I just invested 90 minutes in watching The last public lecture of Randy Pausch.  Randy is a CMU professor who has done pioneering work in Human Computer Interaction, was a co-creator of Alice, co-founded CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center and – after watching his last lecture – is one of those amazingly inspiring and centered humans who understands what is important in life.

Other than knowing about Alice and occasionally stumbling across Randy’s work and research as I study HCI, I haven’t given Randy much thought.  A friend send me a link to the lecture and said that it was a “must watch” lecture.  As I started to watch it, I learned the backstory (from Randy – who is 47) that he had terminal pancreatic cancer and had about three to six months left of good health.  That context made the lecture even more remarkable.

Ostensibly the lecture was about “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.”  However, Randy often referred to the notion of “head fakes” throughout the lecture.  At the end, he revealed the first of his two head fakes – which is that the lecture is really about “How To Lead Your Life.”  To hear the other head fake, you need to watch the lecture.

About 20 of the 90 minutes was consumed by the intro and conclusion from other folks, but even this was worth it – both in the set up of the lecture and the recognition of the amazing work that Randy has done and the impact he has had on so many people.

Fantastic stuff.

My long time friend and first business partner Dave Jilk sent me an email with the quote of the week in it – “The Plural of Anecdote is Not Data.”  Perfect – brilliant.  After responding that it would find the light of day in a future blog post, he responded that he tracked the attribution down to a guy named Frank Kotsonis (a pharmacologist), apparently in The Clinical Evaluation of a Food Additive: Assessment of Aspartame of which Kotsonis was an editor.

A little time poking around on Google uncovered a much more complex attribution issue summarized in the post The Matthew Effect.  I didn’t end up with a definitive attribution, but I increased my affection for this quote.

My friends Paul Kedrosky and Fred Wilson both showed up on WallStrip interviews this week.  Lindsey interviewed Paul and got to ask about why people punch him in the face and Fred talked with Howard about the “Fuck You Phone.” 

While Bijan didn’t make WallStrip this week, he did notice that 50 students at Boulder High walked out during the pledge of allegiance this week. It was that whole “one nation, under God” thing that doesn’t really work that well in a public school, especially in the people’s republic of Boulder.  Praise to the kids for being independent and critical thinkers.

To finish off our Saturday morning “ok – I just caught up on reading my blog posts from the week” I point you to the Union Square Sessions 3: Hacking Philanthropy.  I wasn’t there, but Fred and Brad got about 45 people together to discuss how web technology can be used to hack philanthropy.  I’m anxiously awaiting the transcript.

Oh – and the Red Sox won their pennant race.  Even John Kerry seemed focused on this when I met with him in Denver with a handful of other folks yesterday to discuss the carried interest tax debate.

Tom Evslin has an outstanding post up today titled Causes of Global Warming – Are We Fooled By Hubris?  Amy and I just finished watching Rome Season 2 and our conclusion is “the more things change the more they stay the same.”  Anyone feel like buying some indulgences?

Brilliant moves by Widgetbox and Dapper (I’m not an investor in either company.)  Both of them have released “development tools for building Facebook apps.”  Widgetbox’s App Accelerator helps you turn Widgetbox widgets into Facebook apps.  Dapper’s AppMaker helps you turn “Dapps” (Dapper Apps) into Facebook apps.  Look for a lot more tools like this, but these first movers are both smart and neat.

As usual, Joel Spolsky has an excellent explanation of the Excel 100000 bug. (Thanks Rick)

Network access control (or NAC as the security world calls it) has become a huge technology buzzword recently. Everyone in networking and security is screaming about NAC – with Cisco and Microsoft leading the charge.

NAC is used to test computers before they are allowed on a network to make sure they’re up-to-date on patches, anti-virus, and hotfixes.  StillSecure, one of my investments, has had a lot of success with NAC because they were an early entrant and with great technology (they’ve won practically every NAC review published over the past three years.)   

This week StillSecure did something no other security vendor has been willing to do – they released a free NAC product called Safe Access Lite. Alan Shimel – StillSecure’s Chief Strategy Officer and master blogger referred to it as “Laid Back NAC.”  NAC vendors don’t usually do real evals because of changes to the network they often require, or they don’t have enough faith in their product to put it out for anyone to use!

IT Infrastructure is an area in which we’ve had a lot of investing success.  StillSecure is a company we’ve had cooking for several years and this is the year that its growth has really accelerated.  I’m exceedingly proud of the StillSecure team, their perseverance, and their innovation – both in the product and they way they approach their market. 

Now you can get your NAC either in as a “laid back” version or a full commercial “tighten down the battleship” version.

As an MIT grad I periodically acknowledge that there was a thing referred to as a university down the river from me.  They have this statue of a dude named John Harvard in one of the yards.

John got a makeover today ala Halo 3.  Nice helmet John.

Software has bugs.  Lots of them.  I am a master bug finder (anyone that has had me bang on their stuff likely has at least one anecdote about this.) 

Today’s “special bug” is a bug in Microsoft Excel 2007.  If you enter =850*77.1 into a cell you will get the result 100000.  Hint – that is an incorrect answer.  I tried it in Google Docs and it resulted in 65535 (the correct answer.)  Hmmm – I wonder what 2^16 is?  Boundary condition anyone?

Today EchoStar announced that is has acquired Sling Media for $380 million in cash.  My partner and 2007 travel buddy Ryan McIntyre is smiling tonight as he crawls into bed and reflects on another great deal on the heals of his successful investment in Postini (acquired in July by Google for $625 million.)  I’d recommend that he snuggle up to a Slingbox, but I’ll restrain myself.

Ryan has written a nice essay on the story of his experience with Sling Media.  The Sling team – led by Blake Krikorian – has created a great company and a superb set of products.  I knew I was in love when I turned over my first Slingbox and noticed a little sticker with the phrase “Lebowski” on it.  Sling packed an incredible amount of innovative software (and a tiny bit of hardware) into a plastic box that was mostly filled with air.  The magic was in the software (dynamic video-stream-optimization technology called Lebowski) which reinforced our view that “it’s all about the software.”

Guys – awesome job.  EchoStar – you guys just made a really smart purchase.

I love a good rant and Dave McClure has a doozy up titled VC’s & Tech Lawyers: Innovate, Automate, Simplify.  Several years ago when Jason and I wrote our Term Sheet series, I often thought to myself (and often out loud) “why is this so complicated?” (ok – there were some adverbs used as modifiers in the sentence as in “why is this so X Y complicated?”)

In addition to a delicious rant, Dave has some good suggestions for all of us.  Anyone doing a seed or light Series A round (< $1m) should read Ted Wang of Fenwick & West’s article Reinventing the Series A for some additional ideas. 

While Amy and I were sitting in the San Francisco Airport reading the Sunday NY Times, we came across an article titled Looking for Inspiration in the Melting Ice.  It discusses a great new exhibit at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art titled Weather Report: Art & Climate Change.  BMoCA is one of our local gems – if you happen to be in Boulder, swing by the museum on 13th Street and check out the exhibit.  Have lunch at The Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse while you are at it.

I’ve been in a few parallel universes recently and am noticing it happening more and more.  I like parallel universes – it always smells like opportunity to me (plus I get to see how another “species” lives.)

The parallel universes aren’t just technology-based, but they often inform how I think about stuff.  For example, my recent time in Italy on vacation was a completely parallel universe to my current time in the US bouncing between Boulder and Silicon Valley.  And my day in Silicon Valley yesterday was another dimension of this (compared to the rest of the US.)

Even more specifically, I spent the day on Microsoft’s campus in Silicon Valley, which is a parallel universe to the rest of (a) Silicon Valley and (b) the contemporary software startup industry.

We can get even more granular.  I’ve spent the last 58 minutes (since I woke up) waiting for Outlook to finish synchronizing itself over EVDO (namely my deleted and sent items folders) since I forgot to do this on my high speed network at home.  Two weeks of not turning on my laptop (one week of being home and using desktops and one week of vacation) resulted in 100 godzillabytes of deleted data (which I don’t care about anyway since I don’t keep my deleted email) that now wants to sync itself over a small pipe.  Simultaneously I’ve been using OWA on the [very slow] web just so I can do email while Outlook is spending an hour fixing itself (feel free to substitute Gmail for OWA.)

Don’t even get me started about Facebook and my social graph which happily lives in Outlook.  I noticed that I have only logged into Facebook a couple of times since I got back from vacation – and that was mostly to check that nothing had happened except another 30 friend requests (ok – I played with J-Squared’s Glitter and looked at the Defrag Connector.)

I wonder if I’ll stumble into a wormhole tonight at dinner with Amy.

Those last two posts could have been subtitled “Vacation makes me verbose.”  I guess limiting myself to 140 characters is what my Twitter account is for.

Alex Iskold, the founder and creator of Adaptive Blue, has a long and helpful post up titled Semantic Web: Difficulties with the Classic Approach.  I have a small investment in Adaptive Blue (Union Square Ventures is the lead investor), love what Alex is up to, and relish anything that comes out of his brain.

One of my investment themes for the past 24 months has been in an area I’ve been calling “The Implicit Web.”  Adaptive Blue is in this theme, as are companies like Lijit, Me.dium, and TrustPlus.  Read Alex’s post for a classical definition of the problem (including his post The Road to the Semantic Web.)  Or feel free to wallow around Wikipedia’s description (including a couple of great examples and lots of acronyms and a nice picture of the W3C Semantic Web Layer Cake.)

I have a simple way of describing what I mean by Implicit Web.  The data on the web is a complete mess and getting worse every millisecond.  While I can go to Google and type something into a little box that helps me find stuff, I want “my compute infrastructure” to get smarter about what I care about, who I trust, what information I want more of (or less of), and to help me discover new relevant stuff – automagically.  These are computers after all – they should be able to figure this out for me – based on what I’ve done (and what people I trust have done.)

Easy concept.  Really hard problem.  Really really hard problem.  With many different dimensions.  And huge implications over a long period of time (since the underlying infrastructure – “the web” – will just continue to get more and more complex every – er – millisecond.)

Part of the way I think through stuff like this is I try to hang around, talk to, challenge, and learn from the smartest people I can find.  I also “do stuff” – include using different products and technologies to address my own special problems.  A year ago a guy named Eric Norlin suggested that we do a conference to tackle this – Eric’s been working on it since and in November we’ll have the Defrag Conference in Denver for two days.  I’m not a conference guy but I’ve learned a ton from watching Eric put this together (and he’s a master at it.)  He’s got his own point of view about what’s important and what’s not – his latest post The devil is in the details hits a lot of little things that impact the quality of the experience at a conference.  If you are interested in the semantic web, the implicit web, or just hanging out with a collection of really smart people, come play with us.  Oh – and if you are a Facebook guy – check out the new Facebook “Defrag Connector” to find out if any of your friends are going (hmm – finding out automagically in advance if any of my friends are going to a conference by clicking on a button – how novel!)

While I’m pimping things I’m involved in, Lijit just did a new release with excellent new stats and lots of little bubbles everywhere.  If you are a blogger and still haven’t installed Lijit as your search engine, do your readers a favor and try it.  If you are a data junkie like me, you’ll love it.  If you are not a data junkie, still install it since your readers will love it.

Finally, in an attempt to “make the Internet the Safest Place on Earth”, my long time friend (and Feld Technologies employee #3) Shawn Broderick has launched TrustPlus.  I doubt anyone will remember the TLA that I was using to refer to the Implicit Web before I figured out that “Implicit Web” was a good phrase – but TrustPlus is the “T” in TAR.  Take a look at TrustPlus and help Shawn help you.