Stanford has put all the course material for CS 193P – iPhone Application Programming up on the web. If you are developing an iPhone app, or considering it, the course looks like it has a huge amount of useful data.

While it’s not over yet as the Supreme Court might weight in, the Federal Court Kills Patents on Business Methods. I haven’t read things carefully yet (I’ll leave that for the bathroom this weekend) but from the quick analysis I’ve read (In re Bilski: Patentable Process Must Either (1) be Tied to a particular machine or (2) Transform a Particular Article) it looks like it is a strong, unambiguous decision in the good fight to eliminate ridiculous patents.

All of the hedge fund (and some of the VC fund) statements I’ve been receiving the past few weeks have long essays in them. I categorize most of them as either (a) marketing, e.g. “look how smart we are – we know what’s going on” or (b) rationalization, e.g. “our numbers totally suck, but here’s why you should be optimistic about our future performance.” However, at least one of them was really interesting, well thought out, and gave me plenty to think about.

VentureBeat had a Downturn RoundTable yesterday consisting of a panel of VCs and an panel of entrepreneurs giving their advice on what to do to whether to current economic crisis. I found the TechCrunch commentary to be a very good summary: VCs Speak On The Economic Downturn: Batten Down the Hatches Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs: Make Cuts, Stay Stingy, But Never Forget The Dream Since VentureBeat actually put on the event, it seems appropriate to link to their content also.

I was talking to Andrew Hyde over at the Boulder.me Job Fair and a few of the folks I ran into busted my chops (in a good way) about my publicly declared jihad on my weight. For those of you that have commented – thanks – the encouragement, support, and suggestions have been great. I’ve started a group competition on Gyminee called Overweight Boys In Boulder*.* The competition is to lose the most % body weight before 1/31/09. The losers buy the winner a super healthy meal at Leaf (and we all have a party together). Micah has suggested he’s going to kick my ass, but I think his odds were better in the sushi eating contest that occurred recently.

If you thought the reason I haven’t been doing a Daily Reading post lately was because I didn’t feel like adding more to the endless stream of political noise, global economic crisis, and the impending extinction of arctic wolves, you’d be wrong. I simply forgot I was doing it. Oops. Here are a few good ones from today. Chess Move Simulator: If you are a chess player, you must check this out. Awesome. Thanks Bruce. Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform: A guide for the perplexed: Mary Jo Foley tries to explain Azure. If you notice a bunch of software engineers wandering around Boulder, that’s because the Boulder Colorado Job Fair is in full swing. If you run into someone from out of Boulder, be nice and make sure you tell them it’s never actually cold in Boulder. Seth Godin speaks up on some of his failures in Failure as an event. As is typical of Seth, he has concise, brilliant advice. His biggest lesson of all – “Persist. Do the next one.” Bill Flagg has a great contrarian post on Startup Valuations. Actually, it’s not contrarian. It’s just good old bootstrapping common sense. Ho Nam at Altos Ventures has the real contrarian post of the day (he even uses the word contrarian in it). RIP Good Times? A Different Perspective. Off to spend the day with a top secret group of VCs discussing what we think of the future.

I regularly get the “why do you blog” question. I also regularly get “thank you for blogging” notes (thank you for the thank you notes.) I’m a fan on Andrew Sullivan – he has a magnificent article in The Atlantic titled Why I Blog. He nails it. Thanks for the link Dave.

With a nod to a line given to me from a recent television show that I enjoy, I’m declaring a jihad on my weight. I’ve struggled with my weight for the past 15 years. I was a skinny person until I hit 28. At that point, something happened and I gained about 60 pounds. At my peak, some of my friends referred to me as fat. Eek. I started running about seven years ago. I lost about 20 of the pounds. Some them went into muscle, some of them went away. But a bunch of them hung around – mostly my belly and my ass.

My iPhone 3G continues to delight me. For all of you naysayers out there (e.g. “eh – Feld’s Mac Fetish rears its head again – he’ll be done with it in a week and give it back to Ross), you are wrong this time! As a heavy Outlook user, the requirement for me to be happy was a seamless experience with Exchange. In the Apple iPhone 2.0 software, Apple did an excellent job of integrated EAS (Microsoft Exchange Active Sync) that has completely won me over.