The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

-Michelangelo

Lately I’m pushing hard myself. I’m working out regularly as you people know to lose some “15 years Christmas weight”, we just closed a deal with the excellent guys at BeenVerified to work on their visual design (we couldn’t wait anymore, we worked in a couple of things together and those guys are wonderful), the studio is growing really fast and the people working with us is fantastic; the best of the best out there. We have a really good luck this quarter, the projects we are working are amazing, fun and interesting.

And, to add a bit more of complexity to the equation, since a couple of weeks, I’m learning how to play classic guitar. Funny, it is easier than it looks and much more simpler than I though it was going to be. People always say it’s hard, but if you put your hearth and mind in it, believe me, it’s easy as using hotmail (just kidding.)

Today, I want to announce, I will be learning a new skill that will probably have an important impact in my design skill over time. I’m learning how to do illustrations and concept arts. My brother is one of the top artists right now in Buenos Aires (http://www.carloscabrera.com.ar), and I love his work. Since we where kids, I had the ability to draw, to illustrate. I was pretty good for a lad of my age back then, but with time, I never worked out those skills and they fade to almost nothing. I want that back. I want to be able to do digital paintings, concept art, etc. It will be of a great help in my current line of work. I know how to do it, but I just never put time into it until now. With time I will learn this new skill, it will be pretty fast for me to do so, it’s on the family.

What skill did you ever wanted to learn and for one or other reason you never did? and what are you going to do about it?

Let me know!
Javier Cabrera

If you have an application like basecamp for example, it’s necessary to do the “iPhone version” but, that’s just because the application needs to be specially designed as an app for the iPhone. On the contrary, having a blog, a news paper or any other web site in the iPhone version is like doing a wap version; useless. There is a huge market for wap, we all know that. But it takes back innovation like 10 years. The browser should adjust the site, not backwards. If you don’t agree, then I’m assuming you are one of the really happy designers or coders who laugh with joy every time you have to do an Internet Explorer version of your work.

Again, the browser should adjust the site, not backwards. In fact, Apple agrees with me. They have come up with Safari for the iPhone, an splendid piece of software that lets you see, AND READ a website like if you where looking it at your own home or work computer. It displays the same. It doesn’t change.

I believe Apple innovates. It’s just that people is used to have “a X version of my website for the X“. Fill the “X” with any new device that you can think off, yesterday Palm, recently cellphone, now, iPhone.  We have arrived to the era we all have waited: finally, a portable device manufacturer comes up with software that can read our work the same way we intent to, without touching anything, without modifying one line of code; and what do we do? we keep living in the past.

Just let it go!

I bought an exercise bike last month and started to workout every day. The first day the longest I could do were just 10 minutes. Really, I couldn’t go any further, I was in pain, all sweaty, almost dead. That was the first day. The second day, the same thing happened, just 10 minutes, a bit less maybe, but in the fourth day I managed to do 15 minutes! boy that was a great day!

Now, I can do 25 minutes! That’s almost 30 minutes per day! I feel better, I work better, I don’t feel tired anymore and what’s best of all, I have been eating a lot less!

Funny thing happens when you workout in the morning.

1. You think again before eating anything that can make you fat during the day because, you see, you worked your ass off at the morning and you don’t want to throw that away. So you start taking food very seriously and eat a lot less. It’s hard to do a diet or change your food habits, but that’s because you don’t have any good reason to stop eating like a pig (I know I did), but that changes automatically the minute you start doing exercises; guaranteed.
2. You feel better, more comfortable, confident; you take big steps now when you walk down the street, even run a bit sometimes.
3. You can focus more, true. You can do more work in less time, you start feeling like you can kick ass every minute of your day.
4. You start feeling less heavy, which is good because then you start feeling that you can be a LOT less heavier.

Long story short: if you workout more, you will start feeling more productive, happy and less tired. I know, I know, that’s the usual “fitness” guy speaking, but take it from a guy who didn’t move his ass from the computer since … well, since he was born; IT HELPS. And it helps a lot.

Those things are worth just $200 - $300 USD, what are you waiting? buy one and get over with it!

It’s common sense. Being friendly. If someone stops me at the street and ask me for some direction, if I don’t know the answer, I just try to point to someone who may have the right direction. Like a policeman, a news stand, a baker store or any other person I may know have the answer.

What I do not do, is just walk away.

Lately, I had 2 possible clients that, after exchanging emails, they just stop talking with me. It doesn’t happen often, because I’m a pretty clever guy, but they did. They just, didn’t answered. When I emailed them back (thinking “oh well, they must be busy to keep up talking”) they came back to me with a “we just got another design agency, sorry! thanks!”.

Anyone out there running a business knows that’s a “no-no”. It will keep happening, I know. I just wish people would be more kind to each other, it seems to me it’s the same asking for a direction at the street than asking what your business can do for me. You will get an answer; that’s for sure. Now, what you will be doing with that answer will determinate that person reaction to it.

Couple of months back, I had another case like this two I’m talking about. Just that, after a couple of weeks, the person came back to me. It appeared that his company tried another design agency and it didn’t worked out well. So now, they wanted us to not just resume the conversations, but that inside the quote, add a “clean the mess” price.

Sure, it was more money but guess why we say “no, sorry; we just have too much work right now”?

EmaStudios have always 4 or 5 clients on the progress. 100% of those clients behave in the most respectful, kind way. Some of them we ever got to know in person, some of them we even became friends and we ended up doing some work “just for the cause”.

But, when talking about prospects, or “may or may not become clients”, the percentage vary. Only 70% were  good lads, the other 30% didn’t even bother to answer some of our emails. Even after they sent us PDFs or DOCs

Get Real. Behave like you would do at the street; and doors will open. Always. We can’t thank enough our clients for being there for us. Some of them even traveled here to have a meal with us, it’s incredible!

Be nice with your prospects, even if they aren’t with you. Get real!

Now, there are a couple of myths about Christian that have risen between the community because of his continuous trips around the globe:

1. He works for the CIA or some sort of spy agency.
2. He is loaded, that’s why he can travel everywhere all the time.
3. There are really ten or twenty Christian Van Der Henst spread all over the world as a part of a scientific experiment.
4. He has managed to discover the old, arcane ways of the space-universe portals to travel everywhere he wants.
5. The guy can actually fly.

None of those are true (at least, he didn’t fly while I was there watching, but he did went to the bathroom after we lunch together, so the Nr 5 may be up to dispute) and the guy isn’t loaded. He is an average worker/business owner like most of us, he just loves to travel around!

I experienced something like that this year when I went to Uruguay. Sure, it’s just a 4 hours trip I could do any time, but I did it the “Van Der Henst” way. I took my clothes, bag them, and went to Uruguay. Just like that. I’m thinking on going off the door right now and buy some plane tickets to Japan; the “Van Der Henst” way; the kamikaze way.

You gotta love a guy that is so active it makes you feel you wasted 10 years of your life. This one is going to go high, and if you want to know why; you just have to follow his blog.

Only for Latinos (sorry guys!): si estan leyendo esto; y realmente quieren aprender, inspirarse y motivarse leyendo un verdadero emprendedor, simplemente lean a Christian de vez en cuando, o todo el tiempo si pueden! es realmente una de esas personas que en algun momento, va a hacer epoca. Vale la pena respirar el entusiasmo de los emprendedores latinos; para poder sentirse orgulloso, tal vez no de pertenecer a un pais tercermundista, si no, de saber que AUN estando en uno, se puede tranquilamente llegar lejos, con esfuerzo y con trabajo, como nuestros abuelos nos enseñaron.

UPDATE: sight of three Van Der Henst in the same room. The theory of multiple Christian Van Der Henst as a plan of world domination has become stronger. See it for yourself via youtube, here.

Hi it’s me!

No, you didn’t forgot anything at the office! just wanted to say thank you; it was nice talking to you again. Let’s schedule a meal sometime this week man, it’s nice to have you around at the office.

Take care!
The King.

Ok I didn’t wrote the King but, you get the idea. It was pretty much like this. To see the real benefit, you need to think about it from the other person’s perspective. The coder arrives at his home, he check his emails and finds out a thank you note. That feels good! and it’s free!

Another example: I talked with my banker last week over the phone. She was really quick an efficient on her work (at least with me), so I emailed her a thank you note about it an let her know exactly how I felt after having a successful conversation with her.

She loved it. Who wouldn’t? in this crazy world most people don’t stop to say thank you. Until a couple of weeks, I didn’t either. It’s just common sense. Try sending a thank you note to someone; let them know they are worth the time. It’s priceless, you feel good, they feel good and it’s actually good for business. You end up having good relationship with your coders, your resources, your clients, everyone.

They will think twice before screwing things up for you; and besides, they deserve the respect!

Stupid requests we all know Producers ask to Directors, and both end up ignoring the script and doing totally idiotic stuff like Legolas from Lord of the Ring using a shield like a skate down a castle stairs; which is the same stupid stuff we saw at Batman and Robin perform in the horrible Batman Forever when they did the “bat-skate”. Those stuff comes only from Producer’s twisted minds. This movie, is nothing like that. I believe we will be seeing two more movies of Hancock in the future, and thanks good they still do movies with real people, I’m getting tired of forest animals talking around and walking like humans. I don’t have anything against it but it’s just getting repetitive for me to watch dogs talking, cat talking, cars talking, robots talking, rats, etc. Good old movies (Die Hard, Fight Club, Scape from LA, The Thing) didn’t almost had CGI and they made even more money than talking squirrels for god’s sake.

Wanna have a good time? Wanna watch a movie that will make you laugh with an easy going story? go see Hancock; practically the best out there until Guillermo Del Toro’s HellBoy 2 comes out of it’s shell. Here’s Hancock Movie Trailer at YouTube.

Anything more to say?

Just do the following while you are at Google Reader’s Home Page (that’s, http://www.google.com/reader): press up up, down down, left, right, left, right, B and then press A. You will see how your sidebar now changes! some users have reported a little sound, but I didn’t heard anything. To shut if off, just repeat the Konami Code again and you will be free. This kind of things are just what the web needs, I will be contributing to this on 15tags and the new project management system we are cooking at EmaStudios; will have a good bunch of easter eggs.

In case you are wondering what the heck is the Konami Code:

The Konami Code, known in Japan as the Konami Command (コナミコマンド, Konami Komando^?), is a cheat code thats appears in many Konami video games.^[1] The code also appears in some non-Konami games.^[2] The code was first used in the 1986 release of Gradius for the Nintendo Entertainment System ^[3] but was made famous in North America in the NES version of Contra

Another cute thing about this easter egg is the number of unread articles for every site on your list, which is automatically changed to thirty (30). If this reference is lost on you, a player is given thirty lives upon entering the code in the original Contra, which helps a lot.

UPDATE: thanks for the head’s up CaptionMachine! I really screwed it up before with the Konami Code ;)

If your blog is running slow then you may be suffering from the Guy Kawasaki Syndrome. It’s pretty common for us to start throwing things we don’t really need to our blog sidebar like advertising, search engines that load from another source, our vacations photos via the flickr flash badge and any sort of crappy code you can copy and paste to include widgets in your blog.

Bad news is, it’s a blog, not a billboard. People will come in to your blog to actually read it, not to see that bike trip you did last weekend or to see some Dell computers advertising making your blog jumpy when they scroll down. Here is a list of things you can get rid off to improve the performance for your readers:

SHARE IT.
This is a big no-no and even I got cough in the evil hands of Share it. The promise of having your blog post in every single news sharing web site like Yahoo, Delicious, Facebook and even LinkedIn which has anything to do with it may be too tempting to resist. This kind of services usually throws a javascript for you to copy and paste inside your blog post, pretty simple uh? just one line of code and all those nice icons will open when the reader click on the link or just move the pointer over it.

The problem is, once you place that on your page and you have more than 4 posts, the page becomes really slow to browse and scroll because it’s pulling content from another source. And not just one time, but several times, one time for each pot you have in your front page.

Solution: use it only on the article page, not in your main blog page. When people goes to your blog they should see it right away! If I have to use one of those SHARE IT links, when you come to CYM (http://www.emastudios.com/cym/) you won’t see any SHARE IT link. But, if you click in one of our articles, (let’s say http://www.emastudios.com/cym/2008/05/project-management-web-application/), you will get to that article page and I would actually throw there the SHARE IT link, that way you don’t load 10 or 20 SHARE IT links and you just load one where it is really needed, at the end of your article.

ADVERTISING.
This is a real pain some times. You want to read a blog and you have to scroll twice to get to the real content; the first half of the screen is cluttered with ads.

Solution: use ads only if your blog is getting real valuable visits. If you are getting $5 bucks for your 40 ads in your main blog page; then it’s time to move those ads away for good and start worrying about the content. And, if in the future you need to choose, avoid Flash ads (worst are those ones with movies inside! what the heck!) and choose the good Google ads which, are between the top ones.

DAMN FLOATING BALLOONS WITH A PAGE INSIDE.
The people that use this one should burn in hell. Really. No matter who. There should be a law against those ones. I’m talking about those text links that have a double bottom line and when you, reader, move your mouse pointer over it, a comic-like balloon appears (some times with a javascript effect which makes it a double crime) in the middle of the page, with shadow, and starts it’s evil dance of loading some web page where the word you just touch with your mouse pointer appears written.

Solution: no matter how many “hits” they can give you, they are the root of all evil. Every time someone installs one of those scripts, a devil gets his horns. If you really need to use them, you could use them in your article page instead of your main blog page, to speed up your main blog page but I hardly believe there is a really good reason to keep that anywhere in your blog. I won’t recommend those balloon links scripts.

RATING STARS.
Those little five stars that give everyone the opportunity to vote for your blog post could also produce a slow blog. They usually comes with a small info link for you to click and then, a balloon pop ups from there sometimes moving your scroll up or down, depending on where you browser scroll was at the moment of voting just to display a “thanks!” or to show you the top five blog posts from that blogger.

Solution. Implement a “Best posts ever” on your sidebar and place your best posts there. How to know which ones are? Well, usually the more visited and there are a bunch of plugins out there to display the top five more visited posts (like this one if you have wordpress). You can also place a “Most Commented” list of posts on your sidebar (here is one, simple and powerful). There are lots of things you could do to avoid having those little stars, but if you still need a rating system, I would recommend to place it on your article page instead of your blog main page.

There are more

Of course there are more widgets and plugins that can whisper in your ear and make you end up with a really slow blog; so this is my general rule of thumb. PLACE ANY OF THOSE IN THE ARTICLE PAGE and not in your main blog page, so when your readers come to your blog they don’t wait for all those little ads, widgets and balloon like links to load from 10 different sources before they can start reading at your news.

Yes, we have my Twitter account to display what we are doing on the right of this blog and sometimes loads a while before showing up the real page content. We will be taking that off and opening a Twitter account just for EmaStudios tonight, and guess where it will go? you got it. On the article page.