In response to my Planes, Trains, and Automobiles post, I’ve already gotten several questions along the lines of “how do you deal with our insane air travel system” such as: How do you keep your sanity traveling to the east coast? I’ve just spent the past 6 weeks traveling to New York from Denver and it’s either: get up at 4am only to waste an entire day traveling or take the red-eye.

Today’s article in the NY Times titled Ping-Pong as Mind Game (Although a Good Topspin Helps) is dedicated to all my ping pong friends at TechStars. When I was young (say – 10 – 14) and played a serious game of tennis, I was also a dedicated ping pong player. While I’m left handed, I learned to play tennis (and ping pong) right handed. I was once really good and it shows about every ten shots (in both sports.) Every now and then I’ll pick up a ping pong paddle and give someone that plays all the time a run for their money, but I’m too inconsistent a player to do anything other than make my opponent bring their real game to put me away. As a result, I’m going to stick to Gnip Gnop.

Our portfolio company Rally Software absolutely creamed their first quarter plan – I’m pleasantly stunned by their positive performance. They are leading the adoption of Agile software methodologies into software development organization. While that is exciting, I keep hearing stories – especially from Rally Software customers – about how they are using Agile in other parts of their company. Ashley at GroundFloor Media has a great post up titled PR and software development may have more in common than you might think… about how GroundFloor is using Agile methodologies in other parts of their organization. If you are interested in another example, Matt Blumberg (Return Path’s CEO) wrote about Agile Marketing a while ago.

By the time you read this I’ll be in New York (right now I’m on a plane.) If you follow me (or any of my partners) on twitter, you will quickly understand why a Boulder entrepreneur recently referred to twitter as the “Foundry Group location / travel finder.” We travel plenty. My partner Chris Wand just wrote a post titled Is “Geography” a Cliché in Venture Capital? Unlike many VCs who prefer to invest close to home, we view the United States (and Canada) as our oyster. Take a look at Chris’ post to understand why.

From the WSJ: The Clintons had gross income of $109 million for 2000-2007, newly released tax documents show. President Clinton made $51.8 million speeches over eight years and $29.6 million in book income, while Hillary Clinton made $10.5 million in book income. The Clintons paid $33.8 million in taxes between 2000-2007, or 31% of adjusted gross income, and gave $10.26 million to charity over eight years. Nice tax bill.

I’ve been told that my blogging pace is often a hint as to what I’m up to. When my pace stalls, it either means I’m on vacation or deep into a deal. To those that notice, I say “good observation.” I’ve spent the last three days running around Dallas with Amy and my parents looking at art. Amy and I are patrons of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College where Amy went to college. Every year they have a Patrons Trip to a major city to see private collections as well as the local museums. This year’s trip was to Dallas (where I grew up) so we “patronized” my parents and included them on our trip.

Over the past few years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how people communicate with each other. As an active user of all computer based communication technologies such as email, IM, web collaboration, and twitter, I realize that direct, bite size communication is often effective. However, given the lack of persistence of data in these mediums, I’ve felt like something was missing. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a huge fan of t-shirts and have an extensive collection. I’ve noticed that the vast majority of my entrepreneurial colleagues prefer t-shirts over other types of dresswear. Finally, the t-shirt industry has grown nicely alongside of the software and Internet industry, as most companies have accelerated the growth of the t-shirt industry through their use of swag.

Thanks to my friend Bruce Wyman (who is rapidly turning into my “discoverer of cool things”) I have experienced a major back to the future moment with the Mosaic Communications Corporation web site. The “Founders” page was fun as was the “What is the Internet?” page. There are some “scary looking” pictures on the “Homepage Central” and none of the old FTP download mirrors seemed to work (or maybe Firefox is just programmed to reject downloads of Netscape 0.9 beta.)

Loic Le Meur totally nailed why glue matters in his post My social map is totally decentralized but I want it back on my blog. Following is the defining image from Loic’s notebook. I’m not sure the answer (I want it back on my blog) is correct, but we are in the middle of yet another massive decentralization of data – this time very personal. Loic’s identity and content is spread all over the web (as is mine.) He wants it back in one place – one that belongs to him.