I have listened to NPR every day that I’m in the car on my way into work for as long as I can remember. I have fond memories of hearing Morning Edition in the car as a kid whenever my dad drove me in the morning (which was very rarely – my bike got a good workout.) Last year house Republicans tried to kill funding for NPR and PBS – it was defeated. 

I occasionally hear things from people about how “spam is on the decline.” This always entertains me because immediately after receiving an email like this, I get a 200 message comment spam attack on my blog and three IM windows pop up in Trillian with random people I don’t know saying “Hi” with a link to what I’m sure is something truly evil. Yesterday, Postini announced that instant messaging attacks had increased by 500% in May. They are dealing with large enough numbers and a diverse enough sample size for the numbers to be statistically significant. Here are some interesting ones for you.

Just when you thought you’d never hear from me and Jason on 409A again, we received the following missive from a lawyer friend of ours: (The) IRS is now saying that drafting final regs is too hard and that they won’t be out until late summer/early fall. That translates into September/October in my head. Apparently they’re having issues with putting together startup valuation rules. Well, at least we don’t feel so stupid now thinking that complying with 409A is an almost impossible task. As previously stated in our 409A series, the idea of coming up with any “real” private company valuation is, at best, a shot in the dark. Nice to see the IRS struggling with a monster of its own making. 

Fortune had a really good article on how MySQL is building a commercial open source company. However, buried in the article is a typo that I expect was introduced by Fortune’s editors. It’s not as if MySQL workers get some perverse kick out of catching colleagues goofing off, though. They know how common it is for e-mail or voice messages to be misconstrued, so they watch what they say. Fire off a dumb question to one of MySQL’s mailing lists, and you are likely get back the terse rebuke “RTFM” – read the freakin’ manual.

NewsGator announced today that it has partnered with GMO Internet Group to provide a localized, hosted version of NewsGator Enterprise in the Japanese market. I’ve been impressed with GMO – they’ve also partnered with FeedBurner on the Japanese version of FeedBurner. Geographic expansion, especially for young fast growing companies, especially in Asia, is tough. After spending time in Europe last month, I heard the same thing over and over from the VCs and entrepreneurs that I spoke with – namely “the biggest weakness of US companies is they come over here thinking that everything works the same way, but it doesn’t.” This wasn’t just aimed at “US is different than Europe” – it was a bigger statement – namely even thought there is an EU, each country is different. I’ve heard this for a decade, seen the downside of this many times, and believe it continues to be a very true statement.

Since I promoted my mom yesterday, I’ll help my friend Jeff Clavier promote his wife Bernadette today. She’s been involved in the Stanford Center for Social Innovation and has just launched a podcast called Social Innovation Conversations. According to Jeff, The purpose of “Social Innovation Conversations” is to be a collaborative online platform for experts, community leaders, and scholars to share their knowledge across sectors for multi-disciplinary learning. The Center will offer conferences, faculty lectures, speaker events and expert interviews. In addition, leading professional and other academic institutions will be invited to contribute content to the channel to raise public awareness about the grand challenges of the world.

I kept telling myself I wouldn’t do this, but I just can’t help myself. It’s 6:06am (according to my computer) on 6/6/06. The Omen is in theaters today. FeedBurner is ranked 666 on Alexa. 666 is a hot tag on Technorati. You can watch 666 videos on YouTube. People are wishing the anti-christ happy birthday on the web and reminding us that evil is just live spelled backwards. Hell, Michigan is having a big party today. There are 128 photos on Flickr about 06/06/06 (of course, 128 is a really pretty number also.) Google came out with a spreadsheet today to help you play with numbers.

My mom, who happens to be my favorite artist in the world, is having an exhibit at The Dairy Center for the Arts. The exhibit – called American Landscapes: Two Views – features Cecelia Feld and Maureen Burkhart. The opening reception is Friday, June 16th, from 5pm – 7pm at The Dairy Center for The Arts, 2590 Walnut Street in Boulder, Colorado. I’ll be there – come say hi, hang out, and look at the art (please make sure you say hi to my mom.) Yes – there will be food.

NewsGator announced today Spencer Stuart, one of the oldest Executive Search firms in the world, has deployed NewsGator’s Enterprise Server product. Todd Berkowitz has a nice explanation of how Spencer Stuart is using RSS in the enterprise, including leveraging NewsGator’s API.