I’ve been to a zillion board meetings (ok – let’s guess between 1,000 and 2,000 assuming 10+ / month for the past 12 years.) While the food is usually lousy (but not always, as I’ve seen a marked improvement since I wrote my Board Meeting Food Is Usually Shit post), I’ve found a more troubling pattern than just bad food. The official business of a typical board meeting is back end loaded. Specifically, items such as the ones that follow will come at the end of the meeting.

Ross – my “IT guy” – stole my HP z545 Media Center PC a while ago. I wasn’t really using it because there was too much “marital resistance” to this particular change in our AV infrastructure (plus, I never really got it working the way I wanted.) Imagine my surprise when Ross suggested that it was the core of the best digital media solution he could envision (after he put it all together, of course.) Ross has an extensive post on his blog up about his Media Center configuration and why he thinks it is the best solution – following is a teaser. 

If you have a Windows Mobile device and want to try out NewsGator’s new Windows Mobile feed reader, the beta is now available. NewsGator has had a mobile edition for phones that support HTML available for a long time (since I invested in NewsGator two years ago), however, in our desire to help people consume feeds anywhere, we’ve been working on a more robust approach to mobile clients. As you’d expect, the Windows Mobile feed reader synchronizes your data with the NewsGator Online service (and subsequently with all the NewsGator products) so anything that you read on your phone shows up as read in NewsGator Online (and the phone can be configured to display only your unread feeds.)

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.