I returned home to Boulder today to a stack of books I’d ordered in the spring about the TV show 24. There are a pile of them out now – some are additional episodes in print such as 24 Declassified: Operation Hell Gate while others are critical analysis of various seasons. As I laid on my couch trying to recover from the red eye from Anchorage while simultaneously adjusting to being at 6000 feet, I had a thoroughly enjoyable time reading A Day In The Life. Keith Topping – a british writer – covered Season 1 in great detail along with his often very entertaining wit (e.g. many chapters have a section called “Points at Which [Teri / Kim] Needs a Slap” as well as a section titled “Logic, Let Me Introduce You to This Window.”) I was beginning to feel a little 24 withdrawal – between A Day In The Life and the other seven books waiting for me, I think I’ll be fine until January.

I’m really excited to see the progress being made on The Peer to Patent Project. Beth Noveck is doing a great leadership job on getting serious software companies – including HP, Microsoft, IBM, and Red Hat to engage and work together try to figure out a real Community Patent Review approach in conjunction with the USPTO.

At mile 15 on my run today, I heard one of my three favorite quotes in Atlas Shrugged. Galt says to Dagny, “… it’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence.” As you can see from the elevation graph of my run, the timing of this was perfect. 

I usually enjoy Tom Wolfe. I remember reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test when I was in junior high and thinking something akin to “far out.” I loved I Am Charlotte Simmons, especially Wolfe’s extraordinary detailed characters and complete mastery of the word fuck. I never got around to reviewing I Am Charlotte Simmons but Ben Casnocha did today. Ben is a recent high school graduate, a close friend, and an amazingly articulate guy. His review of the book was as good as the book. If you are in high school, recently started college, or a parent of either of the preceding categories of kids, this is likely to be a wildly interesting book for you to read. If you simply love the incredible characters and storytelling of Tom Wolfe when he’s really on, you’ll also love it.

Tom Evslin, one of my favorite entrepreneur bloggers, has started a FeedBurner Network called My Way, The Entrepreneurs Network. I love Tom’s blog Fractals of Change, was absolutely delighted by his book hackoff.com: An Historic Murder Mystery set in the Internet Bubble and Rubble, and enjoy all my interactions with him. His Network already includes a few of my entrepreneurial friends that blog – such as Will Herman and Matt Blumberg – but have some folks that I don’t know such as Brian Berliner.

There’s been a lot of talk about Oracle being the major consolidator of mature software companies, but IBM continues to march forward aggressively. They bought FileNet today for $1.6 billion and MRO Software a week ago for $740 million. While – according to the Wall Street Journal – IBM has acquired 56 software companies since 1995, FileNet is the fourth largest after PWC Consulting ($4 billion), Lotus ($3.5 billion), and Rational ($2.1 billion). 

A few weeks ago I wrote about how pleasantly surprised I was by the thanks I got from John Minnihan of Freepository for a little help that I had given him. I never expect anything specific in exchange for helping out – a simple thanks is plenty – but in this case his effort and thoughtfulness was really nice. It happened again yesterday. A week ago, a woman named Melissa Cummings was referred to me by an old friend. She recently left Sun Microsystems (in Colorado) and is looking for a new job in the Boulder area. My friend spoke highly of her and her resume was solid so I introduced her by email to a few of my portfolio companies along with a few other people in town that I know that I thought Melissa might fit with.

Terry Gold – CEO of Gold Systems and a long time friend – has a great story about his experience yesterday being up on stage with Microsoft at the SpeechTEK 2006 conference demoing Microsoft Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging and Speech Recognition. Terry gives a good demo – and tells a great story – especially about a demo that was done with no safety net.

As the reality of agreeing to run a marathon at the North Pole settled in today, I was bombarded by intros from Tom Heinrichs to great cold weather / snow runners that had lots of advice to share. All were incredibly quick to respond, encouraging, and full of great info. One of the first email exchanges was about snowshoes. There’s at least a 50% chance I’ll have to run the race in snowshoes, so I might as well learn about them, train in them, and be ready for the possibly that my IceBugs won’t be enough. The United States Snowshoe Association has tons of info about snowshoeing so that was a good start, but Tom’s friend Hal had a great summary of the stuff I needed to think about.