Useful Readings

My fav quotes

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" Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail!"

" Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not
reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them and
try to follow where they lead."

" The first person who has to believe in you is YOU."

" Three seconds to say I love you, Three hours to explain it, And a lifetime to prove it."

" Be beautiful if you can, wise if you want to... But be respected - that is essential."

" Don't tell God how big your problems are...tell your problems how big your God is."

" A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer."

" There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering." -Theodore Roosevelt

" You got to hit rock bottom once in your life to know how it feels."

" Silence is also a form of speech."

" The biggest mistake we could ever make in our lives is to think we work for anybody but ourselves."

" Treat everyone with politeness, even those who are rude to you - not because they are nice, but because you are."

"You can do anything in life you set your mind to, provided it is powered by your heart."

" Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction."

" Creation of woman from the rib of man: She was not made from his head
to top him; nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him; but out of
his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near
his heart to be loved."

" It is not the critic who counts. Not the man who points out how the
strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face
is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs
and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the
great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause. Who, at the
best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the
worst, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall
never be with those timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

" A house is made of walls and beams; a home is buiilt with love and dreams."

" It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are."

" If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don't, they never were."

" They say the eyes are the windows of the soul. I believe....there are
things that the eyes can show.......that a mouth cannot speak."

" I've learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong."

" Success is to stand in the presence of God unashamed."

" The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or
even touched.....they only can be felt with the human heart."

" Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at
the end of the day that says ...I'll try again tomorrow."

" One's true character is most transparent when placed in a position of power."

" Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm."

" There are many things in life....that will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart.......pursue those."

" Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear."

" Life is like a piano. Anyone can play a song through meaningless repetition, But it takes passion to play a masterpiece."

" Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

" There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking."

" What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say."

" In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right
thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you
can do is nothing."

" Do something bad and regret it

Do something good and forget it."

" A candle never loses any of its light by lighting another candle."

" Dreams are only foolish to those who lack them."

" Success is about hanging on when others give up."

" To be a champion, you have to believe in yourself when nobody else will."

" The man who sees where he is going, gets there."

" My interest is in the future,

Because I'm going to be spending the rest of my life there."

" The Secret to Success:

Trust God, Work Hard, Help Others, Be Sincere."

" Only those who will risk going too far

Can possibly find out how far one can go."

" Be patient, you never know how God is going to use you.

It may take a little more time to do those things you aspire to do,

But they will eventually get done."

" Nurture your mind with great thoughts,

For you will never go any higher that you think..."

" There is only Me stopping Me from being Successful.

" Reality is the only obstacle to happiness."

" Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."

" There's a smile in my heart that I've waited my whole life for."

" With clothes the new are best, with friends the old are best."

" It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend."

" The two hardest things to handle in life are failure and success."

" The difficulty in life is the choice."

" Knowing is half the battle."

" Never argue with a fool. Someone watching may not be able to tell the difference."

" God will not look you over for medals, degrees, or diplomas, but for scars."

" The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man."

" It is hard to believe that someone is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place."

" I believe every person has a heart, and if you can reach it, you can make a difference."

" Failure is not the worst thing in the world. The very worst is not to try."

" The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."

" Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals."

" God, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the
Courage to change the things I can; and the Wisdom to know the
difference."

" It's not failure, but low aim is crime."

" Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I accomplish."

" Someone who is afraid of failure and afraid to face challenges will never

taste success."

" The hopeful man sees success where others see failure, sunshine where

others see shadows and storm."

" Love your work and you do not have to work anymore."

" Success is a journey, not a destination."

" The thing that we've got to do is set up the goals no matter how difficult

they may seem at this moment, and then start moving towards them."

" It is kind of fun to do the impossible" -Walt Disney

" The road to success in life is lined with many tempting parking spaces."

" No one who has poured himself or herself into work has ever failed."

" Pay absolute attention to the efforts for achieveing a goal rather than

getting distracted by the goal itself."

Every accomplishment starts with the right decision, "I will try".

" We cannot direct the winds but we can adjust the sails."

" If at first you don't succeed try again. The word impossible is not in my

dictionary" - Napolean Bonaparte

" It is healthful and invigorating to fall many times through life, if you get up each time it's the getting up that counts."

" One reason people never attempt new things is their fear of failure."

" A goal casually set and lightly taken is freely abandoned at the first obstacle."

" Go far as you can see and when you get there, you will always be able to see further."

" The indispensable first thing to getting the things you want is this: decide what you want."

" It's your attitude and not your aptitude that determines your altitude."

" Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes. "

" Discouraged? Just remember that the darkest night did not turn down all

the stars."

" Don't be afraid of opposition. Remember that a kite rises against - not with - the wind."

" Remember that failure is an event, not a person."

" What happens to a man is less significant than what happens within him."

" You cannot tailor-make the situations in life but you can tailor-make the

attitudes to fit those situations."

" No seed grows into a tree into leaps and bounds."

" Don't lose hope - when it gets darkest the stars come out."

" Confidence......I will do it I will!"

" All things are difficult before they are easy."

" Direction is more important than speed. We are so busy looking at our

speedometers that we forget the milestone."

" Develop sincere desire for the goal. Out of fire of desire comes success."

" Success needs no explanation; failure has none."

" Dare to dream - dare to try - dare to fail - dare to succeed."

" Act as though it was impossible to fail."

" That which you can conceive of, believe in and confidently expect must

necessarily become your experience."

" Select a goal in life and thereafter put into it all your might."

" When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering

away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing

in it.

Yet at the hundred and first blow it will break into two, and I know it

was not that blow that did it.......but all that had gone before."

" Outstanding people have one thing in common : an absolute sense of mission."

" Every exit is an entry into somewhere else."

" Life is not a dress rehearsal; it's the main event - you don't get another

chance."

" Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

" Tough times don't last but tough people do."

" Winners never quit and quitters never win."

" You need to accept the fact that from this moment on your situation and

future is in capable hands - yours!"

" The show must go on..........no matter what odds."

" You will be a live wire if you have all the proper connections."

" The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to

excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor."

" Criticize the performance; not the performer."

" Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder."

" Every exit is an entry into somewhere else."

" Even in the dark a little star shines."

" Good intentions are not good enough..........ultimately we are measured by our actions."

" The purpose of life is a life of purpose."

" Defeat never comes to a man until he admits it."

" But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but never defeated."

" Judge a man by the reputation of his enemies."

" It's not length of life but depth of life."

" It's just as difficult to reach a destination you don't have, as it is to come back from a place you've never been."

" You learn from successful failures."

" Take the road less travelled by others, and that will make all the difference."

" Keep on learning - from your successes so you repeat them - from your failures so you never make the same one twice."

" Have the courage to live. Anyone can die."

" Act as though it was impossible to fail."

" Success in most things depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed."

" The thing we've got to do at this time is set up the goals no matter how

difficult they may seem at this moment, and then start moving towards them."

" Dream and work to make your dreams come true."

" He who struggles is better than he who never attempts."

" Develop a plan for developing your goal and a time frame for attainment."

" Regardless of your past your future is a clean slate."

" Winning is not everything but the effort to win is."

" Others can stop you temporarily - you are the only one who can do it permanently."

" When your confidence goes up, your competence goes up at the same time."

" No one can make you feel inferior without your permission."

" You gotta be before you can be before you can do, and you've gotta do before

you can have."

" Success consists of a series of little daily efforts."

" A goal properly set is halfway reached."

" This one step - choosing a goal and sticking to it - changes everything."

" Don't get discouraged; it is often the last key in the bunch that opens the

lock."

" Before you say i can't - say i will try - and then give it your best."

" Aim for the moon; and if you miss it - you will fall among the stars."

" The difference between a big shot and a little shot is that a big shot's just a little shot that kept on shooting."

" The most practical, beautiful philosophy in the world won't work - if you won't."

" In case a situation cannot be changed at all, accept it as such."

" Accept the challenges, so that you feel the exhilaration of victory."

" Confidence..........i will do it..........i will!"

" Everything happens according to the will of God. Have full faith in this.

Then every place, every moment, every event of your life begins to feel like

heaven and you are convinced that what is happenning is meant for you."

" Many of life's failures are men who did not realise how close they were to

success when they gave up."

" Grind it out......holding on just one second more than your competitor makes you the winner."

" All glory comes from daring to begin."

" You are the slave of spoken words and the master of unspoken."

" The will to succeed must be firmly planted in your mind."

" Smile........pass it on."

" If a negotiation is all business, find a way to make it personal. If it's

personal, keep it strictly business."

" When there is a hill to climb, don't think that waiting will make it smaller."

" Speak when your angry...and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret."

" Bad things are always going to happen in life. People will hurt you.
But you can't use that as an excuse to hurt someone back. You'll only
hurt yourself."

" Sometimes no matter how much faith we have we lose people, but we
never forget them. And sometimes it's those memories that give us the
faith: to go on."

" Smile, even if it is a sad smile, because sadder than a sad smile, is the sadness of not knowing how to smile."

" It takes great courage to faithfully follow....what we know is true. "

" If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant;

If we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome."

" In order to suceed, we must first believe that we can."

" Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday."

" What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger."

" In the world you may be only one person, but to one person you may be the world. "

" Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want."

" A dream is a wish your heart makes."

" There is no such thing as a weird human being. It's just that some people require more understanding than others."

" Happiness is a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp;

But, if you will sit down quietly, it may alight upon you."

" Never stand begging for that which you have the power to earn."

" Some people make this world so special just by being in it."

" Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody expects of you."

" Nothing lasts forever - not even your troubles."

" Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end."

" When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced....live life in
such a way that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice."

" Gold medals aren't really made of gold. They're made of sweat, determination,

and a hard-to-find alloy called guts."

" Sometimes you can see a lot by just looking."

" Listen to your heart, because in the end, it is your heart that counts."

" I'd rather be hated for what I am, than loved for what I'm not."

" Success is measured not by the place one reaches in life, but by the obstacles one must overcome to reach that place."

" What would you attempt to do...If you knew you would not fail?"

" If you have the courage to begin, you have the courage to finish."

" Let your heart guide you. It whispers, so listen closely."

" Stand up for what you believe in, even if your standing alone."

" Some things are viewed more clearly when you look away."

" The more you put steel through fire, the stronger it gets."

" To those who can dream, there is no such place as faraway."

" What you get by reaching your destination isn't as nearly

as important as what you become by reaching that destination."

" If you don't know where you are going, how can you

expect to get there?"

" Never risk what you can't afford to lose."

" Don't put the key to your happiness in someone else's pocket."

" Accept defeat without being defeated."

" If you wonder how to do a job: get started, and wonder how you

did it."

" Life is like a blanket : too short. You pull it up and your toes

rebel, you yank it down and shiver meander over your shoulder, but

cheerful folks manage to draw their knees up and pass a very comfortable

night."

" People forget how fast you do a job.....but they remember how well you

did it."

" The grass is always greener on the other side....until you jump the fence and see the weeds up close."

" Good things come to those who wait, but they are left-overs from those who hustle."

" The difference between the impossible and possible lies in a man's determination."

" You don't love someone because they are beautiful; they are beautiful because you love them."

" If someone is mean to you, kill them with kindness."

" If you see someone without a smile; Give them one of yours."

" Be a person with great smile; be happy and merry all the while

When things go wrong, don't go blue

Just smile and say I will get through"

" To learn, you have to listen; to improve, you have to try."

" Ideals are like stars,

You will not succeed in touching them with your hands.

But like the seafaring men on the desert of waters,

You choose them as your guides,

And following them you will reach your destiny."

" Let a smile be your umbrella."

" No matter how small, acknowledge the achievement."

" Those who fear the thorns, cannot pick the roses."

" Walking away from situations you find emotionally upsetting is not an admission of defeat, but a sign of wisdom."

" The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches; but to reveal to him his own."

" Courage is doing what you are afraid to do. There can be no courage without fear."

" If you want to have the rainbow,then sometimes you're gonna have to deal with the rain."

" A friend is someone who dances with you in the sunlight and walks with you in the shadows."

" What you are is God's gift to you. What you make of yourself is your gift back to God."

" If you stand out in the rain long enough, you will eventually see the rainbow."

" Try not to become a man of success but rather a man of value."

" What goes up, must come down."

" Smile God Loves You!"

" Many people chase after success.

Other pursue money.

But I think the happiest people on earth

Are the one's who have found significance.

The real question of life must be

What has significance for you?"

"When the light has sharply faded and you have lost your way; let
another's love guide you, it can turn blackest night into day."

" Listen to life, it is the wisest teacher of all."

" History has proven, God has never given anyone a dream without also
including the power to achieve that dream; It is up to us to claim the
power and go after that dream, Or just claim, it was only a dream."

" It is the darkest hour before dawn."

" In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on."

" You don't realize what you have until it is gone."

" Faith is believing in something that sometimes doesn't always seem logical."

" No matter how long it takes, if you keep moving, one step at a time, you will reach the finish line."

" When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long
and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones
which open for us."

" Never fear shadows. They simply mean that there's a light somewhere nearby."

" Take a walk with your fear and allow it to run, for the courage that you gain is the fear you overcome."

" Victory is what happens when ten thousand hours of training meet up with one moment of opportunity."

" We do not remember days, we remember moments."

" My prayer is : I will be what i will be, I will do what I will do."

I've learned that you cannot make someone love you. All you can do is be someone who can be loved. The rest is up to them.

I've learned that no matter how much I care, some people just don't care back.

I've learned that it takes years to build up trust, and only seconds to destroy it.

I've learned that it's not what you have in your life but who you have in your life that counts.

I've learned that you can get by on charm for about fifteen minutes. After that, you'd better know something.

I've learned that you shouldn't compare yourself to the best others can do.

I've learned that you can do something in an instant that will give you heartache for life.

I've learned that it's taking me a long time to become the person I want to be.

I've learned that you should always leave loved ones with loving words. It may be the last time you see them.

I've learned that you can keep going long after you can't.

I've learned that we are responsible for what we do, no matter how we feel.

I've learned that either you control your attitude or it controls you.

I've learned that regardless of how hot and steamy a relationship is at
first, the passion fades and there had better be something else to take
its place.

I've learned that heroes are the people who do what has to be done when it

needs to be done, regardless of the consequences.

I've learned that money is a lousy way of keeping score.

I've learned that my best friend and I can do anything or nothing and have the

best time.

I've learned that sometimes the people you expect to kick you when your down will be the ones to help you get back up.

I've learned that sometimes when I'm angry I have the right to be angry, but

that doesn't give me the right to be cruel.

I've learned that true friendship continues to grow, even over the longest

distance.Same goes for true love.

I've learned that just because someone doesn't love you the way you want them

to doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have.

I've learned that maturity has more to do with what types of experiences you've

had and what you've learned from them and less to do with how many birthdays

you've celebrated.

I've learned that your family won't always be there for you. It may
seem funny, but people you aren't related to can take care of you and
love you and teach you to trust people again.

Families aren't biological.

I've learned that no matter how good a friend is, they're going to hurt
you every once in a while and you must forgive them for that.

I've learned that it isn't always enough to be forgiven by others. Sometimes you

are to learn to forgive yourself.

I've learned that no matter how bad your heart is broken the world doesn't stop

for your grief.

I've learned that our background and circumstances may have influenced who we

are, but we are responsible for who we become.

I've learned that just because two people argue, it doesn't mean they
don't love each other; And just because they don't argue, it doesn't
mean they do.

I've learned that we don't have to change friends if we understand that friends change.

I've learned that you shouldn't be so eager to find out a secret. It could change your life forever.

I've learned that two people can look at the exact same thing and see something

totally different.

I've learned that no matter how you try to protect your children, they will

eventually get hurt and you will hurt in the process.

I've learned that your life can be changed in a matter of hours by people who don't even know you.

I've learned that even when you think you have no more to give, when a friend

cries out to you, you will find the strength to help.

I've learned that credentials on the wall do not make you a decent human being.

I've learned that the people you care about most in life are taken from you too soon.

I've learned that it's hard to determine where to draw the line between
being nice and not hurting people's feelings and standing up for what
you believe.

-Anonymous

" I've also learned along the way that sometimes it's our pain that makes things possible."

" Don't mind criticism.

If it's untrue, disregard it;

If it's unfair, keep from irritation;

If it's ignorant, smile;

If it's justified, learn from it."

" A winner is a loser that was willing to fail and get up,

fail and get up,

fail and get up,

fail and get up

and win."

Doubt vs. Faith

" Doubt sees the obstacles

Faith sees the way.

Doubt sees the darkest night.

Faith sees the day.

Doubt dreads to take a step.

Faith soars on high.

Doubt questions,'Who believes'?

Faith answers,'I'."

" Did is a word of achievement

Won't is a word of defeat

Might is a word of bereavement

Can't is a word of defeat

Ought is a word of duty

Try is a word each hour

Will is a word of beauty

Can is a word of power."

" For every ailment under the sun,

There is a remedy, or there is none...

If there be one try to find it;

If there be none, never mind it!"

" We can't begin to understand what God has planned for us,

But we face each day with a smile, and in his name we trust

For in this vast world.....is Love

If only we could see the dove

It seems sometimes he doesn't care

When things get rough and hard to bear

But with our Faith we can survive

Because in our hearts He is Alive!"

" A smile costs nothing, but gives much. It enriches those who receive,
without making poorer those who give. It takes but a moment, but the
memory of it sometimes lasts forever.

" None is so rich or mighty that he can get along without it, and none is so poor but that he can be made rich by it."

" A smile creates happiness in the home, fosters good will in business,
and is the countersign of friendship. It brings rest to the weary,
cheer to the discouraged, sunshine to the sad, and is nature's best
antidote for trouble. Yet it cannot be bought, begged, borrowed, or
stolen, for it is something that is of no value to anyone until it is
given away."

" Some people are too tired to give you a smile. Give them one of
yours, as none needs a smile so much as he who has no more to give."

Always have a dream

" Forget about the days

when it's been cloudy,

but don't forget your hours in the sun.

Forget about the times

you've been defeated,

but don't forget the victories you've won.

Forget about the mistakes

that you can't change now,

but don't forget the lessons.

Forget about the misfortunes

you've encountered,

but don't forget the times your luck has turned.

Forget about the days

when you've been lonely,

but don't forget the friendly

smiles you've seen......

Forget about the plans

that didn't seem to work out right,

but don't forget to always have a dream."

" We do not understand Joy,

Until we have felt sorrow;

Faith until we are tested;

Peace, until we are faced with conflict;

Trust, until we are betrayed;

Love until it is lost;

Hope, until we are faced with doubts."

I Asked God

I asked God to take away my pride, God said No. He said it was not for him to take away but for me to give up.

I asked God to grant me patience and God said No. He said that patience
is a by-product of tribulation and that is, it is earned, not granted.

I asked God to give me happiness and He said No. He said He gives blessings, happiness is up to me.

I asked God to spare me pain and He said No. He said suffering draws
you apart from the world's affairs and it draws you closer to me.

I asked God to make my spirit grow and He said No. He said I must grow on my own but He will prune me to make me fruitful.

I asked God whether He loved me and He said Yes. He gave His only son
to die for me and I will be in Heaven someday because of Him.

And I asked God to help me love others as much as He loves me and God said, Now you have the idea.

-Anonymous

Don't Quit

When things go wrong,

as they sometimes will;

When the road you're trudging seems all uphill;

When the funds are low and the debts are high;

And you want to smile,

but you have to sigh;

When care is pressing you down a bit...

Rest if you must,

but you dont quit.

Success is failure turned inside out,

the silver tint of the clouds of doubt,

And you can never tell how close you are,

It may be near when it seems afar....

So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit....

It's when things go wrong that you must not quit.

" Relationships, of all kinds, Are like sand held in your hand.

Held loosely, with an open hand, The sand remains where it is.

The minute you close your hand, And squeeze tightly to hold on,

The sand trickles through your fingers.

You may hold on to some of it, But most will be spilled."

" I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career.

I've lost almost 300 games.

26 times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed.

I've failed over and over again in my life.

And that is why I succeed." -Michael Jordan

I Know

I know He is the beginning, so why do I worry about the end. I know He
is the creator, so why do I wonder who will destroy. I know He has
forgiven me, so why can't I forgive myself. I know He is a healer, so
why do I speak of sickness.

I know He can do all things, so why do I say I can't. I know He will
protect me, so why do I fear. I know He will supply all my needs, so
why can't I wait. I know He is my strength and my salvation, so why do
I feel weak

I know that everything and everyone has season, so why when someone's
season is over I weep instead of rejoice. I know He is the right way,
so why do I go the wrong way. I know He is the light, so why do I
choose to walk in darkness. I know that whatever I ask of GOD, GOD will
give me, so why am I scared to ask.

I know tomorrow is not promised, so why do I put off for tomorrow what
I can do today. I know that the truth shall make me free, so why do I
continue to lie. I know He gives us revelation knowledge and
understanding, so why do I lean on my own understanding.

I know I should live in the spirit as well as walk in the spirit, so
why do I choose to live in the spirit but walk in the flesh. I know
that when praises go up blessing come down, so why do I refuse to
praise Him. I know I am saved, so why do I refuse the word He has given
me. I know He has a plan for me, so why am I rushing it because I am
eager to do His will, when it is His time is not my time. I know He
answers all prayers, so why don't I lay my burdens down.

I know that Jesus Christ is Lord and I'm trusting in Him.

"I am the light of the world, he who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have eternal life." (John 8:12)

God's Promises

OUR THINKING VS. GOD'S PROMISE

"It's impossible"

All things are possible (Lk. 18:27)

"I'm too tired"

I will give you rest (Mt. 11:28-30)

"Nobody really loves me"

I love you (Jn 3:16)

"I can't go on"

My grace is sufficient (II Cor. 12:19)

"I can't figure things out"

I will direct your steps (Prov. 20:24)

"I can't do it"

You can do all things (Phil 4:13)

"I'm not able"

I am able (II Cor. 9:8)

"It's not worth it"

It will be worth it (Rom. 8:28)

"I can't forgive myself"

I forgive you (I Jn 1:9 Rom. 8:1)

"I can't manage"

I will supply all your needs (Phil.4:19)

"I'm afraid"

I have not given you a spirit of fear (II Tim. 1:7)

"I'm always worried and frustrated"

Cast all your cares on Me (I Pet. 5:7)

"I don't have enough faith"

I've given everyone a measure of faith (Rom 12:8)

"I'm not smart enough"

I give you wisdom (I Cor. 1:30)

"I feel all alone"

I will never leave you or forsake you (Heb. 13:5)

Seven rules for Web 2.0 startups

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 21:21:00 +0000

Seven rules for Web 2.0 startups

Posted Dec 1st 2006 9:00AM by David Chartier
Filed under: Internet, Productivity, Web services, Social Software
These days it seems like anyone with an idea and some time can crank out a Web 2.0 startup, be it a service, community, one-trick-pony or ambiguously named whichamadinger. It also seems like many of these startups could use some guidance to help them find their way. With goofy names, varying user experiences and questionable goals running amok, we figured it was time to lay down some ground rules. Check out our seven tips to help Web 2.0 startups be all they can be:

1. Help me make the move: New blogs and communities need easy tools to let their users integrate some sort of blurb about their new hangout on their other sites and communities. For example: I've been playing with Vox for a few weeks now, and just recently they introduced a badge tool that puts together all the HTML users would need to insert in another blog sidebar. This makes it easy for users to tell existing readers they have have (or are moving to) a Vox blog. While it's a smart move and I'm using a badge on my personal WordPress blog, this generator should have existed the day Six Apart, and all who follow in their footsteps, flipped the switch on their service.

2. Don't make me jump through hoops: ...or give you my e-mail address just to check out your service. Good: Tell me in plain language how your product works and how it can make my life better. Better: Show me with lots of screenshots or even a few screencasts. Best: Just let me start playing with it and worry about registration after I've decided whether it's any good or not.

3. Tell me what it is, not what's inside: I don't care whether your service is powered by Ruby on Rails, .NET, AJAX, REST, or Vegemite, so don't waste another breath on it. Tell me what it does and why I want to use it, and keep the nerdy chest-thumping on your Developers page.

4. Keep it simple: ...if you want me to do it a hundred times. If adding a bookmark or a hotspot on a map is a multi-stepped process, the likelihood of me doing it a lot goes way down. This is often the difference between making or breaking the site. Quicker processes mean I'll be back many more times to do it again, and more traffic equals more money for you.

5. Play well with others: It's great that you have a (hopefully) unique vision for your community, but let's be real: you aren't the first startup on the block. This one comes again from my pleasurable experience at Vox: users can upload their pictures, audio and video to Vox, or they can find this media at other communities like Flickr, YouTube and even iStockphoto to easily plug into their posts. This "friendly neighbor" aspect of Vox earns the site huge points in the Web 2.0 community department, as they clearly recognize there is value in allowing their users to hang out at other sites.

6. APIs!: Speaking of playing with others: the technical details shouldn't be on the front page, but they should be there. The gold standard of Web 2.0 is a well-documented interface that lets geeky users and other Web 2.0 developers get at all of your site's data and roll it into their own desktops, web sites, and services in a variety of ways. Bonus points for nailing the trifecta: XML, JSON, and YAML.

7. Don't let your four-year-old name it: Flickr got away with ditching the vowel--you won't. We were through with double-Os long before Squidoo, Calgoo, or Zooomr (triple-O!) came along, and the same goes for your EEs. Domain name scarcity is not an excuse for stupid product names any more than improved traction is a justification for clown shoes.

Simple rules with (ideally) broad implications. We hope these can make their way into the hands of the next Flickrs and del.icio.uses so everyone can have a better time on the web. But is our list complete? Are we missing anything? If you have a rule or two that should have made this list, you know what to do.

Startup Suicide: Five Ways To Kill Your Startup, Which Will You Pick?

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 20:59:00 +0000

Source http://onstartups.com/Home/tabid/3339/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/1167/Default.aspx

When talking about startups, it is interesting to talk about market forces, competition, product design and a variety of other things that founders believe they need to really understand and “get right” in order to survive. Though this is true (all of these things are interesting and important), it seems to me that more startups die from suicide than from external forces.

Sure, the act of startup suicide is not sudden or immediate, but ultimately, from the company’s perspective, is still just as fatal – it just takes a while.

Here are the top ways that I’ve seen for startups to commit suicide. Some are slow-acting methods, others are pretty quick. If you find yourself falling into any of these camps, I’d suggest reassessing and asking yourself: Why am I doing this? Can I control it? What’s the outcome that I really want?

Five Effective Methods Of Startup Suicide:

1. Death Before Life: I’m going to resist the temptation to dive into the metaphor of pro-life and pro-choice (which is a serious topic and I don’t want to belittle here). But, the concept is that the founder is “ready” to start a business. In essence, the startup is “real” (but it’s just in the founder’s head). At this point, the founder will likely start brainstorming. She will start coming up with ideas, bouncing these ideas off people she trusts and respects (and sometimes even people she doesn’t respect) to get a sense of what might work. The goal is to find The One True Idea that when it arrives in the founder’s brain will become this shining beacon of light that will guide the founder and the future management team through the dark wilderness of startup-land. Lots and lots of would-be startup founders kill their startups in the pursuit of The One True Idea. Quick tip: There are very few cases where a founder really comes up with the One True Idea, and even if she did, she’ll likely be talked out of it by friends, family and colleagues anyways.

2. Death By Isolation: Let’s assume that the founder does finally settle in on an idea. One of the most reliable ways to kill a startup (this one takes a bit longer), is to keep the idea to yourself for extended periods of time assuming that you need to stay in “stealth” mode so that someone else won’t steal it. The idea remains in the founder’s head. Little resources can be committed to it, and the idea is never really brought out into the harsh light of reality to see if it can survive even modest scrutiny. Ultimately, when the idea is forced out, it becomes obvious that there is no way this idea will ever really work. Unfortunately, lots of time passes between the original idea and the ultimate realization that it’s not the right one.

3. Death By Founder Dissention: If the founder is smart, she will start early in trying to pull together one or more co-founders to help get the business off the ground. Here is where it gets tricky. Founder issues are very challenging. Everything from how do you divide equity, who will do what, who will take on what title needs to be discussed. The only thing worse than disagreeing about some of these things is not disagreeing about these things because you haven’t even talked about them.

4. Death By Doing Nothing: When I say “doing nothing”, what I really mean is “doing nothing that is creating value for customers”. I am constantly amazed by how many creative ways founders can find to do things that have the illusion of moving their startup forward, but that has almost nothing to do with creating value for customers. Let’s design this fancy website. What about our business cards! What about this 120 page business plan? Surely we have to think through competitive analysis to make sure we build the right product. Don’t get me wrong, all of these things are important – but they are all trumped by the single act of creating customer value. If you don’t know how to create value: ask the customer! So many startups delude themselves into believing that all the activity around strategy and planning and marketing and “launch preparation” (yep, I’ve heard that one too, before the product development was even started) is what will determine their success when they “finally get out there”. I get really worked up about this one. I’m going to go get a cup of coffee and stare out my window so I can cool down.
…Ok, I’m back.

5. Death By Determination: I should have called this “Death by Stubbornness”, but I like the alliteration and “death by determination” just sounds interesting because we always think of being “determined” as a good thing. To clarify, what I mean here is when you are determined to make your original idea a success. You read somewhere that lots of startups die because they give up on their idea too soon and you’re not going to have that happen to you. Come hell or high water you will see this idea through! Here’s an insider tip: Most successful startups end up doing something that is different from their original idea. Dogged determinedness will likely keep you from building the business that you could have built. Yes, you can’t just drop every idea that comes along at the first sign of conflict or controversy. It’s a very thin line (nobody said startups were easy).

There are of course lots of other reasons could fail, but the reason the reason I selected the above ones are because they are all under the founder’s direct control. We have not talked about industry selection, competition or anything else. I don’t know about you, but I’d argue that a higher percentage of startups die for one of the above reasons than the “we got our pricing all wrong and so couldn’t really get market traction” kinds of issues. What do you think? What are other methods of startup suicide are out there? Perhaps there are a few that I missed that are even more effective.

Have a great startup idea? Hmm. Maybe not.

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 20:55:00 +0000

Source http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2006/11/have-great-startup-idea-hmm-maybe-not.html

Over the years I've started a small handful of Internet/software projects/companies. Examples include Mailinator, Preemptive Solutions, Inc., and Classhat.
Actually, I've started a large handful but no one knows about most of
them because they were (in no particular order): dumb ideas,
unsuccessful, too hard for me to complete. Given that I now rate any
new idea I get according to a set of rules that helps me filter out
good ideas from bad. At least, whatever I consider bad. Keep in mind
these rules are for the canonical one or 2-person pre-startup - if you
have 8million in VC, there's a lot of other magic you can do.

Here they are:

1) If there is no business model, its a hobby, not an idea.
I love compiler optimizations. I wrote a Java optimizer soon after Java
came out. I spent months trying to figure out how to turn it into a
business. But guess what, people don't pay for optimizers, or
compilers, or even runtimes. At least not without a strong sales team
telling they need that. By and large most ideas I get are about things
that I'd love to work on but have no real business model (ala my
Classhat project took several years and is, absolutely, a hobby).
There's nothing wrong with hobbies, as long as you know what they are.

2) The best ideas make your customers money.
If your idea can say "If a customer uses our product, they will make X%
more money" (where X is a positive number, even if quite small) - you
have won the game. Importantly - I did not say the customer will save X% more money. I said they'll make
it. That's a big difference. Saving money is great, but you are then
faced with the mission of convincing your customer that if they spend
$100k on your product now, it will pay itself back in 8 months. It's
way way way easier to say "Use our product and you make 2% more money
(of which we get a cut). Don't use it, and don't." Who wouldn't buy
that?

3) The best place to be that I know of is B2B2C.
That is, you want to be a business that serves businesses that serve
consumers. If you're B2C, then welcome to some important challenges.
One is to get people to pay for your stuff, which in this Internet
world, we're not all that happy about doing. Secondly, welcome to
support hell. Its very hard to provide consumer support (and you see
many complaints across the net). It takes a lot of support people and a
lot of money to do it right, which is why it rarely is. If your idea
plans to charge consumers, I'd definitely think twice unless you can
ramp up a support system fast. Thirdly, you'll need a powerful
infrastructure (apart from support) just to handle large numbers of
small transactions. Its harder to sell 1000 $10 widgets than 10 $1000
ones.

On the other hand, if you're simply B2B, life isn't so
bad. Big ticket sales but encompassing the market is harder. Sales
cycles are long. Again, you might need a faster ramp-up of a sales and
marketing infrastructure (which you are going to need eventually
anyway), but you're probably ok if the idea is generally good.

4) If you're going B2C, look for revenue models that don't come right from the consumer.
Given the last point you're probably thinking I'm crazy given things
like youtube or myspace or facebook or google. I'm not (at least I
don't think I am). All those places dodged the problems of providing
support and tracking sales by giving away their services for free and
making money on the backside (whatever that is). Often that's
advertising revenue. Often its partnership deals. Simply put there
absolutely is an Eyeball Business Model. If you can get the
eyeballs, you can sell them. Just try to do that instead of charging
them directly. They'll be ornery about it and demand support.

5) Revisit every bad idea every once in awhile.
Why is AJAX hot? Because its enabling things technically that weren't
enabled before. Are any of these mashups really novel ideas? Not
usually. Old ideas become new again by new technology, faster
computers, etc.

When the computer game Doom came out it included
very little novel technology. All the 3D math and graphics tech had
existed for years. The guys at ID were just the first ones to realize
that personal computers (as opposed to graphics workstations) at the
time had finally gotten powerful enough to do it all in realtime.

Every
time bandwidth gets faster for cheaper, previously bad old ideas become
new and shiny (e.g., video over the Internet). Mobile phones seem
really ripe. Apps and usability currently sort of sucks. Thats really
hampering a ton of uses. With every new advancement however, its going
to open up new doors.

6) Do your best to create a system of recurring revenue.
Advertising on websites and such is easy. But things like packaged
software is hard. Why does Microsoft change the doc format every time
it releases a new Microsoft Word. Surely it probably includes new
features, but why can't old versions just ignore those and load the
file (which is really text right?) anyway? Because they don't want it
to. They want you to buy a new version of Word to get all the new
features (even if you just write letters to your Aunt Edna and would
never use them). They want recurring revenue.

Doing that with
packaged software is harder and often somewhat transparently greedy.
Heard of "software as a service"? That is of course, really, "software
that we can just keep charging for". Bottom line is if tires, light
bulbs, or razors never wore out, the economics of those businesses
would be radically different. Getting more money from your customers
(hopefully while providing value to justify it) is a good way to go.

If
have an idea that follows #2 above (making your customer money), do
your best to simply take a small cut. Small cuts add up and the
customer has no risk in trying your product.

My entry last week
on evaluating start-up ideas netted me some nice feedback. Rereading
it, I realize there were a small pile of things that also should be on
that list. So, welcome to part 2.

1) Let ideas gestate.

Every new idea seems to be the greatest idea I ever had. Usually it goes something like:

Time 0: get new idea

1 minutes later: (some details)

2 minutes later: start thinking about suit I'll wear when I get to ring closing bell when we IPO

After
getting way too excited about way too many ideas, I set myself a rule.
Think through an idea for 3 days before I tell a soul. My excitement is
usually killing me the first day or so, but by the third day its rather
died down. Or, if it isn't, I get a better sense of whether I'm really
onto something. Simply put, ideas always look better the fresher they
are. You're looking for ones that look good even when not fresh.

2) Consider the size of your market.

If
you read Guy Kawasaki's blog you'll see him mention quite often how new
companies pitch to him about the immense size of their new market. Guy
often chides them for their optimism but even he knows you better
believe you do have a big market (and maybe even puff the number in
conversations) or you can forget it. Numbers in the hundreds of
millions or billions are good - you're really only realistically hoping
to glean a smidgen of that.

Consumer markets can be drastically
immense. If you're one guy in your basement with an idea that will
capture you a 40billion dollar market, that's dandy. Hopefully you have
no misconceptions that you'll just own the market yourself (where
there's money, there's competitors, and they'll steal plenty, if not
most of it before you can penetrate it all) but, the bigger the market,
the easier it is to find customers.

Niche markets like hardware
stores, developers, and/or mailmen don't suck - so long as you can
effectively penetrate most of it - and fast. Simple rule, bigger is
better. If big enough (and your idea does actually penetrate it),
you'll capture the attention of someone big who will want it for
themselves. That either means buying you or chasing you - where the
actual outcome happens in the execution (not the idea).

3) "Building a business around a new developer tool" is wrong on so many levels.

Some
markets are not only niche - they live in the land of the free. And I
don't mean the USA - I mean a market where people are used to getting
everything for free.

The software developer inside me keeps
coming up with ideas for software development tools. Occupational
hazard I suppose. I understand the domain space and understand how to
solve the problem. However, development tools are, in general, a really
bad place to find good business ideas. Consider that things like
Netbeans and Eclipse that took thousands of person-hours to create are
given away FREE. Therein lies the rub, developers have created their
own culture of giving away tools for free. There is certainly nothing
wrong with that, unless of course you think you're going to make a
business out of it.

Even then there are niches inside dev tools
that are worse than others. Two dollars and an idea for the greatest
Java software dev tool ever will buy you a cup of coffee. Java
developers are especially used to getting tools for free. In contrast,
Microsoft has created a nice culture of getting .NET and windows
developers used to paying for stuff. In other words, if you "must"
create a developer tool that you intend to sell, stick with Microsoft
or some other market segment where paying is an accepted idea.

4) Ideas really aren't worth all you think they are.

Yes I know you're smart. Yes, you amazingly, super-duper wonderfully creative. But in reality, very few ideas are truly novel.

What
happens is that two independent technology evolutions (say, the
internet and mobile phones) eventually progress to a point where it
takes a simple idea to act as a bridge and converge the two. And a
product is born. The farther ahead you see that convergence, the more
"brilliant" your idea is.

But with every passing day, the
distance between the two technologies lessens and your brilliant idea
becomes ever so slightly more obvious. In other words, if someone else
hasn't thought of it, they will soon. And as more people realize it,
the odds of it hitting someone who's looking to start a company
increase.

Basically, the winner will be the company that gets
things to market fast, creates a marketing and sales infrastructure,
and actually makes sales. Don't rely solely on an idea to make it all
the way. It has to be supported. If it isnt - at a minimum - it will be
stolen (at least in a market sense). You can definitely create a
world-class company on a good idea and a great infrastructure.
Visa-versa is nowhere near as easy.

And, as an aside, once the
technology progressions converge by themselves (apart from your idea) -
your idea will probably be made irrelevant (hopefully you cashed out
long before then).

5) Competition is good.

If you
don't have competition, you don't have an idea. Competition tells you
and investors that your idea isn't wacky. If you work 3 years on a
product with no challengers, maybe they know something about the day
you're going to release and try to make sales that you don't.

Don't
be afraid to chase an existing idea if you have what you consider a
sub-idea that makes a key difference. Both Altavista and Google did
search. Altavista was doing it long before Google started and probably
laughed when they heard some challenger Google was going to take them
on. I hate to say it but the concept of "stealing ideas" in business is
very hard to define. Patents tried to enforce this notion but its so
broken (although you still need them of course) that it hardly matters.

Every
idea you have is already an extension of some existing idea (Every web
2.0 idea "assumes" the internet "exists". Every "mashup" not only
assumes, but steals functionality from 2 or more existing web
services). How close your new idea is to old ideas defines how many
people will say you stole it. And there will *always* be people saying
that.

As a concrete example, I created Mailinator in July 2003.
It was first disposable email service that allowed incoming emails to
create an inbox as they arrived. There are now a half-dozen copycat
sites (some even stole my FAQ questions and license!). Does this
matter? Could I do anything about it if it did? Should I try to squash
them?

A better tactic is to simply out-market them and
introduce new features. Protecting an idea nearly impossible, working
to continually better serve your customers isn't. (And, by the way, the
idea for Mailinator wasn't mine. It was Jack's).

--

So there's 5 more. I have a feeling I have another handful brewing, stay tuned.

Top 10 High-Paying Keywords

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 08:38:00 +0000

High-Paying Keywords

CyberWyre publishes a list of the best-paying keywords determined using the Google AdWords tool.

$54.33 mesothelioma lawyers
$47.79 what is mesothelioma
$47.72 peritoneal mesothelioma
$47.25 consolidate loans
$47.16 refinancing mortgage
$45.55 tax attorney
$41.22 mesothelioma
$38.86 car accident lawyer
$38.68 ameriquest mortgage
$38.03 mortgage refinance

If you could pass on one valuable lesson to the world before you die, what would it be?

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 23:49:00 +0000

“You always have choices.” - Janine Freeman
“Goodness is all there is.” - Janice
“Spend your time with admirable, successful people.” - Loren Ekroth
“You create whatever you’re focusing on.” - Julie Donnelly
“Trust your intincts.” - Toni Reiser
“Trust your vibrations.” - Denise Marshall
“The day is going to be excruciatingly long, but the time is short.” - Victor Andrijauskas
“Communicate your life lessons through your children.” - Judith August
“Never wrestle with a pig because you both get dirty and one of you likes it.” - Judi Moreo
“You create and co-create your own life’s truth.” - Steva Giles
“When you realize what beliefs imprison you, you will find the key to your freedom.” - Ayesha Ashley
“Feelings are the lights on the dashboard of life.” - Cherie Carter-Scott
“Be realistic, plan for a miracle.” - Vicki Kallman
“After the age of 50, you will discover that your greatest trophies in life are your children.” - Rod LeGrande
“Power to change.” - Anonymous
“A lesson is repeated until learned.” - Michael Pomije
“There are no ordinary moments.” - Mark Valentine
“Travel as much as possible.” - Sandra
“Successful people give more than they receive.” - Greg Bruce
“It takes one to know one, all others must guess.” - Daniel Braisted
“Confront your fears. Overcoming them reaps rich rewards.” - Robin Jay
“Don’t fret about the weather; change the entire climate.” - Peter Pizor
“Forgive everyone and everything, including yourself.” - Scott Desgrosseilliers
“The things you own end up owning you.” - Joey Vaux
“Never buy anything you can’t sell at a garage sale.” - John Kinde
“Act as if everything you do has an impact; it does.” - Leslie Stambaugh
“Effective communication involves more than talent. It involves
trust, respect, understanding, empathy, and resolution. It is an art.”
- David Rohlander
“Happiness is a choice.” - Samuel Peery
“Live simple.” - Bill Paetzke
“Three things you can’t change: the weather, your past, and other people.” - Jim Jackson
“Focus on being of extraordinary value.” - Hector G. Diaz
“Taking even a small step toward something you really want is enormously powerful.” - Lynn Brem
“De Oppresso Liber” (free the oppressed) - Michael Lugiai

Blogging for Dollars

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 14:46:00 +0000

Blogging for Dollars

It's not just a hobby - some small sites are making big money. Here's how to turn your passion into an online empire.

(Business 2.0) -- Michael Arrington is a partying kind of guy. While showing off his home in Atherton, Calif., he boasts about how he crammed 500 people into his one-acre backyard at a bash in February. Then there are the official parties, like the one he threw in mid-August at August Capital, a nearby venture firm. Arrington posted an open invitation on his website at 3 a.m. By sunrise, all 500 spots were taken; the onslaught of traffic crashed his site. "I knew it would be fast," says Arrington, who houses so many out-of-towners in his ranch home that he often isn't sure who's crashing on which mattress on which floor in which room.

Arrington, a 36-year-old entrepreneur behind a long list of unrecognizable startups, has suddenly become one of the rising stars of Silicon Valley. Why? The answer lies in TechCrunch, Arrington's blog about new technologies and companies. In the year since he launched the site, he has amassed such a strong following that he's become a go-to person for VCs and tech execs looking to leak corporate tidbits or announce news. More than 1.5 million readers regularly check out his site. But here's what gives Arrington real distinction: He's pulling in $60,000 in ad revenue every month. That's 10 times what the site was making earlier this year, which was when Arrington, convinced of the potentially monstrous riches ahead, quit his day job as president of a startup to blog full-time.

With Internet-like speed, blogs have gone from self-indulgent hobbies to flourishing businesses. Real businesses, with real revenue streams from real advertisers--not overhyped next big things with pick-a-number valuations based on selling out someday to some overenthusiastic big-media sugar daddy. Boing Boing, a four-person operation that bills itself as a directory of wonderful things, is on track to gross an estimated $1 million in ad revenue this year. The digital-media news site PaidContent.org, headquartered in the second bedroom of a Santa Monica apartment, is set to post even more than that. And Fark.com, a site packed with sophomoric humor run by a lone guy in Lexington, Ky., is on pace to become a multimillion-dollar property. In short, some of the most popular blogs, long the bane of the mainstream media, are themselves becoming mainstream.

Complete Story

Death penalty for Saddam Hussein

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 09:36:00 +0000

Saddam Hussein to hang

Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has been convicted of crimes against humanity by a Baghdad court and sentenced to death by hanging.

He was found guilty over his role in the killing of 148 people in the mainly Shia town of Dujail in 1982.

His brother Barzan al-Tikriti was also sentenced to death, as was Iraq's former chief judge Awad Hamed al-Bander

Former vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan got life in jail and three others received 15 year prison terms.

Another co-defendant, Baath party official Mohammed Azawi Ali, was acquitted.

Saddam Hussein shouted out "Allahu Akbar!" (God is Greatest) and "Long live Iraq. Long live the Iraqi people!" after the judge announced the verdict.

Correspondents say the former leader looked visibly shocked as the sentence was passed, but the BBC's world affairs editor John Simpson said that as he was led away Saddam Hussein seemed to have a small smile on his face.

"It was as if he was thinking 'I've come here and done what I intended to do'," our correspondent said.

Top 10 dumbest internet business idea that are extremely successful

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 02:31:00 +0000

Today I came across some very stupid internet business idea that have successfully bring their owner millions of dollar

1. Million Dollar Homepage

1000000 pixels, charge a dollar per pixel – that’s perhaps the dumbest idea for online business anyone could have possible come up with. Still, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old who came up with the idea, is now a millionaire.

2. SantaMail

Ok, how’s that for a brilliant idea. Get a postal address at North Pole, Alaska, pretend you are Santa Claus and charge parents 10 bucks for every letter you send to their kids? Well, Byron Reese sent over 200000 letters since the start of the business in 2001, which makes him a couple million dollars richer.

3. Doggles

Create goggles for dogs and sell them online? Boy, this IS the dumbest idea for a business. How in the world did they manage to become millionaires and have shops all over the world with that one? Beyond me.

4. LaserMonks

LaserMonks.com is a for-profit subsidiary of the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank, an eight-monk monastery in the hills of Monroe County, 90 miles northwest of Madison. Yeah, real monks refilling your cartridges. Hallelujah! Their 2005 sales were $2.5 million! Praise the Lord.

5. AntennaBalls

You can’t sell antenna ball online. There is no way. And surely it wouldn’t make you rich. But this is exactly what Jason Wall did, and now he is now a millionaire.

6. FitDeck

Create a deck of cards featuring exercise routines, and sell it online for $18.95. Sounds like a disaster idea to me. But former Navy SEAL and fitness instructor Phil Black reported last year sales of $4.7 million. Surely beats what military pays.

7. PositivesDating.Com

How would you like to go on a date with an HIV positive person? Paul Graves and Brandon Koechlin thought that someone would, so they created a dating site for HIV positive folks last year. Projected 2006 sales are $110,000, and the two hope to have 50,000 members by their two-year mark.

8. Designer Diaper Bags

Christie Rein was tired of carrying diapers around in a freezer bag. The 34-year-old mother of three found herself constantly stuffing diapers for her infant son into freezer bags to keep them from getting scrunched up in her purse. Rein wanted something that was compact, sleek and stylish, so in November 2004, she sat down with her husband, Marcus, who helped her design a custom diaper bag that’s big enough to hold a travel pack of wipes and two to four diapers. With more than $180,000 in sales for 2005, Christie’s company, Diapees & Wipees, has bags in 22 different styles, available online and in 120 boutiques across the globe for $14.99.

9. TruGamerz

Faux-suede padded covers for game controllers and gel thumb pads for analog joysticks? No one will buy that. Forget it. The product proved to be so popular, it got picked up by Target.com and Walmart.com and annual sales new exceed half a million dollars.

10. Lucky Wishbone Co.

Fake wishbones. Now, this stupid idea is just destined to flop. Who in the world needs FAKE PLASTIC wishbones? A lot of people, it turns out. Now producing 30,000 wishbones daily (they retail for 3 bucks a pop) Ken Ahroni, the company founder, expects 2006 sales to reach $1 million.

The Top Ten Hacking Incidents Of All Time

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 14:11:00 +0000

The top 10 hacking incidents of all time — instances where some of the most seemingly secure computer networks were compromised.

Early 1990s

Kevin Mitnick, often incorrectly called by many as god of hackers, broke into the computer systems of the world's top technology and telecommunications companies Nokia, Fujitsu, Motorola, and Sun Microsystems. He was arrested by the FBI in 1995, but later released on parole in 2000. He never termed his activity hacking, instead he called it social engineering.

November 2002

Englishman Gary McKinnon was arrested in November 2002 following an accusation that he hacked into more than 90 US military computer systems in the UK. He is currently undergoing trial in a British court for a "fast-track extradition" to the US where he is a wanted man. The next hearing in the case is slated for today.

1995

Russian computer geek Vladimir Levin effected what can easily be called The Italian Job online - he was the first person to hack into a bank to extract money. Early 1995, he hacked into Citibank and robbed $10 million. Interpol arrested him in the UK in 1995, after he had transferred money to his accounts in the US, Finland, Holland, Germany and Israel.

1990

When a Los Angeles area radio station announced a contest that awarded a Porsche 944S2 for the 102nd caller, Kevin Poulsen took control of the entire city's telephone network, ensured he is the 102nd caller, and took away the Porsche beauty. He was arrested later that year and sentenced to three years in prison. He is currently a senior editor at Wired News.

1983

Kevin Poulsen again. A little-known incident when Poulsen, then just a student, hacked into Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet was hacked into. Arpanet was a global network of computers, and Poulsen took advantage of a loophole in its architecture to gain temporary control of the US-wide network.

1996

US hacker Timothy Lloyd planted six lines of malicious software code in the computer network of Omega Engineering which was a prime supplier of components for NASA and the US Navy. The code allowed a "logic bomb" to explode that deleted software running Omega's manufacturing operations. Omega lost $10 million due to the attack.

1988

Twenty-three-year-old Cornell University graduate Robert Morris unleashed the first Internet worm on to the world. Morris released 99 lines of code to the internet as an experiment, but realised that his program infected machines as it went along. Computers crashed across the US and elsewhere. He was arrested and sentenced in 1990.

1999

The Melissa virus was the first of its kind to wreak damage on a global scale. Written by David Smith (then 30), Melissa spread to more than 300 companies across the world completely destroying their computer networks. Damages reported amounted to nearly $400 million. Smith was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison.

2000

MafiaBoy, whose real identity has been kept under wraps because he is a minor, hacked into some of the largest sites in the world, including eBay, Amazon and Yahoo between February 6 and Valentine's Day in 2000. He gained access to 75 computers in 52 networks, and ordered a Denial of Service attack on them. He was arrested in 2000.

1993

They called themselves Masters of Deception, targeting US phone systems. The group hacked into the National Security Agency, AT&T, and Bank of America. It created a system that let them bypass long-distance phone call systems, and gain access to private lines.

Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 12:46:00 +0000

You cannot expect to build a first-class application unless you use the best available tools. Besides well-known tools such as Visual Studio® .NET, there are a multitude of small, lesser-known tools available from the .NET community. In this article, I'm going to introduce you to some of the best free tools available today that target .NET development. I'll walk you through a quick tutorial of how to use each of them, some of which will save you a minute here and there, while others may completely change the way that you write code. Because I am squeezing so many different tools into this single article, I will not be able to cover each of them extensively, but you should learn enough about each to decide which tools are useful for your projects.

List of Ten Must-Have Tools:

NUnit to write unit tests
NDoc to create code documentation
NAnt to build your solutions
CodeSmith to generate code
FxCop to police your code
Snippet Compiler to compile small bits of code
Two different switcher tools, the ASP.NET Version Switcher and the Visual Studio .NET Project Converter
Regulator to build regular expressions
.NET Reflector to examine assemblies

Click here for Detailed Description of each Tool

A List of Over 100 Best Firefox Extensions

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 07:24:00 +0000

Listible’s list on Firefox extension has been increased to whooping 123 extensions! This list should be a good start to find useful extensions for Firefox, or look for essential ones for beefing up your browser functions:

Web Developer Toolbar - Essential tools for any web developer. Too many to mention here.

Greasemonkey - "Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML ("user scripts") to any web page to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a web page's style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a web page's design or interaction."
Tab Mix Plus - Loads of Tab improvements. Changing the behavior of tab opening, focus, closing, mouse events on tab and much more. One of the best tab extensions around!
Adblock Plus - The development of Adblock pretty much stopped in 2004. When more and more people demanded improvements Adblock Plus was created. Adblock Plus is a completely rewritten version of the original Adblock.
del.icio.us extension -
IE Tab - IE Tab allows embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla and Firefox.
BugMeNot - This extension automatically fills in login forms from a list of username and passwords collected from bugmenot.com. With this, you can bypass registrations on websites that you would not like to be registered with will still being able to access their content.
SessionSaver - "SessionSaver restores your browser -exactly- as you left it, every startup, every time. Not even a crash will phase it. Windows, tabs, even things you were typing -- they're all saved."
Adblock - "Adblock is a content filtering plug-in for the Mozilla and Firebird browsers. It is both more robust and more precise than the built-in image blocker."
Adblock Filterset.G Updater - This extension allows you to automatically keep up to date Adblock or Adblock+ with G's latest filterset every 4-7 days. It also provides you with the ability to define your own filters that you want to persist between updates.
Download Statusbar - Download Statusbar is a browser extension that allows you to keep track of ongoing and completed downloads in a hide-away statusbar.
ScrapBook - ScrapBook is a Firefox extension, which helps you to save Web pages and easily manage collections. Key features are lightness, speed, accuracy and multi-language support. Major features are: * Save Web page * Save snippet of Web page * Save Web site (In-depth Capture) * Organize the collection in the same way as Bookmarks tree * Highlighter, Eraser and various page editing tools * Full text search and quick filtering search * Text edit feature resembling Opera's Notes
StumbleUpon - "StumbleUpon uses ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and likeâminded stumblers have liked."
DownThemAll! - The power downloader: lets you download in just one click links, images or other selections contained in a webpage.
Mouse Gestures - Allows you to execute commands by moving the mouse around.
Gmail Manager - "This is a Firefox extension that allows you to manage multiple gmail accounts and receive new mail notifications. Displays account details including unread messages, saved drafts, spam messages, labels with new mail, space used, and new mail snippets."
CustomizeGoogle - It enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam).
Fasterfox - performance and network tweaks for Firefox.
ColorZilla - Use and eyedropper tool to find the color of any point in your browser.
FlashGot - "FlashGot turns every supported download manager in a download manager for Firefox"
Forecastfox - Gives a nice weather forecast in the lower right hand corner of Firefox.
Sage - RSS and Atom feed reader extension
Gmail Notifier - A good replacement for Google's notifier, this extension adds a statusbar item showing if you have new email. You can configure the time between checks for new email.
Restart Firefox - Adds "Restart Firefox" menuitem to "File", and a toolbar button for easy restarting. Great for when you install themes or extensions and need to restart Firefox.
SuperDragAndGo - Drag a link (e.g. google ), text-link (e.g. http://www.google.com ), text-uri (e.g. abc.com ), image , or bookmark quicklink from bookmarks toolbar folder and throw it anywehere on your webpage (content area) to open it on a new tab.
Foxy Tunes - FoxyTunes is an Extension for Mozilla Firefox. It also supports the Mozilla Suite and Mozilla Thunderbird. It allows you to control your favorite media player without leaving the browser. The controls are positioned on the status bar or one of the toolbars, so no extra space is wasted.
HTML Validator - HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page.
Performancing - "Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs."
Foxylicious - Foxylicious is a Mozilla Firefox extension that syncs your del.icio.us bookmarks into your browser bookmarks.
Stop or Reload Button - Combines Stop & Reload into one button
CSSViewer - A beautifully simple CSS property viewer - hover over any element to see its properties
Tabbrowser Preferences - Advanced controlls for tabbed browsing.
All In One Sidebar (AIOS) - Manage a lot of things through the Firefox sidebar, create new toolbars, etc.
Update Notifier - Notifies you when updates are available for your extensions and themes. Easily configurable for automatically installing updates when available and checking for updates when Firefox starts.
NoScript - NoScript provides extra protection for your Mozilla/Firefox or Flock browser: this extension allows JavaScript and Java execution only for trusted domains of your choice.
SiteAdvisor - Best. Web Safety. Extension. Ever. They trolled 95% of the world's web traffic and tested e-mail registration forms with unique e-mail addresses for spam and downloads for spyware. Mindboggling - and free. =)
Aardvark - The Aardvark Firefox extension is a tool for web developers/designers providing the opportunity of viewing and editing styles (css) and content of the page elements ... Things You Can Do With Aardvark : Clean up unwanted banners and surrounding "fluff," especially prior to printing a page ... See how the page is created, block by block ... View the source code of one or more elements and more ... one of my very favorite ...
All-in-One Gestures Extension -
Paste and Go - "...lets you paste an URL from the clipboard into the address bar and load it as a single step, either via the adress bar's context menu or by pressing Ctrl-Shift-V. Similarly, you can "Paste and Search" via the search bar's context menu or Ctrl-Shift-S."
Platypus - Interactive removal of page elements through Greasemonkey.
Image Zoom - Adds zoom functionality for images. Easily zoom in, zoom out, fit image to screen or set custom zoom on individual images within a web page.
FireFTP - Full-featured, free (charityware) FTP client that runs as a Firefox extension.
FlashBlock - Flashblock is an extension for the Mozilla, Firefox, and Netscape browsers that takes a pessimistic approach to dealing with Macromedia Flash content on a webpage and blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves placeholders on the webpage that allow you to click to download and then view the Flash content.
Firebug - Enhanced console and DOM inspector for great web development.
Menu Editor - Rearrange or remove menuitems from the main context menu (right-click menu) and main menubar (File, Edit, View, etc.).
Search Engine Ordering - SEO - SEO allows you to sort and delete search engines that are in the search bar.
SpellBound development version - As you type spell check in every text fields. Supports all the dictionaries provided by mozilla.
SiteAdvisor Firefox Extension - "We test the Web to help keep you safe from spyware, spam, viruses and online scams."
LiveLines - Add RSS feeds to web-based readers, reader extensions, or desktop readers with the RSS icon on the status bar.
Mass Installer - If youâve ever had to re-install Firefox, or youâre installing Firefox for the first time on a new computer, you know it can be a pain to hunt down and install your favorite extensions. The Mass Installer extension reads a list of extension URLs from a text file and automatically installs them all in one fell swoop.
Firefox Showcase - Showcase is an extension thought to easily locate and select any open browser window in Firefox. Press F12, and it generates a page with the small thumbnails of opened webpages. (Like in IE7 :)
IE View Lite - This is a cut down version of IE View by Paul Roub, which is 47.4 KB. All the same UI and features are there. It has a right click menu item to open a page in IE and a list of sites to always open in IE. Everything's just been rebuilt from the ground up to be smaller and more efficient. Plus, it has the ability to pass extra parameters to the executable (very helpful for use with WINE), which is not included in regular IE View.
User Agent Switcher - Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.
ForecastFox Enhanced - Enhanced version of the popular Forecastfox extension. This adds 12 improved radar images and the ability to supply a URL for your own radar image. It also allows for pausing, restarting and setting the frequency of automatic updates.
Cookie Culler - CookieCuller is an extended and enhanced version of the Cookie Manager that comes with Firefox/Mozilla.
Colorful Tabs - A simple, but elegant idea: color the tabs in Firefox. Beautiful, and I love it.
LiveHTTPHeaders - View HTTP Headers on the fly. Extremely helpful for debugging web applications.
Slim Extension List - Makes items in extension list shorter, so you can see more at once. Also, sorts them by name (optionally).
Fission - Fission combines address bar and progress bar, making the progress bar more visible and allowing for a nice visual effect. This is similar to the Safari browser's progress bar.
FEBE - This is a brand new Firefox extension that allows you to create a backup of all your installed extensions and themes. The backups are created in an installable xpi format so you can easily port them to another computer.
Google Toolbar - Google Search, Autolink, Translation and SpellCheck in one toolbar.
All-in-One Gestures - This extension allows you to execute common commands using mouse gestures, rocker navigation, scroll wheel navigation and page scrolling.
AutoCopy - Select text and it's automaticaly copied to the clipboard, like Trillian or mIrc.
Autocopy - Select text on any web page and it will be automatically copied to the clipboard. It works in much the same way as does Trillian or mIrc.
Download Embedded - Download Embedded does exactly what it sounds like it does. It adds a right-click context menu entry to download all embedded files on a webpage. Its great for grabbing embedded flash animations, movies, music, etc., and a lot easier than digging through the page source or through Firefox's Page Info.
Hyperwords - Hyperwords allow you to interact with all the text on the web.
InfoLister - InfoLister is an extension for Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird and Nvu that collects various information about Firefox/Thunderbird and saves it to a file. Currently it prints the list of installed extensions, themes and plugins.
Copy Plain Text - Copies text without formatting.
Copy URL+ - The Copy URL+ extension enables you to copy to the clipboard the current document's address along with additional information such as the document's title, the current selection or both. It allows you to add your own custom menu entries.
Chatsum - Chat with other Chatsum users that are looking at the same website as you. Includes cool stats, profile pages, and a web2.0 chat interface.
Mouseless Browsing - GREAT extension to browse with the keyboard *only* - I can't imagine living without it anymore :) Screenshot and additional explanation on http://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.php?topic=3179.0
Foxlingo - Foxlingo translates websites with their current interface; many languages supported.
SwitchProxy Tool - "SwitchProxy lets you manage and switch between multiple proxy configurations quickly and easily. You can also use it as an anonymizer to protect your computer from prying eyes."
Session Manager - Session Manager saves and restores the state of all windows.
Reveal - Reveal creates thumbnails of your tabbed pages, allowing you to select, reorder, or even sort through pages in the session history. After youâve installed Reveal and restarted your browser, it takes you through a nice step-by-step tutorial on how to use it. This is the coolest new Firefox extension Iâve seen in a while (cool as in 50% fun, 50% useful), and definitely worth a look.
Sort Extensions and Themes -
Gmail File Space - his extension allows you to use your Gmail Space (2 GB) for file storage. It acts as a remote machine. You can transfer files between your hard drive and gmail. This is similar to "Gmail Drive" on windows platform. Your gmail account looks like a FTP host and you can upload and download your files.
Deepest Sender - Deepest Sender is a blogging client for Firefox. What does this mean? Well, it means that instead of having to go to the Update page on LiveJournal/WordPress/Blogger/whatever, or loading up a separate client program, all you have to do is hit Ctrl+\, or click the button in your toolbar, and you can start posting.
Cacheout! - Especially for Digg.com and Slashdot.com users, how many times are you unable to access a particular article because the remote server has been slammed by the Digg/Slashdot Effect? Cacheout! lets you try to access articles through Google's caching service and CoralCDN.org. More being added all the time! Load up webpages using Google's caching service and CoralCDN.org.
Add Bookmark Here - Allows you to add bookmarks to any folder in the bookmarks menu like in Opera.
Yoono - Yoono's Firefox toolbar automatically suggests similar sites to the current one based on other people's bookmark folder structure. It additionally allows you to sync your bookmarks with a server and share them across multiple computers.
XBMC Fox - This adds a new option to the right click menu in Firefox which will send URL'S to Xbox Media Center for onscreen playback.
userstyles.org - A collection of styles that puts you in control of the appearance of websites and of Mozilla applications.
Cache Status - Easy cache status & management from status bar.
BetterSearch - Enhances Google, MSN Search, Yahoo Search, A9, Answers.com, AllTheWeb, del.icio.us and Simpy.com by adding previews (thumbnails) and Amazon product images and info, a quick preview feature as well as "Open in New Window", "Site Info" and "Wayback Machine" links to the search results
Tab X - Adds a close button to each of the browser tabs, and removes the close button at the end of the tab bar.
1-Click Answers - Hold down Alt and click on any word to get quick definitions and facts. (reliable facts and definitions from over 100 dictionaries, encyclopedias and almanacs)
MenuX - "MenuX was designed for laptop/tablet use where maximum screen realestate is desired. Adds the ability to collapse any toolbar. Adds a library of toolbar buttons." A real time-saver and really useful for 1-click access to options, sidebars, extensions, etc.
deskCut - This extension adds desktop shortcut creation to the context-menu. Both Windows and Linux (KDE/GNOME) desktop shortcuts are supported.
Cookie Button - Another approach to controlling cookies by site permissions. Currently has many user ratings of 5 out of 5.
Foxmarks - Synchronizes bookmarks across multiple machines.
Roll Your Own FireFox Search Engine - Create custom search engines for your Firefox Search Bar.
trovando - With trovando you only need enter keywords once, to access and compare results from 250+ search engines across 10 categories (Web, Images, Reference, Tag, News, Price, Blogs, AudioVideo, Torrent, URL).
Smiley Xtra - Lets you insert smilies from a huge online database into forum posts and blogs.
Firefox Showcase - This is a great extension, list it up!:-)
SEOpen - Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimization. Including google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more.
X-RAY - This one will show you the html TAGS while you're watching the site itself. COOL idea and it's still getting developed for further usage.
Context Search - Context Search transforms the "Web Search for..." context item into a menu containing your Mycroft search plugins. This is very convenient, since it allows you to decide which search engine you use. Firefox's default is to use the currently selected search plugin only.
Bookmarks Synchronizer - sync your firefox bookmarks between multiple computers using ftp/webdav...the most useful extension i've ever used!
a Better delicious - This extension to post and manage del.icio.us bookmarks is far better than the one they provide.
Slogger - Slogger is an Extension for Mozilla Firefox web browser. It is a very flexible tool for creating a complete log of your browsing history (thus the name: Slogger <=> "browse logger").
SearchPluginHacks - adds a context menu to the search plugins drop-down list, which allows quickly deleting unneeded plugins.
Peekko Chat - An IRC Client links with visiting web page. "Peekko Chat is a new Firefox extension that makes every web page a place where people can congregate."
Answers.com for Firefox - Click on any word on your screen and get instant, accurate facts and definitions. I urge you to try it!
Stealther - Temporarily disable history and cache.
SearchStatus - View PageRank and AlexaRank in the status bar as you browse. Also has many shortcuts for search engine checks.
Feed Your Reader - Feed Your Reader allows you to use the RSS Autodiscovery in firefox to launch external aggregators, such as Nick Bradbury's FeedDemon or web based aggregators such as Feed Lounge. By default, FYR uses the feed:// protocol allowing a wide range of aggregators to be supported. However, FYR can be also be configured to support various web based aggregators and desktop applications which do not support feed://. FYR replaces the functionality of the built-in RSS icon, if you wish to add a live bookmark, hold down the shift key when you select your feed.
View Cookies - It adds a tab to the Page Info dialog box, which shows the cookies of the current webpage. This is interesing for developers, privacy-concious users and others.
Get jetable mail - Get a time limited mail alias to avoid spam, via context menu. Works great
ViewSourceWith - View page source with external applications, you can also open images using GIMP or ACDSee or open PDF link using Acrobat Reader.
refspoof - A simple toolbar that allows to load a page with a different referer.
Chickenfoot - automated web browsing tool. Web agent within firefox.
Adsense Notifier - "Displays your Adsense earnings on the statusbar."
EasyGesture - **easyGestures** is a free software made for the Mozilla Firefox browser. It is **a pie menu** that pops up inside the browser when you click the mouse and then let you perform various actions at the tip of the mouse pointer with minimum mouse movement.
POTO Sidebar - The original Opera-like sidebar. Not cluttered like the derived All-in-One Sidebar.
Unwrap Text - 1) Unwraps a multi-line URL and opens it in a new tab. 2) Unwraps a multi-line street address and opens it in Google maps.
Permit Cookies - Manage cookies permissions site by site.
FxIF (Firefox exIF) - FxIF (Firefox exIF) allows you to view the EXIF data contained in JPEG images from the convenience of your Firefox browser.
Clusty Toolbar -
Color Contrast Analyser - Determining the colour contrast between foreground and background colours is a time consuming task, but is greatly aided by colour contrast analysers. This Firefox extension reveals the colour contrast of all elements in the DOM. If you evaluate websites for colour contrast, this extension will be useful for saving you time, and also take out the guesswork required to determine which colours to test ...
OpenDownload - This extension allows you to open ANY file (executables, etc.) from the internet into the default program assigned by your operating system, without needing to save it first. This is similar to IEs 'Run' function for executables.
Nuke Anything Enhanced - Allows you to remove anything from any website.
Informenter - Easily fill forms with information you often use.
FootieFox - Soccer scores for today's matches of many European leagues - live and almost instantly.
Habari Xenu - An integrated XUL reader for feed (RSS/Atom)
FlickrFox - Browsing Flickr Images in the sidebar.
Grocery List Generator - "The GLG (Grocery List Generator) is a helpful little tool to store your recipe-ingredients and other groceries you need regularly. It creates a well-organized grocery list to help make your grocery shopping as easy as possible."

Best Web 2.0 Web Sites

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:03:00 +0000

Social Bookmarking Sites

Social Communities

Start Pages

To Do Lists

People News Production

News Sites

Image Storing and Sharing

File Storage

Video Storage

Blog Filters

Word Processing

Calanders

Classified & Business Directories

Online Dating

Quotes

Quotiki

Financials

Project Management and Team Colaboration

Content Filtering

Mash-Ups

Aggregators

Web Site Analytics

E-Mail and Communication

Mapping

Parts

World Improvement

Business Software

Command Line

Validator

Web 2.0 Validator

Jobs and Work

Voices

Wiki

Shopping

Search

Trusted Search

Real Estate

Music

Travel

Events

Education / School Life

How a Firefox extension can kill online advertising

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 21:30:00 +0000

The launch of Firefox 2.0 has generated lots of attention. The browser is a “must have” for every geek and is now aiming towards more of a mass-market position. Some even talk about a new browser war between Firefox and Microsoft.

If you or someone you know is considering using Firefox show them the Adblock functionality. You probably have heard of pop-up ad blockers, but this one blocks all the ads IN the page. The technology is probably not new, but I was impressed with how well it works. Check out these screenshots of Adblock taking out 4 ad areas:

As an Internet user I am extremely happy with this extension, as it helps me surf faster with less distractions (you can download Adblock here).

Still, as a media consumer and professional, I can’t help but worry about the implications of technology that can block ads and thus revenue streams for content publishers. The same way I TiVo through TV ads, I can now skip online ads altogether…

Seemingly Stupid Apple Moves That Were Actually Brilliant

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 18:05:00 +0000

At the time Apple announced all of the following, the Mac faithful gasped, asked if hell had frozen over, or wondered what reality Steve Jobs was distorting. But in retrospect, all of these seemingly stupid Apple moves were actually brilliant.

iMac

iMacI remember when the iMac came out, many thought Apple was washed up, and it was too little, too late. Computer experts mocked its translucent candy color, lack of power, expandability, and absent floppy drive. Beige was so much more practical and powerful. And what was with the lowercase “i”? Was Steve Jobs on iCrack?

But in retrospect it was an awesome move. People loved the retro all-in-one idea, snapping up nearly a million units. Suddenly the PC world wanted to get rid of floppies, work in colored plastic, and add USB. Lastly, with the iMac’s success, Apple was back in black and could start innovating again.

The Lisa

LisaThe Lisa was a cool computer but way too expensive at $9,995. John Sculley thought the high price was necessary in order to recoup Apple’s investment in the project’s development. Sales fell off quickly and eventually Lisa computers were buried as landfill.

But it set the stage for the Macintosh in 1984, and the Lisa sticker-shock made the original Macintosh look like a relative bargain. At the time it had to be proven that a GUI and a mouse was the future of computing (both ideas inspired by Xerox PARC and the Alto workstation), and the Lisa helped pave the path for the Mac.

Sacking Steve Jobs

Jobs and SculleyFiring a founder is always going to look stupid. But if Steve Jobs hadn’t been canned from Apple by the soda-water guy, there would be no NeXT and therefore no OS X.

The humbling experience of being fired made Steve Jobs question his values and what he really wanted to do with his passion for technology. It likely inspired him to try that much harder the NeXT time.

If Steve Jobs had remained with Apple through the nineties, it’s quite possible Jobs would have joined Apple on a slow slide into confusion and oblivion and now be a subsidiary of HP.

Buying NeXT

NeXTIn the mid nineties, Gil Amelio was desperate to save Apple and needed a next-generation operating system. Apple nearly purchased Be and its BeOS, which already ran on PowerPC chips. But instead Apple chose NeXT, with the Unix-based NeXTSTEP and the bonus prize of Steve Jobs.

At the time, many thought Be was a better fit. People worried that Steve would be impossible to work with. Many doubted Apple had the resources to get NeXTSTEP working on PowerPC based Macs. And probably the most idiotic part was that Amelio had just hired himself out of a job.

Needless to say, after a few nearly disastrous “public betas” and the wishy-washy title of “iCEO” the NeXT purchase turned out to be a brilliant move. OS X is now considered a step ahead of Microsoft’s Vista. Steve Jobs has proved to be a master promoter and his insane demands for quality raises the bar on everything Apple touches.

Killing the clones

CloneIt was once assumed one reason for Apple’s troubles was their unwillingness to open up their hardware to other manufacturers as with the PC. So during the mid nineties, Apple allowed other companies like Motorola, UMax, and PowerComputing to make Macintosh clones.

When Steve Jobs returned, he killed the whole deal, saying the clone companies were canniballizing Apple’s sales. A lot of people were pissed because for a while, they were able to buy powerful, fast hardware at a cheaper price than Apple could develop. But this vision of cheap boxes didn’t fit with Steve’s plans for Apple.

In retrospect, killing the clones was the only way for Apple to survive in the short term. And luckilly, they went on to make awesome, beautiful, quality hardware. Today, people pay a premium for Apple’s great design.

Working with Microsoft

GatesWhen Bill Gates’ huge visage towered over Steve Jobs at a keynote, many thought Apple had made a pact with the devil. Microsoft was the enemy. Taking money from Bill Gates… nothing good could come of it.

But this great move bought Apple time to get back on its feet. Gates thought he would win either way, because the more Macs sold meant more software sales, plus Internet Explorer would come on every Mac and help Gates beat Netscape, which at the time, he probably thought was a more dangerous adversary. Who would have thought Apple would come back so strong?

iPod and the iTunes Store

iPodWhen Apple’s iPod came out, I first thought it was interesting but no big deal. Apple hadn’t proved it could manage a consumer electronics product - their strength was still in computers.

When Apple began selling music online via the iTunes Music Store, many doubted it would ever fly. People already had too much pirated music. Nobody would pay for compressed sound files. Everybody hated DRM. But Apple had worked really hard on making it the purchasing process easy.

The same doubters floated the same theories with television shows, and are now repeating the same arguments against downloading movies. But in the long run, all these moves will likely be right on the money. There has to be some money to be made selling content for 60 million iPods.

The Cube

CubeThe Cube was considered a masterpiece of design but it didn’t sell well. It was priced in a strange place, more expensive than an iMac but cheaper than a PowerMac, lending people to wonder why not pay less and get an iMac with a monitor built in, or pony up a bit more and get a PowerMac with expansion options. Sales sucked and the Cube was toast.

But consider how the knowledge of building a compact computer influenced all of Apple’s subsequent projects. The flat panel iMac, the PowerBook, and eventually the Mac Mini. Lastly, if you stack two Mac Minis it’s basically the shape of a Cube.

Note: What’s with Steve Jobs and cubes? The NeXT logo, the NeXT black cube computer, and a huge glass cube sitting outside Apple’s Manhattan store. Only the Borg has more cube love.

iPod Shuffle

iPod ShuffleWho wanted an iPod with no screen and only enough storage space for a few CDs? The answer: tons of people who didn’t want to pay more than $100 for an an iPod.

The shuffle feature was also initially looked down upon as more of a limitation with marketing spin. Maybe so, but my first iPod was a Shuffle and I feel the compact size made up for any feature limitations. Second, without a screen, I didn’t worry about scratching it. Eventualy, when I wanted more features, I upgraded to an “actual” iPod. So in the most cynical sense, Apple got an extra $100 out of me because I bought a Shuffle. Brilliant!

Moving to Intel

IntelIn 2005, the move to Intel created more questions than answers. What if people bought Mac hardware and ran Windows on it? What if people bought Dell computers and ran OS X on them?

But new possibilities for Apple soon became evident: Boot Camp, not waiting for Motorola to come up with a G6, more appeal for potential switchers, or being able to ditch hardware in the ultimate exit strategy.

In fact, the stupider move was probably way back in the early 90s when Apple moved to the PowerPC chip. An Apple move to Intel back then would have saved Apple years of development time, and a lot of stress waiting for Motorola to deliver.

In conclusion, I hope this post demonstrates that through, luck, serendipity, or business genius, sometimes stupid is smart. After all, according to Steve Jobs, you can only connect the dots in hindsight.

Ten Geek Business Myths Span

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 18:51:00 +0000

1. A brilliant idea will make you rich.
2. If you build it they will come.
3. Someone will steal your idea if you don't protect it.
4. What you think matters.
5. Financial models are bogus.
6. What you know matters more than who you know.
7. A Ph.D. means something.
8. I need $5 million to start my business.
9. The idea is the most important part of my business plan.
10. Having no competition is a good thing.

Top ten geek business myths

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 18:43:00 +0000

Top ten geek business myths
Since I've started my new career as a venture capitalist I have become keenly aware of some of the classic mistakes that geeks make when trying to raise money for a new business. Instead of writing the same comments over and over again I thought I'd try to summarize some of the mistakes that people -- especially smart people -- make when they decide to try to turn their bright ideas into money. Here then is my top-ten list of geek business myths:

Myth #1: A brilliant idea will make you rich.

Reality: A brilliant idea is neither necessary nor sufficient for a successful business, although all else being equal it can't hurt. Microsoft is probably the canonical example of a successful business, and it has never had a single brilliant idea in its entire history. (To the contrary, Microsoft has achieved success largely by seeking out and destroying other people's brilliant ideas.) Google was based on a couple of brilliant ideas (Page rank, text-only ads, massive parallel implementation on cheap hardware) but none of those ideas were original with Larry or Sergey. This is not to say that Larry, Sergey and Bill are not bright guys -- all three of them are sharper than I can ever hope to be. But the idea that any of them woke up one day with an inspiration and coasted the rest of the way to riches is a myth.

Myth #2: If you build it they will come.

There is a grain of truth to this myth. There have been examples of businesses that just built a product, cast it upon the ether(net), and achieved success. (Google is the canonical example.) But for every Google there are ten examples of companies that had killer products that didn't sell for one reason or another. My favorite example of this is the first company I tried to start back in 1993. It was called FlowNet, and it was a new design for a high speed local area network. It ran at 500Mb/s in a time when 10 Mb/s ethernet was the norm. For more than five years, FlowNet had the best price/performance ratio of any available network. On top of that, FlowNet had built-in quality-of-service guarantees for streaming video. If FlowNet had taken over the world your streaming video would be working a lot better today than it does.

But despite the fact that on a technical level FlowNet blew everything else out of the water it was an abysmal failure as a business. We never sold a single unit. The full story of why FlowNet failed would take me far afield, but if I had to sum it up in a nutshell the reason it didn't sell was very simple: it wasn't Ethernet. And if we'd done our homework and market research we could have known that this would be, if not a show-stopper at least a significant obstacle. And we would have known it before we spent tens of thousands of dollars of our own money on patent attorneys and prototypes.

Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don't protect it.

Reality: No one gives a damn about your idea until you actually succeed and by then it's too late. Even on the off chance that you do manage to stumble across someone who is as excited about your idea as you are, if they have any brains they will join you rather than try to beat you. (And if they don't have any brains then it doesn't matter what they do.)

Patent protection does serve one useful purpose: it can make investors feel warm and fuzzy, especially naive investors. But I strongly recommend that you do your own patent filings. It's not hard to do once you learn how (get the Nolo Press book "Patent it Yourself"). You'll do a better job than most patent attorneys and save yourself a lot of money.

Myth #4: What you think matters.

Reality: It matters not one whit that you and all your buddies think that your idea is the greatest thing since sliced pizza (unless, of course, your buddies are rich enough to be the customer base for your business). What matters is what your customers think. It is natural to assume that if you and your buddies think your idea is cool that millions of other people out there will think it's cool too, and sometimes it works out that way, but usually not. The reason is that if you are smart enough to have a brilliant idea then you (and most likely your buddies) are different from everyone else. I don't mean to sound condescending here, but the sad fact of the matter is that compared to you, most people are pretty dumb (look at how many people vote Republican ;-) and they care about dumb things. (I just heard about a new clothing store in Pasadena that has lines around the block. A clothing store!) If you cater only to people who care about the things that you care about then your customer base will be pretty small.

Myth #5: Financial models are bogus.

As with myth #2 there is a grain of truth here. As Carl Sagan was fond of saying, prophecy is a lost art. There is no way to know for sure how much money your business is going to make, or how much it will cost to get to market. The reason for doing financial models is to do a reality check and convince yourself that making a return on investment is even a plausible possibility. If you run the numbers and find out that in order to reach break-even you need a customer base that is ten times larger than the currently known market for your product then you should probably rethink things. As Dwight Eisenhower said: plans are useless, but planning is indispensible.

This myth is the basis for one of the most classic mistakes that geeks make when pitching their ideas. They will say things like "Even if we only capture 1% of the market we'll make big bucks." Statements like that are a dead giveaway that you haven't done your homework to find out what your customers actually want. You may as well say: there's a good chance that only 1 customer in 100 will buy our product (and frankly, we're not even sure about that). Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Myth #6: What you know matters more than who you know.

Reality: You've been in denial about this your whole life. You were either brought up to believe that being smart mattered, or you just didn't believe your mother when she told you that getting along with the other kids was more important than getting straight A's.

The truth is, who you know matters more than what you know. This is not to say that being smart and knowledgable is useless. Knowing "what" is often an effective means of getting introduced to the right "whos". But ultimately, the people you know and trust (and more importantly who trust you) matter more than the factual knowledge you may have at your immediate disposal. And there is a sound reason for this: business decisions are horrifically complicated. No one person can possibly amass all the knowledge and experience required to make a broad range of such decisions on their own, so effective business people delegate much of their decision-making to other people. And when they choose who to delegate to, their first pick is always people they know and trust.

Ironically, C programmers understand this much better than Lisp programmers. One of the ironies of the programming world is that using Lisp is vastly more productive than using pretty much any other programming language, but successful businesses based on Lisp are quite rare. The reason for this, I think, is that Lisp allows you to be so productive that a single person can get things done without having to work together with anyone else, and so Lisp programmers never develop the social skills needed to work effectively as a member of a team. A C programmer, by contrast, can't do anything useful except as a member of a team. So although programming in C hobbles you in some ways, it forces you to form groups whose net effectiveness is greater than the sum of their parts, and who collectively can stomp on all the individual Lisp programmers out there, even though one-on-one a Lisper can run rings around a C programmer.

Myth #7: A Ph.D. means something.

Reality: The only thing a Ph.D. means is that you're not a moron, and you're willing to put up with the bullshit it takes to slog your way through a Ph.D. program somewhere. Empirically, having a Ph.D. is negatively correlated with business success. This is because the reward structure in academia is almost the exact opposite of what it is in business. In academia, what your peers think matters. In business, it's what your customers think that matters, and your customers are (almost certainly) not your peers.

[UPDATE: this is not to say that getting a Ph.D. is useless. You can learn a lot of useful stuff by getting a Ph.D. But it's the knowledge and experience that you gain by going through the process that is potentially valuable (for business endeavors), not the degree itself.]

Myth #8: I need $5 million to start my business

Reality: Unless you're building hardware (in which case you should definitely rethink what you're doing) you most likely don't need any startup capital at all. Paul Graham has written extensively about this so I won't belabor it too much, except to say this: you don't need much startup capital, but what you do need is a willingness to work your buns off. You have to bring your brilliant idea to fruition yourself; no one else will do it for you, and no one will give you the money to hire someone to do it for you. The reason is very simple: if you don't believe in the commercial potential of your idea enough to give up your evenings and weekends to own a bigger chunk of it, why should anyone else believe in it enough to put their hard-earned money at risk?

Myth #9: The idea is the most important part of my business plan.

Reality: The idea is very nearly irrelevant. What matters is 1) who are your customers? 2) Why will they buy what you're selling? (Note that the reason for this could very well be something like, "Because I'm famous and I have a huge fan base and they will buy sacks of stale dog shit if it has my name on it." But in your case it will more likely be, "Because we have a great product that blows the competition out of the water.") 3) Who is on your team? and 4) What are the risks?

Myth #10: Having no competition is a good thing.

Reality: If you have no competition the most likely reason for that is that there's no money to be made. There are six billion people on this planet, and it's very unlikely that every last of them will have left a lucrative market niche completely unexploited.

The good news is that it is very likely that your competition sucks. The vast majority of businesses are not run very well. They make shoddy products. They treat their customers and their employees like shit. It's not hard to find market opportunities where you can go in and kick the competition's ass. You don't want no competition, what you want is bad competition. And there's plenty of that out there.

Special bonus myth (free with your paid subscription): After the IPO I'll be happy.

If you don't enjoy the process of starting a business then you will probably not succeed. It's just too much work, and it will suck you dry if you're not having fun doing it. Even if you get filthy stinking rich you will just have more time to look back across the years you wasted being miserable and nursing your acid reflux. The charm of expensive cars and whatnot wears off quickly. There's only one kind of happiness that money can buy, and that is the opportunity to be on the other side of the table when some bright kid comes along with a brilliant idea for a business.

All these myths can be neatly summarized in a pithy slogan: it's the customer, stupid. Success in business is not about having a brilliant idea. Bright ideas are a dime a dozen. Business is about taking a bright idea and assembling a team that can turn that idea into a product and bring that product to customers who want to buy it. It's that simple. And that complicated.

Good luck.

HACKERS AND PAINTERS

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 17:02:00 +0000

May 2003

(This essay is derived from a guest lecture at Harvard, which incorporated an earlier talk at Northeastern.)

When I finished grad school in computer science I went to art school to study painting. A lot of people seemed surprised that someone interested in computers would also be interested in painting. They seemed to think that hacking and painting were very different kinds of work-- that hacking was cold, precise, and methodical, and that painting was the frenzied expression of some primal urge.

Both of these images are wrong. Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.

What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things. They're not doing research per se, though if in the course of trying to make good things they discover some new technique, so much the better.

I've never liked the term "computer science." The main reason I don't like it is that there's no such thing. Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia. At one end you have people who are really mathematicians, but call what they're doing computer science so they can get DARPA grants. In the middle you have people working on something like the natural history of computers-- studying the behavior of algorithms for routing data through networks, for example. And then at the other extreme you have the hackers, who are trying to write interesting software, and for whom computers are just a medium of expression, as concrete is for architects or paint for painters. It's as if mathematicians, physicists, and architects all had to be in the same department.

Sometimes what the hackers do is called "software engineering," but this term is just as misleading. Good software designers are no more engineers than architects are. The border between architecture and engineering is not sharply defined, but it's there. It falls between what and how: architects decide what to do, and engineers figure out how to do it.

What and how should not be kept too separate. You're asking for trouble if you try to decide what to do without understanding how to do it. But hacking can certainly be more than just deciding how to implement some spec. At its best, it's creating the spec-- though it turns out the best way to do that is to implement it.

Perhaps one day "computer science" will, like Yugoslavia, get broken up into its component parts. That might be a good thing. Especially if it meant independence for my native land, hacking.

Bundling all these different types of work together in one department may be convenient administratively, but it's confusing intellectually. That's the other reason I don't like the name "computer science." Arguably the people in the middle are doing something like an experimental science. But the people at either end, the hackers and the mathematicians, are not actually doing science.

The mathematicians don't seem bothered by this. They happily set to work proving theorems like the other mathematicians over in the math department, and probably soon stop noticing that the building they work in says ``computer science'' on the outside. But for the hackers this label is a problem. If what they're doing is called science, it makes them feel they ought to be acting scientific. So instead of doing what they really want to do, which is to design beautiful software, hackers in universities and research labs feel they ought to be writing research papers.

In the best case, the papers are just a formality. Hackers write cool software, and then write a paper about it, and the paper becomes a proxy for the achievement represented by the software. But often this mismatch causes problems. It's easy to drift away from building beautiful things toward building ugly things that make more suitable subjects for research papers.

Unfortunately, beautiful things don't always make the best subjects for papers. Number one, research must be original-- and as anyone who has written a PhD dissertation knows, the way to be sure that you're exploring virgin territory is to to stake out a piece of ground that no one wants. Number two, research must be substantial-- and awkward systems yield meatier papers, because you can write about the obstacles you have to overcome in order to get things done. Nothing yields meaty problems like starting with the wrong assumptions. Most of AI is an example of this rule; if you assume that knowledge can be represented as a list of predicate logic expressions whose arguments represent abstract concepts, you'll have a lot of papers to write about how to make this work. As Ricky Ricardo used to say, "Lucy, you got a lot of explaining to do."

The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.

So why do universities and research labs continue to judge hackers by publications? For the same reason that "scholastic aptitude" gets measured by simple-minded standardized tests, or the productivity of programmers gets measured in lines of code. These tests are easy to apply, and there is nothing so tempting as an easy test that kind of works.

Measuring what hackers are actually trying to do, designing beautiful software, would be much more difficult. You need a good sense of design to judge good design. And there is no correlation, except possibly a negative one, between people's ability to recognize good design and their confidence that they can.

The only external test is time. Over time, beautiful things tend to thrive, and ugly things tend to get discarded. Unfortunately, the amounts of time involved can be longer than human lifetimes. Samuel Johnson said it took a hundred years for a writer's reputation to converge. You have to wait for the writer's influential friends to die, and then for all their followers to die.

I think hackers just have to resign themselves to having a large random component in their reputations. In this they are no different from other makers. In fact, they're lucky by comparison. The influence of fashion is not nearly so great in hacking as it is in painting.

There are worse things than having people misunderstand your work. A worse danger is that you will yourself misunderstand your work. Related fields are where you go looking for ideas. If you find yourself in the computer science department, there is a natural temptation to believe, for example, that hacking is the applied version of what theoretical computer science is the theory of. All the time I was in graduate school I had an uncomfortable feeling in the back of my mind that I ought to know more theory, and that it was very remiss of me to have forgotten all that stuff within three weeks of the final exam.

Now I realize I was mistaken. Hackers need to understand the theory of computation about as much as painters need to understand paint chemistry. You need to know how to calculate time and space complexity and about Turing completeness. You might also want to remember at least the concept of a state machine, in case you have to write a parser or a regular expression library. Painters in fact have to remember a good deal more about paint chemistry than that.

I've found that the best sources of ideas are not the other fields that have the word "computer" in their names, but the other fields inhabited by makers. Painting has been a much richer source of ideas than the theory of computation.

For example, I was taught in college that one ought to figure out a program completely on paper before even going near a computer. I found that I did not program this way. I found that I liked to program sitting in front of a computer, not a piece of paper. Worse still, instead of patiently writing out a complete program and assuring myself it was correct, I tended to just spew out code that was hopelessly broken, and gradually beat it into shape. Debugging, I was taught, was a kind of final pass where you caught typos and oversights. The way I worked, it seemed like programming consisted of debugging.

For a long time I felt bad about this, just as I once felt bad that I didn't hold my pencil the way they taught me to in elementary school. If I had only looked over at the other makers, the painters or the architects, I would have realized that there was a name for what I was doing: sketching. As far as I can tell, the way they taught me to program in college was all wrong. You should figure out programs as you're writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.

Realizing this has real implications for software design. It means that a programming language should, above all, be malleable. A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen. Static typing would be a fine idea if people actually did write programs the way they taught me to in college. But that's not how any of the hackers I know write programs. We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.

While we're on the subject of static typing, identifying with the makers will save us from another problem that afflicts the sciences: math envy. Everyone in the sciences secretly believes that mathematicians are smarter than they are. I think mathematicians also believe this. At any rate, the result is that scientists tend to make their work look as mathematical as possible. In a field like physics this probably doesn't do much harm, but the further you get from the natural sciences, the more of a problem it becomes.

A page of formulas just looks so impressive. (Tip: for extra impressiveness, use Greek variables.) And so there is a great temptation to work on problems you can treat formally, rather than problems that are, say, important.

If hackers identified with other makers, like writers and painters, they wouldn't feel tempted to do this. Writers and painters don't suffer from math envy. They feel as if they're doing something completely unrelated. So are hackers, I think.

If universities and research labs keep hackers from doing the kind of work they want to do, perhaps the place for them is in companies. Unfortunately, most companies won't let hackers do what they want either. Universities and research labs force hackers to be scientists, and companies force them to be engineers.

I only discovered this myself quite recently. When Yahoo bought Viaweb, they asked me what I wanted to do. I had never liked the business side very much, and said that I just wanted to hack. When I got to Yahoo, I found that what hacking meant to them was implementing software, not designing it. Programmers were seen as technicians who translated the visions (if that is the word) of product managers into code.

This seems to be the default plan in big companies. They do it because it decreases the standard deviation of the outcome. Only a small percentage of hackers can actually design software, and it's hard for the people running a company to pick these out. So instead of entrusting the future of the software to one brilliant hacker, most companies set things up so that it is designed by committee, and the hackers merely implement the design.

If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.

So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they'll never be able to keep up with you. These opportunities are not easy to find, though. It's hard to engage a big company in a design war, just as it's hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand to hand combat. It would be pretty easy to write a better word processor than Microsoft Word, for example, but Microsoft, within the castle of their operating system monopoly, probably wouldn't even notice if you did.

The place to fight design wars is in new markets, where no one has yet managed to establish any fortifications. That's where you can win big by taking the bold approach to design, and having the same people both design and implement the product. Microsoft themselves did this at the start. So did Apple. And Hewlett-Packard. I suspect almost every successful startup has.

So one way to build great software is to start your own startup. There are two problems with this, though. One is that in a startup you have to do so much besides write software. At Viaweb I considered myself lucky if I got to hack a quarter of the time. And the things I had to do the other three quarters of the time ranged from tedious to terrifying. I have a benchmark for this, because I once had to leave a board meeting to have some cavities filled. I remember sitting back in the dentist's chair, waiting for the drill, and feeling like I was on vacation.

The other problem with startups is that there is not much overlap between the kind of software that makes money and the kind that's interesting to write. Programming languages are interesting to write, and Microsoft's first product was one, in fact, but no one will pay for programming languages now. If you want to make money, you tend to be forced to work on problems that are too nasty for anyone to solve for free.

All makers face this problem. Prices are determined by supply and demand, and there is just not as much demand for things that are fun to work on as there is for things that solve the mundane problems of individual customers. Acting in off-Broadway plays just doesn't pay as well as wearing a gorilla suit in someone's booth at a trade show. Writing novels doesn't pay as well as writing ad copy for garbage disposals. And hacking programming languages doesn't pay as well as figuring out how to connect some company's legacy database to their Web server.

I think the answer to this problem, in the case of software, is a concept known to nearly all makers: the day job. This phrase began with musicians, who perform at night. More generally, it means that you have one kind of work you do for money, and another for love.

Nearly all makers have day jobs early in their careers. Painters and writers notoriously do. If you're lucky you can get a day job that's closely related to your real work. Musicians often seem to work in record stores. A hacker working on some programming language or operating system might likewise be able to get a day job using it. [1]

When I say that the answer is for hackers to have day jobs, and work on beautiful software on the side, I'm not proposing this as a new idea. This is what open-source hacking is all about. What I'm saying is that open-source is probably the right model, because it has been independently confirmed by all the other makers.

It seems surprising to me that any employer would be reluctant to let hackers work on open-source projects. At Viaweb, we would have been reluctant to hire anyone who didn't. When we interviewed programmers, the main thing we cared about was what kind of software they wrote in their spare time. You can't do anything really well unless you love it, and if you love to hack you'll inevitably be working on projects of your own. [2]

Because hackers are makers rather than scientists, the right place to look for metaphors is not in the sciences, but among other kinds of makers. What else can painting teach us about hacking?

One thing we can learn, or at least confirm, from the example of painting is how to learn to hack. You learn to paint mostly by doing it. Ditto for hacking. Most hackers don't learn to hack by taking college courses in programming. They learn to hack by writing programs of their own at age thirteen. Even in college classes, you learn to hack mostly by hacking. [3]

Because painters leave a trail of work behind them, you can watch them learn by doing. If you look at the work of a painter in chronological order, you'll find that each painting builds on things that have been learned in previous ones. When there's something in a painting that works very well, you can usually find version 1 of it in a smaller form in some earlier painting.

I think most makers work this way. Writers and architects seem to as well. Maybe it would be good for hackers to act more like painters, and regularly start over from scratch, instead of continuing to work for years on one project, and trying to incorporate all their later ideas as revisions.

The fact that hackers learn to hack by doing it is another sign of how different hacking is from the sciences. Scientists don't learn science by doing it, but by doing labs and problem sets. Scientists start out doing work that's perfect, in the sense that they're just trying to reproduce work someone else has already done for them. Eventually, they get to the point where they can do original work. Whereas hackers, from the start, are doing original work; it's just very bad. So hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original.

The other way makers learn is from examples. For a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques. For hundreds of years it has been part of the traditional education of painters to copy the works of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made.

Writers do this too. Benjamin Franklin learned to write by summarizing the points in the essays of Addison and Steele and then trying to reproduce them. Raymond Chandler did the same thing with detective stories.

Hackers, likewise, can learn to program by looking at good programs-- not just at what they do, but the source code too. One of the less publicized benefits of the open-source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program. When I learned to program, we had to rely mostly on examples in books. The one big chunk of code available then was Unix, but even this was not open source. Most of the people who read the source read it in illicit photocopies of John Lions' book, which though written in 1977 was not allowed to be published until 1996.

Another example we can take from painting is the way that paintings are created by gradual refinement. Paintings usually begin with a sketch. Gradually the details get filled in. But it is not merely a process of filling in. Sometimes the original plans turn out to be mistaken. Countless paintings, when you look at them in xrays, turn out to have limbs that have been moved or facial features that have been readjusted.

Here's a case where we can learn from painting. I think hacking should work this way too. It's unrealistic to expect that the specifications for a program will be perfect. You're better off if you admit this up front, and write programs in a way that allows specifications to change on the fly.

(The structure of large companies makes this hard for them to do, so here is another place where startups have an advantage.)

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design-- deciding too early what a program should do.

The right tools can help us avoid this danger. A good programming language should, like oil paint, make it easy to change your mind. Dynamic typing is a win here because you don't have to commit to specific data representations up front. But the key to flexibility, I think, is to make the language very abstract. The easiest program to change is one that's very short.

This sounds like a paradox, but a great painting has to be better than it has to be. For example, when Leonardo painted the portrait of Ginevra de Benci in the National Gallery, he put a juniper bush behind her head. In it he carefully painted each individual leaf. Many painters might have thought, this is just something to put in the background to frame her head. No one will look that closely at it.

Not Leonardo. How hard he worked on part of a painting didn't depend at all on how closely he expected anyone to look at it. He was like Michael Jordan. Relentless.

Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible. When people walk by the portrait of Ginevra de Benci, their attention is often immediately arrested by it, even before they look at the label and notice that it says Leonardo da Vinci. All those unseen details combine to produce something that's just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune.

Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too. I'm not claiming I write great software, but I know that when it comes to code I behave in a way that would make me eligible for prescription drugs if I approached everyday life the same way. It drives me crazy to see code that's badly indented, or that uses ugly variable names.

If a hacker were a mere implementor, turning a spec into code, then he could just work his way through it from one end to the other like someone digging a ditch. But if the hacker is a creator, we have to take inspiration into account.

In hacking, like painting, work comes in cycles. Sometimes you get excited about some new project and you want to work sixteen hours a day on it. Other times nothing seems interesting.

To do good work you have to take these cycles into account, because they're affected by how you react to them. When you're driving a car with a manual transmission on a hill, you have to back off the clutch sometimes to avoid stalling. Backing off can likewise prevent ambition from stalling. In both painting and hacking there are some tasks that are terrifyingly ambitious, and others that are comfortingly routine. It's a good idea to save some easy tasks for moments when you would otherwise stall.

In hacking, this can literally mean saving up bugs. I like debugging: it's the one time that hacking is as straightforward as people think it is. You have a totally constrained problem, and all you have to do is solve it. Your program is supposed to do x. Instead it does y. Where does it go wrong? You know you're going to win in the end. It's as relaxing as painting a wall.

The example of painting can teach us not only how to manage our own work, but how to work together. A lot of the great art of the past is the work of multiple hands, though there may only be one name on the wall next to it in the museum. Leonardo was an apprentice in the workshop of Verrocchio and painted one of the angels in his Baptism of Christ. This sort of thing was the rule, not the exception. Michelangelo was considered especially dedicated for insisting on painting all the figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel himself.

As far as I know, when painters worked together on a painting, they never worked on the same parts. It was common for the master to paint the principal figures and for assistants to paint the others and the background. But you never had one guy painting over the work of another.

I think this is the right model for collaboration in software too. Don't push it too far. When a piece of code is being hacked by three or four different people, no one of whom really owns it, it will end up being like a common-room. It will tend to feel bleak and abandoned, and accumulate cruft. The right way to collaborate, I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules, each with a definite owner, and with interfaces between them that are as carefully designed and, if possible, as articulated as programming languages.

Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work. You have to be able to see things from the user's point of view.

When I was a kid I was always being told to look at things from someone else's point of view. What this always meant in practice was to do what someone else wanted, instead of what I wanted. This of course gave empathy a bad name, and I made a point of not cultivating it.

Boy, was I wrong. It turns out that looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success. It doesn't necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. Far from it. Understanding how someone else sees things doesn't imply that you'll act in his interest; in some situations-- in war, for example-- you want to do exactly the opposite. [4]

Most makers make things for a human audience. And to engage an audience you have to understand what they need. Nearly all the greatest paintings are paintings of people, for example, because people are what people are interested in.

Empathy is probably the single most important difference between a good hacker and a great one. Some hackers are quite smart, but when it comes to empathy are practically solipsists. It's hard for such people to design great software [5], because they can't see things from the user's point of view.

One way to tell how good people are at empathy is to watch them explain a technical question to someone without a technical background. We probably all know people who, though otherwise smart, are just comically bad at this. If someone asks them at a dinner party what a programming language is, they'll say something like ``Oh, a high-level language is what the compiler uses as input to generate object code.'' High-level language? Compiler? Object code? Someone who doesn't know what a programming language is obviously doesn't know what these things are, either.

Part of what software has to do is explain itself. So to write good software you have to understand how little users understand. They're going to walk up to the software with no preparation, and it had better do what they guess it will, because they're not going to read the manual. The best system I've ever seen in this respect was the original Macintosh, in 1985. It did what software almost never does: it just worked. [6]

Source code, too, should explain itself. If I could get people to remember just one quote about programming, it would be the one at the beginning of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
You need to have empathy not just for your users, but for your readers. It's in your interest, because you'll be one of them. Many a hacker has written a program only to find on returning to it six months later that he has no idea how it works. I know several people who've sworn off Perl after such experiences. [7]

Lack of empathy is associated with intelligence, to the point that there is even something of a fashion for it in some places. But I don't think there's any correlation. You can do well in math and the natural sciences without having to learn empathy, and people in these fields tend to be smart, so the two qualities have come to be associated. But there are plenty of dumb people who are bad at empathy too. Just listen to the people who call in with questions on talk shows. They ask whatever it is they're asking in such a roundabout way that the hosts often have to rephrase the question for them.

So, if hacking works like painting and writing, is it as cool? After all, you only get one life. You might as well spend it working on something great.

Unfortunately, the question is hard to answer. There is always a big time lag in prestige. It's like light from a distant star. Painting has prestige now because of great work people did five hundred years ago. At the time, no one thought these paintings were as important as we do today. It would have seemed very odd to people at the time that Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, would one day be known mostly as the guy with the strange nose in a painting by Piero della Francesca.

So while I admit that hacking doesn't seem as cool as painting now, we should remember that painting itself didn't seem as cool in its glory days as it does now.

What we can say with some confidence is that these are the glory days of hacking. In most fields the great work is done early on. The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed. Shakespeare appeared just as professional theater was being born, and pushed the medium so far that every playwright since has had to live in his shadow. Albrecht Durer did the same thing with engraving, and Jane Austen with the novel.

Over and over we see the same pattern. A new medium appears, and people are so excited about it that they explore most of its possibilities in the first couple generations. Hacking seems to be in this phase now.

Painting was not, in Leonardo's time, as cool as his work helped make it. How cool hacking turns out to be will depend on what we can do with this new medium.

Notes

[1] The greatest damage that photography has done to painting may be the fact that it killed the best day job. Most of the great painters in history supported themselves by painting portraits.

[2] I've been told that Microsoft discourages employees from contributing to open-source projects, even in their spare time. But so many of the best hackers work on open-source projects now that the main effect of this policy may be to ensure that they won't be able to hire any first-rate programmers.

[3] What you learn about programming in college is much like what you learn about books or clothes or dating: what bad taste you had in high school.

[4] Here's an example of applied empathy. At Viaweb, if we couldn't decide between two alternatives, we'd ask, what would our competitors hate most? At one point a competitor added a feature to their software that was basically useless, but since it was one of few they had that we didn't, they made much of it in the trade press. We could have tried to explain that the feature was useless, but we decided it would annoy our competitor more if we just implemented it ourselves, so we hacked together our own version that afternoon.

[5] Except text editors and compilers. Hackers don't need empathy to design these, because they are themselves typical users.

[6] Well, almost. They overshot the available RAM somewhat, causing much inconvenient disk swapping, but this could be fixed within a few months by buying an additional disk drive.

[7] The way to make programs easy to read is not to stuff them with comments. I would take Abelson and Sussman's quote a step further. Programming languages should be designed to express algorithms, and only incidentally to tell computers how to execute them. A good programming language ought to be better for explaining software than English. You should only need comments when there is some kind of kludge you need to warn readers about, just as on a road there are only arrows on parts with unexpectedly sharp curves.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, Dan Giffin, and Lisa Randall for reading drafts of this, and to Henry Leitner and Larry Finkelstein for inviting me to speak.

Reality Distortion Field

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 15:44:00 +0000

Reality distortion field(RDF) is both slang and computer industry jargon. The term was coined by Bud Tribble at Apple Computer in 1981 to describe company co-founder Steve Jobs's charisma and its effects on devoted Macintosh users and on others. RDF is the idea that Jobs is able to convince people to believe almost anything with a skillful mix of charm and exaggeration. He is able to "sell" people on ideas that they know are against their better judgment or interests.
The term is sometimes extended to other managers and leaders in the high-tech industry, who try to convince their employees to become passionately committed to projects, sometimes without regard to the overall product or to competitive forces in the marketplace. In most instances, RDF is considered more self-delusional than effective.

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 23:08:00 +0000

Using Patterns for Personal Development

Three Primary Patterns
1. Chain
- Stimulus -> response (thought -> result)
2. Loop
- A repeating chain (thought -> result -> thought -> result -> …)
- Self-reinforcing feedback loop
- Habit or addiction
3. Spiral
- An unstable loop where each pass through the loop changes in intensity
- 4 types of spirals: positive mild, positive intense, negative mild, negative intense

Three Ways to Break a Pattern
1. Break the stimulus (prevent the stimulus from ever occurring again)
2. Break the thought (stimulus generates a different thought)
3. Break the result (ruin the result you attain upon proceeding from the thought)

How to Change Patterns to Be Congruent With Goals
1. Identify your goal
2. Diagnose the patterns that are working against you (chains, loops, spirals)
3. Design a new set of patterns that will support you in reaching your goal
4. Use overwhelming force to break the old patterns and install the new ones

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 23:03:00 +0000

How to discover your life purpose in 20 minutes

So how to discover your purpose in life? While there are many ways to do this, some of them fairly involved, here is one of the simplest that anyone can do. The more open you are to this process, and the more you expect it to work, the faster it will work for you. But not being open to it or having doubts about it or thinking it’s an entirely idiotic and meaningless waste of time won’t prevent it from working as long as you stick with it — again, it will just take longer to converge.

Here’s what to do:

Take out a blank sheet of paper or open up a word processor where you can type (I prefer the latter because it’s faster).
Write at the top, “What is my true purpose in life?”
Write an answer (any answer) that pops into your head. It doesn’t have to be a complete sentence. A short phrase is fine.
Repeat step 3 until you write the answer that makes you cry. This is your purpose.

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 14:49:00 +0000

'You've got to find what you love' Jobs says

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.