I’ve had many great meals in my life, but only a few that I’ll remember forever such as my first dinner at Tommy Toy’s (San Francisco) with Len Fassler or the first time Amy and went to Biba (Boston – now gone) together. Last night’s dinner at Le Cinq was legendary. I don’t drink, so I’m usually ready to leave any meal (or party) after two hours and one minute, but I hung in for every delightful minute of last night’s five hour extravaganza. We went with our friends – entrepreneurs Jeff Behrens and Lori Rutter (“The Jeff’s” – that was for Lori’s benefit) and their friend Nicolas Paulmier, a partner at Cinven, a large European private equity group.

I’m in Paris again this week spending time with Amy. She’s basically stopped talking English, so I don’t understand anything she says to me anymore, which – while we have a fantastic relationship – also seems to work pretty well and is probably not that different from most male / female relationships. Unlike my last trip when I did my Q1 vacation, I’ve been working this week. Last night we had drinks with Loic Le Meur, the Executive VP of Six Apart Europe. Loic took us out to the Hotel Costes bar at 239 rue Saint Honore which is a place that easily exceeds my “hip factor.” Loic was a gentleman, didn’t flirt with Amy too much (my core fear of interacting with any French man while in the presence of my wife), and we ate some good snacks together (which you must do when you have drinks at 7 followed by dinner at 9 somewhere else.)

I received a number of requests for copies of The Buffett Letters as a result of my recent post. I now have emailable copies of them – if you’d like them, simply send me an email request. The email I have came with the following request: “Now, the important part. These letters are not our property. Mr. Buffett wrote them to his business partners, not to the general public. But they are of great interest, and Mr. Buffett has let it be known that he has no objection to people passing them around like this, but does not care for the idea of them being posted in a public forum. Please honor his wishes. PLEASE DO NOT POST THESE LETTERS, AND PLEASE BE SURE TO INCLUDE THIS PARAGRAPH WHEN SHARING. Thank you.”

Dick Costolo, the CEO of Feedburner, announced yesterday that we led their financing and that I have joined their board. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that read my original Why Did We Invest in NewsGator post or my What do my blog stats really mean post. I first hooked up with Dick Costolo and the Feedburner crew on May 8, 2004 shortly after I started blogging (on May 4, 2004) due to a heads up from Fred Wilson that I should use Feedburner to publish my RSS feed. I’ve been waiting patiently ever since to have the opportunity to invest in Feedburner.

One of my companies – Quova – just had a month where they served over 2 billion queries from their customers. That’s 64m queries / day (or 750 / second) – a huge milestone (double what 1 billion was ) and actually represents less than half of the actual queries since this only counts customers of Quova’s that have query logging turned on. Real time IP geolocation matters to a lot of people.

As a member of a quarter Jewish, half Atheist, and a quarter Theraveda Vipassana Buddhist household (there’s only two of us in my household – me and Amy – you figure out the math), I found the following email on Zen Judaism hysterical. I post it as an ode to my favorite Buddha loving retired VC, Jerry Colonna. If there is no self … Then whose arthritis is this? Be here now. Be someplace else later … Is that so complicated?

Having watched Federer magically survive the onslaught of Rafael Nadal and eventually demolish him in the fifth set yesterday at the Nasdaq-100 Open (ok – I watch a little TV – usually tennis or 24 with Amy), it was with great delight that I saw Dave McClure’s post on Federer and Agassi fooling around a gazillion feet in the air on the worlds highest tennis court. Jeff Clavier kindly added a comment with a link to Tiger Woods doing the same, but with a golf club. Wow.

Several people have recently asked me variants on the question “How should I compensate a board member in my young private company?” I’ve experienced this question from all sides, having been the entrepreneur with an early stage company, a board member of an early stage company, and an investor / VC in companies that had board members at early stages, so hopefully my answer is balanced and a function of the law of large numbers (I probably have over 100 direct data points at this point in my life).

I landed in Paris today to visit Amy for a week (she’s spending six weeks over here to immerse herself in French). I usually get the sleep thing right on international flights – I screwed up this time because I was tired and crashed on the leg from Denver to Cincinnati. So – I had a nice seven hour flight to listen to music on my Bose QuietComfort 2 Headphones and read.