Amy and I woke up at 5am this morning (which was still several hours after dawn here in Homer, AK) to head the big city of Soldotna, Alaska (population 4,087) to run the 2008 Soldotna Rotary Unity 10 Mile Race. As part of my marathon training I’ve decided to run a lot more races between 10k and a half marathon to try to build up my “racing brain” while having some extra fun wherever I happen to be in the world.

I’ve ranted about the TSA plenty on this blog – I travel a lot and find dealing with the TSA one of the more amusing experiences in my life. So does Patrick Smith of Ask the Pilot – one of my favorite travel blogs. In a recent post headlined Propped up by a culture of fear, TSA has become a bureaucracy with too much power and little accountability. Where will the lunacy stop? he discusses the case of “pilot re-screening” and the “dangerous airline cutlery.”

I’ve heard from several people that NetNewsWire on the iPhone is awesome. While I’m not a Mac user, I’m anxiously awaiting my new iPhone (Ross promises that I’ll have it – along with Exchange sync – on Monday). In the mean time, I’m psyched that my friends at NewsGator have once again harnessed the software wizardry of Brent Simmons to create a fully-features RSS Reader – based on NetNewsWire – that runs on the iPhone. If you have an iPhone you can get it for free at the AppStore now. I know I will on Monday.

If you follow me on twitter, you know I’ve been whining about the lack of sun in Homer this year. We’ve been here for a week and didn’t really see the sun until today. A few days ago I promised “the sun” (via twitter) that I’d blog about it and put up a picture if it ever decided to show up here. We still have plenty of clouds obscuring the mountains across Kachemak Bay (which makes the sun reflect in strange and unusually ways), but when I returned home from my run Amy was jumping up and down shouting “the sun is out, the sun it out” confirming that it had finally made an appearance.

I’ve been really pleased with the way NewsGator’s widget business has taken off. Two years ago I regularly got questions from people about “how would NewsGator monetize the consumer web reader business.” The answer to that is “they won’t – but they’ll use the infrastructure they’ve build – which is rock solid, scalable, and unique – to build a really interesting widget and data business based on RSS content.” NewsGator now has over 100 paying customers for their widget business. Over the past 30 days, they’ve served almost 19 million unique users over 250 million widget views. They’ve also served over 44 million API calls to paying data partners (a total over over 385 million API calls if you include all the free clients out there, including NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, and NewsGator Go! that call the API on a regular basis.) This is in support of 2.8 million feeds and 211 million articles over the past 30 days. The overall NewsGator feed archive now stands at 2.1 billion articles. Non-trivial!

I want to welcome Pixie Maté as a sponsor of the Feld 50 by 50 Marathon Team. Pixie Maté joins Return Path as one of my sponsors and has committed $250 to Accelerated Cure for every marathon I complete going forward. I’ve got 39 to go, so that’s a total commitment of $9,750 – wow guys, awesome! Pixie Maté is a Boulder based organic foods company taking yerba maté to the masses. Yerba maté is the national drink of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and S. Brazil where it is a dietary staple next to bread and meat. This liquid vegetable contains more antioxidants than green tea and affords a buzz like coffee, but without the jitters, and peaks and valleys. Pixie Maté calls it the balanced buzz with a llama-load of antioxidants.

If you follow my tweets you know that I am starting to get desperate for some sun. I could never live in Seattle. There’s a rumor that we’ll see the sun in Homer again later today – if it comes out to play I’ll post a picture of it (did you hear that Mr. Sun – that’s called a blibe (“blog bribe”). Here are some interesting things I’ve collected over the past few days of my cloud induced web reading.

We announced Our Investment in Topspin Media today. My partner Ryan McIntyre has a long post up titled Topspin, Baby! that describes the history of how the investment came together over the past ten years. Ian Rogers – the CEO of Topspin who was profiled in TechCrunch a few weeks ago in the article Ex-Yahoo Music GM Ian Rogers Launches Topspin Media has a nice a post up on the Topspin blog titled Old Friends, New Opportunities. 

Yes – those are the lyrics – buried at about 2:05. Who said mathematicians don’t know how to rock. Thanks Ryan. Cornell just went up a notch in my book.