Reading today’s episode of hackoff.com gave me the chills. Tom has deeply woven the events of 9/11 in his story as Chapter 10 happens on 9/11 (and several of the main characters are in the World Trade Center South Tower at the time.) While I wasn’t in either tower on 9/11, I was in Manhattan having taken a red eye from San Francisco the night before. I got to my hotel (The Benjamin) at about 7am and went to sleep to get a little more rest before my 10am meeting. I woke up at 9:15 (to the clock radio – I remember it vividly – it was a fancy Bose clock radio like the one I had at the time in my bedroom at home) to an announcer saying that the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane and was on fire. At first I thought it was a joke (I was completely zoned out from the red eye and generally tired from the events of the previous five years) so I got up and went to the bathroom as though nothing spectacular was occurring. A few minutes later, when I walked back into the bedroom, the discussion on the radio has turned to panic, so I did something I never do – I turned on the TV in the hotel room. I sat there for the next 30 minutes in a trance as I watched the towers fall.

I’m sure I have to pay someone to put this up on my blog legally. Thanks njschock – nice use of the for:bfeld del.icio.us tag.

Eric Olson has another VentureWeek podcast up – this time with me, Dave Hornik of August Capital, and Mike Arrington of TechCrunch. We discuss the important things of 2005, at least to our little insular universe.

For those of you that requested visual confirmation of me posing as Jack Bauer, following are the photos for the t-shirts that Galanos made for my 40th birthday.

I love the Beatles. I love Brian Ibbott’s Coverville podcast. I love running. I set out to do 60 minutes in Atherton early this morning and started listening to Coverville 149: The 2nd Annual Beatles Thanksgiving Double Shot on my iPod Shuffle. 90 minutes later I had one of my best runs of the year. I was late to my first meeting (sorry Greg) but it was worth it. If you are a Beatles fan, don’t miss this one.

Since FeedBurner and Technorati started off their announcements this week with cooking metaphors, I thought I’d continue the trend. Three of my four RSS-related investments made announcements this week about products and/or customers. FeedBurner announced a new service called FeedFlare. Jennifer Aniston didn’t wear enough Flair in Office Space, but she would have been fine if she had used FeedFlare. At the bottom of my feed, you’ll now see options to email this post to a friend, email me, see the Technorati links to the post, tag the post with del.icio.us, and see any del.icio.us tags that have already associated with the post. This was trivial to set up – a couple of clicks within my FeedBurner setup page and I automagically had Flare. FeedFlare is based on an open-API so expect lots of new Flare to quickly appear. Fred Wilson nails it with his description. 

This just in from Matt Blumberg, a CEO of one of my portfolio companies that is enjoying pondering what to do about 409A. She’s real fine? Or tile cleaning fluid? No – IRS mess.

IRS Regulation 409A really sucks. While I’m probably now on some audit watch list as a result of speaking my mind, there really isn’t any other way to state it. Jason Mendelson and I were bitching about this today as we pondered how to deal with it and decided that we might as well try to constructively air our thoughts (and help educate our entrepreneurial and venture brethern on some of the issues) via a 409A Series (similar to our Term Sheet and Letter of Intent series). Remember – we aren’t lawyers (ok – Jason is…) and this isn’t legal advice – just the thoughts and opinions of two guys dealing with this stuff everyday. 

For my 40th birthday, I got a couple of cool t-shirts with photos of me substituted for Jack Bauer on 24. The only thing disconcerting was the image of me holding a handgun. I was pondering how ripped I looked (on Jack’s torso) when two questions on term sheets came in from someone at Ernst & Young. Being the excellent delegator that I am (much better than Jack, if you know what I mean), I forwarded the questions on to Jason who promptly answered them. They are as follows: