Bill Erickson sent me a link to a TUAW article on Introducing Nike + Group Goals. Nike has a super cool Nike + iPod Sport Kit (which I’ve bought and have sitting on my desk – I guess I need to get my act together and actually try it). Now – they are donating $1 to a cause for every mile that you run and record on their website. The Lance Armstrong Foundation is up first – Nike is donating up to $50,000 for 50,000 miles contributed (he’s got $24,469.28 contributed at this point.) The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society are in the mix as is a showdown between the Northside and Southside of Chicago. Awesomely cool stuff.

Amy and I went to The Departed last night. I’ve got some general movie fatigue these days because everything seems to suck, be a remake of Top Gun, or just be dull. However, The Departed was incredible and it just blew us away. Jack Nicholson may be my favorite male actor of all time. Leonardo DiCaprio is finally coming into his own now that he’s an adult. Matt Damon finally had a role where he needed to act – and he did a great job. While it’s weird watching Martin Sheen be anything other than Jeb Bartlett, he also shined even when he was splattering. Vera Farmiga had the best line of the movie when she said to DiCaprio “your vulnerability is really freaking me out.” And Marky Mark Wahlberg continued to bend my mind with his range. 

Given that it’s getting a little cooler out and I’ve been wearing more long sleeve t-shirts, I decided to update the look and feel of my blog. My friend Kevin Menzie – the CEO of Slice of Lime – who has been doing some amazing work for a number of our portfolio companies – did much of the work. We’re still shaking out a few things, so be patient if you notice a problem. I’m interested in any feedback – good or bad – as I’ve got a new blog in the works with a similar look and feel. Please comment freely on my new wardrobe. Of course, if you run into any bugs, please tell me.

I got the following email from AdBrite yesterday. I had AdBrite adds on my blog for a while and had minimal revenue, so I took them off. I hadn’t thought about AdBrite for a while, so I clicked on the link. Ooops is correct.

Todd Berkowitz at NewsGator posted on NewsGator Everywhere – describing how the NewsGator continues to enable receiving RSS content on any platform or device while maintaining full synchronization across all the platforms and devices that you use. Some new places to play include Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Mobile, Windows Live Writer, and the Windows RSS Platform / IE 7. With this post, I’m officially switching from BlogJet to Windows Live Writer for posting to my blog. I don’t know why I’m so late to come to this party, but for offline writing Windows Live Writer is spectacular. I still don’t understand the name, but that’s not for me to know.

Andy continues blogging on the evolution of Judy’s Book. He’s got a short summary of the meeting that led to some fundamental changes in the business. In it he lists three key questions: what’s hard, what’s easy, and where is the parade?

Well – this about says it all. Thanks Weird Al (and Lucy.)

With all the focus and discussion around stuff like the Google – YouTube deal it’s easy to forget that there are lots of entrepreneurs out there working really hard to grow their businesses. The culture of the tech industry has caused us to think in “monthly” and “quarterly” performance and – whether you think it’s good or bad – it is. Q3 just ended so it’s a convenient time to look at some other macro indicators (e.g. how did private companies perform in Q3) to see how healthy the tech business is.

A long time ago (high school, college?) I remember reading a Scientific American magazine cover to cover that was about the brain (blue cover – picture of the brain on it.) While I don’t remember anything that I read (and – whatever it was – it’s probably irrelevant today), I was completely fascinated by it. When I was at MIT in the mid-1980’s, “Artificial Intelligence” was the rage. Cognitive Science (which has morphed into Brain and Cognitive Science) was also picking up speed at the time as MIT had a great collection of people thinking about neuroscience, biology, and psychology. For whatever reason, I never engaged in it, and my interest ended up being a simple surface level fascination that I never went anywhere with.