Seth Godin has shared some lessons from his Alternative MBA.
Has it really been six months? Apparently so. The Alternative MBA was a six month, free, unpaid, learning exercise based out of Seth’s office in New York City.
It’s amazing to look back over the last six months and consider what I’ve done since I applied and [...]
Category Archives: Ideas
Announcing my retirement
I am going to retire on 1 July 2009. In a little over 2 months, less than 2 months after my 27th birthday, I will retire.
retire v.intr.
To withdraw, as for rest or seclusion.
To go to bed.
To withdraw from one’s occupation, business, or office; stop working.
To fall back or retreat, as from [...]
Thinking bigger
I think Seth Godin’s is my favourite blog. His posts are short, concise and usually thought provoking. Seth avoids the mistake of writing too much, too often, and writing crap just to keep the content flowing.
Today Seth talks about thinking bigger. It’s got me thinking about StraightPress.
I host a handful of WordPress sites for family, [...]
Also posted in Business, WordPress Tagged Business, Seth Godin, startups, straightpress, thinking big, WordPress 3 Comments
A vision for Lonely Planet
Lonely planet publish books. They’re a book publisher. Books, in their traditional paper form, are dying. I attended a talk by Frances Linzee Gordon on Wednesday night at Gleebooks. Frances is a travel writer for Lonely Planet. She’s a great traveller. She’s a good photographer. She has some fantastic stories. It’s a pity her employer [...]
Also posted in Business, Predictions Tagged book publishing, Frances Linzee Gordon, Lonely Planet, publishing, publishing trends, trends 5 Comments
Idea: alternatives.to
I’m always looking for alternatives to sites, for one reason or another. An alternative to Google because of their politics. An alternative to CouchSurfing.com because of it’s unreliability. An alternative to RentaCoder.com because it’s good to spread the reptuation.
This morning, I thought it would be great to launch a simple site that lists alternatives to [...]
Open source and adding value
There has been an interesting shift in Intellectual Property over the last few years. Particularly, the rise in popularity of open-source software. Companies like MySQL, Zend, RedHat, and others are pioneering a new way of doing business. Their core “product”, the software, is freely available. Not only is the product free to use, but you’re [...]
Incremental Backup on Amazon EC2 / S3
Somebody suggested using Amazon EC2 to provide an incremental backup interface to S3. For the likes of rsync to be truly effective, you need to have an rsync program running near the data store. It struck me, you could use an EC2 instance with free, high-speed bandwidth to S3 to do exactly that.
Using S3fuse (currently [...]
Also posted in Techy Tagged amazon backup, amazon ec2, Amazon-S3, ec2, rsync, s3, s3 backup, s3 incremental backup 5 Comments
Affiliate Revenue Sharing
A friend recently told me about rakeback poker sites. When you play poker, you pay a small fee to the casino for the use of the table, this is called a rake. If I introduce you to Poker Website X, they will pay me a percentage of your rake. The latest affiliates offer to share [...]
Also posted in Business, Techy Tagged Affiliate, Affiliate-Revenue, Callum, Callum-Macdonald, Facebook, MySpace, Rakeback, Revenue-Share 1 Comment
21st Century Communal Living
For a few years now I’ve been considering the balance between sharing a flat, as most students do, and living alone, as young professionals tend to. I’m sure there’s an in-between option, combining the personal space and independence of your own flat and the communal living of a shared space.
It struck me tonight that the [...]
Posted in Ideas 3 Comments
Open Plan Productivity
I’m in the process of writing a functional spec, and one of the things I read while researching it is Joel on Software – The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code.
It’s an article that lists 12 steps to better software development teams. Question no 8 is do your programmers have quiet working conditions? Question [...]
Also posted in Personal 2 Comments
easyDesks
Standing in the shower (as you do at 12:30 when you’re a self-employed, home worker!) I’ve just had one of those “bing!” moments.
I’m travelling to Malta on business Thursday and it involves a 3.5 hour stop in Gatwick. Being an infrequent business traveller, I don’t have BA executive club membership and so don’t have access [...]
Also posted in Techy Leave a comment
Your online identity
Following on from my earlier Treo post, I’m at my PC (as I was then, just checking if it worked! ) and figured it was time to let the cat out of the bag on my wee idea.
Currently there are a number of “trusted” organisations that issue things online. Nominet is a good example. [...]
Also posted in Techy Leave a comment
The nightmare of registering
I’ve had an idea…
There’s a great requirement to register with web sites these days. To download a software demo you have to register, set up a username and password and then receive and respond to an email in order to confirm your email address. I would guess one in ten web sites gives you [...]
Also posted in Personal Leave a comment
Free creates social noise
The proliferation of “free” is creating a society in which we are exposed to ever more content. It may seem at a macro level like just more crap on YouTube, but at a micro level it’s more crap our friends are creating, sending, forwarding, spamming. I’m calling this social noise. Crap we are exposed to [...]