codva

I did this back in the 90s, when we had to actually know HTML to make a website valentine. You kids have it so easy today ;)

I got sent an Asana invite from the boss earlier today. Apparently we are going all-in on using it.

I followed that exact progression, except that I'm using Pelican to create the static site today.

And yet, some things are eerily familiar. In 1999 online life was dominated for non-geeks by AOL. In 2014 replace AOL with Facebook and the dynamic is pretty much the same. The difference is that AOL had to spend a fortune to produce or acquire content. Facebook gets us to do that for free.

I delete all email after 90 days, unless I explicitly moved it to an archive folder.

I've never event thought about saving IMs, texts, Twitter, etc. Civilization has survived a very long time without a written record of every conversation ever. It will continue to do so.

40,000 leads is about 38,000 too many. The first thing you need to decide is who are your tier I target customers, and prune the list appropriately. If you product / service is good and solves a real problem for a properly targeted client, it may be quite a while before you bother with the other 38,000. The other 38,000 are marketing leads, not sales leads. They need to do something to identify themselves as tier I sales leads via some set of trigger events that you ID as beacons that could be indicators that the timing is right to contact them. At some point as you succeed you'll grow into a full time marketing staff that spends all day thinking about how to move the suspects over to the sales lead list. But in terms of generating revenue now, you need to prune the hell out of the list so that you are spending your time chasing the highest value prospects.

Only seven interviews? You got off easy. I had 10, for a freaking sales job. 3 on the phone (one each with HR, sales, and a sales engineer), then they flew me across the country for a day of interviews - 7 back to back to back...

The thing is, 5 minutes into that first on-site interview I knew I was wasting my time. They hired a new East Coast Sales VP. He started the week prior. When you get hired as a sales VP what you do is bring in all your old cronies from previous jobs. You don't ever make your first hire somebody you don't know. Even though I nailed the interviews (they told me I handled the case study as well as anybody does) I knew there was no way in hell I would get an offer.

I was right, although I did at least get a polite rejection email a week later.

BTW, I probably had my lunch interview at that same sandwich shop.

He's 25. His life isn't even 1/3rd done. It's pretty rare to even know what you want to do at that age, let alone have actually accomplished it. What your friend needs is some perspective on just how great he is doing. However, I don't have an answer on how he gets it. A lot of it comes maturity I think.

I remember my parents dropping me at the neighbors when they went to hospital to give birth to my brother. I was a month shy of 3. Then I have nothing until I'm about 5.

He proclaimed it the next big thing just 8 months ago. https://plus.google.com/+Scobleizer/posts/ZLV9GdmkRzS

Then, he is wrong often. http://odonnellweb.com/pelican/posts/2013/Apr/google-glass-i...

Adam Savage replied to one of tweets a few months ago. That was my 1 minute of Twitter fame.

Based on the numbers in the article I'm in the top 10%. Yay me. Actually, that is kind of sad. I post to Twitter most days, maybe 1 to 3 things a day on average, 90% of which are ignored without a reply or retweet. If that represents the top it doesn't really speak well of Twitter.

One thing I've learned from my Type 1 wife is to never get excited about this sort of stuff. Her father was a Lilly executive and they tried to get her to use the insulin nose spray back in the 80s. She passed, and a few years later it was pulled from the market as it was destroying the user's nasal passages.

She was also a beta tester for a blood meter that didn't need disposable test strips. It got pulled by the FDA.

I always root for advances in diabetes management, or dream of dreams, a cure. But I'm not expecting it.

Very nice!

That is pretty much exactly how I log into sites that I use rarely. I have strong, memorized passwords for the handful of sites I log into frequently. For the rest, I create a good password the first time and don't bother recording it. If I need to log back in in 6 months I just use the password reset feature.

An unschooling purist would argue that curiosity and a desire to learn are the natural state for kids, and that we squeeze that curiosity out of them in the school system. So take away school and leave the kids alone and they ultimately return to that state of self-motivated exploration. I've seen it work in enough families to take the idea very seriously.

We did a hybrid approach. We were more traditional homeschoolers up until high school. However, once the kids had a solid foundation in math, reading, writing, etc. we pretty much stayed out of their way for the high school years and let them follow their interests where ever they led. It worked well for us and both kids taught themselves advanced subjects that far surpassed anything we could have supplied as their parents.

I'm Director of Sales for an open source consulting company (EU based with a small staff here in the US) so I do this a lot. It really is a crap shoot. I get a quick response of some sort about 3/10 contacts. However I don't contact anybody unless I see something about their company that gives me a specific idea of where we might be able to help them. I never, ever call / email somebody for an appointment to learn more about business. I call because I noticed their website isn't responsive to mobile devices and 35% of their target market is mostly online via mobile devices, or their site is mostly flash, or I met an employee at a networking event who told me how much they all hate Sharepoint, or whatever.

That said, we just landed a new client that called me back out of the blue months after I initially contacted them. So you never know...

I just wrote my first proposal in Docs today, as an experiment to see if we can stop emailing Word documents back and forth. Google Docs is missing some very basic features, like page numbers in the table of contents, and the ability to hide the footer and header on the first page.

That said, creating a cover page and table of contents as separate documents and combining the pdfs later still seems like it'll better overall than dealing with Word.

I would hope the average reader here is capable of utilizing http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ or their own terminal to determine if a site is down.

IMO, the only stuff that everybody needs to know is how to read, how to write (or more generally communicate) and math up through about Algebra I or Geometry. After that, everything else is an elective. Simply structuring the schools to make sure everybody got that core down by 8th grade, and then make high school nothing but electives, would go a long way towards making the education system much more effective.

That could be done within the constraints of the existing public school system. I've read Holt and Gatto and generally agree with them. (Both my kids were homeschooled K-12). However, what they are talking about is less redoing school and more redoing society. It's too much to ever get done. However, cherry picking the ideas that can work with what we have now is a much more doable project.

Fark does that. If they detect an ad blocker you get a little message at the top of the page asking you to allow ads to support the site. Their ads don't get in the way so I did it.

So The Republicans really have no excuse for not showing us how they would do it better?

My wife is a Type I diabetic and 15 + year Minimed pump wearer. She (and many other diabetics) don't like the fact that with the CGM you have to have two infusion sites (one for the monitor and one for the pump). Until they can figure out how to do this with one infusion site I suspect it will not be highly desirable by diabetics.

If the restaurant is doing poorly isn't more of an incentive for the owner to pocket whatever he can from the business?

Hating funnels seems sort of weird to me. Especially in this case, where it's just a model of an idea. There is nothing inherently evil about the concept of a funnel. He even makes that point when he turns it upside down and claims it as genius. The act of the trying to force people through the funnel on your timeline instead of theirs is where the problem is. And that act is going to be a problem no matter how you are modeling the customer acquisition process.

A friend tried something like this a few years ago. He built a resume site where recruiters had to pay to contract you about a job. If you didn't respond in 24 hours they got a full refund. If you responded (even if the answer was, not interested)then you and the site shared the revenue (70/30 IIRC). Each person set their own price.

I thought it was a cool idea but he launched in 2008 just as the economy tanked and he never got any traction.

Actually, he is a pretty big fan of cold war paranoia :) Military history is his passion. He is hoping to turn into a job as a historian with the National Park Service or something like that.

I'm definitely going to watch that video though.

As the parent of a sophomore history major, this is something that I think about a lot. However, my son has a deep, deep passion for history. Advising him to get a CS degree just for job purposes seemed stupid, and considering how much help he needed from his high school sister to get through his Python class last year.... Although I am happy that his liberal arts college requires everybody to take 2 CS classes, I am also mystified why non-CS majors take one python and one C++ class. Wouldn't continuing with Python make more sense?

However, if you are going to major in history, or English, or something like that you really do need to have a plan from freshman year about how you are going to turn it into a job when you graduate.

The author Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group UK.

I don't think we want the ad guys determining the pricing structure for airlines. Anyway, the reason for the wacky pricing on airfares is not some sort of implicit agreement to be socialistic about it. It's because the fixed costs associated with the flight are so high. It costs virtually nothing to add another person to the flight. Airline fares are a dance between filling up the flight while maximizing the average fare per seat. Price too high and you fly with empty seats. Price to low and you fill up but leave money on the table.

Back in 1996 I had a side gig teaching Internet 101 to people who generally had just bought their first computer at WalMart and were afraid to open the box. Every class the first mention of "mouse" caused a few hands to go up and ask what a mouse was. Most of them had the mouse in their other hand at the time. We used Yahoo for search, and Alta Vista for the 'Advanced Search Strategies" class.

The deleted threads do vanish from the home page, but they stay online. There is a GreaseMonkey script if you really want to find them. As a long time active MeFi member, I'd peg the deleted thread rate at less than one per day.

I'm pretty sure it's been discussed in MetaTalk too, so some creative searching of that sub-site might turn up the number.