My title is tongue in check. As Marc Andreessen said in his outstanding analysis of the situation in If Microsoft goes fully hostile on Yahoo – “So this may yet come to remind you of the Democratic presidential primary season — it may last a while.”

You aren’t a real trail runner until you’ve taken a spill that draws blood. I had a doozy today at mile 4. I was on a stretch of trail that I’ve run hundreds of times. I was humming Across the Universe (Amy and I watched the movie last night – five stars) and thinking about whether Google AppEngine is the reinvention of the 4GL. I was jolted back to the present moment when I realized I had caught my toe and was now flying through the air.

Wesley Snipes apparently got a three year sentence for tax evasion this week. At least he’s pretty good at Karate and Kung Fu – I expect that will come in handy if he ends up serving the sentence. Apparently the message being delivered is “pay your taxes”.

There’s a rumor going around that Salesforce.com is switching all of its 4000 employees over to Macs. If so, this will be the first high profile complete Windows to Mac enterprise defection that I’ve heard of recently (I’m sure there are others, but they haven’t been high profile or big enough to catch my attention.) For several months, I’ve been suggesting that when larger (great than 2,500 employee) companies start defecting en masse (e.g. the entire company) to Macs, it will signal another potential tectonic shift (and opportunity) in the software business.

At the end of every board meeting I’m a part of we have a closed session. This is a session that includes only the board members. All of the boards I’m on include the CEO as a board member so the CEO is part of the closed session. If there are multiple founder / management board members, they attend. But – no observers and no members of management that aren’t on the board.

I just did a search in my address book for someone and came up with the address book entry for someone I know that died last year. I was sad. I sat – paralyzed – for thirty seconds struggling to decide whether or not to delete the address book entry. I realized this is a great example of an unintended consequence of technology. I was not particularly close to this person (they were a neighbor of mine) but I flashed back to a walk along our creek that we had one day while scoping out the location for a new gate that Amy and put up in our canyon. He was a nice but somewhat troubled guy that didn’t live long enough.

During my morning routine (90 – 120 minutes of catching up on email, reading my “daily” folder in Firefox, reading my RSS feeds, and blogging) I came across Alex Iskold’s post Faster – Why Constant Stress is Part of Our Future. It was ironic to me that I read it shortly after posting my last blog about my Q1 vacation. Alex makes the argument that constant stress is part of our current reality and that it is accelerating. I don’t buy the argument that it is inevitable – I believe that it is a choice. And I reject it.

If you are a loyal reader of this blog, you know that Amy and I take a week completely off the grid every quarter. Well – I missed my Q1 vacation so we took it early in Q2. We spent five days on the big island in Hawaii, hosted by college friend David Cowan. When I was at MIT, David was my best “Harvard friend.” (ok – I didn’t have too many, but he was the best.) Amy and I hadn’t spent an extended period of time with David and his wife Nathalie since the early 1990’s – it was awesome to reconnect. I assumed that David was in a good mood because we were around, but I’m sure the Tuesday $1.25 billion Bessemer Hat Trick didn’t hurt.

I have a very patterned daily information consumption routine. The left-most tab in my browser is called “Daily” and contains a set of web sites that I open up each morning and look at as part of my routine. Recently, Filtrbox – one of the TechStars companies – graduated to be part of this tab. I try virtually every news alerting system that I come across. I have a set of about 100 keywords that I track daily – all of the companies we’ve invested in, a number of people that I follow, and a handful of random things I care about. My current staples are Google Alerts, Yahoo Alerts, and Technorati. I can only seem to get Google and Yahoo via email, so they show up in my inbox and get moved to my “Daily” email folder (which I read – er – daily.) Technorati comes via RSS so I read it each morning in FeedDemon.