When LinkedIn posted LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS I was intrigued. The post title was provocative (presumably as intended) and drew a lot of attention from various people in the security world. Several of these posts were deeply critical which generated another post from LinkedIn titled The Facts about LinkedIn Intro. By this point I had sent emails to several of my friends who were experts in the email / SMTP / IMAP / security ecosystem and was already getting feedback that generally trended negative. And then I saw this post titled Phishing With Linkedin’s Intro – a clever phishing attack on Intro (since fixed by LinkedIn).

My mom (Cecelia Feld) is having an opening in Denver on Friday 11/1 at Artwork Network Gallery from 5pm – 9pm. I’m heading down to Denver at the end of the day on Friday and will be there from 5pm – 7pm before I head out for dinner (a good son has to eat, right?) I love my mom’s art and if you’ve ever been in my office you’ve seen some of it around. If you aren’t familiar with it, a piece from the show is below or go check out her website at Studio 7310.

As we head into the weekend (which I need very badly), I thought I’d toss up a fun video that the gang at Name.com made recently. They’ve done some funny videos as part of their promotional campaigns (they are our domain registrar – good folks) and asked if Amy and I would do one that references our book Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur. It’s short and I get a silly grin on my face every time I watch it. There are a handful of inside jokes and in the spirit of never taking oneself very seriously, we execute this spirit well. And, as every good salesperson should say, “If you like the video, you’ll love the book – grab your copy of Startup Life now.”

Amy and I just underwrote the renovation of Wellesley College’s new Human-Computer Interaction Lab. The picture above is a screen capture of the Wellesley College home page today (called their “Daily Shot” – they change the home page photo every day) with a photo from yesterday when Amy did the ribbon cutting on the HCI Lab.

Several years ago on a Saturday I found myself at Bank of America Corporate Center in Charlotte. I was attending the second National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) Awards for Aspirations in Computing event. I had gone for a three hour run early in the morning on a beautiful spring day in Charlotte and my mind was wandering all over the place. As I entered the ballroom for the event, I encountered 32 young high school women and their parents. I wandered around and talked to most of the young women. They had a range of backgrounds, came from a bunch of different geographies, and were a mix of ethnicities. But they all had one thing in common – they loved computers.

An event called Startup Phenomenon is happening In Boulder on 11/13 – 11/15. It gets to the heart of how startup communities are developed and I’d love to have you join me at it. If you register to come, use the code “feldfriends” for $100 off the $995 price. You may have seen the recent Kauffman Foundation study that ranked Boulder tops among all cities in the U.S. in terms of tech-startup density. That Boulder was number one was interesting, but what’s more exciting is that there are so many emergent startup communities around the United States that it’s now worth ranking them.

Now that our federal government is back at work and the short term debt ceiling thing is resolved, it should be no surprise that the news cycle is now obsessed with Obamacare and its flawed implementation. Over the weekend I must have seen a dozen articles about this online and in the NY Times, and then I woke up this morning to a bunch of new things about the Healthcare.gov site underlying tech, how screwed up it is, and what / how the Health and Human Services agency is going to do to fix it.

Time for a new Foundry Group video. If you want the backstory, go take a look at the post Foundry Group Announces Major Shift In Investment Strategy. If you just want a break from reality and hopefully a few laughs in the process, enjoy. The video has over 100 easter eggs referring to either portfolio companies of ours or other things in our lives. Some are obvious (like the tshirts), some are very obscure. If you find one, list it in the comments. The best, most obscure one will win a special treat.

Phin Barnes at First Round Capital just nails it today with his post To get the most out of your investors, turn them into rubber ducks. Go read it – I’ll wait and will be here when you get back. I love Rubber Duck Debugging. I use this approach when writing, which I call “Writing with Yoda.” I have a little Yoda figurine staring at me at all times and when I stall out I just talk to him for a little while and then get started again. He always looks serene and wise and I almost always get going after talking to him for a little while.