Sometimes (actually often) “truth is stranger than fiction.”  Nik Cubrilovic – the founder / CEO of Omindrive – has an incredible post up describing “A November I Will Always Remember.”  As he says in the teaser – “here is a story about cross-feed fuel valves, space heaters and wisdom teeth.”  It’s also about work life balance, unintended consequences, and the value of having a great attitude no matter what is going on around you.

I’m going on a blogging vacation for the rest of the year.  While I’ll be online, I’m going to turn off all the blogging stuff (read and write) until January 1 just to clean out my brain.  While I’d love to tell you about how amazing the new FeedBurner Site Stats are (from the BlogBeat acquisition earlier this year) or the super cool “Personal Network Search” that Lijit has created, it’ll have to wait until 2007.

Enjoy the holidays – I’ll talk to you next year.

As a kid, one of the comic strips I read every day was Family Circus.  It was almost always simple, yet brilliant.  Thanks to my friend Bruce, I now have The Nietzsche Family Circus whenever I want.

For all you 24 junkies out there, we are within 45 days of the beginning of Day 6.  Prequel’s are starting to show up.  Make your reservations now for a TV near you on January 14th and 15th.

Tonight must be the night that I’m pointing to new blogs from friends of mine.  The guys at Collective Intellect have started a corporate blog titled New Media Intelligence.  Two of Collective Intellect’s execs already have blogs (Tim Wolters and Darren Kelly) – this will be a nice add to our collective intellect.  I worked closely with Tim and his partner Don Springer (Collective Intellect’s CEO) at their previous company (Dante Group – acquired by webMethods) – these are super smart dudes worth paying attention to.  They are part of my Intelligence Amplification theme, even though they are not fans of the label.

My long time friend Tom Higley has started a blog called Back in the Saddle.  Tom recently came out of retirement to become CEO of Vault Alliance, a Boulder-based startup that I’m an investor in.

Tom was one of the first people I met when I moved to Boulder.  He was running a company he’d started called NetDelivery.  I introduced Tom / NetDelivery to Charley Lax at Softbank (at the time I was an affiliate of Softbank – this was prior to us starting Softbank Venture Capital) who passed on investing, but I got to know Tom anyway.  NetDelivery struggled and Tom eventually left.  In 1997, as I was working with Raj Bhargava and Niel Robertson to start up Service Metrics, I introduced Tom to Raj and Niel.  Tom became a co-founder / CEO of Service Metrics, which we funded.  Eighteen months later, Exodus bought Service Metrics for $280 million and everyone involved was very happy. 

Tom did his tour of duty at Exodus and then left after about a year.  He took some time off and got deeply involved in music (one of his passions).  In 2000, Raj and I cooked up a new idea (originally called MetaColo) and convinced Tom to come on board and be the startup CEO of Latis.  Tom did this for a year until we hired a CEO (who subsequently didn’t work out, at which point Raj became CEO of Latis, which has become a successful security software company known as StillSecure.) 

At this point, Tom officially retired (at least for a while) to go play and compose music.  We stayed in touch, seeing each other socially, but I left him alone because he was pretty clear that he wasn’t in the mood to run a company again (at least for a while…)

Fast forward to 2005.  Tom was the lead angel investor in a new company called Vault Alliance doing online music-related stuff.  I participated in the round, but leaned on my partners Jason Mendelson and Ryan McIntyre who are musicians (and have become good friends of Tom) since I’m generally clueless about the music business.  Vault has evolved nicely and Tom recently decided to take the helm and become CEO in order to accelerate the growth of the business.

Tom’s super articulate, has a ton of entrepreneurial experience (good and bad), and has a great range of interests.  If you are interested in the intersection between music and the Internet, the Colorado entrepreneurial scene, or just the thoughts of an experienced and enlightened entrepreneur, I expect you’ll like Tom’s blog.

Matt Blumberg has a very important marketing insight about clickstreams that he just wrote about.

This was just too good to pass up.  Click through to see a bigger version on Wikipedia (along with all the copyright noise about this.)

Amy and I were both Reagan youth before becoming liberal weenies.

I got a bunch of great suggestions on online chess from y’all – thanks!  I’ve decided – at least for now – to play on Red Hot Pawn (my handle is bfeld) since I want correspondence style rather than real time.  I hope I’ll be able to avoid the mate in one blunder that Vladimir Kramnik made against Deep Fritz yesterday (thanks to Craig Wilcox for pointing it out.)