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"A lot of people obsessed with venture capital see Metafilter as a lifestyle business, but in my mind, it’s a mature business. It works really well and yet nobody aspires to do something like this and I don’t know why. Nobody celebrates just simple businesses that work."
I do, Matt! It's precisely what inspired our work on Domainr, which has essentially been profitable since the month we launched it.
The work Matt and PB have done with Metafilter and Fuelly, what Craig & co have done with Craigslist, Jason & co at 37signals, Buzz with PodWorks back in the day, Marco with Instapaper, the list goes on... is for me some of the most inspiring on the web. It's often DIY/homebrew/bootstrapped, always insanely useful, and ideally profitable.
No Cash? No Problem with New Square Device | Credit Card Assist Blog
Ouch. Not seeing this mentioned anywhere else on the web though. "Worley is a family friend of Square’s co-founder Jim McKelvey, and reportedly shared some of his ideas for such a device. Morley’s came up with the design for the technology that converts the card’s magnetic strip into an audio device. He was reportedly in talks with Square to collaborate on the product, but the talks fell through."
"...individuals, regardless of whether they act alone or as part of a community, are compelled to find ways to reduce the magnitude of any cognitive dissonance they experience."
"A remarkable 55 percent of deaths for people age 15 to 64 can be attributed to decisions with readily available alternatives. In other words, most people are the agents of their own demise. That's a vast difference from a century ago, when, Keeney estimates, a scant 5 percent of deaths were brought on by personal decisions (infectious diseases account for most of the rest)."
I did my first 10-day Vipassana meditation course back in 5/2001, and have done a number of courses since. Friends and family inevitably ask me about them each time they see me heading off to spend another ten days on the cushion, and over the years I've compiled a list of links I email people when they inquire. Rather than keep sending that email, I can now send 'em a URL:
I highly recommend doing courses while traveling, and have been fortunate enough to visit centers in Burma, Thailand, Mexico, New Zealand and Australia (among others). Doing courses abroad is a great way to meet awesome people, eat fantastic local food, and see how they do things at other centers. The course timetables and instructions are the same, but the scenery's different and always interesting.
Here's some related reading, not Vipassana-specific but great for context:
What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula, one of the simplest, easiest to read distillations of what the whole thing is about
Old Path White Clouds by Thich Nhat Hanh, a chronological compilation of stories from the Tipitaka, told in narrative form and utterly delightful to read. I finished it in a single sitting during a 30-hour bus ride from Yangon to Mandalay. ;)
And lastly, some random photos from my Vipassana travels:
"Music is a social process driven by passion, not market logic or copyright."
...
"The mp3 may have atomized music into millions of little pieces, but each piece, it seems, found a publicist. The average music fan now has the built-in capacity to double as promoter and distributor in an ever-expanding arena that's making and eliminating rules every minute."
...
"In the same way that technology is a social force created by humans, with the power to expand or restrict what we're able to do, so goes the law."
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"What DRM taught us during its short life, is that for the law to work, people have to believe in it. This doesn't necessitate Pirate Bay-level countercultural deviance, but the simple idea that the rules laid down are based in common sense, not the frigid logic of corporate balance sheets."
"The club only lasted a couple of years, but during that time its resident DJ invented a new form of dance music. He was Francis Grasso. Writer Albert Goldman claimed that, 'Grasso invented the technique used by every DJ ever since of holding the record he was about to play at the precise point he wanted it to start playing, while a felt mat underneath it revolved on the turntable. Then letting it go, to make a seamless connecting point between two pieces of music.'"
"Grasso's other specialty was to play two tracks at the same time mixing the raunchy heavy drums of British rock music with the soaring voices of American soul. Led Zeppelin's thumping solid drum breaks would throb like an amphetamined heartbeat under the delicate vocals of Gladys Knight or Aretha Franklin. According to Albert Goldman, Francis Grasso didn't just play records, 'he reinvented them out of their composite parts,' the top end vocals and the bottom end rhythm. His method of mixing the different parts of different records to make altogether new music was 15 years ahead of its time."
"During the eight-week study period, students in the dorms with ready access to hand sanitizers had a third fewer complaints of coughs, chest congestion and fever. Over all, the risk of getting sick was 20 percent lower in the dorms where hand hygiene was emphasized, and those students missed 43 percent fewer days of school."
Jon Orwant: "We've learned the hard way that when you're dealing with a trillion metadata fields, one-in-a-million errors happen a million times over."
"Unfortunately many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity—are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices."
The Twitter "hack" has had me thinking about authentication lately, as have conversations with Buzz and Kellan. I'm curious about user-friendly multi-factor auth, and want to try it out with Google Apps to see how it fares as a standard consumer experience. I couldn't find any hardware-based OTP solutions in the Enterprise Solutions Marketplace, just software—I'm specifically looking for hardware.
While digging this morning I came across the very-intriguing ('cause it cleverly pretends to be a single-key USB keyboard) Yubikey:
The EMI Group (Electric & Musical Industries Ltd.) is a British music company comprising the major record company EMI Music—which operates several labels and is based in London, England—and EMI Music Publishing, based in New York. EMI Music is one of the "big four" record companies.
I recently joined EMI , and I'm really psyched to be here—I'm working out of our San Francisco office with Cory Ondrejka, doing a bunch of exciting digital marketing-related things. I'll also be on the road a bit, as EMI operates out of London, NYC and LA. And Nashville. :)
Backstory: DCM's departure from Google was announced in April last year, which put EMI on my radar, then Cory joined him in June, which really got me curious—two top-notch techies heading to the music industry, and specifically to the first of the big four to go DRM-free? I reckoned EMI must be up to something interesting so I checked in with Cory—it turns out they are. I'd met him in late 2007 at a Van Heyst event in Bahrain of all places, and being the lone geeks there, we immediately clicked and stayed in touch.
Way-backstory: I've been a music lover all my life. My earliest musical memories are of watching bluegrass from hay bales at County Fairs in southeastern Ohio, where I'm from. I studied piano before taking up saxophone from 6th-12th grade. In high school we'd drive half-way across Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania to see concerts in actual cities. And oddly enough, I even got to see somethen-mainstreamacts in my hometown—why they played in Marietta will forever remain a mystery to me. I started ripping CDs to MP3 as soon as capable Mac software appeared, and traveled around Europe during college with a few favorite songs crammed into a 64MB Rio. I always have music playing, whether it's coming from a device or inside my head.
I've also been a tech nerd all my life. We had a TI hooked up to our TV when I was really young, and have had Apples around since our IIc. I ran up embarrassingly expensive long distance phone bills in high school, because Marietta didn't have local Internet access at the time. During college, my tech work for CAS faculty was often more exciting and fulfilling than my actual classes, and I was definitely the only Miami student in 1997 taking notes on an eMate. I took a laptop backpacking with me around the world in 2002, in order to share my travels with friends and family on this weblog. My five years at Google (my first job out of college) were an amazing experience, and taught me most of what I know about software and product development—the rest I learned hacking with Randy and Cameron.
Cory and EMI presented me with an opportunity too exciting to pass up, to combine my knowledge (and passion!) for both technology and music and apply it to a unique set of challenges EMI's set out to tackle. After all, applying tech is way different than building it. I'm hoping to talk more about our work here, as it unfolds in the coming months.
Not to worry: Domainr's cruising happily along, and it's got an extensive roadmap we hope to spend random nights and weekends hacking on. And Yd and Ceedub are busy cranking on an extremely cool, über-secret project that has incredible, world-changing potential.
What's with that hat you're wearing in all your profile photos?
It's a family heirloom. Decades ago a Great Aunt or another made it for my Dad or one of his siblings—no one remembers the exact story. I found it buried in our mudroom one day and adopted it as my own. It kept me warmthroughmymanytravels, and last year I passed it on to my cousin Cody. I really need to get a new profile photo.
Whenever I fly anywhere, I leaf through the airlines' in-flight magazines on the off chance I'll encounter something interesting. In between ads for Brazilian steakhouses and executive dating services, I found a gem of a piece in American Way about Herb Hilgenberg, a one-man weather forecasting service operating out of rural Canada. Fortunately AA puts their articles online in their entirety, so you can check it out without flying. Here's the beginning of the story:
Down inside a yacht anchored off an island in the Caribbean, skipper Jason White shows off a state-of-the-art computerized control center. He points out a marine single sideband (SSB) radio, somewhat of a sailing-instrument anachronism amid modern technology like satellite phones and weather faxes.
And then he tells me about Herb. Somewhere out there, on the frequency 12359 kilohertz, is a man named Herb who will give any boat a personalized weather forecast upon request. He’s more accurate than any weather service, say the mariners who rely upon his expertise. But very few sailors even know he exists.
“He only says it once, and he talks so fast, you have to record it and listen to it later,” says White, holding up a small digital recorder. “I use him all the time. But if you bug him too much, he’ll just ignore you.”
In November 1999, Hurricane Lenny developed south of Cuba and then moved west to east, the first Caribbean tropical storm in recorded history to do so. It would eventually smash through several islands, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Herb was in contact with a number of boats in the danger zone and immediately directed them around the Category 4 storm. Except one.
“There was one guy just sitting north of Puerto Rico,” Herb Hilgenberg recalls. “A Swiss couple and their dog. I talked to him and said, ‘You’re gonna have a hurricane in front of you, and it’s gonna approach you in the next six hours.’ “
The sailor radioed back, saying, “I need to get off the boat; I can’t make it. My engine’s not working.” In six hours, he, his wife, and their dog were going to get ravaged by a hurricane with wind speeds of 150 miles per hour and be pounded to pieces. And they couldn’t move.
Herb called the U.S. Coast Guard based in Puerto Rico, but they had already lashed down all their helicopters for the storm. They managed to establish contact with a nearby commercial vessel, and it was able to approach the boat and rescue the couple and their dog.
"The best leaders I know don't want the job of thinking for everybody else. They understand that if they can tap the hidden genius inside the organization, and the collective genius outside the organization, they will create ideas that will be much more powerful than what even the smartest individual leader could ever come up with on his or her own. Nobody alone is as smart as everybody together."
"The United States and New Zealand are the only two countries in the world where it is legal to advertise prescription drugs. The United States accounts for almost 50% of all monies spent on prescription drugs worldwide. But according to a 2006 report by the Journal of the American Medical Association, US residents are nearly twice as sickly as their English counterparts, despite the fact that the former spend almost twice as much on healthcare per person."
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