I’m fascinated with drones. I’ve never been a model airplane guy and my model rocket phase lasted about a month when I was 10. But drones feel like something different, since I can program them to do what I want them to go do, rather than have to control them with a controller. My current goal is to program a Taco Drone to go from the 2nd floor balcony outside of my office to T/ACO, hover for a few minutes while they attach lunch to it, and return to my balcony.

I woke up this morning to another wave of holiday email cards. I had over 50 of them this morning. Yesterday I probably had at least 50 – by the end of the day it was likely over 100. STOP! UNSUBSCRIBE. I’ve never really understood the physical holiday card thing. I think it’s a secret ploy by the US Government to keep the USPS in business. I used to get a lot of Merry Christmas cards, which just annoyed me since I’m jewish and don’t celebrate Christmas. The world has become more politically (or religiously) correct so these are now Happy Holiday cards.

Maybe everyone knows this, but it took me a while to realize that almost all of my performance issues with Google Apps were related to my DNS configuration. Once I switched all my machines and routers to Google Public DNS all of my performance problems went away. It’s remarkable. Simply hard code DNS to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. Problem solved. My office, condo, and house in Keystone are all on Comcast. For the last month I’ve been struggling in each of them. There are days that Gmail feels almost unusable – five to ten second waits between messages. Web performance was “good enough” so I assumed it was a Gmail problem.

A few days ago, Amy and I came up to our house in Keystone. We haven’t been here for about two months; we’ll be here through the end of the first week of January. The first few hours were predictable. We “turned” everything on. We unpacked the car. We got settled in. And I got frustrated. The Internet was slow. The Sonos wasn’t working correctly. Everything was trying to update itself. It was like a giant machine was trying to boot up, but was stuck in an initialization loop.

If you think Amazon Prime Air is neat, you’ll love the new Amazon Prime Ground. Spheros and Quadcopters are available with shipping still in time for Christmas.

Nope, Amy isn’t pregnant. But Bart Lorang’s (founder/CEO of FullContact) wife Sarah is. And Bart has started a new blog called Startup Baby. Well – it’s sort of a blog, or a Medium thing – whatever those are called. His first post is awesome. It’s titled Holy Shit! I’m having a Startup Baby! Here’s a taste. Now I would soon have a child added to the long list of ‘things I’m responsible for.’ Hugo assured me: “There are plenty of books available. There are plenty of mentors available. People have done it before. You are not unique. “ Still, I was scared shitless. I was scared I’d be a bad father. I was scared that I’d let down my wife. I was scared that I wouldn’t be simultaneously a good father AND a good CEO. And you know what? It’s a few months later, and I’m still scared.

Techstars is rolling out a short video program with some of the entrepreneurs and mentors favorite quotes. I recorded a few of them recently – my first one is up. I’m a huge Battlestar Galactica fan and think Commander William Adama has amazing leadership lessons for any entrepreneur. If you don’t know what “rolling the hard six” is, it’s a classic example of a high risk / high reward scenario. Per Urban Dictionary:

Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors is shipping. It was so satisfying to see this today. This was by far the most difficult book to write so far. The title we came up with should have tipped me off – it ended up be extremely challenging to make a book about “boards” not be “boring.”

Yesterday Amy and I contributed $10,000 to the MakerBot Academy campaign which is on a mission to put a MakerBot 3D printer in every school in the United States. We did it via a contribution on Donors Choose, one of our favorite non-profit contribution sites. We specifically finished out the funding for five MakerBots for the following teachers in their classrooms: Mr. Hendry – Yorba Linda High School, Yorba Linda, CA Mrs. Bragdon – Brownsboro Elementary School, Brownsboro, TX Mr. Eiland – Woodlawn High School, Baton Rouge, LA Mr. Condon – Decorah High School, Decorah, IA Mr. Colling – Coronado High School, Scottsdale, AZ Amy and I are planning to give a lot more to this campaign, but we decided to do something tangible right now by finishing off several of the campaigns on Donors Choose.