I’ve been enjoying my experience with Vista on my Lenovo X60 over the holidays. It’s stable, fast, and mostly behaves as expected. I’ve only had two required reboots in 10 days, which I view as a major victory. But – Vista has more than it’s share of stupid little oversights. For example, the Calculator app. Microsoft has included a Calculator in every version of Windows that I can remember. I extremely good at doing simple math in my head so I don’t keep a calculator on my desk, but I occasionally need a mildly advanced calculator to figure things out. While I could run Excel, that seems stupid (ok – it is stupid) for the type of math problems I need a calculator for.

Welcome to 2007. You did make that copyright notice thing a variable or an include, didn’t you?

I’m going on a blogging vacation for the rest of the year. While I’ll be online, I’m going to turn off all the blogging stuff (read and write) until January 1 just to clean out my brain. While I’d love to tell you about how amazing the new FeedBurner Site Stats are (from the BlogBeat acquisition earlier this year) or the super cool “Personal Network Search” that Lijit has created, it’ll have to wait until 2007.

Entrepreneurship requires serious determination. So does life. My friend Andy’s story of his dad’s fractured back reminded me of my favorite story about my dad’s dad. My grandpa Jack was the first entrepreneur I knew. I met him when I was a few days old. While I loved him and played with him a lot as a kid, I really got to know him when I was a teenager. By the time I was running my first company, he referred to me (and my uncle Charlie – who was running his first company at the time also) as “the Typhoons.” Jack was awesome. Following is an example.

David Cohen – who writes the ColoradoStartups blog among other things – came up with a fun idea for a podcast series last week. He’s going to do a “Virtual Board of Directors” podcast – starring me, him, and Niel Robertson – to answer questions that you (the entrepreneur) might have for a board of directors. If you have a question, call (720) 274–0945. While we won’t be giving any legal (or “official”) advice, hopefully we can have some fun with this while answering some questions.

A few of my portfolio companies are looking for superstar Java developers. If you think you fit the bill, send me an email with your resume and I’ll forward it on. Serious Java developers only.

As a kid, one of the comic strips I read every day was Family Circus. It was almost always simple, yet brilliant. Thanks to my friend Bruce, I now have The Nietzsche Family Circus whenever I want.

Are you thinking about selling your company? David Shanberg – who I worked with when I was an investor in PeoplePC and he ran corporate development – has a nice series up about M&A due diligence. He covers: What you should expect How you can protect your confidential info while moving the process forward More on moving the process forward Looking out for warning signs David’s now running his own M&A shop and has some interesting clients.

My dad has gotten involved in a Dirty Coal plant issue in Texas. The environmental issues are directly linked to the health care issues and – as usual – he’s direct, articulate, and deeply engaging about the issue. Very cool Dad! I knew you’d eventually become an environmental activist.