This is a special Sunday hint for all my male friends out in blogland. It’s in the spirit of my work life balance post. These are our golden retrievers (Denali and Kenai). They are looking at Amy, who happens to be standing next to me as I’m taking this photo. Notice their eyes – they are giving Amy their 100% undivided attention. We call these “Golden Retriever Eyes.” I have a special talent. When Amy is talking to me, I can be doing something else (e.g. typing on my computer, reading a book) and – when she says “Brad – you aren’t listening to me,” I can repeat back the last two sentences that she said to me word for word.

Bob Eisenbach -co-chair of the Cooley Godward Creditor’s Right & Bankruptcy practice group – has a new blog up called In The (Red) – The Business Bankruptcy Blog. It’s excellent. While there are plenty of legal bloggers out there, Bob is extremely experienced and a thought leader around bankruptcy law. While entrepreneurs hate to think about bankruptcy, it’s unfortunately a part of business life and a tool to be used appropriately in failure situations. I’ve found Bob’s posts to be current, deep, very interesting, and broadly relevant. I highly recommend adding it to your feed reader in you are an entrepreneur or a VC – I just wish Bob would publish the full posts instead of just excepts.

My assistant Kelly spends a few weeks each summer volunteering at the Denver Zoo. I think it’s probably an easier job than dealing with the animals she has to every day (me, Chris, and Seth.) On September 8th from 6:30pm – 10pm, the Zoo is having a special annual event called “Brew at the Zoo and Wine, Too!” Think “big party with local brews, food, music, and dancing with a backdrop of lions, tigers, and bears, oh my.”

Chip Griffin has an interview with Matt Rightmire of Borealis Ventures up on his blog. Matt is ex-Yahoo and is now a partner at a VC firm in New Hampshire that’s affiliated with Village Ventures. They had a nice exit in my backyard recently when Google acquired @Last earlier this year. I got together with Matt for lunch when I was in Boston running the Boston Marathon and we had a fun conversation about entrepreneurship and venture capital outside of Silicon Valley. Matt and Chip cover this topic extensively in the interview and – while it’s focused on New Hampshire – the ideas generally apply to many other geographic regions outside of Silicon Valley

A Boulder reader forwarded me an interesting article in eWeek titled The Doctor on the Digital Tundra that talks about how the issue of net neutrality could impact rural Alaska, using a doctor who lives and works in Homer, Alaska as the launching off point for the story.

After bitching earlier today about the current lack of critical thinking in the world today, Michael Hirshland of Polaris posted a long piece by his partner – Bob Metcalfe – titled Metcalfe’s Law Recurses Down the Long Tail of Social Networks – which displays an abundance of critical thinking. Metcalfe starts out by addressing a recent IEEE Spectrum article titled Metcalfe’s Law is Wrong – explaining why he thinks the authors’ analysis is boneheaded – and then proceeds to dissect Metcalfe’s Law and then put it back together in the context of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail and the current excitement around social networking. 

My dad (Stan Feld) has a great post up about why he blogs.

I believe I’m seeing a steady increase in the lack of critical thinking from everywhere. In an effort to be recursive, I thought about why I thought I was seeing more of this (and if in fact it was an increase, or I was just noticing it more.) My “instinct” is that I’m seeing more of it, which amuses me when I ponder it. My hypothesis is that it’s coming from a few places:

I had a Rally Software board meeting – this has been a fun company to be involved in from raw startup through its current aggressive growth. When we initially funded Rally – which is the market leader in Agile lifecycle management products, many people said “what’s Agile?” That question isn’t being asked much anymore – in many cases it’s no longer “what’ and now “when?” Rally’s expert coaching services has helped accelerate the general adoption of this, but it’s also very clear that Agile is shifting from a new / niche software development methodology to a mainstream one.