It’s inevitable. Every year we have our “first real snow” in Boulder. That would be – today. Coinciding with the first snow – 100% of the time – is an Internet outage at my house and at our office. Since we use IP phones, are connected to our infrastructure in our California office via point to point, and my T1 line from my house is direct connected into the office, and outage is – well – a major pain in the ass (did you know you can’t make a phone call on an IP phone from your house if your network is down – duh – yeah I’ve got a land line in this server room somewhere, now where the hell is it?)

It’s last week’s news (literally) but if you are interested in hearing directly from Brent Simmons (NetNewsWire) and Greg Reinacker (NewsGator) on NewsGator’s acquisition of NetNewsWire, Niall Kennedy has a good interview online. Look for more M&A news this week – everyone knows that Moreover has been acquired – the current rumor is that it’s Verisign again (who acquired Dave Winer’s Weblogs.com last week).

As part of the VC Advisory Board for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Technology group, I like to say that I work for Microsoft three days a year (this is how often the EBT VC Advisory Board meets). We have a meeting coming up this week and – as I get ready to trek up to Redmond – I was pondering the meeting agenda when I came across Dan’l Lewin’s (who runs EBT) recent post titled “Should Microsoft Invest in Startups?” 

I didn’t go to Web 2.0 – I hate attending conferences (although I enjoy speaking at them) and try my hardest to avoid them. I’ll go if the conference is relatively convenient to my travels and I’m speaking (like I did at WeMedia – I was already in NY for other stuff), but generally I enjoy hearing about what’s going on from a distance through blogs (it is Web 2.0 after all, right?), the web, and the people from companies I’m invested in that attend. Then – I like to sit in front of my computer and actually play around with the stuff. 

Ross Mayfield – CEO of Socialtext – just put up a new wiki called Entrepreneur Exchange. He’s seeded it with a number of links from around the VC / entrepreneur blogging set – see the Venture Capital and StartUp Kit categories for examples. Contribute freely!

If you aren’t an avid Scobleizer reader you might have missed the GooglePark cartoon series. Hysterical. Scoble goes to Google. The Inevitable Sequel — the Plot Sickens. The Umpire Strikes Back. The Conclusion It just feels so real. Web 2.0 fans, beware the underpants gnomes.

A trip to New York isn’t complete without art. Amy and I managed to squeeze in The Met (mostly modern stuff), the Guggenheim (Russia – top two floors were great, Malevich and Kandinsky are total stars, the rest was portraits of peasants, workers, farmers, and royals), and galleries in Chelsea last weekend. Chelsea disappointed in a major way this trip. We did 23rd to 25th street and had high hopes. I only really liked two artists – Chris Jordan and Danica Phelps. Both do crazy obsessive stuff (which massively appeals to me) while maintaining a supremely deft touch with their subject. Maddeningly, the two Jordan’s that I wanted to buy (Circuit Board 1, Circuit Board 2), were both sold.

There are two conferences going on today – We Media and Web 2.0. Both are sold out, have great speakers, and have generated lots of “pre-conference” buzz (whatever that means.) They are radically difference conferences addressing the same thing from two totally different perspectives. The schedules and the agendas tell the complete story. We Media – all media, all day long – in New York. Web 2.0 – all tech, for a couple of days – in San Francisco.

It appears that Google has finally officially declared war on Microsoft. I find this completely perplexing, as I’d think a more effective strategy would be to simply sidestep the whole desktop OS / app thing and just continue to innovate like crazy. Why pick a fight when you don’t need to?