What happens when you cross Jack Bauer with Google Maps? While I doubt this had anything to do with Google’s stock movements on today and last Friday, you never know. Thanks Derek.

I have a rule about what I can eat the week before a marathon. It’s a simple rule – I can eat anything I want, and as much of it as I feel like, as long as it is primarily carbohydrates and protein. Today’s lunch (and yesterday’s lunch) was at Jerry’s Deli in South Beach. Matzo Brie and Kasha Varniska. That feels somehow fitting for a high carbo/protein meal in South Beach.

Jenny Lawton pointed me to ASCII Star Wars. If you are a Star Wars fan, this is mindblowing.

At a board meeting last week we were discussing the dynamics of keeping VC’s informed that expressed interest in “being kept up to date” on the company for the purpose of being somewhat up to speed when the next financing came around. We ended up talking through a list of about 10 different VC’s and at one point one of the other board members muttered “this sounds like the shits.” I gave him a perplexed look and he said “you know – “Signal High Interest Then Stall.” Yeah – well – we’ve all experienced the shits at one time or another.

Jonathan Schwartz – the president and COO of Sun – just posted on his great trip to Sun Mexico and raved about their recent performance. He posted a picture of “the winning team” – my first reaction was “where are the women?” I know Sun is a member of the National Center for Women & Information Technology Workforce Alliance so I was a little surprised. I decided to dig a little more and discovered that two of twenty three senior execs are women and two of nine directors are women. Unfortunately I had no easy way to go any deeper in the organization – it’s certainly conceivable that there is a higher ratio of female engineers at Sun than female executives – although if history is a guide this probably isn’t the case.

Confronting Reality was awful. The celebrated authors of this book – Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan – should consider confronting the reality that the world does not need yet another tepid, uninspired business book that tries to create a “simple” construct (in this case, the notion of – tada – a “business model”) to “confront reality” and improve you business. The construct is lame. The examples, while somewhat interesting (EMC, Cisco, Sun, Home Depot, 3M, and Thompson) and by far the best part of the book, are still incredibly light weight stories of the transformation these companies went through recently.

Earlier this week I was enjoying myself at an Oxlo board meeting (the food was “ok” – at least there was food) and I realized that a number of people in the room were folks that I had met randomly. I’ve had a long standing “random meeting” policy – I try to set aside time to get together with people that are referred to me by someone I know. While I don’t do coffee, breakfast, lunch, or other time consuming things, I’m always happy to spend 15 minutes meeting someone for the first time, hearing their story, and seeing if I can connect them up with something I’m involved in.

Earlier this week I wrote that Tim Wolters – CTO of Collective Intellect had starting posting on terms associated with VC financings. Yesterday – Niel Robertson – CTO of Newmerix (who just closed a follow on to their Series B financing) just wrote an extensive post about his experience with early stage venture financings. Great insight from the entrepreneur’s point of view (in the case that you are sick and tired about hearing about things from a VC point of view.)

If you are into 24, Slate has an excellent interview with Michael Loceff – one of the key writers for the show. Thanks Rick.