Niel Robertson made a brilliant discovery today that he has named “John Galt’s Law.” The brilliant discovery was the Atlas Shrugged Dating Site – the law that emerged is “The value of a social network is propotional to the square of the number of users of the system multiplied by the inverse of the social networks rank amongst similarly themed social networks.” I went ahead and created an account on the Atlas Shrugged Dating Site to play around with it. However, since I’ve found my own version of Dagny Taggart I didn’t feel compelled to fork over $7 / month to join the site as a subscriber. After fooling around (with the site) a little, I’m surprised that there isn’t a “meta-dating site” that is an aggregation of all of these sites (maybe there is and I just haven’t played the field enough.) While I’m not that interested in joining a bunch of different dating sites (or any – for that matter), if I was, it seems like I’d be pretty interested in the multitude of “sub-sites” (or networks) that would be available. 

Both of the local Denver papers ran good summary articles on the closing of the sale of Adelphia to Time Warner Cable and Comcast. This was a long and arduous process – when Adelphia went into bankruptcy there was some talk of a straight liquidation given how much of a mess the Rigas family and prior management had made of it. This has been a high profile deal in Colorado and both Time Warner Cable and Comcast have deep roots in the Colorado cable scene. If you follow this, both articles – DenverPost: Adelphia execs exit as sale finalized and RockyMountainNews: Adelphia’s assets now in hands of cable giants – are good descriptions of the end of this particular story.

I put a webcam up at my place in Homer, Alaska. You can access it via my about me page or – thanks to Rob Shurtleff (who recommended the webcam to me in the first place) – on Zeitcam.com (it’s listed as the Homer Webcam and there’s a pretty neat time lapse option.) It turns out there’s a second webcam in Homer pointing at the Augustine Volcano. As you can see, it’s been a shitty weather day here, but I managed to pound out a 15 mile run, finish off The Stolen Child, and enjoy The Devil Wears Prada. In case you are curious, the camera is a StarDot NetCam Megapixel – it’s a remarkable device that includes a Linux server and an Ethernet Port.

Last week, a private equity group led by KKR, Bain Capital, and Merrill Lynch announced that they were acquiring HCA for $33 billion. HCA is the largest hospital operator in the United States, owning or operating 176 hospitals, 92 freestanding surgery centers and facilities for outpatient and ancillary services in 21 states, England and Switzerland. Stan Feld (my dad – a retired endocrinologist and – among other things – the inventor of “the neck check”) – who has been writing a blog for several months titled Repairing the Healthcare System – sees this deal as another step backward. He’s spent the past few months deconstructing the problems with today’s healthcare system in the US and is starting to put together the building blocks for his solution. He shines a light on some of the potential second order effects of a deal like this which he concludes:

About an hour into Superman Returns, Amy leaned over to me and whispered “The Matrix wrecked everything.” I yawned about 20 times during this two hours and thirty four minutes of this movie – it’s was as boring an “action/adventure” movie as I’ve seen in a while. We are in movie hell this summer up in Homer – we walked out of Nacho Libre after 20 minutes and stumbled through the disappointing Click. So far, only Cars has been satisfying. When is The Matrix IV coming out?

Colorado saw two big acquisitions this week – both in the telecomm (which – in my universe – includes what used to be called cable) sector. On Friday, Time Warner Telecom announced that it acquired Xspedius Communications for $531.5 million. Colorado VC Meritage was the first round investor in Xspedius and will get a nice return from this deal when it closes. Congrats to my friends at Meritage. Also – on Friday – we were reminded that the sale of Adelphia’s assets have been finalized. Adelphia officially goes away on Monday, with some of it going to Comcast and some going to Time Warner. This has been a massively non-trivial exercise for the turn around team lead by Bill Schleyer and Ron Cooper (previously head of AT&T Broadband until it merged with Comcast in 2002) – I’m betting there are a lot of people that are going to take at least a week off. Congrats Ron and crew for salvaging this mess.

Niel Robertson has a hilarious post up of an article he wrote for the New Yorker Shouts and Murmurs section. He got rejected by them, but not by me. Awesome Niel.

My goal of running a marathon in every state by the time I turn 50 pales in comparison to the world’s longest foot race. 3,100 miles around a city block in Queens, NY (that would be over 5,000 laps) in approximately 51 days.

Peter Rip of Leapfrog Ventures has a what I think should become a classic entrepreneur post on business models. He gives some context about the term (and why it’s often annoying, as in “what’s your business model’ – c’mon – can’t you think of a deeper question?) He then decomposes the way he thinks about it, ending with a superb chart (that Peter acknowledges it likely incomplete.) While you might not think about this the same way Peter does, it should stimulate you to “think about how to think about” your business model.