I was inspired by the hilarious McSweeney’s article Recreational Jewish Youth Basketball: An Ethnography (thanks Amy) to host a Jewish Christmas party this year near Keystone, Colorado. If you happen to be out this way on the evening of December 24th and have a hankering for Chinese food and a movie, please drop me an email to coordinate.

I love to invest in plumbing. Not toilet plumbing, but Internet software plumbing. At Foundry Group we call it Glue and – among a variety of investments – have helped start up a conference with Eric Norlin (the creator of Defrag) called the Glue Conference. One of our investments in our Glue theme is Gnip. I had a meeting yesterday with Jud Valeski (the CTO / co-founder) and a few other folks, including the two founders of a new seed investment (in the Glue theme) we are planning on closing in early January. We covered a bunch of stuff, including debating whether 99.95 is now “good enough” for cloud computing, and also talked about some of the architectural issues that Gnip has dealt with as they put together their service.

I’ve started writing a monthly column for Entrepreneur Magazine called VC Insider. The first article is titled Perfect Your Pitch and has a list of mistakes I see over and over again from entrepreneurs approaching me for financing.

If you haven’t done your holiday shopping yet and you like food, go check out the 20% off sale that Foodzie is having. Foodzie is one of the TechStars 2008 companies and recently announced they have raised $1m from First Round Capital, SoftTech VC, and some great angel investors. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I love all the TechStars companies the same way a parent loves their offspring, but I have a special crush on the Foodzie folks.

Close your door. Turn off your computer monitor. Sit quietly and look out the window. Now – ask yourself the following question: “How much time do I spend on the wrong things each day?” Don’t bullshit yourself. Answer it as honestly as you can. 5 minutes? 15 minutes? 30 minutes? 60 minutes? 2 hours? 4 hours? More? Now, turn on your computer monitor. Scan your inbox, even if it’s 4,137 messages (aha – I see you aren’t a zero inbox person of a GTD guy.) Bring up the weekly view on your calendar and look at it. Look at your todo list (if you have one).

When Automattic acquired Intense Debate a few months ago, I committed to Toni Schneider and Matt Mullenweg that I’d convert my blogs from Movable Type to WordPress and become a WordPress fanboy. After the acquisition they sent me a bunch of stickers (along with my Automattic stock certificate). I’ve been dutifully putting my stickers up on lamp posts, doors, and computers all around the country. As of right now, I can also say that I’ve converted this blog over to WordPress.

There’s nothing quite like reading a book about marathons on a weekend that you run a marathon. I carried My First 100 Marathons: 2,620 Miles with an Obsessive Runner by Jeff Horowitz in my bag with me and read it while I was laying around on Sunday recovering. Jeff is a massive inspiration to any marathon runner. The book reads like a combination travelogue + novel + running philosophy treatise. I was really pleased with my Huntsville performance and – after reading Jeff’s book – was even more motivated to get up off the couch as quickly as possible and go run another marathon.

As I was boarding the plane today in Dulles, I twittered At Dulles on the way to Raleigh durham. Post marathon travel is painful. Within a minute I got an email from Jeff Turner, the founder of Blogbeat: “I just saw on Twitter that you’re in route to Raleigh… I know you’re probably booked up, but just in case you aren’t, I thought I’d check in & see if I could buy you a beer or cheeseburger (or something). really just want to say hi and thank you formally for the FeedBurner connection. Either way, hope you’re doing well & recover soon from your marathon!”

I’ve never totally understood the “send out physical greeting cards” thing. I get that it’s a “tradition”, but it has always seemed like a waste of time, energy, and money to me. Yes – I know I’ve signed my share of these cards – I’ve just played along, but it doesn’t change the way I feel about them. I now get a flood of electronic cards (and birthday wishes – thanks everyone!) These make me smile and often generate a response via email from me to people I haven’t talked to in a while. I received very few physical birthday cards this year (which is good) since pretty much everyone that would send me a card sent me an electronic one.