Blue Mountain Arts has been a fixture in the Boulder community for the past 35 years. It was started by the parents of my friend Jared Polis (Susan Polis Schutz and Stephen Schutz) who are all dynamite people. For Blue Mountain Arts’ 35th anniversary, they’ve given a wonderful gift to Boulder. Rather than having a big party and spending a bunch of money, they’ve given each of their 100 employees a share of $200,000 to donate to their favorite charities.

The TechStars hiring wave is beginning. One of the companies – J-Squared – which makes the popular Facebook application “Sticky Notes” (Facebook app #31 – over 1.5m users) is looking for a hot shot developer to add to the team with the following background. Ruby/Ruby on Rails Flex 2 XHTML/CSS/Javascript/AJAX/JSON/XML MySQL Apache2/Mongrel If you fit this and want to join an early startup that is playing in the Facebook ecosystem and cranking away like crazy, drop me an email and I’ll forward it on.

Time for a Sunday morning nerd out. If you are a programmer or entrepreneur in a company that develops in PHP watch in horror as the main Facebook source code is released into the wild. Of course, this could be a hoax, as several commenters assert, but it also sounds like it’s a possibility due to a misconfigured server. Nik Cubrilovic – who wrote a good detailed post on TechCrunch titled Facebook Source Code Leaked – wrote a followup post on his own blog titled Learning from Facebook: Preventing PHP Leakage*.* Ah – the joys of scripting languages. I miss the Microsoft Basic Compiler.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that one of my curious obsessions is bathrooms. I don’t have an explanation for it – just chalk it up to self-awareness (that I view at it as a curious one.) Five years ago, I had a conversation with Heidi Roizen. She had recently been approached by Stanford (her alma mater) about participating in a capital campaign for a new building. She offered to sponsor a bathroom; Stanford denied this request (something like “not dignified enough.”) I said “I bet that I can get a bathroom sponsored at MIT” (where I went to school.) After we had a good laugh, she told me I was on.

Through our investments in FeedBurner, NewsGator, and Technorati I’ve gotten my mind firmly around the idea (and dynamics) between “publishers” and “subscribers” in the universe of blogs, user-generated content, feeds, and search. I’ve learned at least 731 lessons. Lesson #1 is “delight your publishers.” FeedBurner did an awesome job of this and I’m using plays from their playbook at all the other companies I’m involved in that are publisher focused.

Heresy makes you think. Amy sent me an essay about heresy written by the great physicist and thinker Freeman Dyson titled Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society*.* Following is the setup to what is a phenomenal essay. “The main subject of this piece is the problem of climate change. This is a contentious subject, involving politics and economics as well as science. The science is inextricably mixed up with politics. Everyone agrees that the climate is changing, but there are violently diverging opinions about the causes of change, about the consequences of change, and about possible remedies. I am promoting a heretical opinion, the first of three heresies that I will discuss in this piece.

I was delighted to wake up this morning. I’m delighted to wake up every morning, but this is a particular beautiful sunny Saturday in Boulder, Colorado which means I can cuddle up to my computer and catch up a little (ok – and go for a long run.) My inner feeling of delight was improved even more when I was scanning headlines online and saw the NY Times article Judge Says Unix Copyrights Rightfully Belong to Novell. This has been a long time in coming and finally puts a stake in the ground around (or in the heart of) SCO’s ridiculous copyright suit against IBM around Unix.

I had breakfast with Matt Blumberg – the CEO of Return Path – yesterday. I’ve worked with Matt for at least six years and love the way his brain works. During my frustrating quest for the best chocolate croissant in Boulder (so far all of the ones I’ve found appear to be exactly the same – I’m guessing there is one chocolate croissant distributor in town) we talked some about “collaboration.”

Fred Wilson has an awesome post up today titled Venture Fund Distributions – Cash versus Stock. It explains, in great detail, how a VC thinks about distributing stock (either from IPOs or from sales of companies to publicly traded ones) back to their investors (or LPs.) It’s extremely detailed, gets into the mechanics of it, and also – as usual for Fred’s posts – has Fred’s own personal viewpoints woven through it. This is by far the best discussion I’ve ever seen of VC stock distributions either in the blogosphere or in interviews. A must read.