I had Digital Sabbath #3 yesterday. I turned off my phone and computer Friday at sundown and didn’t turn them back on until Sunday morning. I’m starting to enjoy the pattern and had a lot of relief yesterday from the complete disconnect. We had dinner at our house with friends Friday night, Amy and I did some stuff in the morning together, I went for a 9 mile run, took a nap in the afternoon, and we had dinner last night with friends and then watched some comedy on tv afterwards. My brain was less chaotic yesterday and I was able to settle into a calmer state over the course of the day than I had been the previous two weekends.

I got an interesting email from a friend who has historically been a huge Apple fanboy. I asked him if I could repost it verbatim and he said yes. It follows – I’m curious what your response is to this. While I’m still very involved with the art world here in Colorado and still working on conservation issues we’ve actually just returned from almost a year away, the last 6 months in India. I realize that a lot of what I see is colored with the lens of India, but maybe that’s helping to make things more clear.

TechStars Seattle applications for year four of the program are now open! The startup community in Seattle is expanding rapidly and TechStars Seattle is right in the middle of it all, located in South Lake Union surrounded by Amazon, Microsoft and tons of other amazing startups. We’ve been investing a lot in Seattle lately beyond TechStars, including BigDoor, SEOmoz, Cheezburger, and most recently Rover. We love Seattle as a startup community!

As we enter the 5th year of Gluecon, I’m very excited to see it come together. Eric Norlin has been saying year after year that his goal is to make Gluecon “the most technical, developer-focused conference” out there and I love watching him try. You can check out the most recent agenda here, but some of the sessions that are indicative of what Eric’s talking about include: Building a distributed data platform with Node.js, Storm, Kafka, and ZeroMQ An Enterprise Mobile Reference Architecture Building using Netflix’s Open Source Architecture (a 4 hour workshop) Using Swagger to Build a Great API Interface The Pros and Cons of Choosing Go Availability During Cloud Outages: Multi-Regional, Self-Healing MySQL Node.js is for APIs Beyond the content, I can personally testify that you’ll find an amazing group of people to hang out with, a truly welcoming atmosphere, and the best conference wifi you’ll find anywhere. Plus, it’s in Boulder at the beginning of summer!

Do you like your Sphero? How about getting one that is 2500x larger than the current Sphero? That’s the new Sphero product – Peacekeeper. Order it today on Indiegogo. Along with some other cool Sphero stuff.

My close friend Jerry Colonna is giving an extraordinary seminar in Boulder on 4/19 with Parker Palmer called Surviving the Startup Life: The Toll of Merging Identity and Work. Jerry is the best CEO coach I know, a dear friend, and one of the best investors I ever have gotten to work with (we did a lot together in the 1990s when Jerry was partners with Fred Wilson at Flatiron Partners.)

I’m psyched to see Xconomy launch their Boulder/Denver edition. Bob Buderi, Xconomy’s CEO, talks about how it came together in his post Announcing Xconomy Boulder/Denver—7th Region in Our Network. Boulder/Denver joins the other six regions – Boston, Detroit, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle – and is now part of the broad and expanding coverage that Xconomy is providing on business, life sciences, and technology news. I’m especially glad that Xconomy hired Michael Davidson as the Boulder/Denver editor. I’ve known Michael for a number of years and have always found his writing and reporting to be insightful, detailed, and thorough. Of all the local tech writers, I think he’s the best and I’m glad he’s leading the charge here for Xconomy.

Our Foundry Group CEO list lit up this morning with a question about CEO coaches and whether they were helpful. My quick response was: I think a great CEO coach can be awesome and not-great CEO coach can be very detrimental. Jerry Colonna is the best CEO coach I’ve ever met or worked with. There are others that I’m sure will emerge from this discussion but make sure you know what you are getting / looking for.

Amy and I are going to be hanging out at the Boulder Book Store on the Pearl Street Mall on Friday from 4:15pm to 6:00pm. We’ll be signing copies of Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur and talking with anyone who shows up about the challenges and joys of a startup life.