Tom Evslin – the founder / CEO of ITXC (public, and then acquired by Teleglobe) – has written two great posts on An Entrepreneur’s View of Venture Capital. They are here and here – well worth any entrepreneur’s time to read.

Dave Jilk forwarded me the Jon Stewart segment on The Gates (click on Piles of Sheet). “The Gates will do for New York what the West Wing did for Washington D.C. Or – what the band Asia did for that continent.” (Stephen Colbert, aka Ted Hitler, Senior Conceptual Art Correspondent.) Expectedly great stuff. “I used to think $21 million dollars could be used to achieve something noble – like, um, I don’t know – build a hospital wing. But The Gates has caused me to recontextualize my notion of what $21 million dollars can be used for – in this case redecorating a bike path.” (Ted Hitler again).

I must have a fascination with books with the word bullshit in the title, as On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt is the second I’ve read in the last twelve months (the other one was Another Bullshit Night in Suck City). Frankfurt, a Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University, has written a delightful half-book (half-book =< 100 pages). In this book, Frankfurt proposes to “begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit.” You know you are in for a good time when the first sentence of the book is “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” Frankfurt asserts that even though bullshit is all around us, “the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.”

I’ve written before about how most powerpoint presentations are miserable and gave some specific suggestions on how to make them better if you are presenting to me (or any other VC). I read today on Cliff Atkinson’s blog that adding text to a screen in a powerpoint presentation that is identical to the narration harms the ability of the audience to understand the information. If you remove the text, information retention increases by 28% and information transfer increases by 79%. This is no huge surprise if you are a follower of Seth Godin’s methods to Avoid Really Bad Powerpoint – Seth’s actual article is here.

I spent seven years of my life at MIT. I ended up with two degrees, an addiction to caffeine, the ability to do several things at once even when massively sleep deprived, a deep understanding of the phrase IHTFP, and an appreciation for a good hack. I’ve spent the last two days in Cambridge and Boston showing my 15 year old nephew Drew the sights. We wandered around MIT, hung out at the Media Lab, got some demos from several of the researchers being sponsored by the Deshpande Center (and got to play with powered joint braces and the HexFlex nanomanipulator), ate lunch at the Other Side Cafe and breakfast at Sonsie, counted the Smoots on the Mass Ave Bridge (ok – Harvard Bridge), shopped at The Coop, ate dinner at Legal Seafoods, hung out in the Museum of Science, checked out the new Stata Center (Dr. Seuss would be proud), visited my fraternity (ADP), saw the location of my first office (Feld Technologies – 875 Main Street, Cambridge), wandered past NetGenesis’ first offices (56 Rogers Street, Cambridge), and walked the Infinite Corridor. It’s been a blast playing tour guide, revisiting some of my old favorite spots, hanging out with Drew, and starting to teach him how to program computers in Logo.

If you are struggling with whether The Gates is true art, I recommend the following test sent to me by Dave Jilk. I got a 75% – which means I’m merely a pretty good guesser.

Several friends have been raving about The Gates. My mom – the artist – just sent me an email saying it was an amazing installation and I had to look at the web site. I love Christo and HUGE art pieces – they overwhelm me in a weird emotional way (Amy and I have a large installation of Jerry Wingren’s The Visitors outside our bedroom window that I wake up to everyone morning.) As a kid, I could sit and stare at the Claes Oldenberg sculpture in the Dallas Museum of Art forever.

I got the following email from a friend today that I hadn’t talked to in a year or so (see – email isn’t dead…). Brad, Just wanted to drop you a quick note to let you know I am planning to start using Rally on several projects I am working on as a “Rent-a-cto”. Blog + Marketing = Blarketing I got turned on to these guys from reading about them in your Blog. Hope all is well in Feldland!

I stole Matt’s subtitle because it’s so cute. If you are part of either side of the “email is dead, no it’s not” debate, go read Matt’s post on “The Rumors of Email’s Demise …”. I couldn’t have said it better myself – so I won’t – just read what Matt said.