Last year was the inaugural year of the Defrag Conference, held last November in Denver, Colorado. It is back again, and promises to be bigger and better this year, and will be held on November 3rd and 4th at the Hyatt Regency in Denver.

My partner Brad Feld helped Defrag co-founders Eric Norlin and Phil Becker get the conference off the ground last year when Eric contacted Brad after reading his post on Intelligence Amplification, a concept we’d been kicking around at Foundry Group that ultimately led to the investment themes we call Implicit Web and Glue, two areas where we are actively looking for new investment opportunities.

Defrag is all about meeting and brainstorming with people who are working on aspects of the hairy next-generation of software problems that emerge from trying to separate signal from noise in a world of information overload and loosely-coupled and promiscuous applications and data. To learn more, follow the Defrag blog and check out the picture gallery from Defrag 2007. I encourage everyone who reads this blog to attend Defag — if you’re not a local, sneak out to Colorado, where the air is a bit cleaner and the visibility a bit better, both literally and metaphorically.

I just downloaded Friedman’s new book onto my Kindle, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America” (Thomas L. Friedman). He also recently appeared on Charlie Rose. Well worth an hour of your time to listen to Friedman’s spot-on call views on the need for American leadership in the ET (energy technology) revolution.

I don’t often post about matters political, but my partner Jason just put up an item on his blog I thought worth mentioning. Voters in Colorado will have to vote on Amendment 55, Just Cause for Employee Discharge or Suspension, which proposes to amend the state’s constitution that will effectively end “at will” employment arrangements between employers and employees.

Having been involved in the creation of companies (either as an entrepreneur, advisor, angel investor or VC) for the whole of my professional life, I cringe when I see proposals like this. Startup companies and other small businesses are very fragile things, and putting laws in place that restrict (by making more costly) their ability to hire and fire employees as necessary could seriously harm the startup ecosystem. Many (if not most) startups inevitably face challenging times at some point in their lifecycle, and sometimes, as painful as they are, significant cuts in headcount are the only way for a company to survive and have a shot at eventually going on to greatness. And the greater good scenario is clearly a company that goes through difficult times and winds up bigger than before (i.e. more jobs) than a company perhaps forced to close up shop (i.e. zero jobs) or is never able to invest enough in the business to grow it substantially (i.e. fewer jobs) as a result of onerous costs associated with laws like the proposed Amendment 55.

Even removing the scenario of a large-scale restructuring, in a small company a bad hire can become toxic to that company’s morale and productivity, and as Jason points out, it is in practice extremely difficult to prove/document “cause” when firing someone, and a law like this only encourages a bad egg to try to collect as much money as possible from the company on their way out the door. Ultimately, the biggest winners in these scenarios tend to be the lawyers on both sides of an employment dispute.

If you are a Colorado voter, vote no on Amendment 55.

So I couldn’t resist a little mashup of today’s headlines. Putting aside the ridiculous Wag the Dog and hide-the-ball media strategy of the McCain camp, what the nerd in me is most excited about today is that the Large Hadron Collider is now operational. With this, the search for the elusive Higgs boson gets underway, and the folks at CERN take away Fermilab’s bragging rights for having the fastest and most smashingest particle accelerator around.

While datacenters filled with thousands of servers may be cool, the LHC is a true example of Big Iron. This $8B device with a 17 mile circumference is so exquisitely sensitive, that the electronics that control the path of the accelerated particles around the ring have to account for tidal forces exerted by the moon since one side of the giant ring could be a fraction of an inch higher than the other, depending upon the position of the moon.

Finally, I have to give Google a tip-of-the-hat for their logo today, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the concerns that some folks have had that the activation of the LHC could lead to the creation of a black hole that might destroy the Earth. Well, whatever else goes on, I hope they find that boson.

Back in May, I spent a long weekend in Belgium with my friends Jason and Martin. The mission: drink beer, eat fine food and acquire fine chocolate. I am pleased to report that the mission was a success, and I posted photographic evidence of all the beers were able to sample as we skipped from Antwerp to Brugge to Brussels. At some point I plan to post a more detailed recap of the trip, but I felt compelled to write a quick post because I just finished savoring three of the finest dark-chocolate bars I’ve had in a long time. All three were single-origin bars from Pierre Marcolini, and each was delicious and possessed its own distinctive flavor. I really enjoy the fact that single-origin bars have brought the discussion of terroir to the world of chocolate. I also had some truly excellent chocolate at Neuhaus and Wittamer, but Pierre Marcolini’s pure dark chocolate gets my nod on the basis of just plain unadulterated chocolate. Wittamer probably wins the day if you are interested in truffles and being distracted by other ingredients in your chocolate, which I certainly enjoy as well, but I lean more often towards the purism of a simple bar of dark chocolate.

My friend Carl pointed out a cool site to me called wordle. It makes very pretty word/tag clouds. The one here is a rendering of my del.icio.us tags. Captures my interests pretty well, I’d say. Another fun word geek site with a name with only one character’s difference is called wordie, and it is sort of like flickr or del.icio.us for word nerds. The list of my favorite words can be found here.

Carl’s always got fun stuff going on — go check out his APAD photoblog, which he just completed. Carl wanted to improve his photography chops, so he decided to take an “audience worthy” picture every day and post the results on flickr. Go check out all 366 photos (it was a leap year), they are great.