The first Boulder OpenCoffee Club happened yesterday at Amante Coffee on Walnut Street in Boulder. I was in NY so I missed it, but I heard it was a lot of fun and had an interesting collection of people show up. The next one is on April 24 – same place at 8am (although Jason is thinking about trying a different location to accommodate more people.) I’ll likely be in town so I’m planning on showing up. Hats off to Saul Klein for starting this phenomenon.

My partner and co-conspirator at AsktheVC (Jason Mendelson) guest blogs tonight. Unfortunately, I (Jason) get stuck being the shareholder representative in our merger deals where we can’t find someone else to do the job. (Someone should start a company – hmmm.) We had a deal that over a year ago distributed the escrow, but the escrow agent wasn’t able to find a dozen or so shareholders and today, we still have $500,000 or so in the account.

Every now and then I stumble upon a piece of software that – after a few months of using it – I wonder how I ever lived without it. My latest instance of this is SharePoint and it surprised even me. I used to make fun of SharePoint when it was merely Microsoft’s Portal product (going back to 2000–ish.) Folks I knew at Microsoft talked about the incredible number of seats they had sold, but I knew that they bundled it for free as part of their EA program. Whenever it came up, I asked about the number of people that actually used SharePoint and often got blank stares.

Sometimes the web is a hysterical place. Ryan sent me the brilliant description of The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel. I wonder if this will have any impact on Chipotle’s stock price. Also – if you were having difficulty getting access to my blog today, it apparently was a failure with the pneumatic tubes that connect my server to the Internet.

Longtime angel investor Bill Payne has a new book out called The Definitive Guide to Raising Money from Angels. I read it last week and it’s excellent – if you are looking to raise an angel round it’s worth ever dollar of the $37 that Bill charges for it. I first met Bill in the mid-1990’s when we were both working with the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurial Leadership – I was an entrepreneur-in-residence and he was an executive-in-residence (both fancy titles for “consultant.”) We worked closely with Jana Matthews in her “Learning Programs for High Growth Entrepreneurs” project, were deeply involved in the YEO / Kauffman Foundation relationship, and helped with the launch of the original Entreworld site (now eVenturing.)

Last August I somehow convinced myself that I was going to run the North Pole Marathon. Fortunately around the end of the year I came to my senses and decided to give away my entry via a contest on YourRunning.com. Bobby Bostic won the contest and ran the marathon (and the first 26.2 mile North Pole bike race.) Yesterday I turned to Amy and said “well – the North Pole Marathon was today and our guy finished.” She looked at me and said “even though the weather sucks here today, aren’t you glad you aren’t at the North Pole.”

All of a sudden I’m seeing Lucene (and Nutch and Solr) being adopted by a bunch of my companies. While several have been using it for a while, it’s spreading rapidly. I’m curious about the experience folks have had with it – everyone I’ve talked to is thrilled; I’ve yet to hear from someone that said “it didn’t work for me and I decided to use ‘X’ instead.” Any feedback?

Machine Beauty by David Gelernter was phenomenal. I love the notion that a book written in 1998 should be classified as “a classic”, but given the premise of the book and the evolution of technology during the last decade, it fits this categorization perfectly. Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale. Machine Beauty is his treatise on the “elegance at the heart of technology.” The first third of the book is his philosophical setup; the last third is his future vision – including a description of Linda and Lifestreams. These are both fun and interesting.

I wrote a post on March 12th titled Daylight Savings Time is Stupid. A bunch of people agreed with me, but some didn’t, suggesting that (a) I was missing the point and it was more fun to have light at night than in the morning or (b) the “authorities” insisted that we’d get GDP gains, (c) there would be big energy savings helping save the world, and (d) restaurants and stores would make more money due to sunny night shopping. Oh – and I also learned DST = daylight saving time, not “savings.”