Ah – today was delightful. I love the first day of a month, especially if it’s the day after the end of a quarter. Amy and I have a standing date on the first day of every month (“life dinner”) where we get together and reflect on the previous month. Tonight, we chowed down on sushi at Alibi (the one sushi place in Homer – buried at the back of a smoky bar) with our friend Nancy who is visiting for a few days.

Scott Moody sent this article about The Martun restaurant in Kaohsiung as an add-on to my post about the best toilets in this world. Even I found this a little hard to swallow.

My summer “book a day diet” began with a chewy one. Fortunately it was short (a “bookette” – only 62 pages). John Kenneth Galbraith is 95 years old. So – that makes him the Yoda of economists. And – sometimes – I felt like I was reading something Yoda written had. Economics of Innocent Fraud is not the first of his books that I’ve read; I hope it’s not the last. Galbraith takes on the gap between “conventional wisdom” (a phrase he coined) and “reality” and uses the construct of both unintentional (innocent) and intentional fraud to explain how humans continue to snooker themselves. His writing is dense, but delightful (almost poetic at times) and his wit is beyond acerbic. About halfway through the bookette I let out a giggle and said “now he’s going to take on Greenspan and the Fed.” Amy looked over at me with an amused twinkle in her eye and said “you really are a geek, aren’t you.” 

We have a bunch of cool companies. One of my new favorites is Sling Media who makes the ultraspiffy Slingbox. My collegue Ryan McIntyre sits on their board and has a comprehensive post with links up about this nifty new device that helps you watch your television (cable, satellite, or DVR) wherever you are. You can watch Ryan and the CEO of Sling – Blake Krikorian – talking about this type of stuff on The ISV Show.

Amy and I arrived in Homer today. Yippee. Everything in the house works except the hot water. Oops. Guess we’ll have to figure that out tomorrow. Following is the view from my living room at 10pm.

I was recently asked the following question by email by a reader of my blog. Rather than respond with a one-off email, I figured I’d post my answer here since it’s broadly applicable (ah – the joy of a cross country airplane ride when one is caught up on email.) The question follows: At my company, we’re looking at recapitalizing from 3.5 million shares to 35 million (and contemplating 350 million). The reason is pretty straightforward (although we might be way off base here): we want to create “more shares” so that as we roll out our stock option plan there is some enhanced psychological value in “getting more shares,” for employees. Although the value once you do the math is the same, I personally believe that people would rather get 5,000 shares than 5 shares, regardless of the monetary value. So, I asked my attorney what his recommendation is, but I’d love a second opinion. Do we stay at 3.5m, do we go to 35m, do we go to 350m?

I’m on the board of the Colorado Conservation Trust. I think it’s currently the most impactful environmental conservation based organization in Colorado – I am so enthusiastic about it that I merged a non-profit environmental organization that I helped start – the Front Range Alliance – into CCT last year and joined the CCT board. CCT is continuing the mission of the Front Range Alliance with the Front Range Mountain Backdrop initiative.

I’m at MIT all day at a symposium run by Eric von Hippel on Democratizing Innovation. It’s a classic “drink from a fire hose” type of day – short (15 minute) descriptions of 40 or so research projects over two days. Most of what I’m interested in is the research around open source. However, given that I recently read FAB and have been thinking about a “personal fabrication machine”, I was totally jazzed to hear about eMachineShop – an online machine shop that allows a user to design, price, and order custom machined parts online.

Matt Blumberg – CEO of Return Path – posted a job description for a new VP of Marketing on his blog. Jennifer Wilson – Return Path’s long standing VP Marketing is having a baby and going on maternity leave (congrats Jennifer!) – when she returns it’ll be on a part time basis. So – if you are (or know) and A+ VP of Marketing in the Denver or New York area, please drop Matt a note.