As my endless effort to become skinnier continues, I carefully read Ian Rogers post “…look at me I’m skinny…” Diet, exercise, nature, and nurture*.* I’ve enjoyed getting to know Ian through our investment in Topspin and have had several significant substantial meals with him. Little did I know that I was actually doing all the eating (well, I did, I was just in denial.) Ian’s post is dynamite. If you struggle to keep the pounds off, run (don’t walk) over to FistFulaYen, toss your Coca-Cola down the drain, and read “…look at me I’m skinny…”

I was pondering what a tiny part of the universe we are on my ride this morning into Boulder from Keystone. The first hour of my drive was extraordinary as the sun came up over the Rocky Mountains and I cruised down I-70 at a high rate of speed in the bat mobile. I had another reminder of this as I cruised through my Daily folder. The Astronomy Picture of the Day has been delighting me every day since I started looking at it a few weeks ago. Today’s is a movie of Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft’s last moments.

I say “no” all the time. I could start keeping track of the number of times I do it a day, but I’d guess it’s a minimum of 10 and occasionally over 50 times a day. When I type that, my first reaction is “no way, there’s no possible way I say no more than 50 times a day”, but when I think a little more, it definitely happens sometimes.

The web (and the universe) is an amazing place. My sister-in-law Laura turned me on NASA’s “Astronomy Picture of the Day” website. I bookmarked it and put it in my Daily folder so I get a cool new picture from NASA every day. While the web site has that late 1990’s look and feel, the pictures are stunning.

Episode 4 of The Founders: TechStars Boulder is up on the web. This week’s episode includes a special guest appearance from Greg Cohn at Yahoo, a poker party with KKO, thoughts on why startups play poker while big companies play chess, and a bunch of other good stuff. The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 4 “Skills & Persistence” from Andrew on Vimeo.

I’m sitting in the early dawn light in a cabin in Tabernash, Colorado drinking a cup of coffee and getting ready to go for a run in the mountains. I’ve just spent the last 18 hours with my Foundry Group partners at our quarterly retreat. This is an approximately 24 hour affair that includes staying overnight somewhere in Colorado within driving distance of Boulder. We’ve been doing this quarterly since we conceived of the idea for Foundry Group.

Last night I sent the Puttermans (the co-founders of Cloud Engines – the makers of Pogoplug) a note with a few ideas about features I’d like to see in the product. Included were requests for drop-dead simple integration with a few other products that I use including Sonos, Boxee, and AppleTV. As investors in Pogoplug, I’m an aggressive lead user and unapologetic fan boy – it’s just an incredible product with insane potential (how about them adjectives, eh?)

I have three major hobbies – reading, running, and collecting art. On my run today, I realized that I occasionally blog about reading and running, but I rarely blog about art. I’m pretty sure this idea got lodged in my head yesterday while Amy and I were looking around the web for a new piece to “buy each other” as our anniversary gift. While looking, we stumbled upon this incredible painting from Don Coen titled Prairie Rattler.

I had a great week last week. Most of the companies I’m an investor in are doing well and are having strong Q2s. A few, like Zynga, are absolutely killing it (see the Zynga video on CBS News titled SF-Based Startup Thriving, Hiring In Down Economy*.)* As one might expect, I’ve got a few companies that are struggling, but that’s the nature of the beast and I’m really proud of all the folks in those companies as they work their butts off to get to a happy place.