- Recent
- Popular
- Tags (13)
- Subscribers (83)
- 30 day challenge update: meditation!Yesterday
-
It’s time for an update on my 30 day challenges. Here’s what I’ve done the last few months:
June: I didn’t respond to email after 10 p.m. and I read the New Testament of the Bible. Both were interesting in different ways. It turns out that 10 p.m. is a pretty good time for me to turn off email (I’ve tried 9 p.m. in the past and that didn’t work–Google can be a very email-heavy place at times). I’d like to get back to this habit, because it made me distinctly more mellow at night. I noticed that I slipped pretty quickly back into the “email anytime I’m awake” habit.
Reading the Bible was more work. I’ve mentioned before that I grew up the son of an evangelical Christian and a physics professor, which was helpful to learn how to respect other people’s opinions. I hadn’t read the Bible in recent years, so it was enlightening to read it as an adult. If I had to sum up the New Testament in a sentence, it would be “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (the golden rule). However, for all the talk about mercy and compassion in the New Testament compared to the Old Testament, there was still quite a bit of fire/brimstone/judging. I enjoyed reading some books (e.g. Acts and Romans) that I didn’t remember much from growing up. Other parts I enjoyed less. But I got a lot out of reading the New Testament, including some appreciation of the text as literature
- Climbing KilimanjaroAugust 23
-
“Don’t think. Just walk.” — a fellow hiker.
Last week I returned from climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa. I’ll start with the bottom line: I made it to the top!
That’s three of us at sunrise on the sixth day. We took the Machame route, which takes seven days. In theory, you could march right up the mountain, but you need time for your body to acclimate to the altitude, so after ascending for a couple days, you spend several days hiking around below the main summit getting used to the altitude.
We did something that 95% of people don’t do: we hiked up to the crater at the top of Kilimanjaro (18,000+ feet) and camped there overnight. There are some pros and cons to this approach. One big advantage is that you do the 6+ hour slog up to the summit during the day instead of starting at midnight. Hiking during the day is leagues better than at night, in my opinion. The other big advantage is that you get to explore the crater. For example, this was the view out the front of our tent:
- Switching between dev and beta Chrome channels on LinuxAugust 21
-
If you’re on Linux (say Ubuntu 10.04, also known as Lucid Lynx), you can switch between the developer (dev) and beta channels of Chrome like this:
Switch from Beta to Dev:
sudo apt-get install google-chrome-unstableSwitch from Dev to Beta:
sudo apt-get install google-chrome-betaThat’s easier for me than going back for the .deb file and doing something with it.
Also, if you want to check whether a new dev version of Chrome is out, you can just repeat the same command:
sudo apt-get install google-chrome-unstableand if there’s no new version, you’ll get something like this back:
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
google-chrome-unstable is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.I figured I’d document this in case I needed to remember how to do it in the future.
- Climbing Mt. KilimanjaroAugust 2
-
I’m leaving Tuesday to try to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. If you want to show your support, please donate at charity:water. Anyone who wants to give is welcome.
Mt. Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain in Africa, at 19,340 feet (5895 meters). It’s hard to climb Kilimanjaro, mainly because of the altitude. I’ll be completely without internet access for a few weeks. Don’t expect any blog comments or email replies for the first half of August–right now, I’m not even planning to bring my laptop. Not to worry, the webspam team itself will keep chugging away: reading spam reports, improving algorithms, and stopping spam.
I’ve been doing practice hikes with the three friends that I’m going with. Here’s a few camping tips that I’ve picked up:
- Headband lights sound silly, but they work really well. And if you get one with a red light, the bugs bother you less.
- But it’s important to know where your headband light is, or you’ll just be feelin - How to find start-up ideasJuly 19
-
Chris Dixon had an interesting post a while ago about how to find start-up ideas. The advice boiled down to keeping a spreadsheet of ideas and talking to lots of smart people (entrepreneurs, potential customers, VCs, people at big companies). It’s good advice. Paul Graham also wrote in 2008 about startup ideas he’d like to fund.
Here’s another way to come up with startup ideas: walk around your house or apartment, and look for “hot spots.” A hotspot can be an area of high information density, clutter, stress, disorganization, or any place that has a suboptimal solution. Then think about a web or cloud solution to that hot spot. Let’s take a look at a few examples:
Music CDs -> iTunes, Amazon MP3 store, doubleTwist, MP3tunes, etc.
Bookshelf -> Amazon, Kindle, iBooks
Stereo system -> Sonos, Squeezebox, Rhapsody, Pandora, last.fm, Spotify, Grooveshark, MOG, Rdio, etc.
External hard drives -> Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), PogoplugOkay, those all seem simple or obvious, right? Let’s go a little deeper. What would you do with this pile of business cards?
