Bob Geldof is echoing through my head. It was one of those days – it didn’t help that I overdid it yesterday on my run up and down Homer Hill (and am still feeling weird 24 hours later from 90 minutes of too much hill.) At least I have a pretty pictures to look at. Here are your Alaska photos of the day. (Blackstone Glacier and some very happy looking sea otters that didn’t realize that Monday’s happen – courtesy of Dave Jilk.) 

Every VC’s favorite rock band – The Flying Other Brothers – is coming to Homer, Alaska on August 18th (how could you be a VC and not love a band who’s albums are titled IPO, Secondary, and 52–Week High.) FOB is fronted by Roger McNamee – the extremely successful investor that co-founded Integral Capital Partners, Silver Lake Partners, and most recently Elevation Partners (famous – among other things – for having U2’s Bono as a partner.) Amy and I will be rocking out at Duggan’s Pub on the 18th. Maybe Bono will show.

NewsGator announced the NewsGator Enterprise Server this week. Ross Carlson (my superstud IT guy) installed Beta 2 this week – I think it’s awesome. When I first invested in NewsGator a year ago, I bought into Greg Reinacker’s vision of RSS as a platform technology and NewsGator as the platform company for providing RSS reader capability. At the time, there was a some emerging buzz around RSS, but over the past year it has picked up incredible speed and is now working its way into mainstream and enterprise computing.

I grew up in Dallas and – when I went to school in Boston – I was proud (at least for a while) of being from “Big-D”. However, Amy cut me down to size when we hooked up. She grew up in Alaska and told me that if you cut Alaska in two, Texas would be the third largest state.

In the “I’m going to go hide under my bed now” category, Ben Casnocha pointed me to the British Royal Black Squadron’s rendition of “Is This The Way To Armadillo (sic)”.

I’ve been working with Ryan McIntyre at Mobius for five years. Ryan was one of the founders of Excite and sits on the boards of companies such as Technorati, Postini, Sling Media, and Akustica. In addition to Ryan’s wicked sense of humor (he taught his son how to say the word for “izmel-wielder at a Mexican Bris”) and great musical talent, he’s recently taken up being interviewed. John Furrier – who’s been making the rounds with a bunch of great VC and entrepreneur interviews on his infoTalk Podcast – did Ryan last week. And – a few weeks ago – he showed up on Microsoft’s The ISV Show with Blake Krikorian talking about “the convergence of broadband and media in the home” (and Sling Media).

It’s Friday and our new movie choices appeared this morning at our little theater down the block. Tonight we went to the 8:30 showing of Wedding Crashers – remarkably the theater was completely full for the first time this summer (we were the oldest people there – I think all the teenagers in town showed up.) Now – I’ll basically do anything I can to avoid going to a wedding (Amy and I eloped), even ones I’m invited to – so it was with some trepidation that I agreed to go to a movie with the word wedding in the title. Amy tricked me into seeing it by saying that there were venture capitalists in the movie so I had to go see it (yes – Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn pose as VCs in one scene – very very scary.)

After watching my Roomba’s play with each other I was hopeful that I’d come across something that inspired and excited me as much as a robotic vacuum cleaner for this month’s toy of the month. While my friend Jeff Hyman, Dyson’s VP of Marketing, sent me (actually, he sent Amy) the most amazing vacuum cleaner I’ve ever encountered (the Dyson DC15), I felt there must be some unwritten rule that I couldn’t choose a vacuum cleaner as toy of the month two months in a row (or someone might make fun of me), so I’ll reserve the detailed post on the Dyson DC15 for later, but you can be comfortable knowing that we set it up, plugged it in, and then proceeded to chase the Roomba’s around the room with it.

In an effort to experience VoIP at its fullest, I got rid of my landline in Alaska and have been using Vonage all summer. Today – it dawned on me that the experience was very similar to that of using a cell phone 10 years ago. While Vonage has a high novelty factor and provides additional functionality (in this case stuff like a “portable 303 phone number” and voice mail to my email), its performance is erratic. Sometime it works great, sometimes it sounds like I’m talking to space aliens from planet mumble, and a few times a day I simply get disconnected (remember the cell phone dropped call phenomenon – of course, if you live in the bay area, you still experience it every time you drive down 280.)