There are many things I love about Boulder. One of them is the powerful sense of community that exists. Talking about this is fine, but examples are better. Here’s one: On the first Tuesday of every month is the Boulder New Tech Meetup. It’s one of the largest regular tech meetups in the world and is orchestrated by a bunch of folks, most notably Robert Reich of OneRiot who is the founder and ringleader. Given my travel, I can’t make it regularly but I try to go a couple of times a year. Each time is fascinating – I’ve always learned something, met some interesting folks, and had fun.

It looks like I got 25 haiku’s in my haiku contest for a copy of The New Polymath. After consulting with Vinnie Mirchandani (the book’s author) we’ve chosen Rini Das as the winner for the following haiku: Old Polymath all men If New Polymath a woman Then we call it “Progress” Amy told me she approved of our choice. Rini – “the book is in the mail.”

Last Thursday, my good friends at Standing Cloud (we are investors) got a nice (and their first) write up in TechCrunch titled Standing Cloud Gives You One-Click App Installs Across Multiple Hosting Providers. I’m proud of the Standing Cloud team as they’ve resisted all the cloud hype and just stayed heads down and built out some really cool stuff that they are now rolling out. I tuned into the TechCrunch article and scanned the comments and lo and behold, Standing Cloud seemed to have a giant issue being called out – namely the font of their logo.

One of the side benefits of blogging is the various inspiring emails I get from readers about different topics. I got a great one yesterday that I thought addressed the question of “Why am I having so much fun with challenges in my personal life and at the same time am so bored with work. And – more importantly – what can I do about it?” This morning, the New York Times had a great article which compliments this titled An Entrepreneur Who Took A Chance on Herself. If you are going to take a chance on something, why not take it on yourself? The email I received follows with minor edits to anonymize the writer. I hope it’s as inspiring to you as it was to me.

Over the past 24 months, a deplorable activity in the money management business came to light. It got the name “pay to play” but was just another form of bribery. The common description of pay to play is “the practice of making campaign contributions and related payments to elected officials in order to influence the awarding of lucrative contracts for the management of public pension plan assets and similar government investment accounts.” Yup – sounds like bribery to me.

I snuck another book in last night before I went to bed but was too tired to blog about it. After The New Polymath, I felt like I needed something similar but different so I read Where’s My Jetpack by Daniel Wilson (CMU Ph.D. in Robotics). It was hilarious. Following are the chapter titles: Jetpack, Zeppelin, Moving Sidewalk, Self-Steering Car, Hoverboard, Teleportation, Underwater Hotel, Dolphin Guide, Space Vacation, Hologram, Smell-O-Vision, Robot Pet, Mind-Reading Device, Anti-Sleeping Pill, Invisible Camouflage, Artificial Gills, X-Ray Specs, Universal Translator, Robot Servant, Unisex Jumpsuit, Smart House, Food Pill, Self-Contained, Skyscraper City, Ray Gun, Space Mirror, Space Elevator, Cryogenic Freezing, and Moon Colony.

Tonight’s book is The New Polymath by Vinnie Mirchandani. Actually, it’s the book I read the last two nights as it was too much to get down in one night. I’ve been promising Vinnie that I’d read his book ever since he sent me the galleys a few months ago. I tossed the PDF up on my Kindle which, when I got around to it, was unreadable because of the tiny font and the way the Kindle scaled the PDF to fit the page. I promptly went on to another book and never read it.

I’m far away from Washington DC today. Actually, I’m a lot closer to Russia than I am to DC and that makes me an expert on Russia. Wait, someone else said that (although the people next to me and Amy at dinner last night were speaking Russian.) But my friend the Internets (actually, the Web) brought DC closer to me today. While I’m only involved in a handful of things related to politics and DC, several of them popped up somewhere in my world in the last two days. So, I thought I’d share them with you.