I live in Boulder, Colorado. However, my wife Amy and I spend as much time as we can in Alaska. She was born in Anchorage, lived in Anchor Point (near Homer) until she was eight, and then lived in Fairbanks until she graduated from high school and moved to Boston to go to college. We’ve been coming up to Alaska together for the last decade and it has become a huge passion of mine. While Colorado is amazing, Alaska is Amazing^10.

I went to the gym today (we have one in Homer – it’s small, but it works) to do my semiweekly (or is it biweekly – twice a week) weight workout that my running coach makes (ok – begs) me to do. I hate weights (my standard reaction to anyone that suggests we go lift weights is that jews don’t do weights), but I capitulate to my coach. The gym was pretty full (by Homer standards – about ten people). While I was resting between sets, I stretched and looked at the other folks working out (something I never do in a large club – I end up in with my eyes in that “glazed over not looking at anyone or anything mode.”) I was stunned by what I saw. There was a guy on a stairmaster that was literally hunched over at a 90 degree angle to his legs reading a magazine while he lifted his legs straight up. Another guys was riding a bike, but had his chest lying on the bike readout / reading stand thing – again – almost bent over at 90 degrees. Both of these guys looked brutalized after about 10 minutes of jamming their legs up and down at a weird angle to the rest of their contorted body.

I wrote about the merger of EYT and ePartners a few weeks ago. Today, ePartners announced that Microsoft had named it Global Partner of the Year at Microsoft’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference. While not as exciting as the $32 billion Microsoft dividend announced yesterday, it’s great news for ePartners as the Global Partner award is Microsoft’s highest Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) award. Congrats to the ePartners team!

That got your attention, huh? There it is – on page 233 – as our intrepid authors speculate on the title of their upcoming Inc. Magazine interview (which was – thankfully titled – An American Start-Up – subtitled “We’re motivated, passionate, excited, terrified, and, at many times, have absolutely no idea what we’re doing.”) When I was starting my first company, I read all kinds of books from entrepreneurs and founders of companies that “seemed successful.” Many of these were autobiographical, self-promoting drivel. I eventually gave up and rarely read these today.

Amy agreed to move to Stepford with me tonight. We saw the priceless remake of the classic The Stepford Wives in our little town’s theater (the other movie was Spiderman 2). “This place does something to people – all of the women are always smiling,” said Joanna (Nicole Kidman). “That’s a problem because?” queries her husband Walter (Matthew Broderick). “That’s not normal Walter!” exclaimes Joanna. I finally lost it when Claire (Glenn Close) says “I wondered where we could put a town of robots and no one would notice and I thought – Connecticut!”

I wrote the following article for The Kauffman Foundation’s Entreworld web site some time in the late 1990’s. Someone reminded me of it the other day and I looked it up. It’s especially relevant today after all the major public company scandals of the past few years, the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley, and the renewed attempts at activism by boards of directors. A few of the comments – such as the one on D&O insurance – are dated (D&O insurance for private companies is economical, although not often that useful). I’ve sat on plenty of boards and when I reflect on them am sad to say that they are spread equally between the first two categories I list below (I’ve been on lame duck boards, but have resigned quickly after realizing that’s what they were). I wish I could say they have all been (and are all) working boards, but I can’t. I guess it’s up to me to continue to be vigilant about changing that in the future.

My friend Jenny Lawton had a good post on women, voting, and the creative / entrepreneurial efforts of Torrey Strohmeier. Amy and I were talking about women’s rights the other night recalled that women didn’t have the legal right to vote until 1920 (after the amendment was first introduced in 1878). Amazingly, women weren’t eligible to apply for the Rhodes Scholarship until 1977. If you’re a woman (or a supporter of women’s rights), go to She19 and take a look. Remember the story, be thankful for our rights, and buy a t-shirt.

StillSecure – one of my companies that was founded and run by long time entrepreneur Raj Bhargava (cofounded NetGenesis, ServiceMetrics, Interliant, Quova, and StillSecure) – had a great week. They started the week by releasing v4.0 of their VAM product (Vulnerability Lifecycle Management). VAM 4.0 is a mature enterprise vulnerability management product that now includes patch management and something we call one-click remidation workflow management (the best workflow management in the security market). We had good pickup on the product release including CMP Systems Management Pipeline and CRN.

I switched from Netscape to Internet Explorer when Windows 98 came out. Go figure. I’ve been stubbornly using IE and refused to even look at Mozilla / Firefox given that I spend so much of my time in email and I always felt (incorrectly) that Outlook and IE would be better integrated than Outlook and Firefox. I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with IE lately for a variety of reasons, including some bugs that I can’t figure out workarounds for, occassional grungy performance issues, endless popup Windows and Spyware problems, and all the well publicized security issues.