As part of my fantabulous week off, I caught up on some reading that had been sitting in my “to read” email folder. Nine months ago I posted a chart of the top large cap M&A buyers from 2004 through spring 2005. I thought I’d revisit this list with the top 16 technology acquirers from 2003 through January 2006 courtesy of America’s Growth Capital. The companies are listed in order of acquisitiveness with the number of acquisitions over the period listed in ( )’s.

I spent 90 minutes in the Boulder County Justice Center last Friday. Yeah – it’s a beautiful building in an incredible setting. But – what goes on inside isn’t so beautiful. And – it’s definitely not what you see on Law and Order. I have a story about a former running coach of mine who is now serving a long jail sentence. Someday I’ll feel like writing the entire story – it has some amazing twists and turns that – in hindsight – are instructive and enlightening. It was also my first real experience with a convicted felon and – as a result – I had to rethink a lot of my biases, fears, and preconceived notions about how justice works in this country.

I’ve been on vacation this week from everything remotely work related – including all electronic forms such as email, phone, blog reading, and blogging. Amy and I take a week once every quarter where I “go dark.” A few people know how to find me if there’s an emergency, but they do their best to protect me from myself. We were originally planning to go to the Bahamas for a week but I came down with a cold last Thursday. We punted our trip for a few days and then – after realizing how much we love being in Boulder – decided to stay home for the week, but not tell anyone. We’ve had an awesome week hanging out, being completely anonymous, enjoying downtown Boulder (we’ve gone into Amy’s office every day to write and think), being together, and reading.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers just released their quarterly issue of Nextwave. The headline article is Web 2.0: The Internet subset formerly known as the Web and features comments from a number of people, including me, Bill Gurley (Benchmark), Andreas Stavropoulous (DFJ), Tim O’Brien (Microsoft), Chris Sacca (Google), Dick Costolo (FeedBurner), JB Holston (NewsGator), and Dave Sifry (Technorati). If you are a VC stats junkie, this issue also includes PWC’s Q4 and full-year 2005 MoneyTree Report.

I woke up with a brutal cold yesterday so I spent the day today sleeping, drinking lots of fluids, being pampered by Amy, and reading mental floss. Fortunately, my good friend Jenny_the_bookstore_owner had sent me the publisher proof for Harlan Coben’s latest book Promise Me. I love Coben’s books – he’s one of my top five mental floss writers (up there with Stephen Frey and Barry Eisler). As a special bonus, Coben revived an old character – Myron Bolitar – and his gang of cohorts including Win, Esperanza, and Big Cindy. Myron is a complex man (and Yoo-hoo lover) – made even more interesting by the six years that have passed since Coben last wrote a book that featured him. While everyone is a little older, their killer instincts – especially Win’s – are as sharp as always. Coben’s promise is a page turner – and he delivers.

I love numbers. I also love data visualization – Edward Tufte has long been one of my intellectual heros and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information remains one of my all time favorite books. My friends at FeedBurner delighted me today with Feedstorm – the visual (and audible) display of the growth of the feeds on their service. Their viewer’s guide is as follows: Blue drops represent text feeds, orange drops are podcasts. The placement and position of the drops are random. The pace at which the drops drop is representative of the general growth curve of all FeedBurner-managed feeds mapped to our actual dataset. There are roughly 1,200 drops from start to finish, so imagine that number times 200 for a sense of the actual scale. The larger drops are mapped to the emergence of the most highly subscribed feeds. Turn on your audio to get a better sense for the initially sparse and then rapidly growing number of rich media feeds. It’s worth a look and a listen if you like data and creative ways to visualize it.

The 100 HiveLive invitations that I wrote about yesterday are gone. Hopefully some of you will post some comments about what you like and don’t like.

No – I’m not talking about being excellent at rugby; I’m referring to one of the Agile software development approaches. Scrum is becoming extremely popular among developers that are adopting Agile approaches. One of my portfolio companies – Rally Software – has started teaching Certified ScrumMaster classes and recently had a glowing review in Software Development Magazine. The article summarizes things well. Although the ScrumMaster training class is put on by an agile software tools vendor, it is definitely not a thinly disguised sales pitch. The Rally tools weren’t mentioned until a class member asked about them. All in all, if you’re looking to quickly become a Certified ScrumMaster (a resume enhancer for sure), this hands-on class will get you going from 0 to 60 in two days flat.

We fund plenty of things that are ahead of their time. Sometimes we win; sometimes we lose. DoDots – a company started by John and George Kembal – was one of these that – unfortunately – turned into dust. But – a fun Internet bubble quote came out of it that even Timothy Leary would like – “Anything you can do on the Web, you can do on a Dot.” Plus, it was a hell of a lot easier to spell than Konfabulator. Oh well.