I finally found a use for my iPhone – an iPhone Smoothie.  Priceless.  (Thanks Jason.)

Shelfari is running a great competition called Seven Days of Harry Potter.  The grand prize is a signed first edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  First prize is five tickets to see Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix.  Second prize is a broomstick.

As you know from reading this blog I’m a huge reader.  I tend not to be a trendy reader so it surprised even me that I’ve loved the Harry Potter books (as is Amy.)  Today is the day it begins again.  I’m pretty sure I know what I’ll be doing tomorrow.

And – for all you readers out there, the New York Times has a fun article today titled C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success.

Whenever I show up in a powerpoint slide next to Paris Hilton, I’ve got to wonder.

Stan ponders whether Paris has too much attention.  I ponder why I let them cut my hair so short.  Entertainingly, this is not the most popular image in Google Image Search for “paris hilton term sheets.”  For the historians out there, you can go back to the original source of the picture.

Or in a backyard.  Yes – my backyard. 

Amy has the full story on her blog in her post Q: When is a Sprinkler not a Sprinkler?  No one died (including the snake) but some expletives were spoken.  Fortunately I was at my office so all I got was the play by play via the telephone.  If you are a snake lover (or just like red patio furniture), click here for an extensive photo retrospective.

Every now and then I read a book that terrifies me.  The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor is one such book.  I’m not entirely sure why I grabbed it at the bookstore last week – it might have been that I recognized the author’s name (William Langewiesche) or that it wasn’t a very long book. 

I sat outside yesterday afternoon and read it as the sun went down and my dogs played.  As I turned each page, I felt myself getting more and more anxious.  The core story is that of Abdul Qadeer Khan and Pakistan’s rise as a nuclear power, but all the usual characters (Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Russia) are a deep part of the story.  Oh – and the United States.

Langewiesche is an incredible storyteller.  This could easily have been a tedious book.  It moved along more rapidly than most of the junk nuclear crisis fiction crap that I read as part of my mental floss program.  I was also introduced to a new journalistic hero – Mark Hibbs.  Hibbs writes for McGraw-Hill / Platts publications such as Megawatt Daily, Emissions Daily, and Dirty Tankerwire.  While these could be the titles of porn sites, they are most definitely not.  Hibbs has been digging in the nuclear dirt for a long time and some of his discoveries are amazing.  Frightening, but amazing.

This book reinforces that it could all be gone in a flash.  Langewiesche does an awesome job of not being alarmist – he’s very pragmatic – both about the underlying facts around the global nuclear weapon industry as well the challenges of “bad guys” creating an atomic bomb.  At the same time, he shows how utterly chaotic, messed up, and bureaucratic the existing global nuclear infrastructure is and why the dynamics that the US and Russia have unleased on the world – first in World War II – and then during the cold war – is outside our fundamental control (and containment) at this point.

Langewiesche has written a balanced, detailed, riveting, and terrifying book that should be read by any child of the atomic age who hid under his desk at school during an atomic bomb drill.  Wow – boom.  Time to go for a run and enjoy this planet.

If you are obsessed with Facebook, you should be reading Read/WriteWeb this week (as they’ve declared it the week of Facebook.)  The first post is Facebook Week: Analyzing The Facebook Platform and Apps.  Has anyone else noticed that Facebook Inbox doesn’t have a “Forward” (or – in Facebook land – “include more friends on thread”) feature?  What’s with that?

On the heals of my friend Andy Sack giving up his switch over to a Mac, Fred Wilson blogged this morning that he has been unable to fulfill his New Years Resolution of getting rid of Microsoft software from his computing infrastructure.  In Fred’s case, the culprit is Exchange + RIM.  He’s given up on trying to use OSX for work and is going back to Windows / Parallels land.

As Amy likes to say, “why aren’t we still using MS-DOS – it was fine.”  Oh – and as a special bonus, Dave McClure has an awesome post up titled Marketing Facebook Apps: All About the FEED, n00bs!. 

My partner Ryan pointed me to Daniel Rozin’s Wooden Mirror.  It’s a delightful example of humans + technology + art.  All of this stuff is starting to “Blur” together (EricN – hint.)

Andy Sack just gave up on his switch from Microsoft to Apple.  I’ve tried to make this switch twice over the past few years (once randomly, once on the eve of the Vista launch) and ended up in Vista land.  Each time I write about it, I get comments from a bunch of Mac fans saying something to the effect of “Brad – the problem is you – you’re just stupid.”  Ok – whatever.  I think Andy said it better – “I guess I’m just a PC nerd.”  Of course, my iBrick experience (and deep satisfaction with my Dash) just reinforces this.  Now – the big question is whether I plan to get the Xbox 360 or the PS3 version of Harmonix’s Rock Band.

My partner Seth Levine has written an excellent summary of Startup Weekend.  It’s hard for me to fathom that it happened merely a week ago.  As I sit here early this Sunday morning getting ready for a long run into town, I’m wondering how many of the 70 or so people involved with Startup Weekend are still chanting “VoSnap” every hour.  Upon reflection, while the product didn’t ship at the end of the weekend (and still hasn’t – although I’ve seen a working version and it’s pretty cool for a weekend’s worth of work) I think the weekend was a massive success.  I viewed it as a sociological experiment that I’d participate again in a heartbeat.