Several of the bright bulbs at Judy’s Book put together a Holiday Store Guide for online shopping. They’ve got detailed shipping info by store (do you do your shopping on 12/21 – there are still a bunch of places you can get expedited shipping), return policies (c’mon – you know you are going to get some crap you want to return), and the best holiday deals. Since I’m jewish, I get to avoid all the nonsense with a big, fat “bah humbug”, but at least I’m funding a company that is helping shoppers around the Internet this holiday season.

My partner Greg Galanos forwarded me a great article from the Philadelphia Inquirer titled “The Economy Revealed: Why understanding economics is hard” that builds on the more difficult to digest but equally interesting essay / research by Alan Page Fiske titled “The Inherent Sociability of Homo sapiens.” Fiske’s theory is based on the conclusion that all human relationships are built from four types of interactions: communal sharing, equality matching, authority ranking, and market pricing. In Fiske’s theory, these four building blocks (which he calls “relationship models”) result in the entire range of the very complex and diverse social life of humans.

In 1983, when I was a senior in high school, I started my first company. There were six founders – they are the gang below: John Gruberman, Drew Debelak, Jeff Funkhouser, Steve?, Kent Ellington, and me (the smiling dude holding up the book on the bottom right.) I can’t remember the name of the company, but it was probably something clever. I’m 99% sure the book Kent (middle / bottom) is holding up is something about incorporating your business.

In the life of most companies with an active board of directors, it occasionally becomes necessary to recruit a new director. In the case of VC backed companies, a new director candidate is often the suggestion of one of the investors. In these cases, the suggestions are often the result of the VC in question having a past, successful working relationship with the proposed candidate. These candidates are often suitable in terms of “knowing the venture drill”, likely a cultural fit, and appropriately skilled for the challenges at hand. However, the relationship between the VC and the proposed candidate can often be seen as “too close.” Therefore, if independence is a highly ranked criteria for you, Jim Lejeal and I suggest you consider a more formal and deliberate process (and we humbly offer this as the latest post in our Board of Directors series.)

I ran an interesting experiment the past 30 days. I simultaneously used three different desktop configurations – my traditional Windows XP three monitor setup (at home and work), Mac OS X running on a 30” Cinema HD display (at my house in Keystone), and Vista running on a new Lenovo X60 laptop (wherever I went.) The surprise winner – at all levels – was Vista running on the Lenovo X60 laptop (with Office 2007.) It just blew away the other two configurations for performance, ease of use, configurability, and integration with all the stuff I work with (my home network, my office network, my data / music / pictures which live on both, the Internet, all the crap I have stored all over the Internet, stability on all the Internet access points I use (including wireless and EVDO), and all the stuff I play with every day.)

I wrote a post this summer titled CEOs That Are Introverts*.* While I’m very comfortable in group settings and have no problem in front of a crowd, I’d much prefer to be alone, with Amy, or with one other person or couple. Some of my best friends are introverts – and one of them sent me this magnificent article from The Atlantic Monthly by Jonathan Rauch titled “Caring for Your Introvert.” The next time you are with me, please feel free to pop open your laptop and sit quietly doing something near me while I work on my computer – I’ll enjoy it a lot (and – depending on whether or not you are an introvert – you might also!)

For all you 24 junkies out there, we are within 45 days of the beginning of Day 6. Prequel’s are starting to show up. Make your reservations now for a TV near you on January 14th and 15th.

A few weeks ago I launched a new blog called Brad Feld’s 50 by 50 to document my trials and tribulations of running 50 marathons by the time I’m 50 (I’ve done 8 and I just turned 41.) I decided I wanted to segment my daily running stuff from Feld Thoughts as many of you don’t care about my running obsession. I’ll still occasionally post here about major events (e.g. completed marathons), but I’ll save my daily runs, running thoughts, experiments with running technologies, fears, and scatalogical running experiments for my running blog.

Will Herman has an excellent post up titled Board Meetings – A CEO’s Point of View. While I’ve never been on a board where Will was CEO, he and I have been on several boards together, and he’s an incredibly valuable and impactful board member. His “top 11” list of suggestions is a must read for any CEO that has a board of directors. Also – look for some new posts in the Board of Directors series that Jim Lejeal and I have been writing coming soon to a blog near you.