Last week, while on vacation, Fred Wilson wrote a post titled Working on Vacation. It began as follows: The title of this post sounds like an oxymoron. But it is a fact of life for me and probably many of the people who read this blog. The idea of a ‘get away from it all’ vacation is a romantic notion that I cannot seem to achieve as much as the Gotham Gal and my kids would like me to.

I haven’t been reading much lately – I just haven’t felt like it. I’m usually a two to three book a week person so my dry spell has been a little odd, but I’ve rolled with it. Today I snuggled into the couch with my dogs, my Kindle, and Stuart Woods latest book – Beverly Hills Dead. Woods is one of my top five “mental floss” writers. I was finished it a couple of hours later and am pleased that my reading drought is over.

Looking for hint about Gnip? Jud’s got one sitting on his desk.

Recently I bitched about Active’s “upgrade” of CoolRunning (which they acquired) to Active Trainer. I loved CoolRunning; I hated Active Trainer. Oh well – life with software. I went on a search for a new running log. I got a wide range of great suggestions from readers of this blog. Thank you to everyone who commented – I tried almost all of the systems. TrainingPeaks wins. It is spectacular and worth every penny. In addition, the folks running the company are incredible responsive – they didn’t have a specific CoolRunning importer, but I sent them my data and a week later all of it automagically appeared in my TrainingPeaks log as though I’d be using it from the beginning.

The CDN patent battle is about to heat up in a major way. GigaOm has a guest column by Dan Rayburn titled Level 3 Adds IBM’s CDN Patents to Its Portfolio. If you believe in the defense use of patents, this is a brilliant maneuver. If you believe in the offensive use of patents, this is a brilliant maneuver. If you don’t believe in software patents this is a brilliant maneuver. If you believe in the power of software patent pooling / commons this is an extra brilliant maneuver.

Following is an email I just received from a friend. Subject: I am stupid Problem with the MacBook air is it is too small. Just realized four hours late I left it in the seatback pocket on the plane. Explicative!!! At least he didn’t get a black eye protecting it.

One of our new investments – based in the Los Angeles area – is looking for some hardcore software folks. The company has provided the following job descriptions. If you are interested, have serious software experience, and are either based in the LA area or willing to relocate, drop me an email with a resume / bio / cv / links to stuff you’ve done. The following job descriptions are as creative as the amazing folks behind the company:

This rarely happens to me so when it does, I notice it. And – in my effort to write some of my tricks about work-life balance, I thought I’d call this one out, especially since it was totally my fault. In a board meeting last week, I had a quick reaction to something I saw and rather than say something in the moment (since my comment was off topic), I added an item to my todo list to email out a note about it. 

Love it.