I just bought myself a brand new MacBook Air, with a 128GB flash drive and the faster graphics. It runs much faster than the first-gen one I have and also runs much cooler, so in general I’m a happy guy.

But twice now, I’ve hooked up the ethernet dongle and plugged it into a network cable/port that I know works, and the adapter does not recognize that the cable is plugged in, and nothing I do (restart, unplug/replug) seems to help.

Has this happened to anyone else? I’ve tried it with two different dongles too, and the problem happened with both of them. Can anyone out there help?

After spending a moment looking back at the past in my previous post, now it is time to look into the future. Foundry Group invested in a company called Oblong about a year ago, but when we made our investment, we couldn’t say much at the time (though Brad did hint about their Minority Report UI heritage) because Oblong wasn’t quite ready to tell the world exactly what they were doing. Oblong was Foundry’s first investment in our HCI theme. Well, today they have officially de-cloaked and have launched their website. Go check out Oblong.com and get a feel for the mouse-free computing environment of the future: the g-speak spatial operating environment.

I really like the sound of that. Forty-eight hours after the (decisive) election results were called (and North Carolina just put Obama at 364 electoral votes), I am still basking in relief and rekindled pride in my country.

Starting with Al Gore’s popular vote victory in 2000 in an election plagued by voting irregularities, when his presidential bid was upset by a partisan Supreme Court selection (not election) of George W. Bush, I became disillusioned by the social and political climate in my country. My pride in my country diminished further when Bush and his neocon cronies led us into an ill-advised quagmire in Iraq that squandered a trillion dollars, thousands of lives and seriously harmed our international reputation. And when George W. Bush decisively won re-election in 2004, I was forced to revisit every assumption I had about the understanding of reality I had relative to my fellow citizens. How could The Worst President Ever ™ have been re-elected?

Happily, with this historic election, we have elected a leader who has redrawn the electoral map and inspired millions with hope, something that has been in very short supply in this country over the last eight years. As I drove to the airport on Wednesday morning listening to the recap of the election results, my eyes welled with tears of relief and pride that my country made the historic choice to elect Barack Hussein Obama as our next president.

Obama ran a masterful, positive and inclusive campaign that demonstrated his intellect, his ability as an executive and his ability to inspire a broad spectrum of voters in this country as well as citizens across the world. John McCain, a great American that I previously held in high esteem, succumbed to dirty politics in a campaign filled with innuendo and outright lies, and made a cynical and irresponsible choice of running mate in Sarah Palin, a shockingly unqualified candidate who cannot speak coherently in unscripted situations, denies the existence of climate change and possibly evolution, and thinks Africa is country rather than a continent. As happy as I am about the outcome of this election, the fact that Sarah Palin will likely remain a figure on the national stage serves a stark and depressing reminder to me that there remains an insidious cultural undercurrent of anti-intellectualism and theocratic yearning in our county.

In watching McCain’s concession speech and Obama’s acceptance speech, one thing really struck me — the crowd in Arizona was filled with a bunch of angry old white people, while the Chicago crowd was a colorful sea of faces that actually represents the population of this country. While I happen to be a White Guy closing in on 40, I identify far more strongly with an inspiring and eloquent high-achieving well-educated guy of mixed ancestry as a representative of the best ideals of our nation.

Obama has inherited a country in disarray – a shattered economy, two ongoing wars and a dwindling supply of global goodwill towards our country. It may be that no leader is up to the massive challenges that face our country, but I am optimistic about Obama’s chances. The immensely important symbolic choice our country made in choosing Obama to lead us at this time of crisis has made me feel more confident about our country’s future than I’ve felt in a very long time. We finally have a leader I can believe in.

(Several of my friends and colleagues have written some excellent posts about their thoughts on this election, which are worth a read: check out posts by Ian Rogers, Seth Levine, Brad Feld and Fred Wilson).

Two weeks ago, I attended the second Lobby Conference, and, as expected, it was one of the best of year for me, so kudos to David Hornik for iterating and improving – an already great conference became even better. Same as last year, one of the best ideas from the conference is that all attendees are encouraged to make videos introducing themselves to their fellow conference-goers, a great way for everyone to learn a bit about one-another before the conference begins. And to help increase participation, everyone who submits a video in advance receives an iPod filled with the intro videos that they can watch on the plane on the way over to Hawaii. No video, no iPod. You can see my video from last year here, or check out my submission for this year below:

Everything that happened at the conference is off the record, so I won’t comment further on any of the content or conversations that occured, but I figured my own introductory video was fair game, and therefore suitable to be re-published on my blog.

Of late my blog appears to have been less about technology and VC and more about politics. Oh well, ’tis the season, and this is my soapbox. I’m voting for Obama, and being in a battleground state, I’m sincerely hoping I’ll be able to convince some McCain supporters to change their vote, or, if they can’t bring themselves to vote for a Democrat, abstain from voting. There are many ways in which I disagree with McCain’s platform, but perhaps the most troubling to me of all is his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. I just read the New Yorker’s excellent endorsement of Obama, and I couldn’t agree more. One of the points that really stood out was their trenchant observation about McCain’s VP choice:

Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been governor of that state for twenty-one months, as the Republican nominee for Vice-President. In the interviews she has given since her nomination, she has had difficulty uttering coherent unscripted responses about the most basic issues of the day. We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram for her ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina Fey routine on “Saturday Night Live,” but as a vision of the political future it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility.

Remember folks, this guy is 72 years old with a history of cancer, and there are fairly strong odds (some actuarial tables put them as high as 30%) that McCain could die in the next four years. As damaging as I believe a McCain administration would be for my country, the prospect of a Palin presidency is truly disturbing to me, given how profoundly unqualified she is. She represents everything that is rotten in the Republican party, which is now dangerously close to promoting ignorance and disdain for facts and reason as virtue. This was McCain’s first presidential-scale decision and he blew it. His irresponsible and cyncial choice of her as his running mate should make anyone question his motives and decision-making abilities, and should lay out in black and white the disastrous consequences of the Republican party’s unholy alliance with the Christian right.

McCain’s generation and party have had their run, and look where we are now. I’ve had enough of the old white guys – it is time for someone with the intellect and even-handed disposition necessary to take on the presidency in a time of remarkable upheaval. The old tactics are simply not going to work any more. Vote Obama.

So it turns out that Colorado provides $300m in annual tax subsidies to the oil and gas industry. And it turns out that Colorado is the only state in the country that provides these subsidies. This subsidy was put in place in 1982 to help jumpstart oil and gas development in the state – when gas cost less than $1 per gallon. Today, the industry is very healthy and is enjoying record-high petroleum prices and, hence, revenues and profits. This is clearly an industry no longer in need to state support. Additionally, these kinds of subsidies distort the “free” market and provide dirty, cabon-heavy petroleum-based energy sources with a structural market advantage over the deployment of clean energy technologies that we so desperately need to encourage. It is hard enough for new technologies to establish themselves in the marketplace when the playing field is far from even.

Governor Bill Ritter and A Smarter Colorado are supporting Amendment 58, which will end these out-dated and unnecessary subsidies and use the savings to fund scholarships, wildlife habitat preservation, environmental cleanup for areas damaged by gas and oil development and fund renewal energy development.

Not surprisingly, the opposition is well-funded to the tune of about $10m, with most of the funding coming from oil and gas companies. Call me naive, but I’ve been pretty disgusted with the ads the opposition is running — they are full of bald-faced lies, and claim that Amendment 58 is a tax-increase., which is just completely untrue. All it is doing is removing an outdated tax-break that was handed out to energy companies nearly three decades ago, something that IMHO has no place in the state’s constitution. Given the blatant falsehoods the opposition is willing to spread and the fact that the election is coming up in less than a month, I decided to donate money to the cause and to blog about it as well. Tell a friend, and don’t be fooled by the opposition’s ads.

If you’re interested in learning more about why you should vote yes on Amendment 58, check out the FAQ here.

Are you a techie and interested in relocating to Boulder, CO? I made the move from the Valley just over two years ago and am really enjoying the small-town life (I walk to work, my son plays with kids who live on the same block, etc) coupled with the beautiful surroundings and the high-tech entrepreneurial ecosystem that was much deeper and richer than I expected (and is continuing to grow).

All this startup activity has led to an all-too-common shortage: not enough software talent to fill all the open positions. To address this, about a dozen local Boulder companies have banded together to create a weeklong job-fair (October 27-31) to import some engineering talent into the area. This is an application-only affair, but if selected, you will enjoy a no-strings-attached all-expenses-paid trip out to Boulder to interview with numerous startups and get a chance to experience Boulder.

If you’re interested, check out the post on the Foundry Group website for more background, or go right to the site the companies have put up to promote the event.