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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. ...

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’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. ...

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. ...

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.

It’s inevitable. Every year we have our “first real snow” in Boulder. That would be – today. Coinciding with the first snow – 100% of the time – is an Internet outage at my house and at our office. Since we use IP phones, are connected to our infrastructure in our California office via point to point, and my T1 line from my house is direct connected into the office, and outage is – well – a major pain in the ass (did you know you can’t make a phone call on an IP phone from your house if your network is down – duh – yeah I’ve got a land line in this server room somewhere, now where the hell is it?) ...

Paul Graham – founder of Viaweb (bought by Yahoo! in the late 1990s) and author of Hackers & Painters – has two new excellent essays up. While I don’t know Paul, I do know of him, and I think his writing is great. How To Start A Startup . Paul thinks you need three things: (1) good people, (2) make stuff people want, and (3) spend as little money as possible. All the right stuff with fun examples, lots of Paul’s trademark bluntness, and plenty of provocative questions. A Unified Theory of VC Suckage . I won’t even try to defend my VC brethern since Paul’s theory is sound in many ways. He admits that he’s met a few VC’s that he likes, so there must be something messed up in the universe somewhere. He’s finally put an RSS feed up on his site so you can have his thoughts delivered directly to your computer.

Five years ago, Amy told me that in order to stay married (to her), I needed to commit to going away for a week every three months for a vacation. A real vacation. No computer, no email, no cell phone (and now no blogging / RSS). Five years later, we fondly refer to our “quarterly complete disconnect” vacations as “Qx vacation” (e.g. this one was Q1). Amy has dreamed of living in Paris as long as I’ve known her and even though I’d much rather spend a week in Rome, we spent Q1 vacation in Paris helping her get settled in to a six week “intensive Paris experience” where her goal is to really learn how to speak French. She’s been writing about her first week on her blog – if you have any interest in an American writer’s experience in Paris in 2005, check out her Postcards from Paris section. ...

.flickr-photo { border: solid 1px #000000; } .flickr-frame { float: right; text-align: center; margin-left: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Trick Anything Toilet , originally uploaded by bfeld . I love toilets. One of my primary criterias for evaluating office space is to go to the mens room and check it out – it’s a great indicator of how the landlord thinks about his building (and his tenants.) ...