Whenever someone comes in my office that hasn’t seen me before, they always fawn over my monitor. I enjoy my 30" Apple beast, even though it’s running Vista. Yes – that would be my next one curtsey of 9X (via Engadget).

What a fun picture of me and Kevin Parent (now at Oblong) that someone found and gave me yesterday. I was a sophomore at MIT and probably 19 (although maybe 18). Oh to be 170 pounds again. Can you name the statue? Bonus points if you can name the location on the MIT campus.

It’s Friday and there’s a remarkable amount of interesting stuff that came out of my morning “catch up on blog / email” routine. I was going to write a couple of different blogs, but then realized that I didn’t have a lot to add to any of them other than “read this – it’s interesting.” There are a few “linkblogs” that I follow, but I find many break down quickly and become just “lists of more stuff.”

In February, I took my dad away for our annual father – son weekend. This last weekend, he and my brother Daniel did their annual weekend together in Chicago. My dad has written a beautiful post titled Chicago, Chicago, It’s a Wonderful Town. A friend of mine lost his father earlier this week. I feel so lucky that I’ve always had a great relationship with my dad and that I figured out early enough that one of the special things in life was to spend a little time with just him every year.

In my I Love Email post, I got a wonderful comment from my friend Fred Wilson that said: to each his/her own these days. my kids use facebook and text messaging for the most part but now that they have email on their phones (bberry and iphone) they use that as well, but it’s not their primary messaging system. i still use email as my primary method, but as someone else said, it’s the new snail mail. i hate doing it and its a chore. i called it “homework” on twitter today. that’s how i feel about it. i find text messaging and twitter are best for me, but they will only be better for a while. they will get more noisy and i’ll have to move to something else. i don’t use facebook messaging at all. when people send me facebook messages, they are talking to a black hole

Perfect.

Email. Email. Email. My partner Chris Wand just put up a post titled Did Darwin Skip Over Email? Every now and then the “Email is dead” meme makes the rounds and lights up TechMeme. The right answer isn’t that “email is dead”; it’s that new and exciting stuff is happening around the use of “messaging” and it’s time for some new innovation. For those of you who suggest that I switch all my email over to Facebook, I say to you “Laugh-a-while you can, Monkey Boy.”

I was in a meeting with one of our new portfolio companies today. In response to a non-obvious question, the CEO said “I don’t know is the answer to your question.” I fell in love with this CEO all over again and was reminded of Josh Kopelman’s magnificent post in March titled I Don’t Know … Another great line from the meeting was “The only useful things to come out of marketing budgets in early stage companies are stickers and t-shirts." That was – of course – from me.

I am newly addicted to Skype. Several weeks ago when I was in Keystone, I had total IP phone failure. We use a Cisco IP phone system in our office. My house in Eldorado Springs has a T1 line connected to the office with a Cisco IP phone set up. My house in Keystone has Comcast business Internet connected via a VPN (running on a Linux box) to our office network with a Cisco IP phone set up. All the phones are configured exactly the same (one number, the 24 ring tone, similar presets.)