Xconomy has a post up titled Who Knew? Xconomy Uncovers the Strange-But-True Details of Boston’s Innovation Leaders.  My bathroom at CU Boulder enabled me to make the list, even though I’ve never really been part of the Boston VC community.  The list includes some entrepreneurs (it is a list of the strange proclivities of Boston’s Innovation Leaders after all.)

In other VC hobby news, Fred Wilson is digging the new Soul Patch album Sooner or Later.  That would be a hobby of my partners Jason and Ryan.

If you are a long time reader of this blog, you know I’m a huge Warren Buffett fan.  So are many of you – when I offered to send out the "Annual Letters of Buffett Partnership, Limited, 1957 – 1970" I got over 1000 requests and every week I get a new one. (FYI – if you want them, just email me a request and I’ll send them to you, but you have to promise not to post the letters per a request from Buffett.)

This morning I read through a post titled Notes From Buffett Meeting 2/15/2008.  This was from a Q&A session with Buffett hosted for students from Emory’s Goizueta Business School and McCombs School of Business at UT Austin.  Outstanding stuff.  Thanks Scott for pointing me to it.

Jeff Nolan from NewsGator has a good post up on the Enterprise RSS blog titled Attention Data: Content vs. User that describes both attention data and privacy dynamics.  There’s a lot more where this comes from, but it’s a good starting point if you keep hearing "attention" in the context of RSS and wonder to yourself "what is it / why do I care?"

While catching up on some stuff today, I came across the word “automagically” on Bebo.

I first heard the word from Todd Vernon.  Todd is now the CEO of Lijit, but at the time he was CTO of Raindance.  It it one of my favorite Vernonisms, up there with “chocolatey goodness” (used to describe a wonderful computer hack or feature.)

I use automagically all the time – it’s a nice shorthand for Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  I occasionally see it in the wild on blog posts every now and then, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen it used in a web service.  Oh happy day.

Oh yeah – I’m bradf037 on Bebo in case you want to be my friend (I’m really lonely today.)  Dear people at Bebo – your AIM Friend Finder is hanging on “Loading Authentication…” today.

Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about cleantech and – more specifically – the ethanol market.  However, I do understand basic economics reasonably well and have pretty good reasoning skills, although I’ve probably forgotten most of the math I learned in grad school about IS-LM curves.  Oh – I’m also a huge tree hugging environmentalist.

My PIDS (personal information discovery system – aka Amy) has continued to catch up on her RSS feeds and forwarded me an article by Daniel Gross in Slate titled Is The Ethanol Boom Going Bust?   It was short enough for me to read on my handheld while filling up my car with E85 (just joking – I can’t seem to find a gas station nearby me that actually has E85 – it seems to kind of defeat the purpose to drive 30 miles each way to fill up with E85 – although the article was short.)

I think the free market dynamics around ethanol – and the second order effects – are fascinating.  Gross does a good job – in a short article – of highlighting some of what is going on in the market.   My favorite paragraph is his nice linkage back to the dot-com boom, a market I’m very familiar with.

“In other words, the lion’s share of inducements have gone to production—call it supply-side energy policy. But crudely stimulating this ethanol is actually the cause of the ethanol backlash. As production increases, the price of the commodity used in the process (corn) rises. So does the price of the expertise and materials needed to build capacity. During the railroad boom, the cost of steel and the salaries of engineers rose. During the dot-com boom, the cost of fiber-optic capacity and the salaries of Web programmers rose. The Wall Street Journal reported that the cost of building a new ethanol plant has risen from $1.50-per-gallon last year to $2.20 per gallon today.”

An earlier article of his, titled The Ethanol Backlash, is equally fascinating.

Supply-side energy policy and inflation anyone? 

I’ve received a lot of great comments and emails in response to my “Reflections on Mentors” post.  One of them was a note from my mom with a letter attached that I sent to my dad in 1988.  My dad was my first real mentor (and continues to have a huge impact on me.)  I wrote this when I was 23 – when my dad was 50.  One last piece of “mentor advice” – make sure you let your mentors know they are being helpful to you.

March 14, 1988

Dad Feld
Dallas, TX 75248

Dear Dad:

          I remember a sunny summer day about ten years ago. We were driving to Fort Worth in a white Corvette. You were about to deposit me at the Tut Bartzen tennis camp. We chatted about the upcoming week as we zipped down the highway. I was excited about seven days of non-stop tennis; you were probably excited about seven days of not having to deal with me. However, for that moment, we simply enjoyed the ride.

          I’ve learned from you that it’s the ride that counts. Today, I’m hanging out in my “eighties” apartment, with my lovely wife, playing the academician, paying my own way, and simply enjoying the ride. Without you, I might actually think some of this stuff was important. But I’ve learned from you that only the ride counts.

          It has been a long strange trip, hasn’t it… From spring Creek to M.I.T. From Betty Wonderly to Arzell Ball. From E.V. Scott to Richard Weinstein. From BAFB to Watertown to 7877 Alto Caro to 1 Devonshire Place. From Apple II to Fivestar AT. From Nike to Reebok. From Jack Kramer Autographs to Futabaya. From the Bowie Mustangs to the Dallas Marathon. From “See Dick Run” to “The Society of the Mind”. What a great ride. Thanks for being there every mile – I wouldn’t have wanted to do it without you.

Love,

Bradley

Matt Blumberg pointed me to a post about the Boulderites recent decision to raise taxes on themselves by passing a carbon tax.  The feds can’t seem to get around to doing it, so the Bouder locals just took it on themselves as an effort to fill the federal governments gap on climate policy. 

I’ve been struggling with what to say about Al Gore’s book “An Inconvenient Truth.”  I read it a few weeks ago and had very mixed emotions about it.

Fred and JoAnne Wilson saw the movie last night.  Fred’s blog post perfectly captured how I felt about the book. I want the science and the facts, not the melodrama and the preaching.  At some point as I was reading the book, I told Amy that if I read the phrase “moral imperative” one more time, I’d puke. 

The summary – Gore’s substance has impact; Gore’s style is detracting.

Congrats to my friends at Gold Systems for winning the “Best Outbound Solution” as part of the Microsoft Speech Server Partner Spotlight Awards that were announced on Tuesday.  Terry Gold and his team have been working closely with Microsoft on their new Speech Server product and have done some really cool stuff with it, such as the Gold Systems Password Reset Solution that Microsoft is highlighting on the Microsoft Speech Server website.