My friends Alan Shimel and Mitchell Ashley from StillSecure are at the annual RSA security show (“the” show for the security industry) and are reporting and podcasting from the front lines. In addition, Alan has a great rant about booth babes which the feminist in me wholeheartedly agrees with. If you are into security or anti-booth babes, check the posts out.

I’ve written about Discovering Work Life Balance in the past, but when I came across Jim Citrin’s article titled Tapping the Power of Your Morning Routine I realized that I left out an important part of the dynamics of work life balance for me. Some people are early birds; some people are night owls. I’ve always been an early bird. In Citrin’s article, he talks some of the common characterists of key CEOs that he admires. As a morning person, it was fascinating to see what people do when they get up.

My reading pace has been slower than usual lately. I digested a few books in January including Sweet and Low (the story of Sweet and Low and the fascinating machinations of a particularly complex family business), 24: Cat’s Claw (to deal with my 24 addiction prior to Day 6 starting), and Christopher Moore’s brilliant You Suck. Coming off of You Suck I needed something deep and thoughtful. So I settled on AC/DC: Maximum Rock & Roll – the history of my favorite heavy metal band. I was in high school during the Back in Back, Highway to Hell, and For Those About to Rock days and I loved Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, so I got some Bon Scott / Brian Johnson crossover. Of course, the real teenage boy fantasy was to be Angus or Malcolm Young.

Great video on the essence of the web today from Michael Wesch – an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. I love the title – The Machine is Us/ing Us. The neat question, of course, is where is the web going to be tomorrow? At the end, Michael suggests that we need to rethink a few things, including copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, ourselves. (Thanks Bruce for the pointer.)

I was trying to come up with a clever title for the superb week that Me.dium had, but I lamed out. Me.dium had their public launch this week at Demo (although they are still in a controlled user rollout as one of the extremely hard challenges in what they are trying to do is to infinitely scale the service.) Kimbal Musk – the CEO – gave a great demo at Demo.

Paul Kedrosky has a superb post up today titled Building the Perfect Board Package*.* The entire post is worth a slow and careful read as it’s “guidance on the subject from a sales-guru colleague to a company’s management on whose board he sits.” Buried deep near the end is the real gem – metrics for a “perfect enterprise software company” that would trade at 3x revenue (or significantly higher if a SaaS model).

Wallstrip continues to crack me up – almost daily. I’m a small investor in the angel round and Howard and Lindsey are just a riot. Jack in a Box was roll on the floor funny but today Lindsey was trying to interview a random who turned out to be Dylan Ratigan (CNBC’s anchor) – for The Super Bowl Indicator episode – that paid her a compliment. Lindsey didn’t recognize Ratigan (don’t worry Lindsey – I didn’t either) – and her reaction is hysterical.

I’ve been talking about, dealing with (in a “user-generated content context”), and thinking about spam a lot lately. As an investor in email related companies going back to the mid-1990’s, I started experiencing spam as a real problem around 2000. Chris, Ryan, and I spent a lot of time thinking about it and ended up investing in two companies – Return Path and Postini – which have both been very successful companies on the good side of the war against spam.

A reader pointed me at this good, short post describing the shutdown of a service. Failure is a part of the entrepreneurial experience and it’s even more valuable (although not necessarily fun) if you can learn a lesson from it. The lesson here – well articulated by the author – is that he failed to address a point of pain.