Tomorrow is Marathon #13 – the Mount Desert Island Marathon in Bar Harbor, Maine. As part of my pre-marathon tradition, Amy and I relax at a movie the day before. Today’s was Flash of Genius at the awesome Reel Pizza Cinerama. Flash of Genius is the story of Robert Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. It’s a tragedy in three acts. Act 1: Invention and hopefulness that ends in betrayal. Act 2: The hero encounters increasing difficulties, complications, and losses. Act 3: Triumph and redemption. While I’m deeply anti-software-patent, I’m equally pro-inventor. The Kearns story – at least what I know of it from the great 1993 New Yorker article titled The Flash of Genius – is a complicated and provocative one. Greg Kinnear is brilliant as Robert Kearns and plays the dedicated and single-minded investor magnificently.

This morning, I read two wonderful essays on the web – one by Warren Buffet and one by Paul Graham. Warren Buffett: Buy American. I Am. Paul Graham: Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy Both of these made me immediately think of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s brilliant new book – The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable- which has been making the rounds the past few months. If you haven’t yet read it, you should stop what you are doing, buy it immediately, and read it. If you haven’t read Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, you should read it first as it sets the stage for The Black Swan.

No – not that kind of trip, although it might have made watching the debates last night more entertaining. I’m hitting the road for 10 days to travel our great country, check out main street, see some American heroes, and subject myself to more airplane travel fun. I wonder if I’ll stay in any of the same hotels as the presidential candidates. I start this trip in New York, where I’ll be exploring the now famous Wall Street greed and corruption people. I then travel to Bar Harbor Maine to run a marathon (sponsor me and support Accelerated Cure). As part of this quest, I’m going to search for main street; it seems like I should be able to find it in Maine. Then I’m off to Boston to return to my post high school roots, have a nerd party with some wikipedia worthy entrepreneurial friends, and explore the outer reaches of 495. A quick trip by train back to New York and then off to Virginia and Maryland to make sure the leaves are turning the appropriate colors there before they completely fall off the trees.

An annual institution in Boulder occurred last week – the Boulder Chamber of Commerce Esprit Awards. A bunch of my friends were winners this year and – since they were all nice enough to call me out for my contribution to them, I thought I’d reciprocate by congratulating them. So, a big congrats to: Mike Platt at Cooley Godward Raj Bhargava at StillSecure Krista, Johnathan, Tom, and Brent at Kerpoof Y’all are great – thanks for all of your hard work, vision, and contribution to the Boulder entrepreneurial scene.

The “new VC entrants into the blogosphere” has slowed over the past 12 months. In addition, the decay curve of many of the newest VC bloggers looks very similar to the decay curve of nuclear waste, except for it happens over a six month period instead of having a 24,100 year half life. In contrast, the gang at RRE Ventures have both launched a new blog titled Five Years Too Late and filled it with great, relevant, and stimulating content, including posts such as:

A well worn tradition of most venture capital firms is the Monday Meeting. While there are several variations of it, including having it the meeting on Tuesday or Friday in an effort to be counter-cultural, most venture capital firms gather on Monday’s to review their portfolios, have companies come in and present for follow-on rounds or new investments, and ponder the state of the universe. I expect there will be a lot of pondering today. Given that it’s only 1:23pm and I’ve already received several missives commenting on the Sequoia RIP article (including a skeptical email from someone forwarding the VentureBeat article stating that Sequoia raised the largest new fund in Q3), it’s clear that many VC firms are sitting around today discussing ways they can “help” their portfolio companies in these “uncertain times.”

Ok, by now you’ve read 3,127 blog posts either talking about the coming current downturn credit crisis recession coming reconfiguration of all things as we’ve known them. You’ve studied Sequoia’s Get Real or Go Home presentation. You’ve read Alan Patricof’s Chill Out memo, Ron Conway’s Get Ready For It To Suck email, Benchmark’s Adapt and Live Lean memo and John Borthwick’s Don’t Panic – Profit memo. For some balance, you’ve read Dave McClure’s brilliant rant Fear is the Mind Killer of the Silicon Valley Entrepreneur (we must be Muad’Dib, not Clark Kent) and Ted Rheingold’s VC Gloom Means Entrepreneur and Angel Boon. And you are carefully monitoring Fred Wilson’s blog to get a good synthesis of what he and others are thinking.

And now for something completely different. No – this isn’t going to be yet another blog post on how you, the entrepreneur, should react to the credit crisis. That’s later today. Instead, this is my extreme fanboy blog post for my friends at Harmonix and their amazing new version of Rock Band (very creatively named Rock Band 2). In addition to being a magnificent video game (and a great example of what we are looking for in our HCI theme), the Harmonix story is a fabulous entrepreneurial tale. Don Steinberg wrote a long article titled Just Play that’s in this month’s Inc. Magazine. Yours truly makes a very small appearance in the story which is a testament to both the brilliance of Alex Rigopolus and Eran Egozy as well as their incredible perseverance (the story, not my appearance in it.) Forget about “macro issues” – these guys show what it’s like to spend a decade where they are weeks (and days) away from going out of business before waking up one day to a blockbuster success.

Fred has a fantastic blog up titled Capital Efficiency Finds It’s Moment. It – combined with his posts My Thoughts On “Startup Depression” – are full of suggestions that entrepreneurs should be thinking about and taking action on right now. They are both completely consistent with my post Ok Entrepreneurs, Time to Step Up. I’m not into Gloom and Doom. I love the Warren Buffett quote that goes something like “We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.” Part of the brilliance of this is to be harshly rational and evaluate the current situation through a realistic lens at all times.