I usually clobber a book every other day when I’m in Homer. Last week was a slow week because of a family health issue that turned our world upside down for two days (all is ok now) and some friends that visited the past few days. I just finished The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. It was awesome. This is one of the classics that helped start the environment activism movement and imprinted the phrase monkeywrenching in the minds of many people. While it was written in 1975, it doesn’t seem dated at all – in fact, if anything – it was easy to transport myself back to the time when I was 10 and getting hauled around in the back of my parents’ Vista Cruiser station wagon across Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico.

I’ve been watching the backdating option scandal unfold with the same horror that someone watches a slow motion multi-car pile up (or maybe the space shuttle exploding on takeoff.) A few folks have been writing interesting stuff and/or have useful links (such as Paul Kedrosky) and it’s been widely covered in several mainstream publications, most notably the Wall Street Journal. Mercury Interactive – the company that was the first one to have to deal with an investigation into this issue (the first shoe fell with an 8–K they filed on 11/2/05 announcing the resignation of their CEO, CFO, and General Counsel ) finally filed their restated 2004 10–K this week. While a careful read of it is instructive for anyone following this issue in general, Jack Ciesielski has a fantastic summary of the major issues up on SeekingAlpha in his post titled Mercury Interactive: Less Murky But No More Forgivable.

I’ve been struggling with what to say about Al Gore’s book “An Inconvenient Truth.” I read it a few weeks ago and had very mixed emotions about it. Fred and JoAnne Wilson saw the movie last night. Fred’s blog post perfectly captured how I felt about the book. I want the science and the facts, not the melodrama and the preaching. At some point as I was reading the book, I told Amy that if I read the phrase “moral imperative” one more time, I’d puke. 

Do you remember the Banana Junior 6000? Someone actually built one. “Good Morning, Mr. President. Shall we dust Moscow?” I wonder how many times it needs to restart itself to update the OS? Thanks Will (via Dave) – you made my day.

Brian Kellner has started a blog called Grillin’ in the Storm. The subtitle – thoughts on agile software product management – sets the tone. I’ve known Brian for almost 20 years (we were fraternity brothers – I think I was his pledge trainer but I’ve gotten old enough that I can’t remember any more.) He moved to Colorado about five years ago and has worked at several software companies (including – but not limited to – several that I have been an investor in) before ending up at NewsGator.

A few weeks ago I enabled the MyBlogLog Community feature on my blog – I just put it up higher on the left hand side. I’ve been using MyBlogLog for about a year for link tracking – they’ve got a very good inbound and outbound link tracking system. If you’ve ever hovered over a link on my blog (or someone elses) and seen the “N Clicks Today” message box, that’s MyBlogLog in action. 

I’ve given a number of interviews on Work Life balance since the post I wrote about it a year ago. Eric Bergman interviewed me the other day – it’s a short 10 minute piece that I think he did a good job with.

Fred Wilson has a good answer up to a question that was posed to him the other day about VCs and fees. Our startup company recently started seeking funding and the first firm we presented to has shown some interest. However, they have now sent us a Due Diligence Agreement and are requesting a “one time good faith due diligence payment of $9,000”. Is it standard industry practice to charge the entrepreneur a fee for the due diligence? We are obviously short on cash – paying $9k to every VC who shows an interest in us sounds counterproductive.

John Funk, an entrepreneur (I’m an investor in John’s newest company – Evergreen IP) and friend has a innovative proposal up concerning changing the rules on the current patent system. I’ve been on both sides of the patent aisle with John – we like to joke that early on in our relationship John’s company sued one of my companies (and then my company sued John’s company back) for patent infringement (the companies settled several years later for a cross license and $1 – much to the delight of the lawyers who got all the bucks.) Fortunately we got past all that crap and have developed a nice friendship.