About

This is the personal kind of personal/archival weblog of Michael Gracie.

The Proprietor

Publicly

{note to self: for originality, insert something impressive here that isn’t stretching the truth}

Meanwhile, the unimportant but still factually correct stuff…

  • Fast-tracked to Manager in Arthur Andersen’s Turnaround and Restructuring Group. Pulled several companies out from the brink of bankruptcy, several out of the courts, and angered a number of lenders and creditors committee attorneys by being correct. Had lengthy stints in Sydney, Australia and Mainland China. Have industry exposure in almost every sector imaginable, which comes in handy when trying to solve problems in the “mashed-up” business world we now operate in.
  • President and COO of Tango Communications. Did three service bureau acquisitions and grew the core ten-fold in under a year, and on a single round of funding. Had several tough meetings with the board, and one easy one…the day before the company was sold for a 1,500% IRR. I believe that return is a standing record for the firm I was working with at the time, and if it isn’t God bless them.
  • Co-Founder and COO/CTO of Registry Services International. On a hand-to-mouth budget, built a fascinating interactive response service for the building construction industry. The business was sold for a positive return, unfortunately at the beginning of the housing boom.
  • CFO of Rivenet.com. Extracted working knowledge of the securities and insurance industries, and picked up six securities licenses (3, 7, 24, 27, 30, and 66). With my help, the company received what might have been the first unqualified audit opinion for a venture-backed startup post-2000. I left before the company was sold - return (if any) unknown.
  • Co-Founder of TotJot.com. A social network targeting parents of toddlers, it folded within a year. Took lessons in web marketing, public relations, exercising extreme care with platform choices, and characterizing and understanding human motivations. Also reinforced in me the concept of knowing when to cut one’s losses.

In parallel, I’ve done financial and technology integration consulting for roughly a dozen businesses - mostly healthy ones suffering growing pains that have since gotten over their humps. I’ve become a perpetual novice at catching fish with fly rods, and a proficient snowboarder (despite having grown up in Florida). I took my education from an institution that has shown extreme difficulty giving other teams a chance in NCAA sports championships (University of Florida), am a Certified Public Accountant, and adept at sniffing out (in politically correct terms) statistically anomalous communication.

Privacy

My PGP key can be found here.

The Site

Origin

I doubt this method is patentable (heh), but I wanted to outline where the posts came from:

  • Notes - Links of interest, with limited commentary.
  • Office - From the desk…usually boring.
  • Photo - Pictures taken with a cheap camera or phone. Could be a fish I caught in my net or it may be someone else’s fish I caught on my camera. Either way, with captions the posts here should be more fun than the “Office” stuff.
  • Spamroll - Almost everything from the now defunct blog internet security blog Spamroll.com.
  • Thoughtmarket - Almost everything from my old personal blog at Thoughtmarket.com.

Reading Lists

The reading lists (or blogrolls, if you will) aren’t very long, probably because I actually read most everything on the list, every day. Any more would be too much, and sources will come and go over time. The lists are divided between the business, finance and technology subjects (the “necessary evils”) and the truly important stuff (the fishing blogs).

Style

  • The CSS response: This theme is based on Skimmed Milk version 1.0 http://thortz.com/skimmed-milk/ by Thortz, which was based on White As Milk version 1.6 http://www.azeemazeez.com/stuff/themes/ by Azeem Azeez http://www.azeemazeez.com, which was based WordPress Default http://wordpress.org/, itself based on Kubrick by Michael Heilemann http://binarybonsai.com/kubrick/. The CSS, XHTML and design is released under GPL: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php.
  • The Michael response: Skimmed Milk cleaned up a lot of small errors in White as Milk, but I preferred the latter’s color scheme. I made template tweaks for things like tags, categories, and menu labels, as well as 404 notifications, plug-in link points, etc. I’m no expert, and the changes take/took just minutes. Nonetheless, it serves its intended purpose, simplicity - feel free to copy the css. End note: the name “Organic 2% Milk” was suitable and timely - slightly more work added to the previous theme, plus that is what I was drinking at the time.

Miscellaneous

  • There’s a Google Custom Search Engine for this weblog available here, just in case someone doesn’t like using the obvious and convenient search box on the sidebar or are inclined to only use search tools that also display paid advertising. I’m working on harvesting every outbound link from here and creating another search engine that crosses all those sources as well.
  • The site feed was translated using Yahoo! Pipes (which I would recommend tinkering with around beer o’clock). You’ll need a reader that can handle such things (like kanji) - the feeds were tested in Firefox and rendered fine. Languages are as follows:
    - Español
    - Deutsch
    - Français
    - Italiano
    - Portuguese
    - ??????
    - ???
    - ??