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.

I love it when my wife Amy blogs. She’s an amazing writer and has a much wider range of intellectual interests than me. I often refer to her as my personal CD-ROM; whenever I need information on something, I ask her. I find her to be much more accurate and comprehensive than Wikipedia. She put up a new Wordle this morning. This is her tag cloud from delicious.

If you’d like to do something political that has nothing to do with the upcoming elections, read through Tom Evslin’s post Act Now for Better Internet Access. Then go sign the online petition at freetheairwaves.com. It kind of blows my mind that the National Association of Broadcasters is still fighting this stuff, especially with the impending federally mandated cutover to digital TV in February. But hey, lots of things seem illogical – this is nothing new.

I spent the past 10 days on the road in a bunch of different cities (New York, Bar Harbor, Boston, Westford, New York again, Tysons Corner, Alexandria, Owings Mills) doing a bunch of different things (stuff with MIT, our LPs, our companies, some friends, my partner Jason, Amy, and myself). As is my typical fashion, I didn’t pay much attention to the news while I was traveling – allowing myself one read through the headlines each day as part of my morning routine. This left my brain pretty clear to concentrate on the things I was doing and pick up the nuances of how people were thinking and feeling based on what they were saying and doing.

One of the TechStars 2007 companies is Brightkite. Brightkite is a real time location-based social network. I travel a lot and have always wanted an easy way to broadcast where I am at any given time. Brightkite is the solution. While their mobile UI is very good, when I’m traveling the general mobile performance via a web browser has been slow enough to prevent me from using it consistently. Brightkite just released their iPhone app. It is incredible. It integrates brilliantly with all of the iPhone thingys (geolocation, maps, directions), is fast, and clean.

A friend of mine has been going deep on the entire cloud computing ecosystem as he works through some ideas for a new company. He coined a term “clouditude” a few days ago and send me his thoughts about it. I found his term / definition fascinating and very relevant (look for me to start using the word “clouditude”. I asked if I could republish his thoughts directly to see if anyone had any comments to add; here they are. 

Yesterday, I got the following question via email: “I was wondering if you think running has had a long-term impact on your professional self? Does it help keep you focused and motivated while you work, or does it reduce the amount of time you could spend reading about business and financial trends?” This question hit an interesting chord with me – both because of the general nature of the question as well as the “or” part (e.g. the specificity of the “reduce the amount of time you could spend reading about business and financial trends.”)

I’m still loving my iPhone. It’s been around two months now, so I think this thing is finally going to stick and I’ll use an Apple product regularly. My regular iPhone app usage is increasing to include the new version of Brightkite (wow – I’m bfeld if you want to follow me), NetNewsWire (double wow), and the NY Times app. I’m fascinated with the NY Times app – I think it is an extremely well done specialized iPhone app.