Shanti’s Dispatches

Great list of anecdotes on the trials and tribulations here, from some very well-known success stories.

The first on Abraham Lincoln:

As a young man, Abraham Lincoln went to war a captain and returned a private. Afterwards, he was a failure as a businessman. As a lawyer in Springfield, he was too impractical and temperamental to be a success. He turned to politics and was defeated in his first try for the legislature, again defeated in his first attempt to be nominated for congress, defeated in his application to be commissioner of the General Land Office, defeated in the senatorial election of 1854, defeated in his efforts for the vice-presidency in 1856, and defeated in the senatorial election of 1858. At about that time, he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.”

Another one of my favorite quotes:

“If you want to succeed, double your rate of failure.” ~ Thomas J. Watson.

I get a lot of LinkedIn spam. Perhaps its because I leave my email address on my profile.

I believe that’s a good idea, generally - I’ve made some pretty good contacts who just emailed me out of the blue from this.

It’s nice, though, if you’re going to use this technique, to at least:

1) Read up on my profile, and send a nice customized (could be just 2 sentences long) message, instead of one of the generic LinkedIn ones.

2) Perhaps Googled me to find out a bit more about me (i.e. perhaps this blog), and mentioned that in the request (this is not required, I know people are busy)

Introducing the LinkedIn Flip

Instead of ignoring or deleting spam from LinkedIn users — try selling them on one of your own products or services (do this *before* you accept their connection invitation).

If they doth protest (which I just had one person do), explain that you don’t know them, that they spent a grand total of 10seconds sending a form-letter template, and that you only connect with people who you have a working or personal relationship of some kind.

The Pushy-salesman Flip

This technique works equally well on pushy salespeople who have not buttered me up appropriately yet. You see, I have a rudimentary understanding of Psychology, so I know that if you at least butter me up first by being more personable, or perhaps give me something of value for free (with no expectation of reciprocation), then I’m a lot more likely to say Yes when the time comes for me to buy your product/service.

But I’ve had a few instances where I was approached by someone (either online or off) who was rather pushy or very forward — In retrospect I would have loved to sell them on one of my products/services instead of just blowing them off.

“Coffee’s for closers” - Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross

Coffee’s for closers (direct link)

Man, someone could make a killing if all they did was specialize in helping companies make their sites work (and look great) in all major (and minor) browsers. At least Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari, to start with.

God help the web developer who has to make their complex web app work well and look great in even more obscure browsers like Camino, Konqueror and Opera.

It is the least enjoyable part of web development for me, though I’m sure once you’ve been doing just exactly that for long enough, it’s not nearly as painful of an experience.

The problem for most coders / web developers is that they might spend 60% on backend stuff and 40% on basic GUI / HTML code.

So if you bump into an obscure cross-browser quirk, chances are you’ve never seen it before or it’s been so long you forgot what the solution was.

Anyway, if you specialize in this kind of stuff, hit me up! I’d love to have a connection in this area.

I’m subscribed to an email newsletter from Nightingale Conant. A really great article from them just dropped into my inbox. Since I’m not sure if it’s reprinted on the web anywhere, I’ll quote it liberally here. It’s by Denis Waitley:

Setbacks and failures mean little or nothing in themselves. The whole meaning of any setback - or any success, for that matter - is in how we take it and what we make of it.

It has been said that failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead-end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

It may motivate you more toward your own goals to know that some of the most famous and well-known people in modern times had to overcome obstacles as difficult as anyone’s before they finally reached the top. It takes persistence and total commitment to your goals, but it’s possible.

Edison: probably the king of all failure

Thomas Edison’s father called him a “dunce.” His headmaster in school told Edison he would never make a success of anything.

Henry Ford barely made it through high school.

…

Joe Paterno, head coach of the Penn State University football team, was asked by the media how he felt when his team lost a game. He rapidly replied that losing was probably good for the team, since that was how the players learned what they were doing wrong.

Setbacks and failures mean little or nothing in themselves. The whole meaning of any setback - or any success, for that matter - is in how we take it and what we make of it.

We often look at high achievers and assume they had a string of lucky breaks or made it without much effort. Usually the opposite is true, and the socalled superstar or “overnight success” had an incredibly rough time before he or she attained any lasting success.

I love hearing these kinds of stories. Famous writers almost always have an “almost didn’t make it but instead became a huge success” story:

You may not know the background of a certain laundry worker who earned $60 a week at his job but had the burning desire to be a writer. His wife worked nights, and he spent nights and weekends typing manuscripts to send to publishers and agents. Each one was rejected with a form letter that gave him no assurance that his manuscript had even been read. I’ve received a few of those special valentines myself through the years, and I can tell you firsthand that they’re not the greatest self-esteem builders.

But finally, a warm, more personal rejection letter came in the mail to the laundry worker, stating that, although his work was not good enough at this point to warrant publishing, he had promise as a writer and he should keep writing.

He forwarded two more manuscripts to the same friendly-yet-rejecting publisher over the next 18 months, and as before, he struck out with both of them. Finances got so tight for the young couple that they had to disconnect their telephone to pay for medicine for their baby.

Feeling totally discouraged, he threw his latest manuscript into the garbage. His wife, totally committed to his life goals and believing in his talent, took the manuscript out of the trash and sent it to Doubleday, the publisher who had sent the friendly rejections. The book, titled Carrie, sold over 5 million copies and, as a movie, became one of the top-grossing films in 1976. The laundry worker, of course, was Stephen King.

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

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!

www.glenrhodes.com - The power of the Sleep Cycle

Flash developer Glen Rhodes on the Power of the sleep cycle:

Ok, I’ve been talking to people for a long time about the fact that you can get by on 6 or even 4.5 hours of sleep per day without question. The secret is NOT the amount of sleep, but rather the number itself; a multiple of 90 minutes will change your life.

This is so true. Back when I was totally indie and had no schedule whatsoever, I would gravitate towards 24 hours awake, 4.5 hours asleep, with a 90-minute break thrown in there for good measure.

Actually, I generally had no idea how long I was sleeping, because without an alarm clock, there’s no sense in paying attention.

My biggest problem with the standard 9 to 5 schedule is that it assumes you can somehow, magically be ideally be awake, alert, and ready to program during that time.

If you naturally gravitate towards a 24 hour on, 4.5 hour off schedule, you end up getting out of whack every week and/or weekend, only to be on a decent, sound schedule for maybe a day or two.

Of course, I’m not complaining.

Now, if there was a way to accurately measure productivity (which there isn’t), we wouldn’t have this problem (as much).

I hate to say it… but my little baby is one ugly website (design-wise).

It was one of those “let’s knock this out in a few weekends” kind of deals… that I never really developed. Not that I could even begin to knock out an excellent design. That’s why my main man Gabriel was so instrumental in getting Niner Niner off the ground with some kick-ass designs.

WLTM.com’s traffic consistently hovers at 1,200 - 1,600 unique daily visitors, with 2,000+ daily pageviews. Not bad for a few weekends of effort, though it hasn’t nearly brought in the kind of dough that Popdex used to bring on a consistent basis.

Rick Nooner reports on garbage collection languages (like Ruby and Python) vs. compiled languages (like Java and C++), and what it can mean for your bottom line:

When I first came to XXXXX, I was asked to build a system to collect performance and usage metrics from all of our network gear via SNMP, both for capacity and planning purposes and for a new usage based billing system. We had tens of thousands of switches and routers in our network spread across the US, Europe and Asia. I had to collect samples from each device every 5 minutes.

I was hired because I said that I could do this job in a couple of months. Everyone else claimed that it would take a year or more to do. My secret weapon was Python. There were no SNMP bindings at the time for Python but it was easy to add that capability via the CMU SNMP libraries. I finished the first working version in less than a month.

Rick continues…

We wrote this application internally, even though commercial alternatives, existed because we were quoted over $20 million dollars for an equivalent system by more than one vendor.

… So… one proficient Ruby/Python Hacker ~= $20 Million in consulting fees for Java/C++ programmers?

Only, the Ruby/Python hacker gets the job done in 1/12 the time!?!

Even if he’s 10x off the mark, that’s a lot of dough, and a lot of time saved.

It gets better:

The second part of this story is the central collection system that collects the data from each host in the network and does long term trending and analysis.

Our original collection and analysis system used SAS, which costs roughly $300,000/year the way we were using it. I rewrote the entire collection and analysis system in Ruby during a six month period, saving the $300,000/year and increasing performance by an order of magnitude. The Ruby based system also uses Postgres to store the data it collects and analyzes.

I’m going to go out on a limb and bet his software doesn’t do 100% of what these packages / outside services would have provided.

Even still…

The implications are pretty clear from Moore’s Law, etc. that the limiting factor is and will be developer / development time.

Is Ruby and/or Python 20% slower than Java/C++?

Does it matter, if an extra wintel box only costs $600 for load balancing, while saving $80K per year for each C++/Java coder you don’t have to hire.

I confess…

My name is Shanti… and…

I’m addicted to registering domain names for random ideas that I’ll eventually abandon.

There, I said it.

So I now have this superstition… that I should wait before registering a new domain until I have actually made some significant progress on the idea (generally, a web app).

Then again, it sucks to have a domain name registered right under your nose after you’ve come up with a cool idea for a new webapp. Anyone else out there have a similar domain name registration obsession?