As an MIT grad I periodically acknowledge that there was a thing referred to as a university down the river from me. They have this statue of a dude named John Harvard in one of the yards. John got a makeover today ala Halo 3. Nice helmet John.

Software has bugs. Lots of them. I am a master bug finder (anyone that has had me bang on their stuff likely has at least one anecdote about this.) Today’s “special bug” is a bug in Microsoft Excel 2007. If you enter =850*77.1 into a cell you will get the result 100000. Hint – that is an incorrect answer. I tried it in Google Docs and it resulted in 65535 (the correct answer.) Hmmm – I wonder what 2^16 is? Boundary condition anyone?

Today EchoStar announced that is has acquired Sling Media for $380 million in cash. My partner and 2007 travel buddy Ryan McIntyre is smiling tonight as he crawls into bed and reflects on another great deal on the heals of his successful investment in Postini (acquired in July by Google for $625 million.) I’d recommend that he snuggle up to a Slingbox, but I’ll restrain myself. Ryan has written a nice essay on the story of his experience with Sling Media. The Sling team – led by Blake Krikorian – has created a great company and a superb set of products. I knew I was in love when I turned over my first Slingbox and noticed a little sticker with the phrase “Lebowski” on it. Sling packed an incredible amount of innovative software (and a tiny bit of hardware) into a plastic box that was mostly filled with air. The magic was in the software (dynamic video-stream-optimization technology called Lebowski) which reinforced our view that “it’s all about the software.”

I love a good rant and Dave McClure has a doozy up titled VC’s & Tech Lawyers: Innovate, Automate, Simplify. Several years ago when Jason and I wrote our Term Sheet series, I often thought to myself (and often out loud) “why is this so complicated?” (ok – there were some adverbs used as modifiers in the sentence as in “why is this so X Y complicated?”) In addition to a delicious rant, Dave has some good suggestions for all of us. Anyone doing a seed or light Series A round (< $1m) should read Ted Wang of Fenwick & West’s article Reinventing the Series A for some additional ideas.

While Amy and I were sitting in the San Francisco Airport reading the Sunday NY Times, we came across an article titled Looking for Inspiration in the Melting Ice. It discusses a great new exhibit at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art titled Weather Report: Art & Climate Change. BMoCA is one of our local gems – if you happen to be in Boulder, swing by the museum on 13th Street and check out the exhibit. Have lunch at The Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse while you are at it.

I’ve been in a few parallel universes recently and am noticing it happening more and more. I like parallel universes – it always smells like opportunity to me (plus I get to see how another “species” lives.) The parallel universes aren’t just technology-based, but they often inform how I think about stuff. For example, my recent time in Italy on vacation was a completely parallel universe to my current time in the US bouncing between Boulder and Silicon Valley. And my day in Silicon Valley yesterday was another dimension of this (compared to the rest of the US.)

Those last two posts could have been subtitled “Vacation makes me verbose.” I guess limiting myself to 140 characters is what my Twitter account is for.

Alex Iskold, the founder and creator of Adaptive Blue, has a long and helpful post up titled Semantic Web: Difficulties with the Classic Approach*.* I have a small investment in Adaptive Blue (Union Square Ventures is the lead investor), love what Alex is up to, and relish anything that comes out of his brain. One of my investment themes for the past 24 months has been in an area I’ve been calling “The Implicit Web.” Adaptive Blue is in this theme, as are companies like Lijit, Me.dium, and TrustPlus. Read Alex’s post for a classical definition of the problem (including his post The Road to the Semantic Web.) Or feel free to wallow around Wikipedia’s description (including a couple of great examples and lots of acronyms and a nice picture of the W3C Semantic Web Layer Cake.)

Ahhhh. That felt good. In my ongoing commitment to my marriage, I give Amy one solid week a quarter of uninterrupted “Brad / Amy time.” This quarter I handed my handheld to her as we boarded the plan in New York on Monday the 10th and she returned it to on Monday the 17th when we disemarked in Minneapolis. We had a glorious and much needed vacation together. 2007 has been an intense year so far – one that I’m very pleased with – but has demanded (and required) unyielding focus. Amy has been amazingly patient with me but some serious together time was in order.