I read a fascinating book yesterday called The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future by Martin Ford. I can’t remember who sent it to me (someone did – thank you); it appeared on the of my infinite pile of books so I gobbled it down as my first book at 2010. The first half of the book sets up the situation and the corresponding problems. I agreed with much of the first half. The second half proposes a solution. I had a hugely difficult time with it. Ford anticipated this as he regularly acknowledged (unnecessarily) throughout the second half that many people would have a hard time with his proposed solution. Yet he marched on relentlessly.

Every quarter, without fail, a bunch of articles appear talking about the venture capital industries investment pace as a result of the PWC MoneyTree report. I used to get calls from all of the Denver / Boulder area reporters about my thoughts on these – that eventually stopped when I started responding “who gives a fuck?” A few days ago I got a note from Steve Murchie about his new blog titled Angels and Pinheads. I’m glad Steve is blogging about this as he’s got plenty of experience and thoughts around the dynamics of angel investors – some that I agree with and some that I don’t. Regardless, my view is that there more there is out there, the better, as long as people engage in the conversation.

Last year I did an obsessive experiment. Every morning, as one of the tabs in my browser (then Firefox, now Chrome) during my daily information routine, I opened up a clever application called Daytum. In it, I tracked four things: the number of miles I ran, the number of books I read, the number of segments I flew on which airline, and where I slept. Following is the summary and some commentary.

My dad sent me an incredible thirty minute interview of Ayn Rand by Mike Wallace in 1959 which I just watched on my iPhone during a treadmill run. I’m a fan of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and, while I’m intrigued by a lot of Ayn Rand’s philosophy and writing, I don’t consider myself an Objectivist. One of the quotes I most love is John Galt’s statement “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine.” A while ago my mom made a painting out of this quote (it currently hangs in my partner Jason Mendelson’s house.)

Yesterday I had a good conversation with Nivi, the co-author of the great Venture Hacks blog. He recently added me to AngelList, a directory of angel and seed investors that Nivi curates. Our discussion covered a variety of things, including trying to define the parameters that qualifies someone to call themselves an angel investor. Historically, I’ve always said that someone can call themselves an angel investor only if they actually make angel investments! I’ve been exposed to many “angel investors” who have actually never written a check for an equity investment. These non-angels come in many shapes and sizes and often end up either offering to become “advisors” for equity (or worse – a retainer), “brokers” (where they help you raise money for a percentage raised), or employees (where the end up trying to get a job). Now, there is nothing wrong with this, other than them presenting themselves as “angel investors.” Oh, and some people just like to be in clubs with other people who presumably make investments hang out.

At my last Boulder Community Hours (or Random Day, or Bunker Hours, or whatever the latest branding of “office hours” is), I spent 15 minutes with Joel Gratz who runs the great site Colorado Powder Forecast*.* Even though we only spent 15 minutes together, Joel sent me a nice comment: “Office hours is such an amazing resource – many thanks for making yourself and others available to the community. This must be a unique concept in the professional, non-academic world! “

Last night I had a long ranging conversation with Amy and a pair of close friends about the singularity and the future of human and machine. The conversation centered around the notion of consciousness and what happens if (or – in my opinion – when) non-biological entities have more reasoning and processing power than biological entities, especially if this is combined with the notion of consciousness. We didn’t reach any conclusions, but we made an hour disappear really quickly.

We’ve run TechStars in Boulder for three years. So far each year at least one of the teams ends up with a runaway success on a bootstrapped business. In year one it was J-Squared with their Facebook (and now MySpace) apps. The bootstrapper of year two is Occipital with their awesome RedLaser iPhone app. RedLaser has been at the top of the iPhone App Store paids apps listing for over three months. Rather than review the app here, I’ll just point you to a recent TechCrunch article about it reaching over 750k downloads and a recent WSJ article about Price Checking: Finding Deals With a Phone. Or just download RedLaser – it’s only $1.99 and you’ll love it.

Speaking of brilliant photographs, my mom sent me two yesterday. The first one is her dressed in PJ’s reciting “Twas the Night Before Christmas” to her kindergarten class. I remember having to sing Christmas Carols as a kid but I stopped in seventh grade when I started declaring to my teachers “I’m Jewish – I don’t have to do this.” But kindergarten was probably fair game.