One of my all-time favorite cookies is the Dominostein – a cubic inch morsel of goodness – a layer of Lebkuchen, jelly and marzipan, all enrobed in dark chocolate. My German grandmother to this day gives the whole family big boxes full of German treats every Christmas season, and the box always includes Dominosteine. Usually these cookies are a once-a-year thing for me, but my brother just took a trip to Europe that included a few days in Germany and Austria, homeland of these wondrous treats. And because he is such an excellent brother, he brought me back two boxes of Dominosteine, a supply which only lasted me a couple days. Thankfully, the holiday season is right around the corner…

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.

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.