A few weeks ago I wrote about the AEA survey that ranked Boulder as the #2 CyberCity in the US.  I suggested that this was misleading since #1 was "San Jose/Silicon Valley", which is not actually a city.  If you’d decomposed "San Jose/Silicon Valley" into the various cities that actually make up Silicon Valley, they would have been #1 through at least #5 and Boulder would have been #6.

Ever since I’m moved to Boulder in 1995, the "what do we need to do to be more like Silicon Valley" meme pops up ever regularly.  I’ve spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, have lots of friends and colleagues there, and have made (and continue to make) lots of investments there.  It’s a special and unique place. 

Over the years, I’ve asserted that Colorado has no business trying to "be like" Silicon Valley.   There are lots of things that Colorado can learn from Silicon Valley and a lot of them are happening / being created in Boulder right now.  However, it’s a great example of the cliche of "applying best practices" (where Boulder is learning from and applying the best practices of Silicon Valley) rather than strict emulation.

This came up in an interview with me on ColoradoBizTV that just went up today. I have a three minute riff on why "Boulder, Denver, and Colorado in general ebbs and flows with Silicon Valley envy and that’s an error" and why "the Boulder entrepreneurial scene is as healthy as it’s ever been."

I’ve ranted about the TSA plenty on this blog – I travel a lot and find dealing with the TSA one of the more amusing experiences in my life.  So does Patrick Smith of Ask the Pilot – one of my favorite travel blogs.  In a recent post headlined Propped up by a culture of fear, TSA has become a bureaucracy with too much power and little accountability. Where will the lunacy stop? he discusses the case of "pilot re-screening" and the "dangerous airline cutlery."

If you follow me on twitter, you know I’ve been whining about the lack of sun in Homer this year.  We’ve been here for a week and didn’t really see the sun until today.  A few days ago I promised "the sun" (via twitter) that I’d blog about it and put up a picture if it ever decided to show up here.

We still have plenty of clouds obscuring the mountains across Kachemak Bay (which makes the sun reflect in strange and unusually ways), but when I returned home from my run Amy was jumping up and down shouting "the sun is out, the sun it out" confirming that it had finally made an appearance.

It wasn’t very cloudy last night when I took this picture at midnight, but the sun was hiding near the horizon.  Amy was asleep so she missed this.  Note all the lights on the Homer Spit and the snow on the mountains in the background.  Pretty. 

As I was contemplating how to optimally pack my liquids and gels into a single quart sized ziplock bag I came across an article in the NY Times titled Bag Helps Laptop Pass Air Security.  Apparently, the TSA has been testing new luggage as a result of an RPF they sent out recently.  They won’t certify these bags – rather they’ll encourage manufacturers to adopt a universal logo akin to "this bag is checkpoint friendly."

So here’s what’s going to happen.  50+ luggage / backpack / briefcases are going to appear on the market that say "this bag is checkpoint friendly" on them.  They’ll work for a little while.  Then 200+ knockoffs will come on the market at 50% lower price points.  All of them will say "this bag is checkpoint friendly."  Half of them won’t work.  It’ll now take even more time to get through security because TSA will have to manually check all of these bags. 

I’m sure this will settle itself down quickly into a nice routine, just like the Clear line has in Denver.  Oh – wait – the Clear line in Denver no longer really gets me to the front of the line anymore because the TSA decided it shouldn’t.

Are there any airports left in the US that haven’t been completely infected by TSA procedures?  I know of a small part of one major airport.  Any others out there?  Leave a comment, but not before you buy a new bag for your laptop.

Here’s an interesting stat.  The Rocky Mountain News states that Boulder ranks No. 2 among ‘cybercities’ with 230 high-tech works per 1,000.  This is according to a study by the American Electronics Association.

The top five are:

• San Jose/Silicon Valley: 286
• Boulder: 230
• Huntsville, AL: 188
• Durham, NC: 156
• Washington: 132

It’s a strange list, especially since San Jose/Silicon Valley isn’t actually a city!  Just more proof that you can come up with a list for pretty much any measurement you want.  I wonder if this counts all the folks on laptops hanging out all day at Trident.

Hey – if the Boulder Daily Camera (our local paper) can put this up on their web site, so can I.

Gotta love this place.

My Q2 vacation came quickly on the heels of my Q1 vacation (since I didn’t manage to take my Q1 vacation until April).  Amy and I spent a delightful week in Positano, Italy with David and Jil Cohen.  This was their big vacation before David goes heads down all summer on TechStars so it was great fun to hang out, relax, and enjoy the magic of some of the best Italy has to offer.

After a week of vacation bliss, we took the train from trash-filled Naples (what a dump) to Milan where we met up with Jeff and Judy Herman for a week on Lake Como.  We arrived to a two day monsoon.  While Lake Como is beautiful when the sun is out, we all quickly got cabin fever.  Amy and I decided to bail and come home a few days early; everyone else decamped to Milan to wander around the city.

Since I had just been on a week off the grid, I stayed connected this trip.  I got plenty of downtime yet kept up with everything going on.  I did take a vacation from blogging which was nice.  Hopefully it will translate into more pith and creativity.  I ran a ton, played tennis and swam every day in Positano, so I’m officially feeling ready for my June marathon.  I did manage to counterbalance any potential weight loss with the omnipresent gelato.

My partners Jason Mendelson and Ryan McIntyre have written a long post on the Foundry Group web site titled What We Learned By Moving To Boulder.  If you live in Boulder and want to get a view on how they think about this place 18 months after moving here, take a look.  If you aren’t from Boulder and wonder "Why Boulder?" (which is a question I’ve heard over and over again the last dozen years), here is Jason and Ryan’s perspective.  And yes – last winter really sucked.

In response to my Planes, Trains, and Automobiles post, I’ve already gotten several questions along the lines of "how do you deal with our insane air travel system" such as:

How do you keep your sanity traveling to the east coast? I’ve just spent the past 6 weeks traveling to New York from Denver and it’s either: get up at 4am only to waste an entire day traveling or take the red-eye.

For starters, west coast travel is much easier than east coast travel.  Denver to SF is about the same amount of effort as Boston to NY (+1 hour each way which means you get up a little earlier.)  I regularly get to 8:30am meetings in SF or Palo Alto when leaving from Denver on the 6am flight.

East coast travel is trickier.  I’ve found the best solution is to take the later afternoon / early evening flight (4pm – 6pm) out of DIA to LGA.  I get to my hotel between midnight and 1am and sleep until 30 minutes before my first meeting.

Now for the magic.  I don’t try to work on airplanes. Instead, I sleep.  I get settled in as quickly as I can and go lights out until I wake up.  Most of the time I’ll make it the entire flight.  If the flight is more than three hours, when I wake up I read a book rather than whip out my laptop (unless I’m going cross-country or to Europe, at which point I’ll do some work.)

The extra two hours of sleep makes all the difference (at least to me) on the travel.  On west coast travel, I have a 30 minute "transition wakeup" (where am I, who am I, what am I, what is that taste in my mouth?) but once I wake up, brush my teeth, and have a large coffee, I’m good to go.  On east coast travel, I get to the hotel, take a shower, and crawl right into bed.  Wham – deep sleep.

I didn’t used to be able to sleep like this on planes (and know a lot of people who claim they can’t.)  I don’t buy this – I trained myself to do this.  When I started this approach I used to sit – wide awake – for two hours doing nothing except relaxing.  I quickly got bored of myself and feel asleep.  As Amy likes to remind me – most of us are so sleep deprived that it’s actually easy to fall asleep if you let yourself (unless you are truly an insomniac – in which case you might actually fool yourself.)

So – if you see me asleep on a plane, please don’t wake me up to say hi!  Just go to sleep.