I’m rereading Seth Godin’s The Bootstrapper’s Bible via DailyLit. I read the book 3 years ago from cover to cover before we launched Killer Aces.

I’m not sure how much I absorbed back then, reading the book before having started a company.  Rereading it now, I see that some of the Bootstrapper’s Manifesto has stuck with us.  Some of the lessons we had to learn the hard way for ourselves.

Anyway I have three thoughts to share.

1. If you’re an entrepreneur building a new business, do yourself a favor by reading Seth’s book. Even if you have VC funding, this book is applicable. It could just as accurately be called The Underdog Company’s Bible.

There’s no excuse. You can get the book for free as a PDF download or an email series from DailyLit.

2. Rereading the book after I’ve had a couple of years experience is eye opening. I’m absorbing more of the lessons because I can immediately think of actual business issues we’re dealing with now or have dealt with in the past.

Being able to apply the concepts to actual, real world problems makes them so much more meaningful versus trying to learn the lessons in abstract.

So go reread those old business books. There are probably new lessons you can pick up now that you have more real world experience.

3. DailyLit is a great way to read books for time strapped executives. Actually DailyLit is great for anyone that (a) has no time to read and (b) lives in their email inbox anyway.

It’s hard to find an extra hour everyday to read, but it’s easy to spend 5 minutes reading just another email.  It’s also good for people like me who can’t put a book down at the end of a chapter. The end of the email is the signal to move on and work on something.

Amazon Kindle books are still too expensive. For a copy of a book that is locked up on your Kindle and can’t be shared with friends or resold, the $10 or so average is about twice as much as I want to pay. Yes, it’s already cheaper than a paper copy, but it’s still too pricey for something I might want to buy again (like a paper copy to hand to a friend).

If Kindle books were about 50% cheaper I’d be buying books all the time. Where $0.99 seems to be the sweet spot for songs, I think the sweet spot for books is about 5 bucks.  I would spend a lot more money on books at that price.

You can use search operators to create filters in Gmail.   This makes Gmail filters so much more powerful.

I don’t understand why Google tries to hide this feature. It’s not obvious that you can use search operators on the “Create a filter” form, and they don’t even mention it on the filter creation help page.

I thought Google was smart.  Why don’t they at least link to the search operators help page on the filter creation form?

Advanced search operators you can use to create filters include: quotes, hyphen for negative, OR, and parentheses.  There’s no AND operator though.

For example:

Filter email addressed to blackhole@example.com except if it comes from joe@vipclient.com.  Note the hyphen in front of “joe”.

• FROM: -joe@vipclient.com
• TO: blackhole@example.com

I keep forgetting the names of the date formats in Drupal’s format_date() function.

They’re “small“, “medium“, ”large“, and “custom“.

I keep wanting to use short / medium / long because it feels more natural to think of the date formats as lengths.

In any case, that’s not reality. So to help me remember the options, I think of Drupal date formats like pizza sizes.

There is no such thing as a ’self-made’ man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success.
– George Adams

I can think of dozens of traits, thought processes, beliefs, principles, habits that make up my being, and attribute it to a specific person I stole learned it from.

I used to hate being “unoriginal”. I felt like a sham for thinking like Ray or saying things that Will would say. Couldn’t I come up with an original thought all on my own?

I stopped feeling like a sham when I realized that learning from those around us is the only way we grow.  What we choose to take and how we integrate our own experience is what makes us who we are.

I’m more or less a mix of the people I’ve run into in my life.

—

By the way, I found this quote in Keith Ferrazzi’s book Never Eat Alone.  It’s about the importance of relationships in business and career.  And life, really.  I’m only a couple of chapters in, but so far so good.

Productivity, work-life balance, saying no… these are things I’m always struggling with. Always have, but hopefully not always will.

It’s gotten harder since I started working for myself (and my two partners) instead of a boss. Because now, I’m in charge of my own todo list. This is scary. Left to my own devices, I tend to work on what is most interesting to me at the moment. 90% of the time, it’s not what the company needs most at the moment. And when you’re bootstrapping a company, there isn’t enough time to spend all day on “fun long-term” projects.

Incidentally, working on fun long-term projects all day is one of the rewards I’m looking forward to when we have a highly profitable company that doesn’t need me on a day-to-day basis. Forget the yacht, I want to work on interesting things with no looming deadlines.

Anyway, one trick I use to keep from falling too deeply into the rabbit hole of a non-critical but supremely interesting project is to deliver at least one thing a day. Just one solid deliverable a day.

Here are some signs that something has been delivered (in my world, anyway):

1. Email partners or other people I’m accountable to (eg., bloggers counting on me for tech support, outside bloggers waiting for a response, etc) regarding some open question or issue. Puts the ball back in their court.

2. Write or update documentation. It’s not done until it’s been documented.

3. Commit code, increment the version number, and add an entry to the changelog. Look! A record that something changed!

4. Resolve a trouble ticket. Closed ticket! Yeah!

When I find myself exploring (read: being distracted by) something new and cool, and I realize what’s happening, I tell myself I can come back to exploring this thing after I do one of the above.

Just deliver one thing today. Then you can go play.

Flat World Knowledge is a really cool implementation of Creative Commons. They publish textbooks that instructors can customize and students can read for free online.

The textbooks are written by experts. Instructors can customize them for their own classes. They can add, remove and rearrage chapters and even sentences.

Students can read them online for free or choose to pay for other options like print, download for self-print, or audio books. Prices are around $40 — much less than the $150 college students are currently paying for textbooks.

The UI for reading online is pretty good.  Nice use of javascript.

Unfortunately, there are few titles available. There is currently less than 20 textbooks in the catalog, and they’re all business related. There are another couple dozen slated for this fall and next year.

Hopefully they can put the $8 million raised this spring into many more titles soon. Even though I’m no longer a student, I can’t wait for more textbooks to come online.

(Bonus: the site is powered by Drupal.)

Even though I tell everyone I know to use Drupal for their web projects, I finally caved and set up my personal blog (what you’re reading now) on Wordpress. I finally faced reality — using Drupal for my personal blog was overkill and added so much unnecessary complexity.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not defecting. It’s not a war where Drupal and WP can’t coexist. Each CMS has its place and purpose.

For example, if I had to do it again, I would still build the Top Personal Finance Blogs directory and Money Tips Network aggregator using Drupal.

But for personal blogs, Wordpress is the right way to go. I don’t need complex custom functionality. I just need a basic blogging app that makes it easy for me to post my random thoughts.

For years, I thought that as a self-respecting Drupal webmaster, I should use Drupal for all my projects. Then I started using my personal blog as a Drupal sandbox. The more I experimented, the less usable the blog became. I stopped posting because I didn’t want to deal with the mess my futzing had made.

Now I just want my blog software to just work, so I can just blog instead of spending time under the hood.

So here’s to using the right tool for the job. Wordpress rocks.

If you’re having problems with Drupal cron — like cron runs are timing out or running out of memory — here’s a quick hack to figure out which module is causing the problems.

Edit the includes/module.inc file, and find the function module_invoke_all.  Insert the line indicated below to have a notice added to the logs (admin/logs/watchdog) for each module cron is running. You can then figure out the last module running when the problems occur.

foreach (module_implements($hook) as $module) {
  $function = $module .'_'. $hook;
  if ($hook == 'cron') watchdog('cron', "hit $module cron");   // add this line
  ...
}

Thanks to Peter Lindstrom for the tip.

—

UPDATE:

The Drupal cron job crashes but I keep getting this error in the watchdog logs: “Attempting to re-run cron while it is already running.”

Then it gets killed after an hour with this message: “Cron has been running for more than an hour and is most likely stuck.”

To force Drupal to allow cron jobs to run again, you have to:

1. Delete the “cron_semaphore” variable from the database.  (Hat tip to cyberswat on drupal.org.)
2. Clear the Drupal cache to reload the variables.  (Install the Devel module and go to example.com/devel/cache/clear to clear the cache quickly.)

There’s a Drupal variable that is created when cron starts, and is supposed to get deleted when cron ends. If the cron job crashes, the variable is left behind and no new cron jobs can run until the variable gets policed up in an hour.

To clear the cron lock, delete the “cron_semaphore” variable in your database.

mysql> select * from variable where name = 'cron_semaphore';
+----------------+---------------+
| name           | value         |
+----------------+---------------+
| cron_semaphore | i:1246773950; |
+----------------+---------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> delete from variable where name = 'cron_semaphore';
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

The “whoever’s there” conversations that occur in hallways, around a person’s desk, or in the break room are critical components of a company’s culture.

And a company’s culture is its soul.  Success or failure starts there.  So, you know, this meaningless banter is actually pretty important.

When everyone’s working remotely, it can be easy to lose that daily touch.  Without a place where people can just talk to whoever’s around, we lose the team building and serendipitous discovery that comes with talking about stuff that’s too small for IM / email / forums.

This post about what it’s like to work at 37Signals clarified a half-thought that’s been bugging me lately.  For a dispersed team like Killer Aces, a place where “whoever’s there” banter can occur should be the centerpiece of an intranet.