Category: General

Email it to me. My day starts in 10 hours…

😉

10 000 online sheep for sale

via Kottke.org

Download the following pdf and make your own pinhole camera:
Lighthouse in a Tree

Nice marketing idea!

Kathy provides tips how to reduce the info overload/pressure-to-keep-up stress:

• Find the best aggregators.
• Get summaries.
• Cut the redundancy!
• Unsubscribe to as many things as possible.
• Recognize that gossip and celebrity entertainment are black holes.
• Pick the categories you want for a balanced perspective, and include some from OUTSIDE your main field of interest.
• Be a LOT more realistic about what you’re likely to get to, and throw the rest out.
• In any thing you need to learn, find a person who can tell you what is: Need to know, Should know, Nice to know, Edge case, only if it applies to you specifically, or Useless.

My 2 Pence:
As a generalist genuinely interested in a lot of things, this is a challenge.

I’ve reduced the number of RSS feeds to a bare minimum. I’m using RSS to watch the comments and entries at my various sites. And to get my daily Dilbert.

I use del.icio.us to bookmark interesting sites that I find. This blog itself is also a kind of online bookmark or online scrap book, where I document links, howtos, interesting articles for future reference. I’ve started adding favorite blogs to Technorati’s faves. Although Technorati’s search is still deplorable, I’m hoping it will improve in time.

I’ve found that Gada.be is a good and fast search engine for tags.

Currently I don’t have any newspaper or magazine subscriptions. I tend to keep up with news via the web or TV. And I don’t printout web articles except when I know I won’t have access on the plane or train. I use Google alerts to keep up with news from other parts of the world.

And I agree personal contacts are really the way to find out what you need to know. And reading a book offline.

Do you have any tips? Best practices?

Today was beautifully warm and sunny. A gorgeous day. Although I spent most of it in the office… The sunset was great… And my cam was at home.

Mlle A. (at the foot of hills smothered in clouds of mist, next to a romantic river, in a meander of winding alleys, in the attic of an old house…) recently introduced a new category at her blog where she re-posts favorite posts from previous blogging years. Well, I looked back into the archives of Chiperoni.ch and found that my life is repeating itself. One recurring endless loop. Cos I could have written this very same entry this week. About how I battled with headers and footers in long MS Word 2000 docs. To my own credit I managed to tidy up the docs a lot faster than last year.

Buon Weekend,
nchenga

Keep in mind that happiness is mostly dependent on our state of mind, not on our status or the state of our bank account.

Soft, futuristic, or classic?

Here’s a list of the fonts being used for Web 2.0 logos.

see also: the Flickr collection.

via del.icio.us

It’s Saturday morning. Time for the traditional weekend post, but don’t expect any recipes today. (I did bookmark a great recipe blog though. Somewhere.)
For some reason I set the alarm yesterday evening…. so here I am on my second cup of Mzuzu coffee and my second cup of Rooibos. Still half asleep.

Pages that caught my (short span of) attention this week:

• What do you think of my brochure?
• The paradox is that the long stuff gets skipped. The long stuff gets ignored. Short books sell better, short commercials get more viewers. So repetition becomes essential.
• I read David’s post, It’s a great time to start a business, in response to Caterina’s warning. He has some good points. I guess, I still remember the dotcom boom and crash too vividly. Once burnt, twice shy.

Va bene… have a good weekend! Alles wird gut.

BTW, I’ve turned off the default rich editor feature in WordPress. It was driving me up the wall when I wanted to edit the HTML…

Guardian report on Fairtrade:

Oppenheim points out that of the £1 extra paid for a bag of Fairtrade bananas, the proportion going back to the farmer is 4p, while of the 99p paid for a Fairtrade chocolate bar, the return for the cocoa grower is ‘less than 2p’. If a supermarket charges £2.49 for a packet of own-brand Fairtrade coffee, when the combined cost of buying, shipping, roasting and packaging it ‘cannot be much more than £1’, it results in a gross profit margin of 160 per cent.

It’s not exactly ethical, but it’s not exactly news. Retailers stay in business by driving down the prices paid to farmers and preserving their own profit margins – making Oppenheim’s article an indictment of capitalism rather than Fairtrade. As Harriet Lamb points out, ‘We set the price for the farmers, which is the only bit we could ever begin to control. If we tried in any way to set the price for the consumer, we would be taken to the Competition Commission.’ In other words, it is the retailers and middlemen who determine the mark-ups – based on the amount we are stupid enough to pay. At least under the Fairtrade system, it is consumers in the north who are being exploited, not impoverished farmers.

via Swampcottage

on my reading list:

Steve Krug’s “Don’t make me think”

started skimming thru and it looks good. Lots of imgs and examples and
cartoons to illustrate usability issues.