At my last Boulder Community Hours (or Random Day, or Bunker Hours, or whatever the latest branding of “office hours” is), I spent 15 minutes with Joel Gratz who runs the great site Colorado Powder Forecast. 

Even though we only spent 15 minutes together, Joel sent me a nice comment:

“Office hours is such an amazing resource – many thanks for making yourself and others available to the community.  This must be a unique concept in the professional, non-academic world! “

Thanks Joel!  And if you are a skier in Colorado, this is a must read site either by email, RSS, or Joel’s twitter stream.  And Bunker Hours for me for 1/26 still has plenty of slots in case you are interested.

But wait, there’s more.  Josh Larson, a TechStars graduate now working at NewsGator, also writes a great blog titled Colorado Weather.  Josh has an uncanny ability to predict the weather on the front range better than – er – most weathermen.  It could be that he used to work at the NOAA Climate Prediction Center – or maybe he’s just that good.  Apparently, Ari Newman, another TechStars graduate and CEO/founder of Filtrbox asked Joel if he was more accurate than Josh.  Joel graciously replied that they are good friends.

But wait, there’s more.  When on a long, cold run with Kelly Taylor of The Fuel Team (now owned by PR Newswire), he told me about the new Vail iPhone app named Realski that is an augmented reality trail map of Vail Mountain.  Since I haven’t skied on Vail recently, I haven’t been able to test it out but if you are an iPhone user on Vail, try it and tell me how it rates.

Update: The Boulder Daily Camera wrote an article today that lists Five iPhone apps that will help you plan skiing, snowboarding trips.

For the last three years I’ve been laboring to help propagate the myth that it doesn’t snow much in Boulder and when it does it’s 55 degrees the next day and the snow all goes away.  After getting back from a week of vacation on the beach in Mexico on Friday and now being on day five of the thermometer hovering around zero, tons of very frozen snow on the ground, and no chance that I’m going to contemplate heading outside for a run, I’ve decided to call bullshit on myself.

It snows here. Plenty.  It’s a really fun snow.  Beautiful, overwhelming storms that roll in, dump a foot, or two, or even three. (the record at my house – 48 inches). 

Sometimes it’s really cold, but it’s a “dry cold”, it’s not windy, and it you wear the right number of layers, a hat, and gloves it’s actually kind of fun.  Some crazy people (ahem – moi) even like to go for a trail run while it’s snowing, as long as it’s not zero degrees outside.  For example, the view from my house yesterday morning after I left my car running for a while to warm up.

It does eventually warm up and get very, very sunny.  Then all the snow and ice goes away, unless you live near Mapleton, in which case you are screwed for a while, or in Eldorado Canyon, where you actually prefer the snow and ice doesn’t go away so people have a harder time coming to visit you. 

The snow usually starts in December, although a mid-October snowstorm of a foot or more isn’t unusual.  But that early one is just a tease since it goes away in 24 hours when it’s 55 degrees.  The December one sticks around for a while because of the temperature.  And the angle of the sun.  And the next storm that comes before it all melts.  On the bright side, it usually means the ski slopes are getting hammered also.

It’s only really cold in December and January.  Well, sometimes February.  And occasionally March.  And then it really snows just to make sure spring skiing is awesome.  But by now it is actually getting warm on a regular basis so the snow comes and goes.  And it’s no big deal, unless you live near Mapleton.

From 1997 to 2005 there really was very little snow here in the winter.  The people that have been living here for 30+ years tell me that’s because there was a major drought going on.  When I moved her in the winter of 1995, I experienced two years like the past three.  But 1997 to 2005 dimmed my memory, along with all the talk about global warming.  Well – apparently the drought is over.

I’m really fucking cold this morning (-8) although my weather app tells me it’ll get up to 20 degrees today.  Oh goody.

I’ve felt unsettled since we landed in DC on Saturday.  During my run this afternoon on the Washington Mall, I decided to attribute some of it to the redeye I took from Seattle mid-week and some of it to Washington DC itself.

Let’s start with the redeye.  I’m 43.  When I was in my 20’s and early 30’s, I regularly took redeye’s (often as frequently as once a week).  Five hours of sleep on the plane due to my superpower of being able to sleep from wheels up to wheels down, a quick shower, an extra long toothbrushing session, and I was good for a full day.  Wednesday night I took JetBlue from Seattle to Boston.  Five solid hours of sleep followed by a ride to my hotel.  I brushed my teeth and then crawled into bed at 8am for a little more sleep.  I woke up at 1pm, had a meeting, and then went back to sleep until 5pm.  After dinner I went to sleep around 10 and slept until 7.  I felt like shit when I woke up, had a full day, and crashed again at 10pm Friday night.  It’s Sunday and I finally don’t feel tired.  Yesterday, I sent my assistant Kelly a note that said “Don’t ever let me fly on a redeye again.”

Yesterday was a pretty day in DC – a little cold, but sunny.  Today has been beautiful – in the 60s and sunny.  Amy and I are here mostly to go to the Supreme Court tomorrow and hear the oral arguments on re Bilski.  Yesterday was a mellow walk around day with dinner with college friends at Vidalia (mildly ironic since I’m allergic to onions).  Today, we went to the National Gallery and the National Museum of Natural History – if you are in DC and you are an art lover you should absolutely make time to see the Meyerhoff Collection – it is amazing.  We also got lucky and saw Leo Villareal’s Multiverse light sculpture before it was removed.  All I remember from the National Museum of Natural History is the passel of children and the dinosaurs.

Now for the other half of what is making me unsettled.  As I ran on the Washington Mall I had chunks of time with the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial.  Both invoke deep American pride – I find that the best description of the emotion I felt while taking a short break from my run and staring up at Abe Lincoln.  However, something just felt wrong.  DC feels too busy, the restaurants are too full, there is too much traffic, and just too much stuff. I remembered thinking about the office buildings between Dulles Airport and DC – virtually all of them were filled with companies that generate massive amounts of money from the federal government.  Several of the buildings undergoing renovation (such as the Hoover Building) had big pictures of Barak Obama on the signs talking about the scope of the renovations.  I started comparing DC to several of the other capital cities, such as London and Paris, and realized that DC is all about the business of government, whereas the other capitals that I’m familiar with are much broader in scope.

Between the damage I did to myself with the redeye and my sense of being overwhelmed by “the business of government”, I think I need to go hide in the mountains for a few days.

At dinner tonight we started telling miserable airplane travel stories.  Everyone has a least one (or 7,321) so it’s fun to hear some of the really abysmal ones, especially the night before I head to the airport to catch an early morning flight.

We were also talking about various philosophies of life and how to deal with difficult stuff.  After a while the conversation circled back to air travel.  And then I heard the best line of the night.

“When I travel I pretend I’m luggage.  From the moment I set foot in the airport, my expectation is that I’ll be treated no better than my luggage gets treated.  As a result, my expectations are so low that any little bit of happiness and politeness brings me great pleasure.”

I laughed out loud.  It was said with a sardonic grin, so the backdrop was framed appropriately.  There was a quiet pause after my laughter.  And then I pondered it – and thought how incredibly right this approach was.

Rather than bitch endlessly about the misery of our air travel experiences, let’s all spend November pretending we are luggage.  The only goal of the plane is to get us from point A to point B.  I guess there are circumstances where this won’t happen, but in most cases we’ll eventually get there.  Time doesn’t really matter to a piece of luggage, nor does comfort.  Politeness?  I’ve shoved many a piece of luggage into a space that it didn’t fit without even saying “excuse me.”  Oh – and I’ve put my smelly feet on my luggage many, many times.

In addition to pretending I’m luggage, I’m also going to make sure I use my super power on every plane flight this month. Luggage is very good at sleeping on planes, as am I.  Luggage sleepers unite.

See you at the airport.

In case you were wondering what the Boulder Snowstorm resulted in (so far – it’s still coming down) at my house in Eldorado Springs, here you go!

So there is no ambiguity, my dog Kenai loves it.

And – no surprise, so does Brooks!

The Huffington Post launched their Denver channel today (but I’m going to call it the Boulder/Denver channel because it’s really both.)  And they launched with a bunch of great, substantive stuff.  Following is a sample of some of the entrepreneurial articles.

Boulder: You’re Not in Kansas Anymore …:  Kimbal Musk, the CEO of OneRiot and co-owner of The Kitchen has a great essay reflecting on what’s he has learned about Boulder in his seven years living here.

Why I Love Startups: Holly Hamann, the co-founder and VP Marketing for TheBlogFrog, talks about why she loves working in the Boulder startup community.

Boulder/Denver New Tech Meetup Helps Entrepreneurial Community: Brett Green, the Chief Marketing Officer for Oxstein Design Labs, explains the Boulder Denver New Tech MeetUp (BDNT) phenomenon that was founded by and is stewarded by Robert Reich, one of the co-founders of OneRiot.

And, as a special bonus, the old school Denver Business Journal has a fun article that I’m in titled Down on the FarmVille about my addiction to FarmVille.

I had a great flight home from LA on Southwest Airlines on Friday.  My boycott on United has been going pretty well, but Amy and I are flying on it tomorrow to New York as it seems to be the only reasonable way to get from Denver to New York.  I’m pessimistic.  Plus I have a nasty cold so that’ll just make it more enjoyable.

But – I digress.  When I got off the plane I went to the bathroom.  As I lined up in my little stall next to 10 of my newest friends, I noticed that five of them had either iPhone’s or BlackBerry’s out and were typing as they went about their business.  Now – I’ll admit to doing this occasionally, but in this particular case I was kind of stunned by the density of the juxtaposition of peeing and smartphones.

It dawned on me that while most were probably checking their email (it’s really super urgent you know), a few might be tweeting their location – or – better yet – checking in with Foursquare (“DIA Terminal C Men’s Bathroom”).  Yeah – that sounds kind of weird.   I’m betting there isn’t an app for that.  Yet.

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Some folks from the Boulder startup community came together last August to see who could eat the most sushi. I participated in the Sushi Regurge, but (as I promised Amy) stopped once I was full. Actually, I didn’t stop when I was full, I stopped when I couldn’t choke down piece number 55. 

While that was going on, a couple guys who met at Boulder Startup Weekend 2 were over on the side catching up and intelligently observing rather than participating in Sushi Regurge. After realizing they both started out their careers working for nonprofits, they started discussing how they hadn’t volunteered at all recently. Being good techies, they whipped out their iPhones and searched the App Store for "volunteer"  only to find only some apps for Tennessee Volunteers fans. They looked around at the startup talent in the room, busily wolfing down sushi, and said, "This should exist. I bet we could build it."

What followed was a year-long community project involving over 100 volunteers and zero budget. Applying guerrilla startup tactics, they leveraged many parts of Boulder’s startup community: they went to the iPhone Dev Camp, PodCamp, and BarCamp, got lots of help from the crew at TechStars, listened to feedback at Boulder Open Coffee, got help and direction from EFCO and the Community Foundation, and presented at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup. The result was a supportive community who continually stepped up to help when needed and a core team of volunteers who met most Tuesday nights through the spring and summer to write code and build the "business."

The result is the SnapImpact and their iPhone app.  Their mantra – "make doing good easy" – is pleasantly consistent with Boulder’s startup community.  Great job everyone!

Dave Jilk, my first business partner (Feld Technologies) and I have settled into a nice annual tradition of climbing a 14er each August.  This year we climbed three in one day – Mt. Democrat, Mt. Cameron, and Mt. Lincoln.  We started at 6:15am Saturday morning.

By 8:15am we were at the top of Mt. Democrat.

The purists don’t count Mt. Cameron as a 14er since there isn’t enough descent between Mt. Democrat and Mt. Lincoln.  But I count it because by the time you get to the top of Mt. Cameron you definitely feel like you’ve climbed another big mountain.  Plus, I was powered by my TechStars socks.

After 6 hours, we made it back to the bottom.

What an awesome way to spend a Saturday!