I just finished reading 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. In it, Ferriss tells his story of going from successful businessman, fed up with 12 hour work days to more successful businessman with lots of free time. In a nutshell, he did this through outsourcing. Now he fills his time with tango lessons in Argentina and bending the rules in martial arts competitions in China.

I can't say that I'm terribly impressed with Tim*, but he is doing one thing right: He lives the life that he wants to live with passion. That IS inspiring! In 4 Hour Work Week he outlines how he accomplished his mobile lifestyle and lays out several strategies you can use to do the same. The best thing about this book is that it forces you to do two things: 1) Challenge your assumptions about what you can and can't do, and 2) refine your goals.

Anyone who is an entrepreneur or aspires to be one will benefit from this book. Even if the specifics don't apply to you, it will help get the creative juices flowing.

* Tim actually seems like a nice guy. I saw him interviewed by Scobel and he is an enthusiastic and pleasant person. I get the impression that he sincerely believes that life is more than a 9-5 job and that people CAN live the lives they want right now.

Labels: 4 hour work week, 4hww, Ferriss

The desktop is moving to the browser. I don't mean applications delivered over the internet: Your computer's desktop will be the browser one day soon.

There is a shift in the model of how the web is built and used. The web is becoming more like the computer desktop every day. This shift is being driven by these trends:

1. applications that traditionally ran on the local host are being developed for to run remotely through the web (like Google Docs and spreadsheets),
2. Unifying 'desktop' sites like iGoogle, Ripl, Facebook Platform (also see my personal home page to see a desktop-like website) that provide APIs to hook web based applications into the desktop environment,
3. mashup sites like Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft's mashup engine (the name escapes me at the moment), and
4. mashable sites like Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, Google Maps, and any site with an RSS feed.

Sites will are becoming less site-like and tend to have one or more of the above characteristics. There are some types of sites that don't neatly fit into one of the above categories (e-commerce, tech support, wikis), but these can be thought of as applications.

If this analysis is correct, there are deep implications to the internet as we know it. Figuring out the implications will be left as an exercise to the reader...it could lead to your first (or next) $1.6 billion dollar company.

Labels: web trends

I'm working on my first online video project. My laptop couldn't handle the humougous files. The right tools just don't exist for my beefy linux box. So I decided to load Microsoft Vista on the linux box. I wasn't really using it for anything that required linux anyways. And besides, Microsoft recently issued an plea to the computer users of the world to upgrade to Vista already. Poor Microsoft.

Vista stopped me cold. It is not ready for prime time. If you need your computer to work, rely not on Vista! Granted, some of the problems I faced were related to the software I was trying to run (QuickTime Pro and Adobe Premiere Elements), but really, by Microsoft's own logic, the applications can't be separated from the operating system. When I'm trying to export a large MOV file and the computer issues a cryptic error message and reboots, who cares whether the OS or the application caused the problem?

My advice: Avoid Vista unless you only are running applications that come on the Vista disk. You will struggle using any serious application that demand the operating to perform. Vista will improve. Vista applications will improve. But for now, they are not ready to be used as reliable tools for getting real work done.

I'll try Vista again when service pack 1 is released toward the end of the year

---END OF RANT---

Labels: video, video editing, vista