As we all head into the long weekend, I thought I’d give you something to ponder other than what your friends will twitter about this weekend. While in Italy last week, David Cohen and I got into yet another discussion about whether it was better to be a nerd or a geek. I generally use the word nerd to describe myself whereas David was all about geek. During our fundraising for Foundry Group last year, we had a due diligence session with two of our investors where we got into the same debate. The conclusion from our discussion (no alcohol was involved) was that “nerds are geeks who make money.”

Josh Kopleman at First Round Capital has an excellent post up titled Depending on pending… I’m going out to lunch at the Rio today and having a margarita to celebrate the issuance of the original Half.com patent (#7,373,317) that was just issued. 8.5 years after Josh filed for it. And 7 years after eBay acquired Half.com. To my great joy, Josh states “I believe there is little-to-no value in depending on pending patents for a “barrier” to entry. “ He then adds a line that I love in the never ending “patents are like nuclear bombs” debate: “But if you’re fighting a war today, it’s better to count on weapons you have at hand today — don’t rely on a nuclear program that could take five years to come to fruition.”

I don’t write much about politics on this blog. Like father, like son – politicians (and politics) give me a headache. However, I love to pimp my father’s blog and he’s got a great post up today titled John McCain Describes His Health Plan; In Reality A Non Health Plan. For the past few months, my dad – a retired endocrinologist and now healthcare pundit – has been inspecting, dissecting, and commenting on what the various presidential candidates have been saying about healthcare. He’s got plenty of stuff on Obama, Clinton, and McCain. It’s a compendium of uniformly dismal, sad, and disappointing non-solutions. 

Yes – I’m back from vacation. But you probably figured that out already. The next six weeks are pretty intense ones for me in my annual rhythm of things – I love the time period of memorial day weekend through July 4th. A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Reena Jadhav on Vator.tv on how to get funding. Other than my excessive hand gestures, it’s a good look inside my brain about how I think early stage entrepreneurs should think about funding, especially first time entrepreneurs.

I have a long documented love of APIs. Ever since I started programming in the late 1970’s the idea of writing software that interacted with other software was a cool idea to me. Abstractions 30 years ago weren’t very sophisticated, but when I look back at some of the Apple II documentation in my own personal computer museum I am amazed at what you could peek and poke, even back then.

My Q2 vacation came quickly on the heels of my Q1 vacation (since I didn’t manage to take my Q1 vacation until April). Amy and I spent a delightful week in Positano, Italy with David and Jil Cohen. This was their big vacation before David goes heads down all summer on TechStars so it was great fun to hang out, relax, and enjoy the magic of some of the best Italy has to offer.

Great, inspiring video on failure. (thanks Scott).

Yeah – that was one of my favorite movies of my youth – I’ve always loved Mork. I guess that’s part of the reason I moved to Boulder. The title of this post is nonsensical – I just wrote what came to mind because this is going to be another of my “here’s what I found interesting on the web this morning” posts. I’ve got six for you today instead of five. Going forward, these will be categorized as “Daily Reading” although of course you can search for magic words that you remember via my Lijit Search Wijit on the sidebar.

Some great images are coming in already in response to my Request For Images For A Presentation post. I couldn’t resist putting this one up on the heals of the Microsoft / Yahoo! drama. If you don’t get it – well – I can’t help you. (Thanks Ray)