Eric Olson – who I got to know through FeedBurner – is bringing his TECH Cocktail event to Boulder on March 6th. If you are part of the Boulder tech / entrepreneurial community and around on 3/6, register and come to The Foundry (not our office – but the bar across the street) from 6:30pm to 9:00pm for a good time with a bunch of your local friends and colleagues.

Alan Shimel has a fantastic post up titled Do they have to grow up? As I read it, I thought of some of the great lessons my dad taught me when I was a little kid and how hard they must have been for him to carry out. Amy and I have a regular discussion about whether or not it is helpful to tell a child “you can do or be anything you want.” Amy’s reply is that she could never be an NBA center and neither could I. While the metaphor is a good one (e.g. “don’t let anyone limit your aspirations or dreams”), accomplishing things – especially amazing ones – requires a huge amount of hard work, perseverance, drive, skill, genetics, timing, and luck. Alan nails it:

My friends at Lijit are looking for a Database Architect/Administrator, Java Developer, Web Developer, and a UI Web Developer. If you are interested, send a resume to jobs at lijit dot com. In addition to being at a super cool high growth place to work, you get to be one floor above me in downtown Boulder. If you end up getting a job at Lijit via this blog post, tell me and make me take you to Amante for a gelato.

I travel a lot. I always have. The ease of air travel runs in cycles – we seem to be at another low point where lines are long, planes are full, flights are late / delayed / canceled, and almost all travel personnel (except apparently those on Southwest) are somewhere on the spectrum between grumpy and rude. But that’s just travel. You’ve got to get past the crazy TSA people before you can actually embark on your trip. The experience of standing in a long line, having to take your id out of your wallet so they can inspect it carefully, unpacking all your liquids and gels, listening to the same inane announcements over and over again, and having a completely random “inspect board pass as you go through the metal detector” algorithm gets old. Really old. Oh – and don’t forget to take your shoes and belt off. All in the quest to fly safer.

On March 4th at the CU Boulder Law School, there is another great event on Innovation, Intellectual Property, and Entrepreneurship in the Information Industries. The panelists include folks such as: Don Elliman – Exec Director of Colorado Office of Economic Development Paul Jacobs – CEO of Qualcomm David Goodfriend – VP of Echostar Richard Green – CEO of Cablelabs Don Gips – GVP of Level 3 Jason Mendelson – Managing Director of Foundry Group Phil Weiser – who hosts these events – is really on a roll this year.

While I’ve known Bill Flagg for a number of years, I had a chance to work closely with him and his partner Attila Safari on the sale of their company – RegOnline – to Active last year. RegOnline is one of those “sleeper companies” in Boulder – self funded, rapid growth, highly profitable, and a very impressive exit. Bill, Attila, and all the folks that have worked at RegOnline over the years have created a great company. Bill is channeling some of his experience and insights into his new blog. I highly recommend you check it out and subscribe. Bill – no pressure!

Two interesting NewsGator posts today. Activity Scoring in NewsGator Online talks about a new feature in NewsGator Online that incorporates the massive amount of attention data that NewsGator is collecting daily. Next is Nick Bradbury (the programming maestro who created FeedDemon) talking about The Joys of String Allocation. Even maestro’s write code that – if optimized – can generate over 1000% performance improvement.

I’m supposed to have my new MacBook Air tomorrow. It’ll be running Vista. If you care, Ross tells you how to set Vista up on the MacBook Air (and when to go get a cup of coffee.) I feel like such a cross dresser.

My long time friend Ben Neumann has a detailed post up titled Network Outage. Ben is CEO / owner of Globat, a successful web hosting company. I met Ben through an acquisition in the late1990’s when Interliant bought his previous company Icom (also a web hosting company.) Ben’s company had a tough day yesterday. Multi-hour critical failure is a way of life in any rapidly growing SaaS / hosting / web business. It’s nice to fantasize that it will never happen, but virtually every high growth company has “its moment of fun.” It’s all in how you deal with it, how you treat and communicate with your customers, and what you learn from it.