Greg Reinacker has a comprehensive post up about why NewsGator has shifted to subscription pricing for all of their products (except the soon to be released NewsGator Enterprise Server.) If you are a software entrepreneur thinking about “subscription” vs. “perpetual” pricing, it’s worth reading this post. I’ve watched a number of my companies work through this – most end up either with subscription (e.g. Commerce5, Oxlo, Quova, Rally) or perpetual (Klocwork, Newmerix) but some end up with both (StillSecure).

Jason and I are feeling the need for closure on our term sheet series as we’ve started gearing up on our next series (M&A). So – we’re going to knock out the balance of the standard term sheet terms this week. We’re still in the “terms that don’t matter much zone” so we’re including Voting Rights and Employee Pool for completeness. “Voting Rights: The Series A Preferred will vote together with the Common Stock and not as a separate class except as specifically provided herein or as otherwise required by law. The Common Stock may be increased or decreased by the vote of holders of a majority of the Common Stock and Series A Preferred voting together on an as if converted basis, and without a separate class vote. Each share of Series A Preferred shall have a number of votes equal to the number of shares of Common Stock then issuable upon conversion of such share of Series A Preferred.”

I’m lucky. I get to live in two beautiful places: Homer, AK and Eldorado Springs, CO (I like to say I live in Boulder because people know where it is, but we actually live in Eldo.) We live in Alaska part of the year because I have to get away from the hustle and bustle of Eldo / Boulder to think straight. In addition to our nation’s 229th birthday, it was Eldorado Springs’ 100th birthday today. I’ll get back to writing about serious stuff like venture capital, but for now, happy birthday Eldo.

Fred Wilson clued me into a fun use of del.icio.us. He calls it the “for:“ tag. He set one up for his wife Joanne (Gotham Gal). Whenever he wants her to see something on the web, he simply tags it “for:gothamgal”. I just set up a for:bradfeld tag in del.icio.us. Then – I subscribed to it in NewsGator. If you run across something on the web you want me to see, just tag it.

I stumbled over Edward Tufte’s Sparklines this morning. Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is one of my favorite books and his essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint helped shape my point of view that PowerPoint is contributing to the intellectual degredation of contemporary society. Sparklines are an awesome new way to display high densities of quantitative information. Tufte nailed it once again – hopefully we’ll start seeing these pop up all over the place. Fortunately there’s already a PHP Graphing Library up at Sourceforge and O’Reilly’s xml.com site has a good article with Python code up.

Michael Parekh pointed me to an awesome 10 minute movie of how the United States came together.

Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk has replaced James Frey’s books as the best book of the year. Several people recommended it to me and it was simply awesome. Rawicz tells the story of his arrest, interrogation, trial, and sentencing for espionage in Russia in 1939. Of course all of this is bogus as he’s merely Polish and has done nothing wrong, but he is stubborn and – rather than admit false guilt (and surely be executed), he hangs in there for a year of abuse and is sentenced to 25 years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp.

I have used a two monitor setup for several years (I’m about to try three just for the hell of it.) I discovered Ultramon the other day, downloaded it, and my life will never be the same. If you use two more more monitors on your PC setup, this is a must have app. Following are some of the features that I’m already using: Multi-monitor windows management Taskbar on each monitor (showing only apps on that monitor) Tie apps to particular monitor Setup / switch between multiple display profiles Different wallpaper on each monitor Different screen savers for each monitor There are plenty of other features, some of which I’m sure I’ll discover over time. Installation is trivial and was flawless for me. I’ve been using it for three days and can’t imagine not having it.

Live8 is just awesome. I’ve been tethered to my computer for a while watching it live on AOL. Pink Floyd is on stage right now in London (the first time since 1981 as a full band, including Roger Waters.) I love Pink Floyd. I once listened to Dark Side of the Moon for an entire semester during college (I had an early CD player – I started it at the beginning of the semester, pressed the repeat button, and pressed stop at the end of the semester. Yes – I occasionally turned the volume down to sleep at night.) I have fond memories of my mom yelling “turn down that shit” when I was home from college visiting for the summer blasting The Wall.