Anyone that’s walked (or run) across the Harvard (aka Mass Ave) bridge has noticed little numbers painted on it that end at 364.4 (and one ear).  If you are an MIT grad, you know that in 1958 Oliver Smoot and his frat brothers from Lambda Chi Alpha measured the bridge in “Smoots” (Smoot was 5’7” and was the shortest dude in his pledge class), painting the bridge in intervals of Smoots one fall evening.  This tradition of repainting the bridge has lasted since 1958 and I always get a chuckle in the fall when I end up in Boston and go for a run that crosses a bridge when I hit “69” or “halfway to hell”.

Oliver Smoot retired last week.  His day job was as Vice President at the Information Technology Industry Council (DC-based high-tech trade group).  He also served on the board of the American National Standards Institute, the DC-based association that sets standard units and measurement guidelines. 

Ok – pause and think about it – the guy that became the unit of measure for the Harvard Bridge (a Smoot) has been serving on the board of the American National Standards Institute.  I love it.  NPR had a great interview with Oliver Smoot on Pearl Harbor Day – if you’ve ever walked across the Harvard Bridge, you’ll get a good chuckle out of it.

Smoot is now a serious and endearing measurement.  If you ever wondered how long the Harvard Bridge actually is, Google Calculator will happily provide a translation from smoots to yards.  I expect that if you are a math nerd, you’ve known for a long time that the ear is a proxy for epsilon.

In the past, I’ve written about several of my CTO friends who are bloggers.  Niel Robertson, the CTO / co-founder of Newmerix – now joins their ranks with his new blog titled Parallax: Calculating Technology’s Future. 

I first met Niel in 1995 in Cambridge, MA.  He was an early employee of net.Genesis (I was the chairman, Raj Bhargava was the CEO / co-founder.)  A year or so after Raj left net.Genesis, he connected with Niel and started working on a new idea.  They cooked up the business that became Service Metrics, which I helped fund in 1998 and was then acquired by Exodus for $280 million in 1999.  I fondly recall Niel bitching about having to move to Boulder from Boston (“Boston is so much better”) – Raj said the same type of thing; they both happily live in Boulder now (although they each occasionally go visit Boston to play and presumably get stuck in traffic.)

After Niel left Exodus, he joined Mobius as an entrepreneur-in-residence and started working on a set of new ideas around IT Management.  This ultimately turned into Newmerix, which I happily provided the first round of financing for (with IDG Ventures, who was our early co-investor in Service Metrics.) 

Niel is an essay writer (he calls his posts “blarticles”), so expect periodic long, thoughtful pieces that are worth sitting quietly and reading.

Best Haiku of the Day (thanks Dave)

terabyte disk drives
software a mature market
and Brad is forty

Best Photo of the Day (thanks Chris)

Best Introspective Thought of the Day (thanks Scott)

I was watching Alaskan animals play around on Discovery channel while sitting in pizza place a few hours ago. Animals really know how to have fun. In spite of the fact that they always have to be on the lookout for predators, they run and wrestle with each other like it’s nobody’s business. I think, in that respect, our superior brain power is a liability.  I hope you’ll have a really fun 2006.

I turned 40 last week.  Amy took me to Cabo to the incredible One&Only Pamilla Resort with family and some close friends for an amazing week off hedonistic fun, no blogging, minimal phone, and minor email (I had a few deals that I was keeping an eye on – I only got in trouble a couple of times as we also called this Q4 vacation.)

I read less than normal for a week off (since I spent a bunch of it playing with my friends), but still managed to enjoy three books.

1. Tuva or Bust! Richard Feynman’s Last Journey: I idolize Richard Feynman – in my next life, I’d like to be more like him.  The story of his obsession with traveling to Tuva is magnificent, a great bit of history, and super perspective on communication with Russia during the cold war (pre a bunch of technologies that we currently take for granted).
2. 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York: I picked this one up at the Strand Book Store on a recent trip to New York.  It’s a fascinating history of the creation of the New York subway system.  Lots of politics, industrialists, complex financial issues, occasional mob stuff, and some heroic figures that dramatically impacted New York.
3. God on the Starting Line: The Triumph of a Catholic School Running Team and Its Jewish Coach: This was recommended to me as a running book, not a religious book.  There was a little too much religion in it for my tastes in the first half, but this fell by the wayside after the author made his point and really got into the running story.  It’s an exciting one and fits in the “inspiration running book category”, especially if you are catholic or jewish.

 I’m back in Boulder where the temperature is lower than my age and the wind is higher than my age.

I woke up to a video of The Worst Job Ever in my inbox.  On this Thanksgiving weekend, be thankful you don’t have this job.

Kimbal Musk just put up a blog about his brother Elon’s rocket launch that is scheduled for tomorrow on Kwajalein Atoll.  I wrote about it yesterday – Kimbal has a lot more pictures up and I expect he’ll be reporting live (or hopefully simply “alive”) from the scene tomorrow.

Think back to 1992.  “It’s the economy, stupid!”  Amy and I watched The War Room tonight, the brilliant documentary of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and the organization behind it, spearheaded by James Carville and George Stephanopoulos.  Carville’s quote was actually “the economy, stupid” and was part of a haiku that Carville came up with.

Change vs. more of the same
The economy, stupid
Don’t forget health care.

Carville is an absolute genius and unbelievably entertaining as a special bonus feature.  I’d team up with that dude any day just for the laughs.  Stephanopoulos reminded me of Sam Seaborn which – it turns out – was intentional.

While it’d never play out the way it did in today’s TSA / Patriot Act world, the next time someone says “you’ll never be able to do that”, simply refer them to David Cowan’s magnificant story of his trip to Athens in 1991.  I remember David telling me the story in – well – 1991 – and it holds up well 14 years later.  Back when you could be “the last person on a flight” and still make the flight, Amy was constantly annoyed at me when we travelled together.  Whenever I cut it too close, I simply reminded her of David’s story.  Now I can simply point her to his blog post.

I ran the New York Marathon with Matt Blumberg yesterday.  We started together, finished together, but only ran about 3 miles total together.  This was my fifth marathon as part of my quest to run a marathon in every state by the time I turn 50.

Since the first or second question I get asked is “how did you do” (the other one is “how do you feel”), I feel surprisingly good today (only a little “extra soreness”) and finished in 5:06:45 (place 27,811, although I came in first in the “brown haired jewish guy from Eldorado Springs, CO 39 year old category).  It was a little slower than I was shooting for (my marathon PR is 4:05 and I’m usually around 4:30) as it was hot, humid, deceptively hilly, and I was a little undertrained for this one.

The New York Marathon is one of the crown jewels of marathoning (there is a group of people trying to put together a “grand slam series” for marathons and New York will undoubtably be one of them.)  The start is unbelievable – about 40,000 people congregate at Fort Wadsworth in Staten Island and wander around for two hours eating bagels, stretching, peeing, drinking water, and peeing some more before the cannons go off.  It took us about 10 minutes to get across the starting line, at which point Matt took off as he was planning to run faster than me.  The race touches all five boroughs, although the bulk of it is in Brooklyn and Manhattan. 

Since I can’t recall ever being on Staten Island or in Brooklyn or Queens (other than passing through on the way to an airport), I feel compelled to rate them.  Using a marathoner’s point of view, Manhattan was by far the best energy of the race, followed by Brooklyn.  Queens was so so (and pretty bleak looking), Staten Island was a non-event (it was – after all – merely a two mile bridge run across the Verrazano-Narrows), and the Bronx was just depressing (at mile 20, you really want someone to cheer for you, rather than just sit on the steps of a building looking totally bored by your agony).

The race was surprisingly hilly.  As I struggled down 5th from 120th to 80th (mile 22 to mile 24), I kept feeling like I was in an Escher painting as I remember running uphill on 1st from the 80s to the 120s (or maybe I was just delirious).  I’m a good hill runner but I took the Queenborough bridge way too hard and was completely wasted at mile 18.  It was a very long last 8 miles.

I passed Matt around 17 (he went out too fast, the heat got him, and he started struggling at mile 12).  I was completely surprised to see him, not only because I expected him to sail through the race, but because I was already in tunnel vision mode at 17 and only looked up when I heard a mildly annoyed “Mr. Feld.”  We stuck together a little and then I clomped on, only to hear a cheerful “Mr. Feld” at mile 23 as Matt caught back up.  We stumbled through Central Park and put on a good show the last mile, passing about 1,000 people (but no Ethiopians) on the way to the finish line.

Matt and I were both very happy to be finished.  The city of New York really showed everyone a good day – if you are a runner, this is one you must do sometime in your life.

5 down, 45 to go.  The next one up is Miami on 1/29/06.