch auctions for a number of years through their OpenIPO program, including Andover.net, Peet's Coffee, and others.

  But most of these companies are outliers with relatively low market caps which happened to have creative management teams. Google may bring some credibility to this process. This is good, because the traditional IPO process is largely a racket run by the old boy's club, and a proliferation of Dutch auctions would level the playing field.

• In thorough imitation of Berkshire-Hathaway CEO Warren Buffet, Larry Page wrote an owner's manual for Google shares. The letter is worth reading on its own, and many people have summarized it, but here is one of my favorite quotes: "A management team distracted by a series of short term targets is as pointless as a dieter stepping on a scale every half hour."

It's hot and humid here, and the air is full of insects. They used to say that the best thing about living in Charlottesville was that there were no mosquitos. Well, they must have been imported sometime in the last five years, because this weekend they are out in legion. My sister and I were driving along Skyline Drive for a hike up Humpback Rock: a childhood favorite. We watched a tractor-trailer kick thick swirls of orange dust as it drifted onto the shoulder, and the dust mixed with the bugs and the haze and it seemed to me that the air in Virginia is different because it's alive.

He's wearing a Wheel of Fortune hat.

Nat's brilliant plan was to run up the trail. Um. Now I am pretty fit and I knew there was no freaking way this was happening, but the thing you do with big brothers is appease them. Nat got very sweaty. When we made it home he fell asleep in our little sister's princess bed and woke up two hours late for dinner.

Peach on the trail.

Well, okay. So, we didn't end up running the whole trail. There were long stretches of brisk walking, and stretches of running also, but the sign at the bottom said "40 minutes" and I'm pretty sure we did it in 20. Maybe even 15. I mean, we hauled ass up that trail. And sure, I was pretty tired at the end, but I swear I didn't know it was a princess bed I was crashing in.

Me at the summit.

Peach and her friends.

This is an important step. Desktops need a standard set of core APIs for personal addressbook information, to allow things like unified presence information, identity-based data association, and to build a richly integrated environment for collaboration. Our intent is to establish Evolution as the standard client for addressbook, mail and calendaring to make these things possible. And now that Evolution is 100% open source, it is not only a true competitor for Outlook, it also has a real shot at being the hub of your personal information/collaboration environment. 26 May 200426 May 2004 Friday I was at an all-day meeting near San Francisco. Interesting people, interesting conversation.

Sergey Brin and Mitch Kapor discussing Mozilla.

Mid-afternoon found me at 826 Valencia, Dave Eggers's writing workshop for students ages 8-18. I saw Stephen Elliott there and bought his latest book, Happy Baby. 826 Valencia is a bit unusual; the space is zoned for retail, and the proprietors are required to offer something for sale to people who wander in off the street, though the back 80% of the store is filled with tables and computers used for teaching and writing.

To meet the zoning requirements, they've turned the front into a "pirate store," where eye patches, jolly roger flags and poison rings are offered for sale, and where one can barter for pure lard by the pound. It's not clear what pirates use lard for, but it's there. For public health reasons, they're not allowed to sell the lard, and hence the bartering arrangement.

Of course, books are also sold.

In 826 Valencia.

I was planning on taking the redeye back to Boston, but then I remembered that my friend Jimmy was in LA, and suddenly the idea of sitting in an airplane all night Saturday night struck me as pretty unappealing. So I flew to LA.

Jimmy picking me up at LAX.

We were tired and not really in a party mood, so after an hour we decided to walk the campus a bit. Caltech is gorgeous and very SoCal: clay-tiled roofs, unclear distinctions between indoor and outdoor space, scattered palm trees, etc. The hallways, however, were pretty familiar to anyone who's spent time at MIT.

In a Caltech dorm.

Star-of-David balloon art.

From the beach we rushed to Grauman's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard for a post-prandial movie. We saw Troy, and Jamie's observation -- that the movie portrayed the Trojan War as taking place in about three weeks instead of the ten years it actually took -- was irking me the whole time. Overall, a pretty good movie. Not sure I would have spent $170 million making it though.

Back in Boston.

In other news, the collapse of the new airport terminal in Paris has struck me as a personal tragedy. Such a beautiful building, now partially crumbled and perhaps doomed to being razed. Last month I wrote this in my diary:

The new terminal 2 at charles de gaulle airport in Paris is an extraordinary building. It is modern without being stark. It is vast and grand, white and clean, and somehow it gives hope that out of this culture there can come good. It seems to spring not from the mind of a great architect but from the best parts of a society that sees a humane future in a world of technology and quantity.

An architect in Cambridge, Brad Bellows, is quoted as saying: "We don't want to purge the world of future Golden Gate bridges, Notre-Dame cathedrals, and Concordes. It should not be lost in the aftermath of its failure that Terminal 2E was a gorgeous piece of work."

Hear, hear.

Me in Terminal 2E of Charles de Gaulle in October of 2003.

Terminal 2E today.

29 May 200429 May 2004