Drinking tea is one of life’s simple, but amazingly rewarding pleasures. My wife and I have been using the Chantal Tea Ball for almost six months now, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s the best tea kettle I’ve ever had. Not only does it look stylish, it’s easy to use, has stood up to daily use, and its harmonic whistle has a very pleasant tone.
I decided to flip the switch on the beta release for version two of existence.com late last night! Many thanks to May-Li Khoe for the new visual design.
As I brought v2b up I reminisced about my first blog entry, The Power of V2, posted almost exactly six months ago.
To implement the design, I had to learn CSS. Turns out that there are a lot of browser hacks necessary in order to implement cross-platform support. Needless to say, as a beta, there are plenty of bugs. If you see any, please send them my way via email to feedback (@) existence.com. Thanks and enjoy!
I’ve never been a big TV watcher, but last summer, I found myself watching an hour or so a day. One night, my wife and I sat down at 7pm and awoke from the television set at 11pm, feeling dirty and grimy after four hours of Law & Order. At that moment, we realized it was time to eliminate our cable television. We did it the next week, and we have never looked back.
The decision changed our lives. We spent more time with each other and on things that we cared about. Our brains did not shut down in the evening. We returned to the life we knew before we watched television. It took two weeks for the addiction to fade completely, and once completely gone, our minds were free.
I know all of the arguments for keeping cable around, and none of them are very good.
Got that favorite show, get Netflix. When we want to watch a movie or a show, we place it on our Netflix queue. No more unplanned or unguided TV watching. You’ll see your favorite shows in order, with no commercials, at your leisure, with no temptation to keep watching other shows you don’t care about.
Think TV keeps you sane, winds you down, etc.? Think again. There are many other ways to accomplish the same effect that are much healthier. Go for a walk, take a shower, meditate. Find that thing that decompresses you but keeps you functional. You need to function to start a business.
An aspiring entrepreneur working and starting a new business must free up as much time as possible to devote to their new endeavor. Eliminating cable television is an easy way to reclaim an hour a day, or 365 hours(15 days!) a year, with one simple phone call. Do it now and increase your chances of success in life. Don’t believe me, check out the stats.
I am slowly reading through the Carnival of Capitalists over at Weekend Pundit. Some great pointers to interesting articles, check it out.
I particularly like this article by Evelyn Rodriguez recounting a powerful sales and customer service experience she had at Pike’s Place in Seattle, Washington. Read to learn about the art of creating an Experience of Yes.
What is leverage?
Ah, leverage. The not-so-secret sauce that enables real estate to have such wonderful returns. I’ve mentioned before that the equities equivalent of putting a mortgage on a property is trading stocks on margin. In both cases, you are getting a loan and backing it with assets. Should those assets go down in value too much, then the entity loaning you the money will call the funds or in other words, force you to pay them back, potentially liquidating the assets backing the loan at a bad time. Sounds scary, doesn’t it?
Well, it is and it isn’t. Unlike stocks, which can drop significantly in value over short periods of time, real estate tends to change value in years or in extreme markets like we live in today, in months. Another difference is that, in most cases, it’s much easier to sell a stock than sell a house.
These two differences as well as a few others lead to leverage in the real estate world being a commonly used tool.
In general, an agent is someone who acts on your behalf, someone who is supposed to represent your interests. Because of this, in transactions where real estate agents are involved, it is crucial to understand for whom these agents work.
I’ve always said that entrepreneurs are people who have a knack at selecting and organizing patterns from an infinite set of chaotic possibilities. The greater the created patterns, the greater the skill of the entrepreneur. Related to this theory is some interesting research from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program. The lab’s research indirectly supports the possibility that human intent has a “small, but statistically significant” effect on reality.
I found PEAR after watching the movie What the Bleep do We Know!?. I think that they are performing interesting science, although it’s admittedly difficult to tell based on their website. I was happy to see a Wired magazine article discussing their research and hope that such press coverage will provide more funding both to PEAR and other research groups around the country to help them better understand humanity’s intuitive understanding that has lead to the phrase Mind Over Matter.
A financed real estate transaction has a good number of moving pieces and steps that need to happen in order to for things to work. Here’s a rough overview of the buying process.
Joel Spolsky has a great article explaining that if a company is attempting to build high quality software they have to hire the best programmers and designers.
I’ve always understood that the best programmers or designers are at least one order of magnitude better than good programmers or designers, but Joel’s explanation is better than any other I’ve heard yet. I particularly like his analogy that five average composers will never compose a work of equal quality to a musical genius like Mozart.
This artistic explanation is an easily understood comparison, so why don’t people seem to understand this phenomenon when it comes to software development? Perhaps it is because people who do not create software cannot easily appreciate the complexity or effort necessary to build a software system, let alone a great one. Whereas almost everyone can listen to a piece of music and grasp its complexity.
Not all companies are looking to build the best software, but if yours is, read his article.
I recently started using statcounter.com, an easy to use website visitor tracking system. All tracking is done on a remote server through a small bit of javascript installed on one’s web pages.
It was so easy, it took less than 15 minutes to setup and start watching statistics about my website. Best part is that they have an option that is free, the perfect cost for a bootstrapping entrepreneur.
