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.

Josh Kopelman has a great post up about Sales Forecasting, along with a sample model of a “Waterfall Forecast.”

Quest Software has been competing with Mercury Interactive for a number of years. In the past, several of Quest’s strategic moves clearly positioned it as a alternative to Mercury. However, last week, they ended up being similar to Mercury in a way they most likely weren’t happy with and never anticipated. Quest announced that it will have to restate its finances from 2000 to 2005. The stock dropped some, but will likely hang out where it is until this plays out more. 

We’re at our house in Homer which doesn’t have a TV (by design). Amy loves watching tennis and wanted to watch Wimbledon. Our Tivo at our house in Boulder broke in May and we haven’t bothered to replace it. The intrepid nerd decided to BitTorrent Wimbledon for his darling bride. Imagine my shock and horror when I basically couldn’t find any Wimbledon BitTorrents. There were plenty of TV shows, as well as lots of porn, but no tennis. I sulked around for a few minutes and then decided to head over to the Wimbledon site to figure out the times / channels to ask Ross to record for me, burn a DVD, and fedex.