I woke up this morning thinking that it should be easy to blog offline via email. I already read my blogs offline via Newsgator. Why can’t I simply send an email to my blog on Typepad. I popped up Typepad, hit my Control Panel, and voila – you can through their Edit my mobile settings shortcut. This blog is being posted offline via email. I can now post via my Danger Hiptop or offline email when I’m travelling. This is both simple and synchronistic (I love it when I wake up thinking of something techy and it’s trivial to do). The only drag is Microsoft Word – where rather than generating HTML for me correctly, I end up having to insert the href (HTML codes) automatically. I didn’t do it for italics – if “Edit my mobile settings” is italicized above, then Word (and typepad) did the write thing – if not – then not.

How’s that for a title? I’ve got two books, a Homer Simpson like “doh!”, and blog spam for you today. First the books. My wife and I are huge readers (she’s also a writer). So – we read pretty much anything we can get our hands on. I’m always looking for recommendations – so send them to me. Book one is Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin. Seth is an amazing writer (and fantastic guy). Everything he’s ever written is worth reading – even the stuff that’s crap (since it’s better crap than the other crap out there). I haven’t read Free Prize Inside, but mine is on order and I hope to have it soon. If you have any interest in business – read Seth’s stuff.

I ran the fourth marathon of my life today – the Ft. Collins Old Town Marathon. It wasn’t my fastest marathon (that was at Chicago last fall), but I was very happy with the results. I’ve been on a steady training regimen since the beginning of the year – which – given winter and travel has been challenging to keep up. However, my coach, Jeff Kline of RunFitUSA is both supportive and relentless – which helps.

During the Internet bubble, it was easy to forget how most companies are created. I remember endless presentations where the punch line from two guys and a powerpoint presentation was “all we need is a seed round of $10m and we’ll be able to get going.” I occassionally get a chance to tell the story of how my first real company – Feld Technologies – was funded by me and my co-founder Dave Jilk with $10 (yes – 10 one dollar bills) of equity (we had 10 shares of stock – $1 / share – that’s all the money we ever raised). There was an interesting constraint – at the time – it was basically all the money we had and it never occurred to us to go try to raise money from venture capitalists (we did eventually get a $10,000 bank line that my dad personally guaranteed with us).

As I got out of my car at home after dinner last night, my wife Amy was snickering. “My jedi mind trick worked – I got those guys to back up their car by thinking you will back up your car.” To get to our house in the mountains, you have to drive through a state park and up a narrow dirt road wide enough for one car. Our friends that run the state park have kindly put up a sign that says “Only authorized vehicles past this point” at the beginning of the one lane road. Daily, there are a number of people that either can’t read, ignore the sign, or decide they are in an authorized vehicle. At the end of the road, they reach what we hope is an unpenetrable gate (unless you know the magic code), turn around, and have to retrace their steps. It’s exactly in the middle of this route when we inevitably reach these morons.

The endless reconfiguration of the blog has begun. I’ve always been a nerd – ever since I was 13 and got my first computer for my bar mitvah (instead of – say – a car). Yes – it was an Apple II with an Integer card (now – wasn’t that an ironically named device). So – after screwing around with the Typepad configuration for a hour yesterday while on a less than interesting conference call, I figured there must be a way to post effectively online. Since I’ve been using Newsgator as my RSS aggregator (it’s an Outlook plug-in – a much better idea than a standalone app since I live in email) and read most things offline, I went looking for an offline poster. Voila – MoveablePoster.

I’m a professional emailer / phonecaller / meeting taker (aka a venture capitalist). Much of my time is spend writing, reading, thinking, talking, and learning. As a result, I’ve been fascinated (and deeply involved) with the evolution of email and web-based communication and technologies. I noticed blogging when Dan Bricklin turned me on to it. I’ve been following many of my VC collegues blogs (Fred Wilson, Jerry Colonna, Jeff Nolan, Martin Tobias) and others for some time.