In the past month, I’ve had two situations where I came within three seconds of grabbing my Lenovo x60 (running Vista) and smashing it on the ground, stomping up and down on it, and then lighting it on fire. The only thing that kept me from doing this was that I didn’t have a video camera handy and didn’t want to waste a Youtube content creation moment (e.g. “VC accidentally burns down office building after being driven crazy by laptop – full story at 6 o’clock.”)

I’m sitting at the W Hotel in Union Square as Amy packs up. We are finally heading home to Boulder after being on the road for 10 days. We had an awesome time this week in Manhattan – one of our favorite cities away from home. But – we are both fried from full days and awesome dinners / late nights. Plus, our pants are tight. Earlier this week I had a fascinating couple of hours with some smart friends talking about email. Two hours later, we had a lot more questions and things to think about. Some of the thoughts are up on the blogs of Fred Wilson, Tom Evslin, and Jeff Pulver. Fred’s insight that we are really taking about “messaging”, not “email” is an important one.

If you are following along at home, a gang of us are getting together in NY today to discuss email. Tom Evslin – one of the gang – has a blog post on his pre-meeting thoughts titled Thinking Aloud. I just read a pile of stuff about email in Slate including The Death of E-Mail. Don Dodge (who I should have invited to this meeting) and I have had a fascinating exchange (pun intended) about this over the past few days. This will undoubtedly be a interesting meeting.

CIO Magazine, that paragon of business wisdom, has a a list of five Five Favorite Facebook Widgets for Business Users. My TechStars friends J-Squared weigh in on the list with Sticky Notes. Entertaining.

Hedge fund Pardus Capital Management which owns 2.6% of Delta and 4.82% of United is urging them to merge. While this might be good for Pardus, as a frequent traveler on United out of DIA, this sounds like a really bad idea to me. Probably 50% of the flights that I’ve been on since United came out of bankruptcy have had some sort of problem (mechanical, routing, crew delay, undermined) and I have several situations where the plane simply didn’t show up. 

At BlogWorld last week, there was a lot of chatter about ClosedPrivate. Several of the key members of the initiative are blogging up a storm about it and there have been invitations to conferences to discuss ClosedPrivate vs. OpenSocial. Lijit has even managed to turn me into a search wijit. My favorite search term – ClosedPrivate. Yes – we had a lot of fun at BlogWorld, even though we ate way too much sushi at Nobu on Thursday night. Ok – it was the sake that did us in, not the sushi.

Is it possible that I’m thinking about the same stuff this morning as Fred Wilson and Jeff Pulver? Fred just put up a post titled The Biggest Social Graphs and Jeff just posted Social Media is changing the Face of Communications. Well – ok – yeah. We’re getting together tomorrow, along with a couple of other friends including Matt Blumberg and Tom Evslin to talk about this stuff. Paraphrasing a recent email from Fred – “Email is Dead, Long Live Email.”

I spent seven years at MIT and managed to pick up two degrees before they kicked me out. I describe the place using the 10/40/50 rule. 10% of the people there are off the chart brilliant and nothing phases them. 40% of the people are extremely smart, figure out the system, and make it through with moderate but not life threatening scars. 50% of the people are extremely smart, but never figure out the system and their experience at MIT is a “daily assault on their self esteem.” Fortunately, I was in the 40%.

I’m completely baffled. Yesterday, Saul Hansell of the New York Times had an article titled Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network. Saul’s article is short and punchy, but excruciatingly obvious to anyone that has been playing with email for a while. The amount of “social network” information contained in a typical email user’s data store is enormous. Google and Yahoo are sitting on huge amounts of very interesting email data that to date they’ve done nothing with. According to Saul’s article, this is about to change (with the subtle insinuation that “Facebook should watch out.")