Error Code 80169d94 cost me an hour of my life last night and ninety minutes of my life this morning. All I wanted to do was upgrade my Xbox Live Silver account (which comes free with an Xbox) to Xbox Live Gold (which costs $49.99 / year) so I could stream Netflix movies on my Xbox (cool feature). I spend the first 15 minutes following the directions and trying to update to Gold on the web. Every time I hit confirm the update page refreshed and did nothing. Being stubborn, I did this about 25 times, including firing up IE and trying that (figuring that it was a Microsoft / Firefox thing.) Wrong.

A marathon wouldn’t be a marathon without my sherpa. Amy plays the role perfectly, including taking all the important pictures. My favorite:

I think I’ve read every book that Michael Lewis has ever written going all the way back to Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street . While Lewis merely edited Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity , it’s a brilliant book and a good start to my year end “16 days of books” (where I read a book a day while I’m up in Keystone.) Panic covers five modern financial crashes:

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.