If you thought the reason I haven’t been doing a Daily Reading post lately was because I didn’t feel like adding more to the endless stream of political noise, global economic crisis, and the impending extinction of arctic wolves, you’d be wrong.  I simply forgot I was doing it.  Oops.  Here are a few good ones from today.

• Chess Move Simulator:  If you are a chess player, you must check this out.  Awesome.  Thanks Bruce.
• Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform: A guide for the perplexed: Mary Jo Foley tries to explain Azure. 
• If you notice a bunch of software engineers wandering around Boulder, that’s because the Boulder Colorado Job Fair is in full swing.  If you run into someone from out of Boulder, be nice and make sure you tell them it’s never actually cold in Boulder.
• Seth Godin speaks up on some of his failures in Failure as an event.  As is typical of Seth, he has concise, brilliant advice.  His biggest lesson of all – "Persist. Do the next one."
• Bill Flagg has a great contrarian post on Startup Valuations.  Actually, it’s not contrarian.  It’s just good old bootstrapping common sense.
• Ho Nam at Altos Ventures has the real contrarian post of the day (he even uses the word contrarian in it).  RIP Good Times? A Different Perspective.

Off to spend the day with a top secret group of VCs discussing what we think of the future.