Matt McCall – a partner at Portage Venture Partners in Chicago – has started a blog called VC Confidential. I’ve gotten to know Matt through my investment in FeedBurner – we both sit on the board and Matt and his partner Ed Chandler were the first investors in FeedBurner. If you are interested in VC bloggers, subscribe to Matt’s blog.

Once a year, the Feld men over 5 feet tall (me, my brother Daniel, my dad, my uncle Charlie, and my cousins Jon and Kenny) go away for the weekend and play. This year we went to Phoenix for spring training and I disconnected from email for the weekend. After a full day of meetings yesterday (classic VC Monday) and an evening of 24 (two full hours of Jack trying to save the world, more presidential screw ups, and a serious body count), I find myself finally caught up on email. In my inbox was a guest blog from Ross (my IT guy) ranting on about DRM and the Apple iTunes Movie Store. I love a good flame so I thought I’d share it with you. Here goes (lightly edited by me.)

Scott Maxwell – a partner at Insight Venture Partners – demonstrates his prowness with Ajax.

My fraternity brother Colin Angle – the CEO of iRobot (I was his pledge trainer – that’s my claim to fame) was on Cramer’s Mad Money yesterday. He did well – Cramer was subdued but happy. It was fun to watch a Roomba cleaning Cramer’s studio floor with some toy bulls on top of it. The new I Love Robots commercial is out (maybe it’s been out for a while and I just don’t watch enough TV.) It’s cute – my favorite quote from the commercial is “the Roomba is more intelligent than some people I know.” As the proud owner of three classic Roomba’s, one Scheduler Roomba, and a one Scooba I can comfortably say that I (and my dogs) love robots.

Amy gave me my March 1 gift today. We try to go out to dinner on the first day of the month and celebrate life (hence – “life dinner”) and often exchange gifts. The gifts I’ve received over the years range from the farcical (e.g. a remote control fart machine) to magnificent (e.g. beautiful pieces of art.) I won big with my gift today. Whenever we visit New York, we usually swing by Alaska on Madison and pick up some pieces for our Alaskan / Canadian Inuit and Yupik art collection. When we were in New York in November for the New York Marathon, Amy bought a bunch of stuff which she recently got around to unpacking. My gift – four extraordinary “Greenland Gremlins” – were sitting on my desk this morning.

I’ve enjoyed getting to know Ben Casnocha over the past few years. I think he’s a remarkable guy, I’ve learned a lot with him, and I always have fun interacting with him. Ben turned 18 years old today. Happy birthday Ben! The other day, I (along with some of Ben’s other friends) received the following request. On Wednesday I turn 18 years old. I’m writing to ask for a birthday present. Don’t worry, it doesn’t cost you anything. If you can spare a minute, answer the following question. I’m going to post some on my blog — which will be fun — so if you want to be anonymous let me know. Feel free to answer this on your own blog, if you have one and want to. When you were about 18, what did you do that you most regret and/or what did you *not* do that you most regret? A word, sentence, or paragraph will do. Gold stars for those who answer in haiku.

This week has already been active for new startups in Colorado. On Monday, the news broke that my friends Don Springer and Tim Wolters had closed on a $2.6 million financing led by Appian Ventures for their new company, Collective Intellect. Tim has blogged some about the fundraising process from an entrepreneur’s perspective – good stuff. Yesterday, my friends Paul Berberian and Karl Maier announced that they’d raised $19.3 million for their new company, Market Force Information. This equity piece was $11.3 million and was led by Centennial Ventures with participation from Boulder Ventures and Vista Ventures; the debt piece was $8 million from Hercules Technology Growth Capital. Market Force also announced that they have acquired their first company, Atlanta-based Shop’n Chek, one of the largest mystery shopping companies in the country.

Yesterday, I wrote a high level summary of this year’s Venture Capital in the Rockies conference. I thought I’d give the local press one more day to see if anyone was going to write something substantive about some of the companies presenting. I haven’t seen anything, so here are my thoughts on the companies I saw. 24 companies presented in two tracks so the most I could see was 12. I had a couple of conference calls during the day so I only managed to see 7 of them: Collective Intellect, Confio Software, HomeSphere, Solidware Technologies, iPosi, CreekPath Systems, and XAware. The only company on this list that I directly have an investment in is Collective Intellect, although I have indirect investments (through VC funds that I’m an LP in) in XAware as well as Collective Intellect. I’ve listed the companies in rank order starting with the one that I thought was most interesting / did the best job.

I love stats (also know to serious people as “analytics.”) In the past, I’ve written about the variety of stats packages I use and track regularly (e.g. at least daily.) Today, FeedBurner came out with an upgrade to its stats that add a number of new things, including uncommon uses, the concept of “reach”, and item popularity. Mike Arrington at Techcrunch has a comprehensive post up with screen shots – rather than repeat this here, I’ll simply point you there to take a look.