We spend a lot of time talking about “computers in the home” as part of our Digital Life theme. Over the past year, I’ve heard the phrase “Home Networking” with increasing frequency. It made the rounds a while back (anyone remember when it was called a HAN – home area network) but seemed to fade into the background for a while. I’m not sure what caused it to show up at our party again (although I’m suspicious that it is Windows 7), but it’s back.

There are two CU Silicon Flatirons Entrepreneurs Unplugged events next week – one on Monday November 2nd at CU Boulder in Atlas Room 100 and one on Wednesday November 4th at the Denver Art Museum. The 11/2 Entrepreneurs Unplugged is with Steve Halstedt, the co-founder of Centennial Ventures. Steve co-founded Centennial in 1981 and was one of the fathers of the venture capital business in Colorado. When I moved to Boulder in 1995, Steve was one of the first VCs I met with here and he’s been a great friend and mentor ever since. I look forward to interviewing him about his experiences, especially how entrepreneurship has evolved in Colorado since the early 1980’s. Please register and join us!

Bloomberg TV is running a show called Bloomberg Innovators. One of our portfolio companies – Oblong – is the focus of the first episode that airs this Friday (10/30) on Bloomberg TV at 9pm and 11pm ET. As a special bonus, Jason and my Donkey Kong machine are in the trailer and both Jason and Ryan are in the episode that stars John Underkoffler, Kwin Kramer, and a bunch of the Oblong gang. Oh – and Jason’s hair looks funny.

In case you were wondering what the Boulder Snowstorm resulted in (so far – it’s still coming down) at my house in Eldorado Springs, here you go! So there is no ambiguity, my dog Kenai loves it. And – no surprise, so does Brooks!

Talking about scale and growth is hard. Many people talk in percentages in pre-determined time periods (e.g. let’s grow revenue 100% next year). I find this to be relatively useless. Instead, I like to challenge people to think on a bigger scale over a variable time period. My favorite line of late is “add another zero – you pick the metric and the time frame.” I used to call this “increase X by an order of magnitude” until I realized that lots of business people don’t actually know that an increase in an order of magnitude is equal to multiplying by 10. While it’s silly, there’s no ambiguity when you talk about “adding a zero to the end of a number.”

The Defrag Conference in Denver is just around the corner – November 11 and 12 to be exact. Eric Norlin has put together a remarkable agenda for this one including an incredible closing panel titled Cluetrain at 10 starring JP Rangaswami, Chris Locke, Doc Searls, and Rick Levine. This will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the The Cluetrain Manifesto and as far as I understand is the first time in a decade that Chris, Doc, and Rick have shared the stage. If we are lucky, Rick might even bring us some Seth Ellis Chocolates.

One of the challenges of living your life out in the open is signaling where you are going to be. I’ve struggled with this on and off, tried a bunch of different web services, and have never been happy with any of them. I’m going to keep trying, but in the mean time I’ve decided to put a calendar up on my blog using Google Calendar. It shows two things:

VCs say a lot of stupid things. I’m guilty of it plenty and whenever someone calls me on it I try to acknowledge and change. One that I try really hard not to do is say “my company” when referring to companies I’ve invested in – I think it’s one of the most annoying things a VC can say. I was talking to a VC the other day about a few companies he had invested in. By the third time he referred to one of the companies as “my company” (as in “My company is working on X”, “My company would like to talk to Company Z about thing Y”) I felt myself starting to react. I didn’t really have a relationship with this VC, but I knew that he had never run a company (investment banking post college, MBA, then VC). I realized I wanted to stop him at some point and say “dude – it’s not your company – you are merely an 18% shareholder in the business.” I bit my tongue and had the conversation, but I’ve been thinking about this in the back of my mind ever since.

On the heels of the FCC doing what everyone expected them to do today with regard to Net Neutrality, I thought I’d remind you of the awesome Ask a Ninja on Net Neutrality from 2006.