I think sometimes I have trouble seeing the big picture. I have always loved the idea of working for myself, or starting my own company but have never really hit on what I believe to be my million dollar idea. Oh, I have ideas, tons of them. But I’m not sure if any of them have the legs needed to carry me or my family away from my 9-5 day job. I believe my problem consists somewhere in the initial steps of conjuring up my startup idea.
Step 1: Oh my gosh! I have a great idea! - This period lasts anywhere from 10 minutes to a few days. During this initial period of brainstorming an idea that I believe to be at least somewhat worthy falls into my head and I begin to obsess over it. I try to look at the idea from a few different angles, but honestly spend most of the time thinking about how good it will feel once the idea blows up to be way larger than it could ever possibly be. “Man, it will be so sweet when my blog about Polar Bears ranks inside the Technorati Top 100!”
Step 2: Groundwork/Research - I then spend approximately 5 minutes (max) Googling terms that are loosely associated with my idea. If I can’t find a match after a few searches I move on to step 3. If I do find something close to my idea I immediately give up on it. No use reinventing the wheel.
Step 3: Implementation - If I have made it this far in the process, then I begin the grunt work. Often times in this step I don’t put enough time or thought into the actual design hoping that the idea alone will carry the project. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Good ideas are one thing, but good implementation is what every startup needs.
Step 4: Loss of Interest - Inevitably I wind up here. For some reason I always become discouraged with my projects. If the idea is good enough to outlast this stage then maybe I’ll put a half-hearted version of my idea online. If not, then most likely the idea is scrapped and I am left with yet another unaccomplished item on my to do list.
Perhaps you have an actual success story about how you made your millions. I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong
This may seem like a pretty obvious How To article, but admittedly, I discovered this by accident and sheer boredom. Over the weekend, I was driving around some friends. We were listening to my Zune that I had connected to my car’s sound system with a casette adapter. After a while, my Zune’s battery died and we were left to listen to the radio or stare at each other blankly. To avoid both of these disastrous scenarios I reached inside my dash console and pulled out my Nintendo DS. Eventhough the audio out jack on the DS is proprietary I crossed my fingers and risked both life and limb to see if what I was envisioning would actually work. We plugged the cassette adapter into the DS jack, turned it on and voila - instant DS surround sound. Great for those long road trips, or when you just gotta hear that soundtrack from Contra 4.
The Breakdown:
Step 1: Insert cassette adapter in car stereo.
Step 2: Plug adapter into audio-out of DS.
Step 3: Nintendo DS audio coming from all speakers!
I wonder how this would sound with Elite Beat Agents…
My growing list of RSS feeds is quickly becoming quite difficult to manage. Luckily, I use Firefox. With some simple organizing, I found a pretty simple way to manage and navigate through all my current feeds without ever leaving my browser’s toolbar. With this method of feed reading, you can quickly browse through the days news without even logging into Bloglines.
First open your Firefox browser (note: for this article I will be using version 1.5.0.6) and make sure you have your bookmarks toolbar enabled. (right click on the top toolbar and make sure there is a check mark next to the ‘Bookmarks Toolbar’ item.)
Next, create a new category folder on your bookmarks toolbar. Right click on the toolbar –> new folder — > left-click –> choose a name for this folder depending on the feed category you want to have (i.e. Tech, News, Ted Stephens, etc.). Then click ‘OK’. You can repeat this step to add all the categories that you will need.
Once you have enough categories to get you started, go to the ‘Bookmarks’ tab on the top toolbar and select ‘Manage Bookmarks’. Within this window, you can locate your category subfolders and drag them into a master folder that I called ‘Feeds’ (this should also be created within the bookmarks toolbar).
Now find your feeds. The easiest way I have found to do this is to actually go to the sites that I want to subscribe to, left-click on the little orange feed logo on the right side of the address field, and then select the format of the feed you want. A Firefox popup window should appear asking you where you want to place the feed or ‘Live Bookmark’. When you see this, click the small button on the right of the window and navigate to the appropriate category folder for this feed.
When you’re all set, you can easily browse through all your feed headlines in a snap by navigating through the dropdown menus. While I’m not giving up my Bloglines account just yet, I am enjoying the convenience of having all my news within one easily accessed folder.
Soap is a pointing device based on hardware found in a mouse, yet works in mid-air. Soap consists of an optical sensor device moving freely inside a hull made of fabric. As the user applies pressure from the outside, the optical sensor moves independent from the hull. The optical sensor perceives this relative motion and reports it as position input. Soap offers many of the benefits of optical mice, such as high-accuracy sensing.
I really love this new design of the computer mouse. The video below is very intriguing and really makes me want to make my own version soon. Depending on just how functional it really is, I could see this blowing past the gyration mouse to be the most innovative mouse advancement in thirty years.
