My friends at Slice of Lime just put up a website for the new Blink Gallery on 1011 Pearl Street in Boulder.  Clean, simple, and contemporary, just like the gallery.  We sure do miss Colorado art when we are up in Alaska.

Amy said a really nice thing to me the other day.  We were talking and she said “One of the things I really admire about you is that your work is play to you.” 

I’ve always loved what I do.  Yeah – I’ve had my share of really crappy days (and months, and even a crappy year or two – say around 2001) – but even when things are really rough, I treat the “work” part of it as indistinguishable from “play.”  As I’ve figured out more things about how I relate to the elusive notion of work life balance I’ve determined that “always being on” is not a requirement for effective work (nor is it sustainable.)  Once I’d finally decoupled the idea of work and play, it became easy to put them back together again since so much of what I work on is just a blast.

I was on a call earlier today and the person I was talking to said “sorry for interrupting your vacation in Alaska.”  I kindly responded that even though I was up in Alaska, this wasn’t vacation, this was life, and I just happened to be up here right now.  I’ve been in front of my computer or on the phone since early this morning (except for an hour when Amy and I wandered over to Cosmic Kitchen for lunch).  I’m jamming out to Cowboy Junkies, my favorite person in the world is at her computer five feet away, and it’s been a really fun day.  Even the garbage I had to deal with today was “fun” if you squint and look at it the right way.

I talk and email with a lot of “random” people.  I’ve blogged about my random meeting policy in the past – whenever I reflect on it I realize that it has served me well.  I never have any specific expectations for these meetings and almost always enjoy the people that I meet.  I have the same approach with email – I try to respond to everything I get (that’s not spam), even if it’s a short “sorry – I can’t be helpful” or “this isn’t interesting to me – good luck with things” type of message.  I’m sure I occasionally miss someone / something, but I try. 

I often get email thank you notes for helping folks out.  Since I started blogging, I get more of these that are random and unsolicited.  Often they turn into an email relationship; occasionally even a friendship or a working relationship.

One of these random meetings – which started out via email – was with John Minnihan, the creator of Freepository.  I poked around on the site, was interested in what he was up to, and offered to get together with him on a random day.  We had a good first meeting, I gave him some feedback, introduced him to a few other people in Boulder that I thought there was potential for him / Freepository to collaborate with, and we stayed in touch.  We’ve continued to email back and forth and had another call last week that resulted in some specific potential activity that could be helpful to his business.

A few days later I got a note from him that thanked me and told me he’d arranged for a gift certificate for me at the Homestead Restaurant.  This was completely unexpected and – in addition – required a little effort on John’s part since the Homestead is one of the nice restaurants up here in Homer.  To figure that out, he had to do a little bit of research on the web, pick up the phone, talk to the folks at the Homestead, and arrange for the gift certificate.

We took our neighbors The Schallock’s out to a delightful dinner at the Homestead on Friday.  Lo and behold there was the gift certificate waiting for us from John.  After the meal, when I settled the bill, we all thanked John for contributing to underwriting the dinner.  Now that’s class – not just the gift, but the effort to figure out an interesting and memorable one.  Thanks John.

Paul Kedrosky – the author of the excellent, informative, and often entertaining Infectious Greed blog – sent me a link to a fantastic post by Art De Vany on Elite Athletic Training and Disease.  It’s primarily a very thoughtful and insightful article by Mark Sisson on elite athletes, health, and overtraining.  It’s great stuff for anyone that is an endurance athlete.

I’m looking for ideas about different sources – online, books, and software – for helping a teenager learn how to program.  I’m looking for both introductory / early programming stuff as well as general computer science stuff.  The more interactive, the better.  If you have any ideas, please post your comments. 

EndurancePlanet put up an interview with me about running marathons.  If you are a runner, or just want to hear me talk about something different than entrepreneurship and venture capital, enjoy the roughly one mile (10:46) of interview.

Another GooglePark episode is up and it’s hilarious (as usual.)  And – as a special bonus – I discovered EllisonPark which I have no idea how I missed before.

If you haven’t tried Technorati in a while, go take another look.  At their birthday party, they rolled out a new major upgrade to the service.  Dave Sifry – the CEO / founder describes it in detail.  My quick scan around the blogosphere pundits showed consistently strong positive feedback.  I often get asked how I manage to keep up with as much information as I do – especially about the companies I’m involved with.  Part of my secret weapon is Technorati, NewsGator Online search feeds, and FeedDemon.  Plus – they all work really nicely together.

Happy birthday guys.

We hit a rainy stretch the past few days – good for reading; not so good for getting a sun tan.  In addition to The Big Six, I managed to finish four other books this week.  All of them were good, but for different reasons.

Hayduke Lives! was the funnest (and the only one that was fiction.)  I read The Monkey Wrench Gang a few weeks ago – it was my first introduction to Edward Abbey (thanks Dave.)  I loved it, so Amazoned Hayduke Lives! which was published posthumously, but was a continuation of the characters and stories in The Monkey Wrench Gang.  I had a difficult time getting into Hayduke Lives! (I imagine if Abbey had been alive he would have worked it over a few more times), but I was deeply hooked after 100 pages.  Abbey’s characters are insane, beautiful, hilarious, and brave – in an insane, beautiful, and hilarious way.

The Long Tail has been widely reviewed, praised, and discussed.  It earns its praise – Chris Anderson has written an excellent book that nicely balances analyzing what has happened in “the new economics of culture and commerce” (his words) while being instructive and predictive about how things will play out in the future.  It’s credible, well written, full of relevant examples, and thought provoking.  If it’s not on your bookshelf, it should be.

I’m not a huge fan of books on “how to sell”, but I liked The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer.  It’s part of Gitomer’s arsenal of sales stuff – extensively promoted on his website at Gitomer.com – and was surprisingly good.  A blog reader recommended it (thanks – leave me a comment so I know who you were) and it was worth the time.  If you are in sales, or a CEO of a startup, it’s worth a read, if for no other reason than to charge you up, clean off some mental cobwebs, and give you some fresh ideas and a kick in the ass.

Blueprint to a Billion was a mixed bag, but fundamentally good.  It’s being positioned as a Jim Collins like treatise on how to create great companies (which the author – David Thomson – calls “Blueprint Companies.”)  Thompson analyzed the 387 companies that have gone public since 1980 and have achieved $1 billion dollars in revenue looking for common characteristics that drive their success.  While there is plenty of data and solid analysis surrounding it, unlike Collins, Thomson ends up getting lost in the data in places and lets the numbers dominate his thought process, rather than stepping back and articulating profound and powerful conclusions.  Jim Collins is unmatched at this type of analysis, and – although Thomson falls short – Blueprint to a Billion was still very good.  Thomson’s web site has a blog, although there are only a few posts and then end on 4/30/06 – I guess Thomson is too busy running around doing consulting and giving his book tour to keep the blogging up.

Next week will have a lot more fiction in it – I promise (myself.)

I read less this week than I read last week (mostly because it was a busy week) but I still managed to get through five books.  Looking back on the week, four of them were business books, which is unusual for me – I think I was stalling reading the last Dennis Lehane book for as long as I could (it’s up next.)

The best book of the week – by far – was The Big Six.  I’m generally grumpy (that’s a nice euphemism) with the accounting industry these days, especially the Big Four.  The combination of the accounting scandals of 2001 – 2003, which led to extensive new government regulations such as SOX, had the unintended consequence of making the Big Four more arrogant, lazy, ineffective, and non-responsive to entrepreneurial companies.  In the late 1990’s, these firms would do practically anything to get audit work with early stage companies, promising that they would “grow with them.”  Today, not only do they have no interest in working with young companies (“we don’t have enough time – we are too busy working with our large public company clients, helping them deal with SOX and other regulations”), they behave incredibly inappropriately with regard to any sort of client transition activity (I have a long list of stories here – ranging from requests for $185,000 to transfer work papers to a new auditor (a 10 hour process) to cover “cumulative discounts over the past four years” to holding up merger accounting for a public company for 12 months “because we don’t have time”, resulting in the public company having no way to get the SEC to approach an S-3 registration statement.)  I could rant for a while about this – I suppose that should be the topic for another blog post (or seven).

The Big Six – subtitled The Selling Out of America’s Top Accounting Firms – was written in in 1991 by Mark Stevens and is a brilliant description of the Big Eight landscape at that time, the people (and personalities) that led these firms, the scandals that rocked them, and the market pressure that generated the first wave of accounting firm consolidation that resulting in The Big Six.  Included is a short narrative of each firm, which provided context for their history and culture that I had never read before.  In addition, the book has several stories of major accounting scandles in the late 1980’s, including the fraud of ZZZZ Best (and how they hoodwinked Ernst & Whinney – mostly displaying the incredible incompetence of the people involved at Ernst & Whinney) and the S&L crisis – most notably the story of the demise of the Beverly Hills Savings & Loan and the revolving door of audit firms involved in this.   

This book made me more – rather than less – grumpy (see euphemism above).  Fifteen years later, I think things are much worse.  The accounting industry had a major breakdown – again – in the beginning of this century with the apex possibly being the complete demise of Arthur Anderson during the Enron scandal, the one firm in the Big Eight that went out of business rather than merging with someone else.  Ironically, all of this simply resulted in extensive government regulation, which made the audit firms who participated in the debacle in the first place more powerful.  While some unintended consequences are at work here, it’s doesn’t take much of a cynical mind to question the validity of the entire system.

You’ll hear more about the other four books in my next post.