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Man, that’s a pretty house.

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The book rambles through Keith’s life in a memoir-ish fashion, which does undermine it somewhat. I loved how he was able to show his life developing, especially through the help of his many role-models, advisors and mentors. But viewing it from the web startup point of view, I can only see what an abject failure his past business YaYa Media was. He seems to have rebounded into a successful consulting, writing & speaking career but I still wonder if he’s just a networker for networking’s sake. From the tone of the bok and especially his chapter “Balance is BS” that may very well be the case. How can you have time to build a business if all you are doing is networking? That’s actually been more problem with some of the web startup scene- too much networking for the sake of, and too little building a real, paying client base and a growing successful business. But I digress.

Another problem is that the book hit in 2005 right at the beginning of the social media revolution. This means that although Keith touches on blogs and the online world, it is mostly in passing. It is such a central part of business relationships now that the book feels outdated from the mere 4 years that have passed. I’m interested in reading some of his later works and checking out Greenlight Community to see if Keith has kept pace.

But where the bookreally is a defining text is in repeatedly driving home quite practical, often obvious, to-do’s for relationship-building. Keep organized, set goals, work with gate-keepers, reach out selflessly and find some value you can give to people you’re reaching out to, follow up religiously. I could be better at all points. One of the ways Keith kept hitting upon to do that is to make sustainable platforms for interacting with people- monthly dinner parties, starting your own clubs or conferences, or whatever. It takes work, but I can see how valuable this can be.

I think I can leverage much of this advice as I find my own balance and own path to build great connections as I work to grow my own biz and I think this would be a good book to revisit as I do.

I was in dire need of a haircut and wanted to look good to meet Becki’s parent’s tonight at Passover dinner. Should be exciting!

What do you think of the hair?

This was the first time I was lucky enough to work with my now friends, Sven Kils, a designer at Vier Für Texas in Frankfurt, Germany, and Robby Russell a web programmer at Planet Argon in Portland.

Together we created, built and launched a website unlike any that had existed. It was a repository of thousands of portfolios of the top architects and interior designers in the country. Homeowners (and anyone else) could browse the designs and save them in their inspiration folder. From here 30elm would recommend the best professionals for their job and make introductions.

A pretty neat system, really. As 2008 started to show signs of the housing & remodeling crisis my partner and I ran low on time, and money. I hope to revisit 30elm and help it achieve all it can be sometime soon.

Running Monolingual removes the additional languages from the system, and from any other applications that may have also installed additional languages. In this case (admittedly an extreme case) running it saved over 3 GBs. Since the computers were being imaged using Netboot you can imagine the time and annoyance savings that 3GB times however many computers can bring. But really everyone should strive to have a lighter computer.

On Wednesday Becki and I had spent a quite lovely day coworking together. Becki was diligently working on some stories for myyearbook while I distractedly worked on invoicing & leftover cleanup projects for some clients. But the kitchen was so chilly that we had to move the kitchen table into the living room and setup shop there. I learned that the landlord has the automatic thermostat set to go down to, I don’t know let’s say 42° on weekdays.

So I spent today sealing the kitchen windows. These circa 1920 windows woefully lack storm windows and hence are enormous cold air leaks. I resorted to the old Frost King Winterizing Kit- you know the kind where you use a hair dryer to shrink some extremely thin clear plastic sheeting which you tape to the window frame. It isn’t the most attractive thing in the world, but is better then nothing. Between that and switching the screens for storm windows in the outside doors, things are much improved.?

I still think I may have to resort to a space heater and begun investigating who manufacturers some of the better ones. DeLonghi, based in Italy, makes some of the better, inexpensive oil-filled radiators. I imagine that space heaters like these are even more popular in Europe where homes are often a few hundred years older and draftier and heating units equally antiquated. They go for about 50-100 bucks, not so bad considering the dollar/euro. Besides these heaters are made in Italy and therefore better-looking, or at least more interesting to look at then any American products.  Of course, they all use 700-1500 watts dependent on the setting. This is normal for space heaters, but still a huge energy hog for something you may have on for days at a time.

One alternative I found is the Econo-Heat panel heater which uses a mere 400 watts and is also about a hundred bucks. Overall people seem to like it, my only concern is that some Amazon reviews talk about the product cracking and charring after a few months of use. Not so good. I may try it out for a cold room on the fourth floor of the Philly house. Heat barely reaches that 4th floor room from the enormous 185k btu oil-furnace, so this could be a good addition. We’ll see soon enough.