Paint Job nail polish colors are actually created to match specific car paints. My pick is Jaguar Jade Green Pearl Metallic, but for a car, not for my nails. 1997 Chrysler Light Gold Pearlcoat or 1993 Isuzu Ultra Violet Pearl Metallic might be OK for my fingertips.

Thanks everyone who made sure I didn’t miss Brenda Laurel’s essay about Purple Moon. I had a difficult time deciding what to write about it, if anything. Because Purple Moon’s mission was near and dear to most every employee’s heart, the time spent there and the time spent tearing ourselves away was emotional. It is hard, as I am often reminding myself in business life, to not take it personally when your goal feels so noble, so pure, so capital-G Good, but, hard as you try, you are failing to make it. Even our partners, our customers, and our suppliers were rooting for us, treating us so well because they too wanted to believe in and be a part of something Good. It was hard for every little thing not to be emotional and personal, because everyone cared so much. We all felt we had a personal stake in our mission. Wouldn’t it make such a difference to believe so strongly in what you were doing every day at work? That’s what we had. But I don’t think anyone realized that the biggest risk we were taking was that we would all feel so damn horrible when it failed.

Brenda makes some interesting observations about women in business in her essay. Yes, of course, I have my ideas of which names go with her “recognizable dysfunctions”. It makes me feel better that she recognizes the management traits many of us had to contend with. Maybe we have different people in mind, but that’s OK. People vary in different circumstances. Most of us can be and have been stellar under better circumstances. As I grow wiser and reanalyze situations from a greater distance, I’ll probably learn even more lessons from Purple Moon — and all the other startups I’ve participated in.

This past weekend I learned that a box of McCormick/Schilling food colorings (that little package of four teeny squeeze bottles) costs $3.89 and the same exact box of four food colorings, branded by Safeway, costs $.89. Same ingredients, same little bottles, even the same words on the box (except for the branding). They weren’t even on sale.

The Library of Congress’ archive of Coca-Cola TV commercials includes outtakes from the 1971 commercial featuring “an international group of young people on an Italian hilltop singing ‘I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke'”. Tame stuff, but it is a real part of history now since it’s almost thirty years old. Whew. (via Yahoo’s Weekly Picks)

I clicked into the tail-end of a documentary about toxic areas in Silicon Valley and they were showing a tower outside of a Netscape building which looked like it might be art, but was really a Superfund cleanup project. The tower is taking contaminated groundwater and spewing the chemicals into the air to clean it out. I’m assuming that’s a safe way to deal with it, but it makes me nervous. Netscape’s campus is on the former Fairchild Semiconductor Superfund site. Here’s the irony of computer manufacturing: because the facilities need to be impeccably clean, they use(d) large amounts of strong solvents and cleaning solutions. The underground storage tanks for these chemicals (and you can be sure there were many in the Silicon Valley) sometimes leaked. At the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition website, I used their maps to find the Superfund sites near where I live. As was disclosed during my condo purchase, I’m not sitting on top of one (though there are plenty of old underground gas tanks nearby). But the area is definitely peppered with them. Be aware.

After I was all prepared for them to come crashing down, the Iridium satellites are being saved by the U.S. Dept of Defense (which reminds me, soon it’ll be time to worry about tax returns again). There’s a Slashdot thread on this too. For $3 million a month, the Pentagon gets unlimited air time for up to 20,000 government users. That’s $150/month per person. Not too bad. They also get to avoid public panic over pieces of satellite falling out of the sky. Perhaps that’s the real bargain here. Someone’s going to do a Mastercard commercial parody, aren’t they? “Global satellite system: $25 million. Two years of satellite phone service for 20,000 government workers: $72 million. Keeping a public raised on “Armageddon”, “Deep Impact”, Y2K hype (and many who still remember Skylab falling in 1979) from panicking: priceless.

TNT is co-producing a mini-series based on The Mists of Avalon, the Marion Zimmer Bradley book which tells King Arthur’s tale from the perspectives of the women. It will air in 2001. Anjelica Huston and Julianna Margulies (formerly of ER) are starring and the production team is Emmy and Oscar laden, so expectations should be high. I have to admit that although I have tried three times, I have never been able to finish the book. I always get stuck in the middle and don’t have the will to continue. I’m not sure what it is. I know quite a few women who count it among their favorites. Maybe next time I’ll just start from the middle.

From the Annals of Improbable Research, here are Postal Experiments. Various items (most not packaged) were addressed and sent out via USPS. Apparently teeth are considered human remains, which, I suppose, is accurate in some cases. I noted that the helium balloon is addressed to a town next to my hometown. (thanks for the link, Lisa!)

Last night I watched three consecutive episodes of Junkyard Wars on The Learning Channel. It’s a British show, kind of a cousin to the robot building competitions. Two teams have to build a contraption that performs a certain goal (last night: demolition, bomb dropping, and underwater maneuvers) using what they find in the scrapheap around them. This typically involves lots of welding. The teams of 4 include one expert (a ringer, really). At first, I feared that the hosts would be annoying window dressing, but they were great. The female host, Cathy Rogers, co-created and produces the show, so she’s far from vapid. Robert Llewellyn, “Kryten” from Red Dwarf, adds a lot of humor. There are clear, educational explanations of the physics of the tasks and the mechanics of the machines. The original British name for the show is Scrapheap Challenge, and it’s filmed by RDF Media. There are FAQ’s on both sites (and be wary if you run across the schedule Wallchart page, because it reveals who wins each event by listing the teams in the next set of finals). The American team on the series, The NERDS, have their own site describing their experience on the show. It too reveals how they fared, so be warned.

Via LTSeek, Duke OKs its chapel for same-sex unions. Here’s Duke’s news release about it. Duke‘s current president is Nan Keohane, the highly respected president of Wellesley when I was a student there. Definitely no stranger to controversy, I’m sure she’ll navigate the negative backlash with flying colors. She won my admiration during a small gathering in my dorm. We were discussing the Barbara Bush debacle (students were protesting Barbara’s choice as commencement speaker) and Nan admitted that she previously had difficulty respecting women who, like Barbara Bush, dropped out of college to get married and start families. She wasn’t criticizing us, telling us to grow up, or to get over it. She was telling us that she could relate and that it was OK to feel that way. And, I think, also, very very lightly, reminding us that we all had the capacity for growth and tolerance.