Summer Glau just totally kicks ass.  So does xkcd – it’s my every other day dose of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

You’ll have to go to xkcd for the rest of them.  Race 2, Race 3, Race 4, and the grand finale – Race 5.  How could anyone possibly thing that it was a good idea to cancel this show.  Weren’t they afraid Summer might kill them?

Yesterday Gist announced that we led a $6.5m Series A financing.   Gist is right in the cross section of our email theme and our implicit web theme.  To better understand this, spend three minutes and watch the video below that explains the cerebrum communicator.

I first met T.A. McCann, the founder/CEO of Gist, at the Defrag Conference.  We helped Eric Norlin create Defrag because we wanted to go hang out with a bunch of smart people and talk / learn about the Implicit Web.  At the beginning of Defrag last fall, T.A. sent me a tweet that he was looking for a running partner during the conference. We ran both days, sweated together, and got to know each other.  I started playing around with Gist shortly thereafter and was immediately hooked.

I look forward to having the Internet directly connected to my brain.  Until then I’ll settle for Gist.  In the mean time, is anyone up for a run at the Glue Conference next week?

Do you remember when the blink tag appeared on the scene?  I do. I was giving a reference on a great CEO I’ve worked with since 1996.  The VC I was talking to and I took a trip down memory lane to 1994 or so and the blink tag came up.  I wondered if it still worked – let’s see.

I’ve always hated the fucking blink tag. It’s so obnoxious.

Well – that’s interesting – it doesn’t render in Windows Live Writer in either the edit or the preview view.   I just looked the blink tag up on Wikipedia.  I love the quote by its inventor – Lou Montulli: he considers it to be “the worst thing I’ve ever done for the Internet."

Follow Up: Blink works in Firefox but doesn’t seem to work in IE 7 or Chrome or Safari on my iPhone.  What’s up with that?  How can we maintain the integrity of the universe (and subsequently the Internet) if the blink tag vanishes?  Any know the story on Opera?

If you watch Lost and are current, you know that the “Variable” is extremely important.  As Daniel Faraday says, “we spend way too much time trying to figure out the constants – we need to pay more attention to the variables.”

On Saturday I was at the Nantucket Conference (the 10th one.)  I did not have a great time getting there (note to self – you get seasick even on the high speed boat thing) but I had a great time hanging out, participating (I was on the VC panel), seeing a bunch of people I hadn’t seen for a while, and meeting some new ones.

At the lobster dinner, Josh Kopelman (who was on the VC panel with me) grabbed a few minutes to go sit in a corner and catch up on Gnip – one of the companies we are both investors in.  A crowd developed and our conversation eventually turned to Work Life Balance. Josh made a comment and provided me with an insight I’d never considered before.  Josh lives in Philly but spends a bunch of time in the bay area and other places.  He was describing his typical “red eye” flight pattern – early Monday morning flight to the bay area, work like a dog, redeye home on Thursday night – chill with the family on Friday through Sunday.  Repeat.  His defined his unit of “work life balance periodicity” as “a week”.  Basically – four days of incredibly intense work followed by three days dominated by time with his family (although plenty of email during these three days.)

I described my tempo (which I’ve blogged about before in The Rhythms of My Life. I have daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, and decadal periodicities, although the quarterly one dominates.  Anyone that knows me knows that I work intensely for long stretches – usually measured in weeks or months – and then crash.  I use my quarterly vacation as my main recovery period (totally disconnected from the world for a week – no phone, no email – just me and Amy somewhere on the planet together.)  I’ve gotten better about not overrunning my limits and “breaking”, although I’ve had two nasty colds this winter that are a signal to me that I’m overdoing it on the quarterly cycle (e.g. I need more rest on a shorter periodicity.)

As part of this discussion, Josh and I realized the huge generational shift that’s going on.  The natural “work cycle” used to be a steady one until you retired.  Once you retired, you ended up having the “play / relax” part of life until you died.  So work cycle begins around 22 (earlier for some ) and continued until somewhere between 55 and 65.  You then retire.  The assumption was that your retirement time will balance our your work time.  Unless you misjudged a critical variable – the date that you die.  If you die at 47, you never got the retirement part.  If you die at 102, you got a whole lot of ~work, which might be good, or might be ~good.

The variable matters a lot. Having the “retirement constant” causes your chance of having healthy work life balance to be low.  If you move the constant into something like weekly, monthly, or quarterly, you’ve got a lot better shot of maintaining the balance, and adjusting things if you get out of balance.

Don’t forget the variables.

I’m a big believer in super powers.  Each human has at least one super power even if they haven’t discovered it yet.

I fly on planes a lot.  While I’m looking forward to my own personal teleportation machine and that damn jetpack that I was promised in my childhood, I survive all the travel I do because of my airplane super power.  I can go to sleep immediately upon sitting down in my seat and sleep until the plane begins its final descent, regardless of the length of the flight.

While not quite as good as a teleportation machine, it’s pretty close.  I’m chronically sleep deprived because of my work and my running, so I get lots of catch up sleep on airplanes.  I also don’t notice the time passing between “start” and “end” of a flight – I just go to sleep in Boston and wake up in Denver.  Or go to sleep in Denver and wake up in Seattle.  Or go to sleep in Seattle and wake up in San Francisco.  Kind of like a teleportation machine.  But without the nasty side effect of potentially leaving body parts in Boston.

As a result of this super power, I can fly on any plane in any seat.  I usually spoil myself with first class (via an upgrade) if the flight is longer than three hours but for anything less I don’t really care one way or the other.  And I have no need for private planes since I simply sleep through the experience.

I’ve got a bunch of other super powers, but this is one of my favorites.  What’s your super power?