For the guy (or gal) that has an extensive collection of black t-shirts with all kinds of logos and band pictures on them comes – the Wi-Fi Detector Shirt. In addition to taking your wardrobe to a new nerdy level, you can perform a public service by helping everyone near you know whether or not Wi-Fi is available (Thanks Mark.)

Jack and Suzy Welch have a great article in this week’s BusinessWeek titled Directors Who Don’t Deliver. I’ve served on many boards and written plenty of board of directors, including my personal favorite board of director post titled Boards That Are Not Bored. The Welch’s describe five types of dysfunctional board members: the do-nothing, the white flag, the cabalist, the meddler, and the pontificator. If you’ve ever served on a board, you probably know at least one of these dudes. Hopefully, you (and me) haven’t been one of them.

I spent part of my Friday night installing Leopard (also known as Mac OS X 10.5) on my Mac at home. The install went perfectly and I was generally pleased with the new apps (like Time Machine and Spaces) and kept suggesting to my Vista machine sitting nearby that it already needed some new eye candy. As I was reading my daily RSS feeds on my Vista machine (aha!) I came across a 2,174 page long blog post on Ars Technica titled Max OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review. This is a spectacular review – in exhilarating detail – of Leopard. The first few pages are a great rant about the new UI stuff, followed by a very thorough and deep analysis (both non-technical and technical) of all the new features and components in the upgrade. Ok – it’s only 17 pages long – but these are real pages chock full of interesting information for all Mac nerds.

Following is a guest post by my partner Jason Mendelson. All of the thoughts and grammar errors are his. All of the formatting errors are mine. Every year I go back to the University of Michigan and spend a day teaching undergrads in the economics department. I’ve been doing it for a few years now and it’s a way to give back to the program. Specifically, one of my former professors, Jan Gerson had a huge impact on me and I promised that I’d come back every year (if I ever got “smart”) and impart some knowledge. I’m not sure that I ever got smart, but I do like to visit Ann Arbor. 

My partner Seth Levine has a good post up titled 1980’s all over again with a link to a very interesting Merrill Lynch report titled 1980’s Redux. I was in high school in Dallas, Texas for the first third of the 1980’s and then college in Cambridge, Massachusetts for the rest of it. I started my first company in 1987 – on the heals of the Massachusetts Miracle and the beginning of the late 1980’s recession which was painful for Massachusetts, but I was too young and naive to notice.

I got an email today from Ryan Roth, a long time reader of this blog. He is giving away four tickets to Saturday’s World Series game. The only catch is that you have to be a disabled Iraq / Afghanistan war veteran to be part of the drawing. Following is the story: So, we have four tickets! One upper deck, three lower deck. All for Game 3 of the World Series. We want to give them away to disabled Iraq/Afghanistan War Veterans. We don’t know you, but we are thankful for your service and your sacrifice. We will draw four names from a Rockies hat at 2:00 pm. You don’t have to be present to win. We will contact the winners directly and also post the names on this website. To enter please fill out the form below. Please, we ask that only disabled veterans check the “Enter me in the Raffle” checkbox. This, of course, enters you into the drawing. Additionally, Our hope is that we can create some community around this giveaway. Please feel free to join us, no matter who are. We plan on settling down and watching the game at Uptown Tavern in Denver. We would love it if you joined us. So if you win, you get to see a World Series game, if your name doesn’t get drawn, you can still meet new people, share experiences, and root on the Rockies over some tasty food and drinks. Can you beat that? Want to donate another ticket? Perhaps a pair? Do you know where a good meeting place close to the stadium is? Don’t hesitate to call us or email us!

BusinessWeek has a web slideshow running called Big Tech Buyouts. It profiles the founders of 10 Internet companies that have been acquired this year. Three of them – FeedBurner, Sling Media, and Postini – are companies we were investors in. Everyone appears to be smiling. Notice the abundance of gray hair (or in Dick Costolo’s case, no hair.) I realize this is shameless brogging, but it’s fun sometimes. And I’m really proud of these guys and the companies they helped create.

I just caught a post my dad wrote today titled Birth Of An Entrepreneur: Brad Feld. Totally unexpected – it made me smile a big smile. My dad knows me well, remembers my antics from when I was a kid better than anyone (except maybe my mom and my brother), and tells great stories. Love ya dad. Thanks for making me. And thanks for investing that extra $1800 in an Apple II in 1978 – it has paid off well for both of us!

Eric Norlin – the organizer and host of the upcoming Defrag Conference (Denver – Nov 5 and 6 – hottest ticket in town since the World Series will be over) has a great rant up titled Cycles, Juxtapositions, and Predictions. Midway through the rant, he says: “Putting it all together, here’s what I’m thinking: Bottom line — Tech innovation is about to get very focused on selling to the enterprise.”