When 369 of something suddenly appears, I get excited about the opportunities to do something with it. When I noticed the 370th new ad network, I realized there were probably a few opportunities to do some interesting things across them. AdReady – a company I made an investment in a year ago – is seriously kicking ass (if you do any display advertising on Google, Yahoo/RightMedia, or AOL go take a look at them) and their early success reinforced this idea to me.

As snowstorm #2 in Boulder the last week starts to diminish, I thought I’d offer up a picture of what it looks like in Homer, Alaska right now (at 10:30am Homer time.) That dark stuff on the bottom 10% of the picture is land. That lighter dark stuff at in the middle of the picture is the ocean. The top half of the picture is probably dark, fog, and clouds. That little dark stretch of land going to the left across the bottom of the picture is the Homer Spit.

One of the hallmarks of a great entrepreneur is knowing what you suck at. I suck at plenty of things – Paul Berberian’s blog The Name Game reminded me of one of them – naming things. I was an investor in Paul’s last company – Raindance Communications – which went through five names to get there (Intellistat Media Research, Vstream, Evoke, Evoke Software, and finally Raindance Communications.) At some point I suggested we change the name to Ekove (read Paul’s story to learn why) but I was over-ruled – or rather, ignored. Paul ends his story with the line “My Advice – don’t do what I did” which should always be an enticement to read it.

Just in time for the annual presentation of The Nutcracker, I can now get my very own Hillary Nutcracker without having to go to the ballet (thanks Dave.)

Tristan Louis nails it in his post Personal Relationship Manager*.* I think the only thing he missed are blog comments. Too bad PRM stands for the now mostly defunct “Partner Relationship Management” category.

My IT guy Ross has been having his fair share of them lately. Ross has been blogging about silly Microsoft tricks, including Microsoft you’re about to lose me and Why Microsoft, why? Ross isn’t limiting himself to bitching about things – he’s also offering useful suggestions such as Disabling Vista auto update. Plus he’s writing about some obscure stuff such as Installing Vista on a MacBook Pro using Imagex.exe (only obscure if you don’t want to do it!)

I’ve been having plenty of bad Microsoft days lately. If you’ve been following the adventures of “Brad the boy who loves new toys” you know that I recently bought a new MacBook Pro to try – once again – to switch from a Vista box to a Mac. Since I’m writing this on my Vista desktop (with my beautiful 30" Apple Monitor) you can likely infer that the switch hasn’t been going very well. Yup – I’m having bad Apple days also – mostly “using Exchange and Sharepoint on a Mac sucks rocks” days, which might actually still be classified as a bad Microsoft day with Apple as the collateral damage.

Upon my return from a week off the grid, I was slaughtered by Facebook invites, LinkedIn invites, and an endless stream of unread blog posts. It only took me 75 minutes of my morning routine to get through all of them. The most entertaining ones had parallel structure to them: “you are my friend on Facebook – I thought we should be friends on LinkedIn” “you are my friend on LinkedIn – I thought we should be friends on Facebook.” Of course, if I hadn’t turned off email reminders for both services I would have also had email messages alerting me to my new almost friends.

If you’ve noticed that I haven’t been blogging, it’s because I went off the grid for my Q4 vacation with Amy. As is our habit, we checked out completely, spent a week at the beautiful Palmilla One & Only in Cabo, and did our normal quarterly vacation thing, which includes reading a bunch of books. I started off with William Gibson’s latest – Spook Country. It started off slow – possibly because I kept comparing it to his last book, Pattern Recognition, which was amazing. I almost gave up but Amy encouraged me to stick with it. After 100 pages Gibson clearly established three parallel stories that clearly were going to converge at some point and I got sucked in. Around this point, the amazingness of Gibson also kicked in. The end result – great book, highly recommended, but be patient with the set up.