Wilson's Landing

Your attention please

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 13:47:36 -0400

Jason from 37signals writes that he thinks time was his most limited resource but highlighted the difference between giving your time vs your attention.

How many of us give(sell) our time to our employer? Are we giving our attention that whole time?

How does this change when you work for yourself or if your compensation is tied directly to your performance (which we assume requires your attention)?

My favorite part is:

The greatest things you make and do are the ones that get your full attention. It’s helpful to take an inventory of what you’re doing and then ask yourself where you’re spending your best attention. You can fill your time, but you have to spend your attention. How you spend it is probably a better measure of priority than anything else.

Do Happier People Work Harder? Yes!

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 11:25:10 -0400

Do Happier People Work Harder? Yes!:

“Working adults spend more of their waking hours at work than anywhere else. Work should ennoble, not kill, the human spirit. Promoting workers’ well-being isn’t just ethical; it makes economic sense. Fostering positive inner lives sometimes requires leaders to better articulate meaning in the work for everyone across the organization. Sometimes, all that’s required is that managers address daily hassles and help with technical problems. If those who lead organizations — from C.E.O.’s to small-team leaders — believe their mission is, in part, to support workers’ everyday progress, we could end the disengagement crisis and, in the process, lift our work force’s well-being and our economy’s productivity.”

The VersaPay Team and I in the news!

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 12:35:00 -0400

The VersaPay Team and I in the news!:

An interview about how VersaPay can improve cashflow & sustainability while reducing cheque fraud.

Why the groupon copycat business models don't make sense

Fri, 27 May 2011 00:16:18 -0400

In the late 1500s, tulips were introduced to Holland. The flower was considered so rare that wealthy aristocrats and merchants tripped over themselves to buy them.

Speculation ensued and the flower became wildly overvalued.

In 1637 the tulip trade crashed.

People who thought of themselves as extremely rich were reduced to poverty overnight. Trends are temporary.

Don’t just do something because everyone else is doing it – do something because it makes sense

Thanks Credit-http://37signals.com/28

Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Anything?

Wed, 18 May 2011 10:57:00 -0400

“The economy we have today will let you chow down on a supersize McBurger, check derivative prices on your latest smartphone, and drive your giant SUV down the block to buy a McMansion on hypercredit”

an outcomes gap: a yawning chasm the size of the Grand Canyon between what our economy produces and what you might call a meaningfully well-lived life, what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia.

hedonic opulence vs
eudaimonic prosperity

doing, achieving, fulfilling, becoming, inspiring, transcending, creating, accomplishing or

are you just (yawn) a pawn in the tired, predictable game called ‘the pursuit of diminishing returns to hyperconsumption’: the game that’s rigged by hedge-fund bots against you?

http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/05/is_a_well_lived_live_worth_anything.html

"When Steve comes into his office and his garbage can is full, he stays late and asks the janitor..."

Tue, 10 May 2011 08:39:10 -0400

“

When Steve comes into his office and his garbage can is full, he stays late and asks the janitor why. The janitor replies “the reason I didn’t empty your garbage is my keys don’t work on the lock”.

“When you’re the janitor,” Jobs has repeatedly told incoming VPs, “reasons matter.” He continues: “Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering.”

”

"You know how you can tell when you’ve made a good decision? If you feel like you waited too..."

Wed, 04 May 2011 11:41:40 -0400

“You know how you can tell when you’ve made a good decision? If you feel like you waited too long to make it, then it’s a good decision.”

-

Jason Fried is co-founder of 37signals, a Chicago-based software firm, and co-author of the book Rework, which was published last March.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110501/jason-fried-how-to-hire-an-assistant.html

"3 questions Coudal asks before deciding to take on a project: Can we make money from it? We’re a..."

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 08:32:02 -0400

“

3 questions Coudal asks before deciding to take on a project:

Can we make money from it? We’re a going business. We have mortgages to pay. We have tuitions to pay for our kids. We’re not ashamed of making money.

Are we gonna be proud of it when we’re done? There’s nothing that will break your heart faster than working three months on a project and then, when it’s all done, you’ve sold your soul and compromised and you don’t even want anybody to see it.

Have we learned something new? That allows us to continue to grow in the skills that we have. It allows us to be better filmmakers and writers and coders and art directors. And it keeps things interesting.

”

- Coudal Partners

"They are not new lessons. Never owe any money you can’t pay tomorrow morning. Never let the markets..."

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 08:29:01 -0400

“

They are not new lessons. Never owe any money you can’t pay tomorrow morning. Never let the markets dictate your actions. Always be in a position to play your own game. Never take on more risks than you can handle…Good businesses, good management, plenty of liquidity, always having a loaded gun; if you play by those principles you will do fine no matter what happens. And you don’t ever know what’s going to happen…

I mean, when times are good, it is kind of like Cinderella at the ball. She knew at midnight that everything was going to turn into pumpkins and mice, but it was just so much damn fun, dancing there, the guys looked better and the drinks got more frequent and there were no clocks on the wall.

And that’s what happened with capitalism. We have a lot of fun as the bubble blows up, and we all think we are going to get out five minutes before midnight, but there are no clocks on the wall.

”

- Warren Buffett’s answer to “What are the key lessons you took from the financial crisis?”

"Ultimately, the best test of any product is to go to your target market and pretend like it’s a real..."

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 15:23:59 -0500

“Ultimately, the best test of any product is to go to your target market and pretend like it’s a real business. You’ll find out soon enough if it is or not. You have to take some risks. You can sit and analyze these different markets forever and ever and ever, and you’d get all these wonderful answers, and they still may be wrong. The problem with the businessman type is they spend a lot of time with all their great wisdom and all their spreadsheets and all their Harvard Business Review people, and they’d either become convinced that there’s no market at all or that they have the market nailed.”

- One of the entrepreneurs profiled by Saras Sarasvathy in “How Great Entrepreneurs Think.” Among Inc. 500 CEOs, 60 percent had not written business plans before launching their companies and just 12 percent had done market research, according to the article.

To create positive change, don't make rules focus on outcomes

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:35:13 -0500

Facebook has cut spam by 97% in the past year. An impressive feat even for a tech company with their vast resources.

Facebook defined spam as anything that shows up in your feed that you don’t really want to see. Remember all those farmville messages?

How would the company or government of yesterday deal with this? The US would declare war on it, Canada would cook up a bunch of poorly enforced laws and corporations would embattle developers in a gargantuan “acceptable usage policy”.

Facebook simply focused on the output. If no one was clicking like, and no one was clicking on the app, they automatically disapeared posts by that application. They focused on what desirable outcomes are (clicking for more detail, adding the application, interacting with that friend after seeing their post). Naturally this forced developers to align their practices with messages that users actually cared about. Facebook was able to shorten their AUP by 50%.

How can this be applied to you organization, school or government?

http://www.fastcompany.com/1721252/how-facebook-killed-spam

"You know what we’ve found? Magical things happen when employees know they’ll get to be king for a..."

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 22:58:42 -0500

“You know what we’ve found? Magical things happen when employees know they’ll get to be king for a week. Gone is the complaining about what management is forcing them to do, because rotating management gives them a clear perspective of both sides of the fence. Employees will step up and grow if you give them the chance.”

- Un-Manage Your Employees, an article for My Business by yours truly on the self-managing teams at 37signals.

"We live in a world of action driven by thoughts from our head; yet we are creatures of the heart."

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:00:17 -0500

“We live in a world of action driven by thoughts from our head; yet we are creatures of the heart.”

My team’s contributions represented graphically

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 22:59:09 -0500

My team’s contributions represented graphically

Decided i’d see what happens if you lose your password and...

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 09:09:13 -0500

Decided i’d see what happens if you lose your password and email address but want your facebook back.

What do you think?

iWallet Payments here sooner than you think

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 21:07:21 -0500

Now we have a hint: Another new Apple patent suggests an iPhone (or iPad, etc) could get a second SIM tray-like port on one side, into which you’d slip the little golden chip segment from a modern credit card. The neatness of this idea is impressive: All the credit card makers need do is slightly modify their existing cards so you could pop-out the chip in the same way you do when you get a new cell phone SIM card delivered (which does come in a credit card-shaped plastic carrier, if you remember). All the security and ID and—more importantly—control over card numbers and distribution to customers—would remain with the card issuer, disrupting their business model less than other solutions would.

Testing copy with google adwords

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 13:02:00 -0500

I was inspired by Tim Ferris’ technique for testing potential titles for his new book using google adwords.

He took 6 prospective titles that everyone could live with: including ‘Broadband and White Sand’, ‘Millionaire Chameleon’ and ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ and developed a Google Adwords campaign for each. He bid on keywords related to the book’s content including ‘401k’ and ‘language learning’: when those keywords formed part of someone’s search on Google the prospective title popped up as a headline and the advertisement text would be the subtitle. Ferriss was interested to see which of the sponsored links would be clicked on most, knowing that he needed his title to compete with over 200,000 books published in the US each year. At the end of the week, for less than $200 he knew that “The 4-Hour Workweek” had the best click-through rate by far and he went with that title.

His experimentation didn’t stop there, he decided to test various covers by printing them on high quality paper and placing them on existing similar sized books in the new non-fiction rack at Borders, Palo Alto. He sat with a coffee and observed, learning which cover really was most appealing.”

Take away

I am beginning to wonder if all our conversion buttons, product names and key phrases should be tested using adwords before their deployment to our pages.

Anyone else know of ƒunctional ways of using adwords to test phraseology?

How to achieve your new years resolutions.

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 19:44:29 -0500

Based on my research this year here is my advice:

1. Do not say them to anyone. Research shows that the effect of your brain mistaking the saying for the doing is stronger than the social obligation created by announcing your plans.

2. Start as soon as you come up with your ideas as any cognitive dissonance you exhibit now will carry into the new year and foil your positive habit building efforts.

3. Don’t focus on goals!! Focus on habits for habits lead to the achievement of goals.

4. Remind yourself that we are fundamentally motivated by curiosity, challenge and passion. Money, looking sexy and being powerful won’t successfully motivate you. They decend from having the right balance of the above.

Ubuntu boot time scripts with etc/init.d

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 13:08:00 -0500

I wanted to collect some of my learnings on how ubuntu/debian manages scripts at boot time.

First, /etc/rcRUN-LEVEL.d/NNname is a series of directories that are symlinked to the /etc/init.d/name actual boot script.

So, if you want a service or program to run at boot time first create the script at /etc/init.d/servicename and chmod it to be executable. You can find an example at /etc/init.d/skeleton

Set the appropriate runlevels directly in the script. The defaults should work for most users.

then run sudo update-rc.d servicename defaults and the appropriate symlinks will be added for you.

When you’re constructing your boot script, the LSB header tells update-rc.d what runlevels and what ORDER to run your daemons in. For our use which will be a onetime execution before self-destruction on the first boot of a vm template we want all other services to start first so we will add a ” Required-Start $all “

How to add disk space to a ubuntu machine with lvm

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 19:37:03 -0400

Add the additional physical disk

sudo pvcreate /dev/sdb

sudo vgextend ubuntu /dev/sdb

sudo lvextend /dev/ubuntu/root

sudo resize2fs /dev/ubuntu/root