My partner Ryan McIntyre has another thoughtful post up about the “power in the data center problem.”

I felt like that wonderful Robin Williams character when I fired up FeedDemon this morning and saw the flood of patent posts from Jim Moore and then bounced around Google Groups for the Irregulars list and saw more commentary on the IBM Patent announcement. Eventually, I noticed that Jim had taken me to task for cheerleading the IBM announcement without providing any critical analysis (I think I got classified by Jim as a “smart liberal” who – when “ultimately IBMs motives and plans will be revealed” – will “look like [a] fool.” Oops – I don’t think my mother will be proud of me when this occurs.)

The images from my mom’s new show – “Prints: A Journey” – are now up on her website. I like them all, but I especially dig the Rothko-like solarplates. If you are in Dallas in October, the show is currently up at Splashlight Studios on 2410 Farrington Street until October 16th.

If you are a Typepad blogger, you’ll be especially interested in this. Now – from within your NewsGator Online subscriber list – you can easily add the subscriber list to your blog as your blogroll. You no longer need to manage a separate blogroll in Typepad. This all started when Amy asked me if she could do this. I screwed around on my site first and figured it out. I then got it working on Amy’s Typepad blog. I then blogged about how to do it. It was way too hard for a human to do, so I emailed Brian Kellner at NewsGator. He then blogged about our interaction around it. This was about six weeks ago.

Andy Sack – CEO of Judy’s Book – wrote a nice summary of last week’s “bored” meeting, along with our meeting after in Boulder, and his new found inspiration to eliminate boredom from the lives of his board members. A positive side effect of this meeting is that I did get a nice run in on the treadputer, although Andy took some of my money in poker later that night. 

As I’ve written before, I’m a huge critic of the existing patent process, especially as it applies to software patents. Today, the NY Times has an article up describing how IBM will begin putting its patent filings online for public review. This is a huge positive step by IBM and shows real leadership in addressing our completely screwed up patent system. IBM collaborated over the summer with a group of 50 experts from outside IBM to come up with a new approach to protecting intellectual property. The result of this effort is summarized in the report Building a New IP Marketplace. This is superb and exciting stuff. Since our government can’t seem to make any progress with this, I hope they’ll at least follow the leadership of some major industrial companies that while ultimately acting in their own self-interest (as they should) recognize that they get more economic benefit long term by fixing the underlying dysfunction.

For those of you that share my fascination with the versatility of the word “fuck”, Wikipedia has a comprehensive entry listing the films that most frequently use said word. The 14th on the list is The Big Lebowski, right after Pulp Fiction. Casino – one of my all time favorite movies – weighs in at #3 (398 times.) The FPM rating is also fascinating – a surprising number of these movies have an FPM > 2.

Brad Spirrison has a nice article in the Chicago Sun-Times titled Feedburner’s investors have its technology at their fingertips. Among other things, he highlights that three of the FeedBurner investors – me, Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures, and Matt McCall at Portage Ventures are active bloggers that use FeedBurner’s services regularly. While the notion of your investors using your product is a tricky one for some companies (say an ERP software company or an optical switch company) , it should be a no brainer for a consumer or Internet company. I just did a quick check and I’m an active user of all but two of the companies I sit on boards of. I’m also a user of many of the other Mobius companies products – even when I potentially have other choices – so that I can provide deep and regular product feedback. While my role isn’t “product manager” or “beta tester”, I can provide much more comprehensive feedback, better understand the product cycle, really have a perspective on competitive products (since presumably I can use them also), and provide insight into other things that I’m seeing that directly relate to the company’s products. Plus – it’s a lot of fun for my inner nerd.

Having seen a few bears up front and personal (think “20 yards away”), I know how incredibly intense they are. Chris Wand send me this link from a set of photos of Alaskan bears that one of his friends took recently. My favorites are Chocolate Eating and Brothers with Fish. As a special bonus for the nerds in the crowd, it shows off Google’s Picasaweb.