I’ve played guitar for about 25 years now, and have been relatively restrained about adding new axes to my arsenal, until the last year or so, when three great new guitars found their way into my collection.

Last year after we finished fund-raising, my partners gave me a Fender VG Stratocaster. And after NAMM this past January, I became the very proud owner of a Taylor Builder’s Reserve electric guitar.

And when I went to pick up the Taylor at one of the finest guitar shops I know, Wildwood Guitars in Lousiville, CO, the Gibson SG Diablo, a limited edition SG from their custom shop caught my eye. How was I to resist such an aptly named and somewhat evil-looking guitar?

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the 3G iPhone for some time, and was mostly pleased with the new features, but the July 11th release date was a bit of a drag, as I’m no good with the whole delayed-gratification thing. Besides the higher data speeds and third party apps, the feature I’m most excited about is Exchange integration, given our shop at Foundry Group uses Exchange for our calendar, contacts and messaging. Oh, geotagging of photos is pretty damn cool as well.

But since I cannot truly be satisfied by what’s currently available and am always looking around the corner, I might as well complain a bit. The iPhone needs a better camera — with Samsung and others shipping 5 megapixel camera phones, the fact that Apple didn’t bump up the pixel count beyond two paltry megapixels on the 3G iPhone was disappointing. As is the ongoing lack of ability to record video, though I’m hopeful this can be addressed in a future software upgrade and won’t require another hardware rev. The late-breaking rumors of a front-facing camera for video conferencing were also intriguing, so that was another unfulfilled item on my wishlist. And, finally, I’d be more than happy to pay a premium for more storage, and I was really hoping for a 32GB capacity model. Looks like I’ll have to wait until 2009 to get those wishes fulfilled.

Despite my bitching, I’ll be in line on July 11th to get the new iPhone – it will still be (by far) the coolest phone out there.

From Slashdot: a dude named Thomas Rocicki has just proven that 23 moves is sufficient to solve an arbitrary Rubik’s cube configuration, not including the impossible configurations created by dismantling and re-assembling the cube, the only method by which I was able to reliably solve it.

Rocicki had previously established it could be done in no more than 25 moves, but access to more compute power allowed him to shave two moves from the his cube-solver algorithm. Pretty cool. I’m sure if the Franklin Ace 1000 (props to you, Howard!) I used in my youth had the power of the renderfarm at Sony Pictures Imageworks, I would have been able to prove this using my highly sophisticated BASIC skills. Yeah, right.

Now this guy’s algorithm just needs to be connected to the Lego Mindstorms Rubik’s cube-solving robot I heard about years ago, which is also an incredible piece of engineering. Watch the video below to see it in action…

I’ve recently joined the board of a Seattle-based startup called Smith & Tinker. The picture here is one I took of the cool little figurine that co-founder and CEO Jordan Weisman gave me after our investment in S&T closed.

I cannot confirm or deny what (if anything) it has to do with what the company is working on — they are keeping a low-profile until they are closer to product launch, so I can’t say much about what they are up to, but check out my post on the Foundry Group blog for a teaser…