Shanti’s Dispatches

Sablog.com - the place to go when you have Ginormous Life technology problems.

A quick roundup of Web Happenings.

WaPo on Starting a Winning Blog

Mandatory Google Complete Link (still a little buggy, IMHO)

It’s a wonderful life in 30 seconds (with bunnies, of course)

The History of the Universe: the website (wait, didn’t some old white guy w/ grey hair just make the darn thing in like 7 days, some odd thousand of years ago?)

From the “Captain Obvious” this-was-so-obviously-going-to-happen section: Wired: Video feeds follow podcasting

How To Build Traffic to Your Blog From The Perspective of a Spammy SEO-oriented Type Perspective

Roger L. Simon has dinner with Iraqi bloggers

Scoble on MSN Desktop Search Toolbar

the 25 most difficult interview questions (going to have to go ahead call bullshit on these as being the “most difficult.” they’ve obviously never interviewed at Microsoft, let alone Google)

Suggested Google Alphabet hack-thingy

Conservative amazon reviewers thinks she’s getting a little promiscuous:

This is harmful to children. This teaches lack of responsibility towards those we claim to love. And moreso, this is depressing. Children should not have to fear broken hearts so early and accept that even a relationship of nearly 50 yrs…should and will be followd by a rebound fling.

Nothing like the feeling of an empty inbox. Besides, of course, actual sex with a real human lady.

Speaking of which, mine is pissed at me lately. Maybe I should spend less time in my GMail account and more with her.

I’m about to sign up for SkypeOut. Only $.02 per minute to call anywhere in the US (minus Alaska & Hawaii) and Europe (minus a few countries), plus tons of other places.

To some of the most popular destinations, we have one unified rate, which we call the SkypeOut Global Rate:

Argentina (Buenos Aires), Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Canada (mobiles), Chile, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico (Mexico City, Monterrey), Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia (Moscow, St. Petersburg), Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States (except Alaska and Hawaii), United States (mobiles) and last but not least: Vatican.

Unless it is specifically mentioned, the SkypeOut Global Rate is only for calling regular landline telephones. Calls to mobile phones are more expensive.

1.7 Euro Cent is approximately the same as 2 US cents or 1,1 pence.

I’ll report back here on the audio quality. We’ve been using Skype’s free conference calling feature for our board meetings over at menlo park 2. The audio quality is simply inredible. We did run into an issue when I left my BitTorrent client open and it was streaming out 50k per second and disrupting the Skype audio quality. Just make sure you close out all other P2P bandwidth-hogging apps and you’ll be fine. Skype let’s you conference up to 5 users for free. Not sure how well it can scale beyond that, tho.

Aby and I had dinner last night at the Biltmore up in Scottsdale. It’s probably the swankest hotel I’ve stepped foot in. Phoenix is mostly strip malls and corporate office parks. But apparently there are these little enclaves of ginormous wealth. Some of the homes on the Biltmore property were on the market for $4 million. Just a few hours work for Billy G.

But anyway, we had dinner with Aby’s boss and two other guys who work there. They’re in the mortgage processing business. She tried to explain what exactly they do — and I think I’m beginning to understand it. People buying homes choose to work with them instead of banks directly, because they can find alternative lending sources at cheaper rates. In exchange, the mortage processor takes a cut of each transaction (points).

In Phoenix, apparently homes that were going for $100k six months ago are already selling for $150k or so today, in the hot parts of town. These mortgage processors are mostly handling $200k+ homes, and taking 1.5+ percent spreads. There are other fees on top of that, too. So they’re pulling down a good $5k per deal, averaging 4 deals per month. I’ll let you do the math.

Anyway, it’s great to hang out with these guys cuz they know how to generate revenue, consistently. When you’re an entrepreneur, this is the black magic science that we’re always trying to figure out. The difference, is that generally entrepreneurs (the innovative ones) are trying to destroy old businesses. So, for example, if I were going into the mortgage processing space, I’d build an online system that basically takes the live, human mortgage processor out of the equation as much as possible. Perhaps build a ranking or scoring system and only bring in a live human when absolutely necessary. I’m sure these systems exist now, but they probably didn’t 5 years ago.

Guys like me need the veteran sales guys to show us the way. Once we’ve built an innovative system, how do we take it to the marketplace and start generating revenue - that’s the question. Of course, it’s a totally different ballgame with consumer-oriented sites like w.l.t.m. or popdex where your revenues are going to come from advertising and/or service fees of some sort. These are easy to get off the ground and generate cash in the range of $100 - $2,000 per month. That kind of dough can be made in one deal though when selling into the corporate market.

That’s why, if you’re an entrepreneur, dinner with veternal sales dudes is always a good idea!

Seems Wired has picked up on something that I’ve noticed in my studies of happiness:

Since the time of Adam Smith, we’ve used the wealth of nations as a proxy for the well-being of nations. We measure whether life is getting better by checking whether the good numbers (GDP, personal incomes, and so on) are going up and the bad numbers (unemployment, inflation, and so on) are going down. However, over the past half century, something strange has happened. The US’s per capita GDP - the value of all the goods and services a nation produces divided by its population - has nearly tripled, but American well-being hasn’t budged. We’ve grown almost three times richer but not one jot happier. There’s ample evidence that in all postindustrial societies, material wealth and broader happiness are no longer closely in sync.

When I’m forced to do something that I do not enjoy, it doesn’t matter whether I’m getting paid 3 times as much (say $100 or even $200 per hour), it still doesn’t matter. I’d rather be working at Starbucks for $8/hr. than be in this situation.

But I know, to some extent, it’s my choice. Often-times I’m feeling drained and hating life midway through the day… I’m tackling a problem that seems to come out of nowhere. Microsoft goblins have infested my code, and I’m rushing it over to the production server but it’s configured differently… and nothing seems to be going right.

But sometimes… and it happens more than I expect… I make that killer breakthough. I have that A-HA moment, when the code just begins to work. Things just start to flow… I’m in the zone again, and time doesn’t inch by ad infinitum. It flies by. There is no universe.

I love this feeling… My goal in life is to help and enable others to achieve this flow feeling, more and more often in their lives. If I can do that, if I can achieve this state of flow, this state of oneness with the universe and my task at hand, of effortless productivity and harmony, there is nothing that can stop me in the moment.

It is only when I step back and re-enter the World As We Know It that life returns to me. I look in the mirror and have that, “Oh yeah - I’m Shanti Braford thought. I’m that guy looking back at me in the mirror. You crazy, wacky fucking guy you. What are you doing here??” Honestly, the stuff that goes through my head - it’d scare you if you could hear me thinking. The best is when I want to get pumped up before going out clubbing or something, and just look at myself and think, “You Sexy Bitch, You.”

Mark Cuban is starting a New Hedge Fund:

Iíve decided to start a new hedge fund. However, this hedge fund wonít invest in stocks or bonds, or any type of business. Itís going to be a fund that only places bets. A gambling hedge fund.

It wonít be me figuring out what bets to place, or what games to play. This is a fund. I will find the best and the brightest, with a confirmable track record and hire them.

Itís an idea whose time has come.

I have bet on stocks long and short for about 15 years now. Iíve done very well. There has already been one hedge fund started based on my trading results. In those 15 years, I have learned that despite all the claims and books written about efficient markets, the trading of individual stocks are not efficient. There are always people trading on better or worse information. There are always people trading on emotion rather than logic. There are always people trading on hopes of the big hit. What Peter Lynch would call the ì10 Baggerî. They were gambling. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Itís not unusual to hear people refer to trading stocks as no different than going to Vegas. They are right. Gambling is gambling.

The question really is, which gives the opportunity for a better outcome?

One of my babies had an issue this weekend. Seems she threw up when we installed PHP 5 on her over the weekend.

Luckily, a quick “pear -f upgrade SOAP” did the trick. You gotta love open source … when things just work … effortlessly … painlessly.

… spyware will be installed on the wrong motherfucking programmer’s computer.

He will do what Microsft, McAfee, Ad-Aware, Spybot, etc, etc. have not been able to do. Mainly, write a piece of software that:
- actually protects you from getting known spyware in the first place (before you’re infected!)
- patches known IE + Windows security holes for you… without fudging up your browsing experience
- actually make IE a viable browser in the face of so easily being infected. you know, most sites are still optimized for IE. everytime I work with a mozilla-only person, their design 50% of the time is broken in IE (cough… 80%+ of users… that’s a big deal)
- do all this without destroying the usability of my system

As you can probably tell… my PC just got infected again with spyware. I thought I was fairly well protected, but after downloading an mp3 alarm program… things royally started going to hell in a handbasket.

Someone… please… please solve this fucking problem. It’s obvious MS isn’t going to figure this one out in time, if ever.

Just placed a massive order over at Amazon.com… Should keep me busy this winter.

I’ll be reading:
SPIN Selling (one of the best-rated Amazon books on selling)

Getting to Yes (read back in college… more for the “business book library” i’m building)

Optimal Thinking (good Amazon reviews… including one by a Fortune 100 company exec who said it was the best personal development book he’s ever read.)

Getting Things Done (THE personal productivity bible, it seems. I’ll be posting more about GTD as I implement david allen (the author)’s suggestions.)

Code Complete - 2nd ed. (THE bible for software development, it seems.)

The Procrastinator’s Handbook: Mastering the Art of Doing It Now - now that I’m implementing some of the suggestions in GTD, I can clearly see where I’m procrastinating… because my task list & inbox starts piling up pretty heavily. now… the next step is to actually Get Shit Done.

Joel on Software (the book) - another one for the development/business library… read most of the articles online already but i’m sure i’ve missed some good nuggets over the years.

and lastly, one which I’d never heard of before but it had great Amazon reviews:
Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Fast-Growth Firm

I’ve actually read Chernow’s lengthy biography of Rockefeller. Talk about a bad-ass motherfucker - Rockefeller, I mean. I don’t necessarily agree with some of his business practices, but it was a great read nonetheless.

If you have any other reading suggestions… for a budding entrepreneur / programmer … drop them in the comments section below. Cheers!