I've discovered that I enjoy working and/or wasting time at a local coffee place, Espresso Royale. It's nothing like my original view of coffee shops (namely, starbucks). Espresso occasionally has unique bands play and mostly plays local and/or unknown alternative music when there isn't live stuff. The atmosphere is great, and the people are extremely friendly. I need to get south of green street more often.
In other news, conference is a week away, w00t!I had an interesting experience yesterday that I wanted to share and analyze, because I'm not exactly sure what happened.
Each year, a student group puts on a conference. The topic of the conference is not relevant, what's relevant are the logistics. The conference is free, but attendees are encouraged to register to receive a free tshirt and pay a fee if they'd like food throughout the weekend. Every year, most of the attendees register. However, there is always a number of folks (local students who see advertisements on the bus or quad, for example) who show up without registering and happily receive a free tshirt. Of course I have no problem with these logistics. I'm not criticizing the way anything is run; each year the conference is a wild success. However, as a capitalist, I am trying to see a way to make (even just a little) more money from something like this, without sacrificing the quality of the conference or anybody's experience. Everyone loves free stuff, but I hypothesize that NOT giving away free tshirts to UNREGISTERED attendees will not affect the overall quality of the conference experience for the participants. I suggested selling each spare tshirt to anyone who wants one at the conference for something like $10. Due to some existing funding situations, it costs close to $2 to print each tshirt. If we have 100 spare shirts, and we sell them at $10 a piece, that's 800 dollars without really sacrificing anything. Sure, it isn't enough to hire a speaker or pay for anything really enormous, but it's completely effortless. And what's the downside? We don't sell them all? We have boxes of conference tshirts from years past, so that argument doesn't make sense. The reactions I got were mixed, but I can't remember a single one who thought it was a good idea. I'm not upset, I'm just surprised. It could be that most people don't think the same way I do. Perhaps I came across as a cutthroat capitalist who wants to make money at the expense of anything else (this is ridiculous, I think). Either way, I'm still at a loss to explain why this idea was shot down. After this debate, a friend (who had been eating a fortune cookie) walked up and handed me the fortune. It said "You will do well in expanding your business." I now keep this in my wallet :-)
Rands (www.randsinrepose.com) spoke at ACM Reflections|Projections last year, and it was a fantastic talk. He's a project manager at a rather large, well-known software company. His most recent blog post is entitled "Hurry", and deals with ideas and success. Read it here (it's short): http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/10/02/hurry.html
It reminded me of one of the most motivational ideas that ever hit me: the idea that successful people are no different than everyone else. The ongoing impression is that these people are smarter or have some sort of innate "killer instinct". I don't think this is true. Since I've been in school, I've met several people who have been either mildly or wildly successful. Each time this happened, they were utterly normal. There were a few differences that I noticed, but these were differences not in talent or intelligence, but in attitude. These were people who talked about ideas, not about stuff or other people (unless they related to ideas). It's a well-uttered fact that success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, but it's hard to internalize this and believe it. It's true though, I think. Unfortunately, I have yet to experience wild success in this capacity, but seed funding groups like YCombinator routinely find lots of success by choosing who to invest in based upon that PERSON, sometimes more so than the actual IDEA. They judge these things based upon how passionate the applicant is and their attitudes. They've discovered (so far) that this is the best way to successful investment. The money doesn't lie. Once you discover that successful people mostly don't have any intellectual or innate edge over you, there are no longer any excuses to not follow your dream. It's sometimes easier to ask forgiveness than permission, so go for it. Deal with things as they come instead of trying to plan everything. It's the journey that matters, not the destination. But every once in awhile, the destination will be simply fantastic.
1) Going places without knowing anybody is a cool thing to do.
2) Theme parties are a really, really good idea. More of these need to happen.
3) Caffeine is interesting. It helps with brute force work like doing an MP, but sucks for creative thinking and brainstorming (for me).
4) Helping people learn new things is really cool.
5) Building products that people are excited about and use daily is very rewarding. Making money off those products promises to be immensely satisfying.
A thread over on Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794908) has some good feedback on being productive in differing time intervals. One of the comments had a link to something called the Pomodoro technique for time management (http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/) along with a link to an OS X desktop app to help with this technique (http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/pomodoro.html).
Well, I'm always looking for tools to help me be productive. And I don't own a Mac. So what about me? My idea is a web application that does what the OS X desktop app does. The bulk of the Pomodoro technique is to set a timer for 25 minutes, and start your task. Then, after the timer goes off, take a 5 minute break. Then repeat, except with a longer break at the end. And repeat. Etc. The web app could have a timer and a way to manage your task lists, possibly with plugins to other sites (like rememberthemilk.com). Would you use this? Do you think it would be worth building, if only for personal use?
I really love music. Part of that love is seeing my favorite artists (and new artists) in concert. I'll pay upwards of $100 to see someone I really like. Until now, I've had to go to ticketmaster or livenation periodically, or check the artist's tour dates to see what's coming up. Sometimes I'll go to a venue website to see who's coming to town.
No more. BandsInTown is what every music lover should use. You tell it what artists you like, and it tells you when they're in your town. It shows a calendar of upcoming shows and has a concert cloud that shows other concerts people are looking at. It's simple, easy to use, and you can try it out (fully) before signing up. And signing up takes approximately 5 seconds. Also, you never actually need to tell it your location (it detects that). Minor, and changeable, but convenient. This is a startup that focuses exactly on what it's users want. I think it's nailed it pretty well. They have a simple interface: Navigation/Profile, Activity Stream, and Upcoming shows. You don't need to leave the homepage to interact with the best part of the site, and it accomplishes this without giving the feeling of a web app. This is a site that's easy enough to use for my grandparents to use. Also worth mentioning is recommendations. Periodically, in my "Upcoming Shows" feed, an artist wll appear that BandsInTown has recommended. I haven't checked yet to see if any of their recommendations are good, because you don't listen to music on the site. If the concert is cheap (<$20) then I'll probably just go. I like live music. Give it a shot. Put in a couple of your favorite artists and see how many of them will be in town. I put in 67 artists and there are 6 shows coming up in 4 months that I almost certainly wouldn't have known about. Check out my page: http://www.bandsintown.com/fan/davezorLooking back at Harmonize (again), we didn't have a good way to make money. We would've had to pay royalties to the record companies for people to listen to new music, and we signed up for an Amazon.com affiliate account, with a link to "Buy!" a new song. But that user experience was far less than optimal. It would've required the user to download the amazon downloader, then re-upload the music to harmonize. A pain.
The plan was (I think) eventually to write software to handle this, possibly to download music from amazon and then automatically sync it with your Harmonize library. My idea is this: a service that will allow vendors (of any kind, not just music stores) to resell music, at the same price as amazon or iTunes does. We'd perhaps have tiered pricing, charge different prices depending on how many songs your store sold in a given month. Our main value would be an API that allowed easy exporting of the downloaded music. We'd grab the music from whatever is cheapest (Amazon and iTunes are the only ones that come to mind, but I'm sure there are more) and then your site would have easy access to that music for the user to either download or sync with your site/service/app/whatever. The only possible downside I can see is that perhaps Amazon and iTunes don't allow the music to be resold. This is possibly hackable, maybe they'd be open to negotiation or perhaps even the record companies would sign off on it (yeah, right). We'll see. Just an idea. There are obviously lots of pitfalls to avoid and lots of ways to add value to this. What do you think?I like this one alot:
"One common false conclusion is that because someone is truthful and upright toward us he is speaking the truth. Thus the child believes his parents' judgments, the Christian believes the claims of the church's founders. Likewise, people do not want to admit that all those things which men have defended with the sacrifice of their lives and happiness in earlier centuries were nothing but errors. Perhaps one calls them levels of truth. Basically, however, one thinks that if someone honestly believed in something and fought for his belief and died it would be too unfair if he had actually been inspired by a mere error. Such an occurrence seems to contradict eternal justice. Therefore the hearts of sensitive men always decree in opposition to their heads that there must be a necessary connection between moral actions and intellectual insights. Unfortunately, it is otherwise, for there is no eternal justice."
Coding Horror: Nobody Hates Software More Than Software Developers
I absolutely feel this way. Software development has many different conventions that are supposed to be followed, but mostly are only followed by good developers. Most software requires much knowledge to operate, even for very basic operations. My parents had a problem with GMail yesterday, for example. It wasn't exactly a problem, it was just a lack of understanding. Scanning pictures and documents, burning cds, and other things people need to do daily should NOT require any prior knowledge. Apple in the 70s was aiming for this, and their success with the iPod is a great example of beautiful technology that is easy to use. All software should be intuitive and attractive.
Currently, it isn't. This is a period of time where bad software is the norm. Mostly it's because the industry is still (relatively) in its infancy; 30 years is not very long for software practices to develop. It's also due to the very volatile, dual nature of software. You must have technical skills, but in order to write good, usable, attractive software (or web sites), you must be creative and have an eye for design and taste. These are extremely rare to find side-by-side. Another reason for this is because of how new the industry is. People have been living with automobiles for nearly a century, so it's 100% intuitive how to operate a car or truck. Nobody gets frustrated because putting the gear shift into "D" doesn't do what they thought. Software is so diverse that these expectations are still being built in the public consciousness. Plus, it turns out anticipating how people will use something is utterly difficult. It's hard to get right, but it's not impossible. The same instinct that forces me to correct people on definitions and terms in day to day life comes into play when teaching people (my parents, for example) how to use a certain piece of software. Most of the time it's horrible software, so I feel that I'm teaching, but teaching someone to use horrible software will mold their expectation, and I hate that. I hate that people are learning to expect difficulty and unfamiliarity with software. It shouldn't be that way. Most of the time it is, but that will change over time, hopefully. That's the goal, and that's one of the reasons I love what I do so much. It's a deceptively young industry, so anyone with a moderate amount of skill will find that there is tons of wiggle room, room to explore and create.
I've been thinking and talking to people about this seriously now for about a week, so I figured I'd solicit feedback.
When I lived in PAR, doing laundry just sucked. I always left it until I had nothing left to wear, so I'd be forced to travel down 4 floors with a gigantic basket of dirty clothes, and when I got to the basement, there (of course) would only be one machine available. I could either wait for another one to finish, or come back later. Either way, I was wasting time. And we all know my time was precious ;-)
What if you could go to a website (sort of like campusfood) and just click "Pick Up my Laundry"? We could charge perhaps $1.20 / pound or a certain number per load, or even a monthly fee in exchange for regular service. I've also heard the suggestion of making a clever name "X's Laundry" so then we could distribute free tshirts around campus with slogans like "X washed my panties" or something similar.
I'm aware of two competitors. Collegebellhop.com is present at a number of colleges around the country (not Illinois). They charge a fee at the beginning of each semester and then they do students laundry during that semester. I believe they have a drop box at each dorm for folks to put their dirty clothes.
There's also student-valet.com, which IS on the illinois campus. However, I'd never heard of it, and I don't know tons of others who have used it or heard of it. They must be doing alright, though, because they've opened professional-valet.com for the Champaign/Urbana area.
Anyway, I've done some serious thinking and calculation, and it is quite possible to make a bit of money doing this. Any thoughts?
I'm 23. I write software, play poker, jam on my guitar, and try to meet new people every day.
"Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great." - Mark Twain
"Imagination is a poor substitute for experience."
"One small step up the mountain often widens your horizon in all directions."
"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
