Shanti’s Dispatches

You may have seen this addictive little puzzle at Borders or your local mega-bookstore.

They had an entire table (about 30+ books) devoted to Sudoku at both bookstores I recently visited.

What’s all the fuss about?

Of course, you can play online but I wouldn’t recommend it.

I haven’t become quite as fanatical about these puzzles as some people, but it is a good time passer.

Currently I’m working my way through one book’s medium level puzzles. I’ve gotten stuck on one step for 10 minutes or so. Usually when I come back later, suddenly a solution appears for a particular box and I’m on my way again.

For now, I’m a tad afraid of the Fiendish level that my Sudoku book also features.

My cox high-speed Internet was down over the weekend.

Talk about several hundred dollars in lost opportunity cost of working on my projects.

Luckily the cable guy came out and got it back online… only $59.95 for a new cable modem. Apparently my Internet connection had been turned off too by a cox technician. (Anyone else think this sounds a little fishy?)

O’well, I was just happy to be back online!

In unrelated news, Ruby on Rails had a very special birthday today, reaching 1.0 baby!!!

I’ve also been looking for some extra help on Niner Niner to help knock out changes to our various WordPress themes, etc.

I know that you get what you pay for… but when did $10 per hour become peanuts to do basic HTML work?

We’d love to pay $20 or $25 an hour, but what we need done just doesn’t warrant that kind of dough, even if we had it.

If you’re interested, or know of anyone, drop me a line at: shantibraford (at) gmail

Gabriel and I first started Niner Niner about a year ago after some initial success at collaborative blogging. (Our first was HIPAA Blog, a nice little niche.)

Since then, I’ve come to realize the biggest drawback of starting this kind of project, which is, you have to cater to the needs of three distinct groups of people:

• Your Readers
• Your Writers
• Your Advertisers

Yes, AdSense goes a long way, but you still need advertisers to make it a business as opposed to a hobby. (at least in our case)

Niner Niner has been an awesome endeavor and we’ll continue smoothing out its rough edges and working on it when we have time. Gabriel has also been doing some great work with customizing a WordPress Multi-User installation for a related project. (can’t talk about this one yet, I don’t think…)

But the appeal of subscription-based services such as Basecamp, Backpack, Flickr Pro and soon Mailroom is what drew me to Sprout.

These kind of apps also fit right into the sweet spot of Ruby on Rails.

Sorry, it must.

I realize it might be a great business model. Maybe it’s just the way it’s bantied about… either I’m not getting the sarcastic nature of each reference to “user-generated content,” or I’ve just lost my capitalistic, web 2.0 edge.

Someone pitching a VC on their new user-generated content play:

See, mr VC - here’s my business plan idea. All these naive users of ours are silly enough to generate ‘user content,’ that is, ‘user-generated content’ for us. We then monetize said content by providing an Open API into our ad-serving system, while leveraging existing exigencies and core competencies of AdSense and other third-party systems. You see, it’s all very open. We’re an ‘open source business.’

Here’s a question: when was the last time you generated some content?

Is that what I’m doing now? Is that what I’m doing over on my Flickr account?

Sorry, it may just be the wording. But ick.

…next post will be less ranty, I swear!