Freshbooks: How to stop giving away your ideas for free.
It’s always a difficult call, how much information to give a prospect. Freshbooks has good advice.
SF New Mexican: Ski Santa Fe sets Saturday opening.
“We received 16 inches of new snow from this last storm. The Super Chief Quad Chairlift, Easy Street Beginner Chairlift and Pine Flats Conveyor Lift will be open. The Chipmunk Corner Children’s Center will be open with lessons being taught in the Pine Flats Area.” Didn’t think they’d open until January. Good news for the employees, for sure.
SF New Mexican: Fight flares up after man claims he was cheated by firewood vendors.
Semantics can hurt. Know a ‘cord’ from a ‘load.’
Way to support small business, CreateSpace.
Work for hire agreements for their book designers. Via Craigslist. No wonder their prices are so low. The remuneration must be Turk level. Remember this, if you’re self-publishing through CreateSpace. Ugh.
NY Times: The Autism Advantage.
When you have time/opportunity for this article (it’s long), there is much of interest within.
LA Times: Happiness may bring you more money, survey says.
“Regardless of whether money can buy happiness, being happy may actually make you more money down the road, new research finds.” A banjo didn’t help Nixon [channeling Steve Martin’s Let’s Get Small]. Seligman’s Learned Optimism.
adafruit: How To Start A Hackerspace.
Keeping an eye on this. NM needs more hacking.
ReadWrite DeathWatch: Real Estate Multiple Listing Services.
Of note.
Slow start today.
Lots of email to go through and answer. Links shortly, as I have time on this busy Friday.
Lifehacker: Think Outside the Box to Get Your Resume Noticed.
True. A couple of decades ago, I formatted and re-formatted a friend’s resume. None ever got a response. Finally, fed up, he *hand-wrote* a resume. Every firm he sent it to told him “Never do this again.” But also, every firm he sent it to gave him an interview. One hired him.
Telegraph.UK: Chris Anderson, the do it yourself guru.
“You could call it megalomania, or you could just call it entrepreneurship on steroids. Either way, it works.” I’d like to see some mention of ethics in such statements.
NY Tech Meetup: Letters to the NYTM Community from President Obama and Gov. Romney.
Hmmm. I like Obama’s answer better, because he actually talks about entrepreneurship, things that have been done, rather than party talking points. Neither deal with the huge gap between being a sole proprietorship and a multi-employee company that could be eased with just a few tax adjustments.
The Atlantic: Think We’re the Most Entrepreneurial Country In the World? Not So Fast.
“So our start-ups aren’t unquestionably the most innovative. Americans still has a fairly strong, if weakening, tradition of creating businesses from scratch and trying to support those who do.” I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again … make it easier, tax-wise, to grow from sole proprietor to multiple employees. Until the city, state and Feds reduce the paperwork and costs, startups will remain flat.
The Atlantic: The Fiscal Cliff Will Cost a Median-Income Family $2,000.
If you’re a small business, rethink your business deduction/depreciation strategies. As they say in NM, “This Congress ain’t a-gonna do squat.”
Mashable: Vimeo Creators Can Now Make Money Off Their Videos.
Tip jars didn’t work very well for blogs in the past. I’ll watch this one.
SmallBusiness.com: Survey - 35 Percent of Small Biz Owners Don’t Find Value on Facebook.
Even more interesting to me than the title … “78 percent of all respondents say they gained at least a quarter of their customers via online channels this year. The survey was conducted online, so presumably there were very few respondents who don’t have a website or other online presences.” That gives me ideas for changing up my advertising/marketing methods.
Macworld: How I organize everything with plain-text notes.
Uh-huh. I use text editors and their project management (folder-tracking) features. Particularly BBEdit (though most text editors these days have project management capabilities available as plugins, if not built-in). I have a text-editor project set up that runs in parallel to my frequently-used logins on 1Password, that gives discursive information for every piece of software, every online service, every server, every client project … text documents arranged by collapsible folders. Some service and software particulars reside in a special label in Gmail, but I do my best to get everything out of mail and into this text-based system. And this gets backed up to my secure thumb drive and backup disks on a weekly basis.
I like using plain-text files because they’re readable by just about any program or hardware out there … and the information I have stored is just the kind of thing I’ll need to access in a hurry on any computing device that’s handy.
StartUP.
SF New Mexican: Minimum wage law needs cap, Chamber says.
Just FYI, it seems business wants to ‘cap’ the living wage. Better to just have it track the cost of living index, up or down, no?
Busy with meetings; links later on.
Don’t waste time here … go trolling elsewhere. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.
The Atlantic: No-Vacation Nation - Why Don’t Americans Know How to Take a Break?
“Like computers, we need time to boot up, and it’s only after a bit of practice that we ‘hit our groove.’ That’s one reason Monday’s feel slow. We’re still trying to find our flow.” I know that one! Yet when the need arises, I can hit the ground running. So these are not hard-and-fast rules.
PS Mag: To Boost Creativity ...
Hanselman: Productivity vs. Guilt and Self-Loathing.
Good advice. Particularly ‘guilt piles.’ In a certain light, my collections of bookmarks in Evernote and Yojimbo could, in part, be seen as ‘guilt piles.’
Wired: Ursula K. Le Guin - Still Battling the Powers That Be.
The Freelance Life: Antidotes to Dry Spell Anxiety.
Sweat. And rice ‘n’ beans. [Kidding. Sort of.]
