I bet you can guess what I’m doing tonight.

Terry Gold – CEO of Gold Systems – has a great post up about his experience with speech recognition on the Palm 700W (and yes – he finds some documentation errors on the Microsoft website.) Terry has been working with the application of speech recognition to computing – both at a business and consumer level – for as long as I’ve known him and – if you are interested in this area – he’s a guy you should know and keep track of.

Not surprisingly, some lawyers have suggested that Jason and I are now 409A experts and that we have been dispensing 409A advice. Nothing could be further from the truth – we are merely expressing our opinions as lay people affected by 409A about what we think is going on. Of course, since lawyers have written us, we feel compelled to clarify. Fortunately, the IRS gives us a way to do this, as follows:

I’m a huge James Frey fan – I loved both of his books A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard. He’s recently been beaten up for embellishing his story as The Man Who Conned Oprah. Richard Bradley also takes him to task on the always “entertaining and stimulating” Huffington Post. James Frey and the story about his story have been on the Technorati Top 10 List for the past few days, once again demonstrating that all press is good publicity (I’m sure there were plenty of other books bought as a result of all the discussion.)

There’s been some chatter – stimulated by Jeff Jarvis – about the generic advice given on many VC blogs (e.g. “Dear World, Here’s My Top 10 Tips For A Better Startup.”) While I hopefully don’t end up in the lame category, I expect that I produce my share of generic, generally uninspiring content. Yesterday, I received a “Client Alert” from one of the name brand Silicon Valley law firms. I get these all the time from most law firms – they are “marketing activities” from them to show VCs how smart they are and – presumably – to help VCs stay on top of important issues. Ironically, while I expect most of these firms have double checked to make sure they comply with CAN-SPAM, I know that many of them don’t use good UCE hygiene (specifically, I never opted in – they simply put me on the email list since they have my email address in their system somewhere.)

Tom Evslin’s fantastic blook hackoff.com: An Historic Murder Mystery set in the Internet Bubble and Rubble – soon to be available in traditional book form – is now available as a podcast. Subscribing to the podcast is easy and Tom’s done a nice job of providing options via RSS (for the blook and the podcast.) Look for some of your friends (me, Fred Wilson, several others) to guest star as some of your favorite characters (yes – Fred and I will play VCs) in upcoming podcasts.

I speak at a lot of conferences – I’m basically happy to give a speech or sit on a panel if I’m in the town when the conference is happening (I don’t want to have to travel to speak since I travel all the time, but if it’s convenient, I do it), have time, and feel I have something to add on the topic in question. I generally do this for the intrinsic satisfaction of participating and whatever intangible second order effects result (e.g. who the hell knows why I really do this, other than I enjoy it.) Yeah – I’m a panel whore.

From the guys who brought us Candy Bar Sex (Chris Wand and his dad Martin) comes the best Google search I’ll do today. Go to Google. Search for “French military victories”. Hit “I’m Feeling Lucky” Laugh (unless you are French, at which point you should start a petition to boycott Google) Entertainingly, when I do an “I’m Feeling Lucky” on my name, my blog comes up. Maybe I should write a Greasemonkey script that changes the button to “I’m Feeling Ego-Self-Referential.”

Seth Levine has a great post up about the dynamics of exit value in a startup. If you wonder why there are so many relatively quick deals for startups under $50 million but it takes a relatively long time for a deal to reach the point where it can command an exit value of $200 million plus, get a cup of coffee and settle in for a good read.