For all you 24 fans out there, my now excruciatingly long time friend and third Feld Technologies employee Shawn Broderick (aka Mr. Doody) has a brilliant photo comparison up on his blog.  In fact, it’s so brilliant I’ll just steal it and post it here.

I’ll try to limit my overwhelmingly cynical political points of view to my Twitter stream, but I doubt I’ll be successful.  Maybe Jack Bauer will be out of jail in time help us all.

I spent 45 minutes this morning desmegmafying three new Xbox 360 controllers, three new Wii controllers, a Wii charger, and a bunch of videogames.  Thanks to everyone that suggested Wii and Xbox 360 games to me – BioShock ate my morning (after I got the controllers out of their packages.)

My experience reminded me of Mark Cuban’s brilliant post from 2006 titled Seagate Leaves me bloody…  My right index finger is now sliced, my left palm has a cut on it, and my left index finger is still bleeding a little – five hours later.  But I’ve liberated the controllers from their plastic jail, inserted the batteries, and gotten my butt kicked at Wii Table Tennis.

When I looked at the damage I had done (including scraping up over 50% of the brand new controllers I’d gotten, including one particularly gruesome two inch long scratch in the black plastic of a brand new Xbox controller), I pondered the pile of crumpled and useless plastic that will take 154,792 years to decompose.

I spent some time on Wikipedia trying to figure out the type of evil plastic that is used for this stuff and got bogged down in common plastics and their usages.  I now know more about polycarbonates, polystyrene, and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene than I thought I’d ever want to know.

Why, oh why, do consumer products companies insist on using this shit?  There has got to be a better way.  I’m sure I would have done better at Wii Table Tennis if I hadn’t damaged my hands.

I’m looking for a new running log.

I’ve been using Cool Running as my log.  They were bought by Active sometime last year.  Last month Active discontinued Cool Running and migrated all the data to Active Trainer.  I was optimistic that Active had thought this through, as I like the Active folks and think they’ve generally done a great job integrating their acquisitions.

To my great disappointment, I discovered that Active Trainer stinks.  Cool Running was 95% of what I wanted to track my running.  Active Trainer is maybe 50%.  Clunky UI, missing data, hard to get at summary information, and a generally crummy user experience.

Oh well.  I’ve been on both sides of buying and selling companies (and web services) and I know that sometimes transitions don’t work out as planned for end users.  In this case I’m too impatient to wait a year for Active to get their service to parity with Cool Running, even if they chose to.  So – it’s time to look for a new running log.

Now – I might not find one.  I might end up staying with Active Trainer.  But I’m going to play the field and see what my options are.

I’m looking for suggestions from any runners (or other folks that track their workouts online) out there.

One of Kenai and Brooks’ favorite thing to do is to destroy any dog toy we give them.  Apparently Micah Baldwin’s dogs have the same tendencies (as does my brothers dog Nevada, although she only goes after the dog squeaky things inside the toys.)  I guess most dogs enjoy death and destruction of toys (presumably that’s one of the drivers for the rapidly expanding dog toy industry – one of my 2008 predictions is that the dog toy industry will surpass the cat toy industry.)  To address this issue, we decided to get Kenai and Brooks a giant granite brick for Christmas this year.

I’ve worked with my good friend Heidi Roizen at Mobius Venture Capital since 1999.  Heidi transitioned out of her role this year and has decided to do something completely different.

When someone leaves a VC firm, they usually say something like they are "following their passion."  I accept that the passion of some ex-VCs is to run a software company, but it’s not much of a "passion shift."

As long as I’ve known Heidi, she’s been passionate about her weight.  Or rather – passionate about getting rid of some of it.  Most of our serious discussions were on a walk either at the Dish or around her neighborhood.  So – I wasn’t that surprised when she told me about her idea for SkinnySongs.

I came up with the idea for SkinnySongs because I wanted great music to keep me motivated about losing weight and getting in shape — and I couldn’t find any. I wanted fun but empowering music, like Pink’s 18 Wheeler or Carrie Underwood’s Before He Cheats, but I wanted the lyrics to be about taking charge of my weight and getting in shape. And I didn’t want preachy or corny music — I wanted first class, radio-hit-quality music to listen to while walking, running, hiking, working out, driving — even while just sitting around if that’s when I need to hear it.

Heidi’s inner rock star is finally coming out.  She wrote all the lyrics on her first SkinnySongs album.  The composer and producer for the majority of the songs is David Malloy, a heavyweight in the music industry with over 40 number one hits to his credit as a producer and two Grammy nominations as a songwriter.   The artists are the real deal (Tania Hancheroff, Kaleo Sallas, Larkin Gayl, Susan Ashton, and Rachelle Byrne).  And the whole project was executive-produced by George Daly, CEO of About Records, whom Heidi first met through my other partners Ryan McIntyre and Jason Mendelson. 

SkinnySongs works great – Heidi has dropped a ton of weight and looks awesome.  Pick up the music and a couple of t-shirts for post-holiday ‘resolution support’ gifts for your friends that will soon be dieting again after the endless holiday food.

Ok – it’s actually a Keynote presentation.  The Onion demonstrates their deep insight once again with the article Gore Wins Oscar, Nobel Peace Prize For Slide-Show Presentation.  I’m so pleased that someone has finally gotten recognition for their mastery of presentation technology (thanks Dave.)

There are a handful of hysterical VC Holiday Cards.  I think the best one is The Adventures of Gary Snoman (produced by Blueprint Ventures.)

Gary travels the world this year and helps us understand how VCs think about different cultures (or at least loads us up with a bunch of new cliches from the past year.)  The deleted scenes are a nice add on – watch Gary struggle in Paris and abuse his assistant for no good reason.  Gary’s 2005 and 2006 adventures are also available.  To the gang at Blueprint – nicely done! 

I hate buzzwords.  They make me nauseous.  I just got an email to the link of The Office 2008 Web 2.0 Buzzword Forecast which includes such beauties as search moptimization, wombagging, friendiligence, converstations, social mediation, we-bargaining, greenlashing, shamsparency, credlining, facelifting, blog groveling, world war 2.0, microtubing, and lipsmacking.  I’m going to go lipsmack about buzzwords after I go vomit in my carbon neutral bathroom.  (Thanks Greg.)

Just in time for the annual presentation of The Nutcracker, I can now get my very own Hillary Nutcracker without having to go to the ballet (thanks Dave.)