We hit a rainy stretch the past few days – good for reading; not so good for getting a sun tan. In addition to The Big Six, I managed to finish four other books this week. All of them were good, but for different reasons. Hayduke Lives! was the funnest (and the only one that was fiction.) I read The Monkey Wrench Gang a few weeks ago – it was my first introduction to Edward Abbey (thanks Dave.) I loved it, so Amazoned Hayduke Lives! which was published posthumously, but was a continuation of the characters and stories in The Monkey Wrench Gang. I had a difficult time getting into Hayduke Lives! (I imagine if Abbey had been alive he would have worked it over a few more times), but I was deeply hooked after 100 pages. Abbey’s characters are insane, beautiful, hilarious, and brave – in an insane, beautiful, and hilarious way.

I read less this week than I read last week (mostly because it was a busy week) but I still managed to get through five books. Looking back on the week, four of them were business books, which is unusual for me – I think I was stalling reading the last Dennis Lehane book for as long as I could (it’s up next.) The best book of the week – by far – was The Big Six. I’m generally grumpy (that’s a nice euphemism) with the accounting industry these days, especially the Big Four. The combination of the accounting scandals of 2001 – 2003, which led to extensive new government regulations such as SOX, had the unintended consequence of making the Big Four more arrogant, lazy, ineffective, and non-responsive to entrepreneurial companies. In the late 1990’s, these firms would do practically anything to get audit work with early stage companies, promising that they would “grow with them.” Today, not only do they have no interest in working with young companies (“we don’t have enough time – we are too busy working with our large public company clients, helping them deal with SOX and other regulations”), they behave incredibly inappropriately with regard to any sort of client transition activity (I have a long list of stories here – ranging from requests for $185,000 to transfer work papers to a new auditor (a 10 hour process) to cover “cumulative discounts over the past four years” to holding up merger accounting for a public company for 12 months “because we don’t have time”, resulting in the public company having no way to get the SEC to approach an S-3 registration statement.) I could rant for a while about this – I suppose that should be the topic for another blog post (or seven).

Fred Wilson has a great, thoughtful post up titled “Scars From The Last Bubble.” If you are a VC or an entrepreneur, I recommend you read it slowly. Remember, it’s not a success until you can buy beer with the cash.

Will Herman has (yet another) great post up about failure in his first startup. His company – DataWare Logic – looked like it was on a path to success – until it ran out of money and – in Will’s words – “… didn’t have time to get new customers while supporting my existing ones and my company virtually augered itself into the planet in an instant.”

I guess it’s my week for having people email me clever things on YouTube and ifilm. Bill Gates and Napoleon Dynamite spend some time together in their apartment and on the Microsoft campus. Priceless.

I was pondering the early days of Feld Technologies tonight, thinking about what mistakes we made (and boy did we make a lot of mistakes.) I wound the clock all the way back to the beginning (sometime in 1987) and tried to figure out what the first major mistake we made that could have killed the company. Both Dave Jilk and I started working full time on Feld Technologies in the summer of 1987. I had just gotten my undergraduate degree from MIT and Dave had recently quit Viewlogic to help start Feld Technologies. We decided to rent an office across the street from our fraternity (the fourth floor of 875 Main Street) and go for it.

The Big Lebowski is in my top 10 favorite movies of all time (ok – I admit it – so is Caddyshack.) Paul Kedrosky pointed me to The Big Lebowski: F*cking Short Version that lasts about two minutes. I always wondered why I loved this movie so much – now I know.

Today, FeedBurner announced that Matt Blumberg has joined their board of directors. Matt – the CEO of Return Path – has a good post about his perspective on joining the board. Matt has always been an advocate on the value of CEO’s sitting on other boards and has benefited greatly by the CEO’s that have been on his board (thanks Scott, Bob, and Ben.) As a long time investor (and past board member) for Return Path, it’s been fun to work with Matt as he’s grown the company. It’ll be fun to work with him side by side to help the FeedBurner guys. Welcome Matt!

I’ve had a rash of friends and colleagues struggle with various forms of cancer (most notably, but not limited to, breast cancer) the past 24 months – I guess I’m of the age where this starts to be a real part of one’s life (fortunately I haven’t lost anyone to this, which is a testament to progress since “cancer” is no longer an automatic death sentence.) Derek pointed me at MyCancerPlace – an online community for people with cancer. It’s another twist on the resurgence of the rapidly spreading community model. It looks like it has just launched and there’s not much content yet, but at first glance it’s well put together. If you – or a friend / family member has cancer, it’s worth taking a look.