25 hour day

“this is the closest i’ve ever gotten to a college graduation”

Shopify.com looks like the easiest and fastest way to set up online shop.
Lots of people are raving about shopify’s ease of use.
I agree. So when I ran into Shopify Consulting I thought it was pretty funny.
Looks like even the easiest way to set up online shop may require help from professionals.
It looks like shopify still needs to do some work on making the process of opening online shop even esier.

Friend of mine has to deal with this screen every day.
It looks like this ms word application has every option and plug-in imaginable.
It literally takes a minute to start up.

Compare it to writeboard.
You see your title and body. Nothing more to distract you from actually writting.

Writeboard is a product of 37signals. These guys get the difference between the software that allows you to write and software that is there for processing:

Writing is getting the words right. Word processing is… processing. It’s taking what you’ve written and doing stuff with it. Either bolding this or italicizing that or centering the headline or inserting a table or tweaking the margins or changing the font and sizes or adding color or… That’s word processing or page layout.

when you’re about to write that’s all you should be ready to do: write. Leave the rest for another day. There are words to get right.

While updating my Google spreadsheet I encountered an error.
Below is the their error message:

This almost makes me glad that I generated this error.
I feel like I have done something productive today.
I have contributed to common good.
By helping google I help thousands of other Google docs users.
Users that will not see this error(if Google fixes the error that is).

On a serious note, this is an example of great copy writing.

Justin.tv is the website of Justin Kan, a 23-year-old guy who is “lifecasting” himself on the web.

If this concept sounds familiar, thats because its very close to the plot of the movie “Edtv“.

You can check out his archive for more exiting content at his blog

I’m not sure what the long term goal of this site, but I think they fulfilled their short term goal of getting a lot of exposure.

I don’t watch TV that much and when I do I gravitate to Discovery, History or TLC channel.
Recently I discovered current_ network, (channel 101 on my Time Warner cable box).
The concept: viewers send in their videos and Current_ runs them.
I like that concept. It works.
You get interesting stories and footage that you wouldn’t get anywhere

If you have a blog and enabled comments there is a high probability that you get spam.
I use to get close to 10 spam comments a day. It sucked. So I disabled comments.
Then I asked around and was refered to Akismet . (thanks Noah )
I installed Akismet on this blog a week ago and re-enabled comments.
Guess what? No spam. None!

Here it is in action, so far caught 47 spam comments:

Akismet is a great product.
I wish they gave a better name for it.
Akismet, stands for Automattic Kismet, which makes total sense.
However, I imagine its hard for people to memorize it and pass it on to others.

Take myself for instance. Yesterday, I was having lunch with a friend and told him about it.

Me:”Yeah, its awesome! Catches all the spam.”

Friend: “Yeah? Whats it called?”

Me:”I think its Askimet.”

Well I was close, but still you get the point.

Bill Sullivan talks about setting up his shots:

I developed a situation so that various subjects could be defined by the constraints of exactly the same mechanical apparatus.

I stood there turning pages of a magazine observing subjects out of the corner of my eye, waiting for only the moment when they pushed the turnstile bar to release the shutter.

The French riots of 2005 inspired the photographer Denis Darzacq to head for the housing estates on the outskirts of the capital. But he wasn’t after gritty shots of urban deprivation… He wanted something more - to capture an entire generation in freefall and with no one to catch them. - via guardian

more at Denis Darzacq’s La Chute

Now all I need is a phone to take notes.
If I need to write myself a reminder and I don’t have pen and paper handy, I call Jott.com

Here is how it works:
1. Go to Jott.com and register
2. Call their 800 number
3. Leave yourself a message
4. Jott records message
5. Creates a transcript of your message
6. Emails you
7. You can also read or listen to all your messages when you login to Jott.com

Its easy. I have Jott 800 number on my speed dial and it takes seconds to start recording a message.