Rob Shurtleff – a VC in Seattle with Divergent Ventures – whom I’ve gotten to know over the past year, dropped me a note with some ideas about a few posts in the Board of Directors series that Jim Lejeal and I have started writing. The first topic Rob suggested has evolved into the a post titled “The Chairman”. Through the magic of Writely, I’ve involved him into a group edit on this post – what has resulted is a collaboration between the three of us.

Every now and then someone asks why I spend a chunk of time in the summer in Homer, Alaska. Amy took a few pictures that tell most of the story. That’s the view from the living room. Now – turn your head right. On a clear day, you can see Mount Iliamna. That dude is 200 miles away and rises about 10,000 feet out of the ocean. Now – go left.

Niel Robertson just pointed me at retrievr. It’s pretty cool – you do a quick sketch and it searches Flickr and matches it to images. You can also upload a picture and it’ll do the same type of match. Of course, none of my sketches seem to have much correlation to the images it returns, but I’ll attribute that to the sketcher (me.)

Alan Shimel, the Chief Strategy Office at StillSecure, is podcasting up a storm. Alan’s up to podcast #6 and giving my friend Scott Converse and his ClickCaster podcasting service a good workout. If you are into security software, want to listen to a lively debate, get nostalgic for Long Island by hearing Alan’s accent, or even hear music from the CTO of StillSecure Mitchell Asley, tune in. Seriously – great stuff Alan.

My partner Greg Galanos led the first round investment in Danger, the company that makes the T-Mobile Sidekick. I’ve loved it since the day the Sidekick 1 came out and – over the past five years – have tried pretty much every other mobile / data device and always come back to my Sidekick. I got my Sidekick 3 a few days before heading to Alaska. I didn’t expect it to work up here (my Sidekick 2 didn’t work last summer – T-Mobile’s service wasn’t strong enough.) Imagine my surprise when I showed up and it worked perfectly. I’ve had two weeks of it now and it is a simply awesome product.

Jim and I are using Writely to collaborate on our Board of Directors series. I had some character interpretation problems between Writely and Movable Type – they were similar to problems that I had posting from Flock a few weeks ago. Basically, ampersand based HTML codes come across fine in the HTML, but get interpreted / built incorrectly by MT. Thanks to the magic of Google, I found the problem and a potential solution in about 18 seconds. This is a test, to see if the problem is fixed. The following apostrophes should look correct: “This is a test’s of the apostrophe’s warning system’s.” The grammar should not be correct.

Jim Lejeal and I have worked together for almost a decade – I was one of the investors in his last company – Raindance Communications (now part of West Corp) and am an investor in his new company, Oxlo Systems. Jim also has a lot of experience as an angel investor and a board member for startup companies. In response to my other posts on boards, Jim suggested that we co-author a “Board of Director” series similar to several other series – such as the Term Sheet series, the Letter of Intent series, and the 409A series that Jason Mendelson and I have written. A few emails later, we had a rough outline. We hope you enjoy it (and feel free to suggest topics.)

No – I haven’t read it yet (just the summaries.) Yes – I probably will (read it.) However – until then – Chris Pirillo has the best word on the Friendster patent so far.

The partners of Union Square Ventures (Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham) recently had a “Union Square Session” on “Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Public Policy.” In these sessions, they get together some of the smartest people they know around a topic to spend a day talking about a set of issues – in June, one of the subjects of the “Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Public Policy Session” was patents. I was on the road and wasn’t able to join them, but I was interested to see what came out of it.