My long time friend Andy Sack has started blogging. Andy is currently CEO of Judy’s Book, a new local search startup funded by Ignition Partners. Andy is a great entrepreneur. I first met him in Boston in 1995 when we was working with the original team at a new Internet startup called Agents (which turned into Firefly). Shortly after, he started a company called Abuzz and he asked me to join his board. Abuzz was originally considering creating an online auction site (damn) but ended up creating a complex but powerful email-based collaborative filtering product. Abuzz raised venture money from Flatiron Partners (I sat on the board with Jerry Colonna), Softbank Venture Capital, and DFJ. Shortly after releasing the product, NY Times Digital came calling and acquired the company. We had stars in our eyes about the ultimate valuation of NYT Digital (as they planned to go public in 2000) – with the dot com crash that didn’t happen, but Andy had negotiated a clever put in the event that the NYT Digital didn’t go public and we all got a nice big check for our share of the equity in the deal in 2000.

Today was a strange day. At 2:30pm, on our way back from Aspen to Boulder, I got a call from my assistant Wendy saying, “there’s a fire in Eldorado Springs – I’m driving over to your place to see what’s up and check on your dogs.” Apparently, Boulder County was doing a controlled burn just outside of Eldorado Springs and it hopped the fire line and got out of control.

The noise about RSS bandwidth jams finally made the NY Times today. However, that’s not what this post is about. In the article, the NYT quotes blogger Steve Main who writes on his blog. “The whole purpose of an RSS aggregator is so that I don’t have to open my freaking Web browser to 100 different pages. By having the content right there in my aggregator, I can skim an entire article in the time it takes to open up a new Web browser. By not including full content in the RSS feed, you take away some of the productivity gains that RSS offers.”

I’m an unashamed South Park fan (if Colorado wasn’t a swing state I’d consider writing in Cartman for president.) Amy and I watched South Park – The Passion of the Jew tonight and rolled around on the floor in laughter. The DVD included two bonus tracks – Christian Rock Hard and Red Hot Catholic Love. If you aren’t a South Park fan, can’t handle “clearly over the reasonableness line” satire and sarcasm, or are easily offended, this is not for you. However, if you are a South Park fan, couldn’t ever figure out what was the big deal about The Passion of the Christ, or just love 90 minutes of non-stop, non-PC satire – this is it. As one would expect from the titles, each episode does actually have a moral at the end.

NewsGator announced another RSS content relationship yesterday – this time with uclick, the online arm of Universal Press Syndicate (UPS). You can now get Doonesbury, Cathy, FoxTrot, Garfield, Ziggy comics via RSS (god – I loved FoxTrot – I forgot it existed…) Greg Reinacker (NewsGator’s founder) also put up a post discussing his thoughts about changing the NewsGator name. He’s looking for feedback – go to the post and tell him what you think. As a board member, I can assure you that your opinion will count here as we’re currently pondering what to do.

Tim Robbins is a genius. In 1994, he made a satirical movie called Bob Roberts that documented a fictional right-wing candidate’s (Bob Roberts – played by Tim Robbins) run for senate in Pennsylvania against a 30-year incumbant democrat (played by Gore Vidal) in the 1990 election cycle. Amy and I saw it in Boston when it came out and both “kind of remembered it.” We watched it tonight. We’re both tired from the week and I’m sick, so it was an easy decision to lay on the couch and melt our brains with a movie. Oops – wrong movie.

I have a close friend – Jenny Lawton – who is a long time, extremely talented, and irrepressible entrepreneur. For a decade she ran a high-end network integration company that was doing Internet stuff well before Internet stuff was cool. She sold that company to a public company that was a large application service provider and stayed on for several years, playing a number of different leadership roles in that company. 

If you follow my Read Recently list, you know that I plowed through a lot of books this summer. However, I’ve been stuck on What Einstein Told His Cook for two weeks. It’s not a bad book (in fact, if you are a foodie, it’s a very interesting book.) However, as I’ve been crushed with work the past two weeks, I haven’t been reading much and the book hasn’t pulled me in to escape from the world.

I love tennis. When I was a kid (age 10 – 14) I was a serious junior player until I burned out from too many 10 hour, 100 degree plus days of banging my racquet against the ball (and the fence, and the ground, and my head) in the Texas heat. I still love to play and – instead of fighting to win – I’m delighted to go for every shot and see my old amazing strokes and ball placement every one out of ten shots.