I’ve been an Internet email user since early 1984 when I got my first Project Athena account as an undergraduate at MIT. Notwithstanding all the “email is dead” messages over the years, I continue to use email as my primary online communication mechanism. There are an enormous number of things that frustrate me about email, most notably the lack of fundamental innovation in email clients and servers. That said, as a messaging tool – it still dominates for me.

I love data. And I adore playing with it graphically, as I learn a lot from graphing longitudinal data about things I’m involved in. However, I find that almost all of the web services I use suck at providing visualization / graphing tools for their data. For example, I’ve never really found any of the graphing options in any of the running software I use satisfying or useful. I’ve known about Tableau Software for a long time. The CEO and founder is Christian Chabot – we worked together at Softbank Venture Capital. Tableau has built a significant software company and when Christian called me up to ask if they could play around with some of my running data as part of their launch of their new web-based services, I agreed.

I’ve never been great with remembering names the first time I meet someone. I’ve tried all the usual tricks and haven’t found one that works. For me, it’s a matter of regular meeting – eventually I’ll start to remember your name. The most embarrassing part is forgetting the names of spouses that I work with. For whatever reason, I only have room in my brain for one of the two names (gender doesn’t matter). I’ve solved this by referring to wives as “Tifanny” and husbands as “Herman”. So far, 100% of the time, I get the correct name out of the spouse, along with a chuckle. I figure that on the day that I don’t, that person’s name is actually either Tiffany or Herman.

On Wednesday I did my final One-on-One with Phil Weiser on the topic of Work-Life Balance. Rocky Radar did a great job of summarizing it in the post Feld on Life Balance: “Accomplish What You Want, Not What You Think You Have to”**. w3w3.com recorded it – you can listen to it here. Since it was at 5:30 and on a beautiful evening, I figured there would probably only be 10 people in the audience. The room was packed and the questions were really fun. Hopefully everyone got something out of it.

Last year we got connected to some guys from Hollywood who talked to us (I can’t decide if we pitched them or they pitched us) on doing a “TechStars Reality Show.” The whole thing seemed seriously sketchy to me, but I knew it was a no-op when they made us a proposal for us to do all the work, come up with all the money, and they would get all the revenue. Clearly I don’t understand how things work in Hollywood. So we punted.

I have a new Windows 7 computer at my loft in Boulder that I’ve been working on for the past 24 hours. It’s the same exact configuration as my desktop (except for Windows 7 instead of Vista) and “my IT guy Ross” images all the machines the same so I get the same base config. The amount of configuration in the image is substantial – it probably cuts out a full day of install, wait, download, configure, reboot shit.

My friends at Rocky Radar have launched a Colorado Company Index. It’s a free resource designed to catalog the technology companies working within the state, from IT to Life Science to Clean Tech. Thanks also to the guys at SurveyGizmo for helping out here. They are currently bootstrapping the index – submit your company info here.

We are super psyched about our investment in Pogoplug. Generally, I hate self-referential tech analogies as a way of describing a product, but in Pogoplug’s case it’s easy: “Pogoplug is a Slingbox for your hard drive.” Our big insight about Sling as an investment was that it was “a bunch of magic software packaged in a cool plastic box that just works.” Similarly, Pogoplug is “a bunch of magic software packaged in a cool plastic box that just works.”

Wow – that was a great and much needed week off the grid. Both Amy and I were exhausted. But, we are back (although she is about to decamp to Keystone for the summer to work on her book.) Before I checked out I spent 36 hours in Idaho with my friends at Highway 12 Ventures at the Idavation Conference. My keynote speech is up on their website along with me hosting the Idaho’s Top Geeks panel. Mark and Pam Solon were incredible hosts – I had a great first trip to Boise along with a superb run with Ryan Woodings of Metageek (really cool wi-spy product). This was my second trip to Idaho – Amy just tossed up pictures from last years Ashton Idaho Marathon with the Blumbergs.