Amy and I have been big supporters of a movie about immigration called For Here or To Go? With our friends at Boundless, we are sponsoring a week of screenings in Seattle. We are supplying a bunch of free tickets and – when they are used up – will still have a set of paid tickets available. It’s playing at the Landmark Theaters Crest Cinema Center from Friday 9/22 to Wednesday 9/27. If the topic of immigration is important to you, this is a great, powerful, thought-provoking movie.

For starters, let’s look at some Golden Retriever puppies instead. I watched most of the Apple announcement last week (I was on vacation and hanging out waiting for Amy, so I just plopped down on the floor and watched Special Events on the Apple TV channel.) I fell asleep for a few minutes part way through it. I turned it off about halfway through the iPhone X announcement. I’ve been an Apple user for many years now. Every few years, I switch to an Android phone for a month (whatever the newest model is) but always end up going back to my iPhone. Whenever each new iPhone model has come out (for at least the past five years) there’s been a mad rush among my partners to make sure all of us have a new phone the day they ship. I even sported a rose gold one during one upgrade cycle just because I could.

Boulder has local elections every odd year. That means we are having a local election this year, with mail-in balloting starting on 10/16/17 and ending on 11/7/17. Because it’s on an odd-year cycle, turnout has historically been relatively low (under 50%). As a result, a very small number of votes can have a big impact on the election results. This is especially important for the city council election. A number of Boulder residents, including me, have organized a new group called Engage Boulder to help get out the vote in this election cycle. Between now and 11/7/17, you’ll see a number of suggestions, events, and encouragement.

Amy and I just spent a week of vacation off the grid in Aspen. I ran, read, and hung out. I had a fantasy about writing, but didn’t get to it. We watched Narcos Season 3, ate at a bunch of Aspen’s restaurants, and had an Amy pre-birthday dinner with our friends Dave and Maureen. And we napped – a lot. I hadn’t had a vacation since mid-April, which is unusual for me as Amy and I try to take a week off the grid every quarter. On day three, which was a Monday, I settled into a total chill zone which lasted all week. I did my long run on Friday (instead of Saturday) and cruised from Aspen to Basalt. I then slept most of the day on Saturday when I wasn’t reading or eating. Yup – I’m marathon ready.

As my writing progress on my two books – Startup Communities 2 and #GiveFirst – continue to equal zero and the pile of unread stuff reaches higher into the sky than the stack of turtles going all the way down, I’ve decided to try a new process thing. I’m going have a reading and writing week starting today and going through 9/17. Any excess time I have next week will be for reading the turtle pile and working on the new books. The activities are self-reinforcing – I write better when I’m reading a lot, I can only write productively for a few hours a day, and reading refreshes me a lot for future writing.

I woke up from a dream about being in my early 20’s. It was a complicated one that included struggling to finish my graduate degree (yup – that’s clearly an anxiety dream) along with meeting with Bill Gates and trying to sell him my company (something that never happened but clearly has some fantasy element to it.) As I was brushing my teeth, parts of the dream stuck with me, as some do. In my waking haze, I inhabited some of my memories from my early 20’s. The fantasy meeting with Bill Gates led to the Microsoft / Lotus battle for #1, which reminded me of several Lotus meetings I attended with my Uncle Charlie when I was in college and he was CIO for Frito-Lay (I can’t remember his exact title – I think it was something like VP MIS, but he was what we would call a CIO today). Mitch Kapor loomed large there and at MIT, even after he left Lotus and started On Technology.

Ted Rheingold just passed away. He was an amazing guy beloved by many. Endlessly joyful, inspiring, and loving. His autoresponder (typos and all) is one for the books, and like great poetry, worth reading over and over. My cancer (ccRCC, metastic) has gotten the upper hand and I’ll be putting all my resources into managing it. In my stread, please keep these very important messages in place: * be good to each other * enjoy evert day * wanting is suffering * The journey is still the destination, now more than every * the trend of purpose is coming like a tidal wave, get out a heard of it. enjoy the ride. die fulfilled. * Reframe your thinking of “what your career can do for you,” into “what can your career do for others,” and wonderful, meaningful work awaits you.”

I’m running my 25th marathon in South Dakota on 10/8/17. My training has been going well and I’m now in a zone of 30+ miles a week with a long run once a week in the high teens. Today’s run from Aspen to Basalt was the best run I’ve had in over a year. Just under a year ago, I did this same run in 4 hours. So, I’m in significantly better shape, which makes me happy since my October 2016 Marathon in Portland, Oregon was a debacle.

Welcome to Force Friday, one of my favorite days of the year. I still fondly remember watching Star Wars with my dad when I was 11. As I walked out of the theater, I asked him if we could buy another ticket right then and watch it again. He denied me that night, but we went and saw it again a few days later. Sphero just released two new droids, R2-D2 and BB-9E, which now rounds out the family that includes BB-8 and the Force Band (so you can control the droids with the Force).