50th anniversary
My parents recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. So my sisters and I held a celebration at the Four Seasons in Vancouver … and we also created a book showcasing my parents’ lives and our life as a family.
I used Blurb to create the book. It was great, but as with all projects like this, the hard work was in selecting, digitizing, and cleaning up the photos. My wife Teresa and I probably put in over 50 hours of work into the book, but the results are spectacular.
Here’s a link to the book, and a limited preview:
In England, they plan forests
Here we plan buildings, developments, roads, and so on. In England they plan forests.
Take a look:
More details here. Interestingly, in England 850 acres is considered a big forest.
Who treats their customers like this?
Who makes their clients heroes? Who makes their clients feel like purchasing a product is a significant life choice? Who makes their clients an instant member of a cool, exclusive, and yet world-wide club … the club where all the smart people, the happy people, the successful people go?
Apple, of course:
(Whether you believe it, of course, is entirely different from whether or not it’s true.)
How can you make your clients feel the same way?
One trillion pages on the web
From the Google blog:
We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!
Awe is a good word - one trillion is a big, big number. Wow.
Top 10 Productivity Secrets of Highly Successful People
Matt Rissel interviewed 100 highly successful people, trying to find the tools they used to make themselves successful. Only problem? There wasn’t any tool commonality.
However, there was a principle commonality. Here are the top 10 common principles that highly successful people share. They tend to …
- Have passion for what they do
- Surround themselves with excellent people
- Create an environment within which excellent people can succeed
- Maintain simplicity
- Know their motivation
- Create their secret sauce
- Make their decisions be great
- Balance their lives
- Execute on priorities
- Build their own system
Scoble interviewed Rissel on FastCompany.tv - take a look:
Shwap that Shmap
From the somewhat cool and gently gratifying department: I’m in the Shmap.
What is the Shmap, you ask?
Exploring a Schmap Guide is a uniquely interactive experience: maps and guide content are dynamically integrated, allowing intuitive, real-time access to reviews and photo slideshows for places of interest.
They’re available for iPhone and iPod touch, and they use photos that amateurs like myself have taken. Here are the two places my photos are being used:
Not so mobile me
I signed up for a 60-day trial of Apple’s new MobileMe service today only to find it is not currently compatible with OS X 10.4.11, more commonly known as “Tiger.”
The latest version of Mac OS X is 10.5.x, or “Leopard.” My home machine runs Leopard; my PowerBook still runs Tiger - and the preference pane that is supposed to be Mobile Me is still the old .Mac.
Which means, unfortunately, that all of Apple’s instructions regarding how to sync my iPhone and laptop are useless.
Hopefully an update will soon be forthcoming …
Educational technology on a budget
I love seeing what smart creative people can do …
Reverse productivity
If someone could please explain to me why this application is in the “Productivity” category of iPhone applications, I would really like to know.
The entire application consists of a “game” of holding a button on your iPhone (or iPod touch) for as long as possible. Unshockingly, “Hold On” is the name of the application, and also the entire instruction manual.
The “app” is by IMAK Creations, and I can only assume it was their first attempt.
Funny!
At the very least, they’ve got people talking and linking, and that can’t be bad.
iPhone is myPhone
No time to publish much right now, except that yes, I finally have an iPhone. And yes, I’m pretty pumped about it.
It’s unnatural, a grown man being so excited by shiny plastic toys.
More later …
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About
Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
Welcome, enjoy, buy the T-shirt, take a picture, tell your friends. -
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