vishaldpatel

Covertly or publicly - anyone who wants to buy politicians tends to do it across the political spectrum.

So, your landlord is waiting for the market to crash rather than find someone to buy the place and still walk away with a possibly decent profit? Or did he purchase the home at an inflated price to begin with?

Step 1: Get a life.

What a boring idea.

Chapterhouse Dune.

It seems that walking is more dangerous than driving in San Francisco.

I surf. If anyone likes to go surfing and thinks that they'd go more if they knew someone at the break.. drop me a line. I surf at Pacifica.

I have a simple theory, which is well.. simple: - Most people look for paid work when they need the money. This puts them in a position where they are unable to negotiate a market wage. This adds tremendous downward pressure on wages and keeps the middle-class down.

I can't comment on willpower over everything, but if it is about working out / doing chores / getting to work, I have a hack for you:

Well.. it isn't really a hack, but something to remind yourself every fucking time that you're stalling. All you need is enough motivation to do it for 5 minutes. FIVE MINUTES!

Thats enough motivation to basically start an activity and forget about everything else in the process, and getting on with it. Just start doing it... FIVE MINUTES!!!

Seneca College in Toronto has a similar thing going for its Computer Programming diploma. Or at least, this was the case when I went there:

1) You can take an exam for a class at the beginning of the semester if you think you know the material. There is a cost of this exam, but if you pass, then you save money on taking the whole class... and time too.

2) You must complete every single assignment to pass a given class. Your assignments must work 100%. You'll be graded on style.

3) Every class was offered every semester - even during the summer semester. And there was a section for most classes at night.

There's just one issue: I thought universities were supposed to teach you how to learn, while community colleges were meant for specific job-related skills.

Shouldn't doctors, lawyers, nurses, computer programmers etc... all be getting their job-specific diplomas, just like the mechanics and the electricians? And shouldn't 'degrees' be more research oriented anyway? Why are degrees more valued when whats needed in most cases is someone with a specific skill? Do people with degrees really think that people with diplomas are incapable of learning? Do employers feel this way?

For one of my projects, we took the TOS from a firm that was in the same industry with a similar product and heavily modified it to our needs... removed a lot that didn't apply to our situation and added a few things in the appropriate places. We judged appropriateness based on how the document was initially arranged.

Are you saying that you won't move forward with any development - not even a prototype - until you have paying customers? And what does it mean to have a "secured and signed" order? Does it mean that they're about to cut you a first check as an advance on purchasing / subscribing to the product?

Have you always practiced this, or did it take some realization?

Thanks, - V

A sort of, counterargument: I think that individuals don't change that much. Most, almost all of my friends haven't changed. Change is difficult and deliberate.

We get better at sorting through "noise" over time. What is noise to one person is music to someone else.

I'd argue that hacker news is changing as it grows - what started out as an acute viewpoint of like-minded people is growing into a fairly diverse membership that agrees on principles. This increases the noise for everyone else.

Services like HackerFollow and Twitter let us find and hang on to individuals in an otherwise growing and therefore noisier environment.

[edit: Removed 'slowly' from in front of 'growing'.]

Okay, time for renaming fun: Picasa will now be known as Google+Photos and Blooger will become.. Google+Globber! :D

Thank you both. Will add that to the applescript on the blog post. Cheers.

Ah cool - I'll add the iCal version to the post as well, thanks! =).

This is awesome. Why? Because it strokes my ego monumentally with a great list of songs. Put this on Reddit. It will get reddited!

Haha, yes a lot of people do, I think. I wanted to setup an internet radio station as my alarm clock and I still use my laptop =).

People usually like to see a portfolio of pretty projects if you're a UI person. Got a website with some work on it? It would certainly help having one. In fact, you might even get a few jobs from here! =)

Once you have one, print a nice business card with your website on it.

Start networking. Meetup.com has programing / startup / business type meetups... go them all! Be nice, have fun, listen to what people say, and when the opportunity comes up - usually when they ask you what you do (people are interested in you if you're interested in them), tell them you're a UI designer. Give them your card. Take their card. Send them an email telling them how glad you were to meet them (which, you were).

Place an ad on Craigslist / other popular classifieds sites. I know someone who started getting UI work this way.

Cool idea. Time to guess on how the app will work:

-> Download the app.

-> Log in to one or more social networks, or create a contact-profile. Allow anyone who is your friend on a social network or already has your contact to stay up-to-date on changes to your contact information.

-> Check to see if existing contacts also have the app, and if so, then the two can now stay in sync forever! =)

-> Added bonus feature - all phone numbers will be stored with correct international extensions for easy international dialing.

Also, internet radio: Soma.fm Di.fm

Business leasing is usually longer-term (often 10 years) and any rent increases are negotiated. The fun starts when the lease is up for renewal:

- Landlords can refuse to renew it. I know of cases where the landlord changes and the new landlord decides not to continue the lease. When the business owners leave, the landlord restarts the same business in that location - hires his cousins to run shop. Often the businesses, despite being profitable (a lot of small businesses are just ramen-profitable) can not afford to move out so they leave everything behind.

- Landlord wants a lot more rent to reflect market conditions. This increases fixed costs, which make the business harder to run, and much more unattractive to potential buyers.

Most landlords want the businesses who rent from them to succeed and try to be reasonable with their demands because they prefer to have a stable cash-flow from their investments.

Some of my friends make fun of me for having as much faith in humanity as you do.

For some reason I thought that was the e-mail field was for in our profiles - I guess it is private. Thank you for bringing this to light. I've sent you an email.

Hmm, a portfolio is tricky because most of my work is on the server-side. I have lots of code samples - I could create a page to show them off. And, I suppose there are a couple of websites that could at least show that I know how to write html/css from scratch in a text editor. My personal website can be found at seevishal.com. I also did backend, as well as some of the mobile work for mobilefolk(.com).

I change mine based on how busy I am. I'm more reasonable than most. It is harder to change something once it has been published. Your profile has no contact information. I'd be happy to send you my current rate. Please feel free to get in touch.

How many developers are you managing, exactly? Are you a developer yourself? Some random advice:

On timelines: -> An old guideline is to try breaking each deliverable into individual, atomized tasks. Put an estimate on each task. Add it all up and double the final amount. -> Use something like pivotal tracker, or redmine, or Jira.

On getting reliable estimates from developers: -> Each dev is different in their estimations. Get to know their quirks. Some feel that everything is easy and tend to say "two days" for everything. Others will try to buy as much time as possible and will tell you "a week" for something that will normally only take them a day. Knowing their tendency will let you make adjustments.

On getting to know the devs: -> Start by getting to know the difference between estimated and actual time on smaller issues.

Quick Daily Meeting: -> Spend 10 minutes at the start of each day to get a status update - what is each member working on? Are they facing any problems? Is anything taking more time than it should? -> Make adjustments to your timelines accordingly if you have to.

Try not to micromanage. They should let you know when they face problems. That said, radio silence is bad... thats what the daily should help alleviate.

I think some of those concerns will be addressed by the 2050 model ;).

The "zones" could translate into a sky-light zone and a sleeper zone.

In the parts of India I've been to, most neighborhoods are inside gated communities. Within these gated communities the houses have high walls around each home. This is the system. The same goes for offices, universities, etc... nothing is open to plain sight either to the folks looking out of the offices or the folks looking at them.

So unless they absolutely need exposure - mostly the form of street-side businesses and vendors, the MO is to be behind walls.

This system of construction / mindset / infrastructure.. call it what you'd like makes it hard for ordinary Indians to do what is literally beyond what they can see. It isn't the lack of empathy but the system that works against change.

By contrast, most homes have stone floors and get mopped shiny clean everyday.

If you come up with a few on your own, then you're thinking creatively!! =)