I knew it would happen – it was just a matter of time.  Amy’s blog finally ate her brain.  It’s 4:30pm and she’s in her bathrobe continuing to work on her blog.  Amy’s a writer and it’s fun to watch her get completely absorbed by something.

In particular, I love it when she jumps up and down and rants at stuff.  She usually does this in close proximity to something she’s reading, especially the NY Times.  Today she wrote about a quote from Evelyn Husband and an editorial from Salman Rushdie.  And yes – she was jumping up and down and screaming rude things when she told me about it – she moderated herself for her blog.

In addition to being willing to talk about politics and current events (something I rarely express an opinion on other than to hand out copied of Atlas Shrugged to people), she’s a much better photographer than me.  If you want to get a feel for our place in Homer, check out her Alaska 2005 pictures.  Moose or gulls anyone?

P.S. If you are too lazy to read Atlas Shrugged, try the Atlas Shrugged (Cliffs Notes).  Yo – Amy! – time to go for a run on the Homer Spit.

I’ve always had poor impulse control when it comes to buying electronic toys.  Amazon hasn’t helped, as I can satisfy my cravings with a single click.  While I was listening to Daily Source Code from a few days ago on my run, I heard Adam Curry talking about how the Amazon affiliate feeds from the ad on his site for a Senseo HD7810/65 Single Serve Coffee Machine was making him enough dough to buy his whole family a cup of joe each day ($300–ish / month).  The combination of partially subsidized toys, daily coffee, and the idea that all my really cool toys have a story inspired me to start a “toy of the month” category on my blog. 

July’s toy is a Roomba 4210 Discovery Floorvac Robotic Vacuum Cleaner from iRobot.  Amazon delivered two of them to my house in Homer on Wednesday and I set them up the other day (one upstairs / one downstairs).  We named them after our dogs (Denali is the upstairs one / Kenai is the downstairs one).  We had an old model at our house in Boulder which – like the one Tom Evslin has blogged about – would do its thing and then eventually run out of batteries and fall asleep wherever it happened to be at the time.  No longer – the new ones are super smart and come with a docking station.  When they get tired, they simply find their way back to their docks and recharged themselves (and do a funky robot wiggle dance to get lined up to go into the dock.)

The best part of getting my new robotic pets is watching Amy play with them.  She misses our golden retrievers a lot (ok – I do also) and she’s obsessed with vacuuming so what could be better than watching my wife watch a robotic vacuum cleaner do its thing (very effectively – I might add)?  She even jumped up and down with happiness when the little blue dirt detect light came on and Kenai spent more time getting the dirt I tracked in cleaned up.

iRobot will go down in my history as one of those companies I was too stupid to invest in.  I’ve had plenty of chances to invest in successful companies that I’ve passed on.  David Cowan has a great list of deals Bessemer chose not to do (their anti-portfolio) that went on to be huge winners.  The phrase “Robotic Vacuum Cleaner? – c’mon” comes to mind.  However, I don’t have any excuses here – Colin Angle – the CEO of iRobot – is a frat brother and a friend (when we are old and gray, at least I’ll still be able to say “I was Colin’s pledge trainer.”)  Colin even called me for advice when they were raising a round a few years ago and said “hey Brad – would you guys have any interest in taking a look?”  I thought to myself – “robotic vacuum cleaners – now, my partners will NEVER support me on that one – remember Feld, you’re a software guy” and – after a short discussion with several of them – decided to pass on taking a serious look.

Dumb dumb dumb.  iRobot has sold over 1 million vacuum cleaners, has announced Scooba – the robotic floor washer (er – mop) and – well – is just kicking ass as a company.  Congrats Colin and gang.  Maybe I can contribute a little to helping keep the world cleaner by helping sell a few robots. If you have poor impulse control, a wife that likes to watch robots vacuum, or just want to play with a robot (it comes with a serial port and the rumor is that an API will be released soon), buy yourself a Roomba.

I’m an investor in Gold Systems.  I’m an investor in Rally Software.  I like both companies a lot.  So – it was fun to catch a thread from Jason Groshart – one of the engineers at Gold Systems – who is working on Gold’s Password Reset product (inexpensive enterprise speech-based password reset based on Microsoft Speech Server).  Gold is using Rally Software’s Agile Development Environment for running their software development process.

Jason has written a series of posts about his experience.  His recent ones talk about what’s working and what’s not working (and how he suggests addressing the stuff that isn’t working), as well as how he is thinking about the Rally Process Flow.

For those of you who know how much money is wasted by companies trying to “get feedback from their customers”, you know it doesn’t get better than this.  Raw, real time, lead user feedback out in the open for all to see.  Jason knows that by doing this he’ll likely impact (positively) Rally’s product, so it’ll become even more effective for him over time.  And – Rally gets rich user feedback.

It’s especially fun to wake up to it randomly in NewsGator.

Joshua from del.icio.us just commented on my for:bradfeld post about tagging things in del.icio.us for me.  Joshua has changed how the “for:“ prefix works and the right way to tag something for me in del.icio.us is to use for:bfeld as the tag.

I’ve gotten some good stuff from folks over the past week – tag away and send me stuff you want me to look at.  If you don’t know what I like or am interested in, er, um, read my blog?  Or – read Amy’s – she gives plenty of hints also (plus she talks about how robots entertain her – what more could a nerd like me want in a woman??!)

One of the treasures of Homer is our local movie theater.  It’s located on the corner of Pioneer and Main (how fitting) and is an old single seating theater.  We get two movies a week with three showings a day (3, 6, and 8:30).  The movies change every Friday so there’s a moment of excitement late Thursday night or early Friday when we drive (or run, or walk) by the marquis after the movie change.  The popcorn is fresh and parmesan cheese is 25 cents extra.

Last week’s movies were Star Wars III and The Longest Yard.  I punted Star Wars III since I’d already seen it in Boulder (and once was enough for this one – how disappointing) so Don and I went to The Longest Yard last night (gotta get it done by Thursday or you’re hosed).  The girls (Amy and Christine) had no interest so they stayed home and played with dolls or something.

Adam Sandler’s remake of the 1974 Burt Reynolds original version was great.  It got predictably lousy reviews, but that’s just because the reviewers don’t appreciate the artistry of a repressed Jewish comedian in jail pretending that he is an ex-NFL superstar who got busted for shaving points, turned into a loser, and got tossed in jail for drunk driving. Sore stomach’s from 25 belly laughs and a pair of big smiles greeted Amy and Christine at Cafe Cups for dinner after the movie.

Tonight’s movie: Mr. & Mrs. Smith which we’ve already seen, but tonight is a 6pm movie night, so we’ll get to enjoy my namesake demonstrating some studly behavior while fantasizing about his girlfriend / movie-wife.

Nick Bradbury put up a post earlier this week about FeedDemon going to a subscription model.  FeedDemon was acquired by NewsGator several months ago and – as part of NewsGator’s effort to “normalize” (and simplify) our product sales approach, we started the process of shifting FeedDemon to subscription pricing to match up with NewsGator’s pricing model.  This was in advance of a point release of FeedDemon (1.6) which will have the NewsGator synchronization engine fully integrated along with a other features. 

None of us expected 100 comments within 48 hours.  A few clear themes emerged from the comments.  A group of us, including me, Nick, Greg, and JB, had several long conversations over the past few days to both synthesize the comments as well as figure out the most effective and user-responsive approach going forward.

The result was a significant change in the way FeedDemon will work if someone’s subscription runs out – most notably – the software will continue to work, just with some of the subscription-oriented features disabled.  We also sharpened our thinking and point of view on the separation in the extended NewsGator product line between the software components and the service components.  Fortunately, we have plenty of models to build on (e.g. Symantec, McAfee) so we aren’t reinventing anything; however, we made progress getting clarity around how this works across all of our products.

The feedback to Nick’s second announcement has been uniformally positive.  It’s great to have users that have strong points of view, even when they are different (or of a much greater magnitude) than what you expected.  As a result of Nick’s blog, we were able to engage in a rapid, very public, and constructive feedback loop.  Assuming we are successful listeners, I’d hope this will lead to even better solutions for our customers.

Of course, there are several interesting sociological things at play here.  Historically, if users didn’t like what a manufacture of a product was doing (even if they loved the product), they were usually limited to one of two choices: (a) suck it up and live with it or (b) stop using the products.  The tempo and dynamics of blogging clearly has impact on these communication patterns in new and exciting ways, which will logically impact how products get created and evolve – hopefully to incorporate even more user feedback. 

New West Network just started up an Aspen-based blog.  If you are a fan of Aspen (and I know a bunch of you New Yorkers out there are because I can’t manage to get a reservation in any of the good restaurants there at Christmas-time without pulling strings), take a look.  Aspen joins the other New West sites for Missoula, Boulder, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque / Santa Fe, and Northern Idaho.  There’s nothing up for Homer Alaska yet, but maybe I can convince Jonathan to come visit.

I woke up one day (yesterday) and all of a sudden I’m using Skype all the time (including SkypeOut).  What changed?  First, I’m at my house in Alaska and my habits got shaken up.  Second, I installed my Vonage phone so I could have a 303 area code while I’m up here (and just to play around with Vonage) so I decided that while I was at it, I should try Skype as a phone and see how it compared.  But – most importantly – the Skype for Outlook plug-in hit beta. 

Holy shit – this is cool.  It works exactly as you’d want it to.  I hate talking on the phone, but it’s a side effect of being a VC.  I live in two apps – Outlook (on the left monitor) and Firefox (on the right monitor).  Suddenly I’ve got a little magic toolbar that lets me call people via Skype by looking up their info in Outlook.  Perfect.  And – it works.  $12 from Paypal (10 euros) and I’m set with long distance for a long time.

Now – all I need is a headset with a microphone that integrates with my fancy speakers.

My friends Don and Christine Springer went bear watching today (I stayed home and worked – Brad is a dull boy.)  They took a float plane from Smokey Bear Air in Homer to the Alaska Homestead Lodge (45 minutes away).  We did the trip last year and had a great time with the hosts – James and Shelia Isaak.  Pictures follow:

The Flight

Real Alaska Mountains

The Bear (Yes – It’s Close)