"Aikido is performed by blending with the motion of the attacker and redirecting the force of the attack rather than opposing it head-on"
Rather than lamenting Wall Street's unproductive money games and doing nothing about it, we could embrace the fact that these tools exist in the current economic climate and we could use these tools to generate the capital we need to further the goals of more productive pursuits.
Maybe VCs like Fred Wilson who have both financial leverage and disdain for shenanigans (technical term) could use capital generated by playing Wall Str's funds shuffling game to build meaningful companies who create things and create a more sustainable and entrepreneurial base on which to build an economy.
In 1998 my brother and I sat down and planned a web service which would allow travelers and writers to write journals and upload their photos whilst on the road. It would focus on simple image uploads, short chronological posts and then notifying your friends/family of new content through a subscription service. I wrote a functional prototype which included the ability to post/upload via email. We bought a domain and had plans to launch the service at some point. Looking back on this now, we had really started to develop a part of a rudimentary hosted blog service (chronologically arranged posts which facilitated discussion via comments) with elements of Flickr (image uploads and comments and social discovery of images uploaded near your current location) and the ease of use of Posterous (email all your content directly into the publishing system).
Beyond a working prototype we never pursued this in any serious way. Of course the execution is what matters and I think it's a failure that we never executed on this service to see if we could have created something that users adopted.
Blogs were around for a long time before they had a name. I started mine in 1998. We just called them "personal websites".
As to Travel Blogging, I actually implemented the grandparent's idea back in 2005, right when the Google Maps API became available. We just passed the 10,000 blog mark last month. Check it out:
When you say blogs were around for a long time, I know there must have been people publishing journal type sites, but what I think was key with blogger was that anybody, not just webmasters, could post frequently and effortlessly.
"Blogs were around for a long time before they had a name."
Exactly. We simply called this concept 'Travel Journals'.
The main obstacle we faced in 1998 was that most people didn't have digital cameras yet and the scanning and uploading of photos was a serious timesuck.
+1 for Munin. Very easy to install and deploy. There is a central collecting server and each host being monitored runs a fairly lightweight agent. You can write plugins in any language (bash, Perl, Ruby, PHP etc) to graph custom data points. I prefer Munin over Cacti because Munin's config is in simple text-based config files which can be scripted.
You don't mention the number of transactions you do per month or your typical account balance. These will determine which business checking product you need.
- No monthly fee
- No minimum balance
- Max free transactions: 200/month
- Max free cash deposit: $5,000/month
Here is why I chose PNC:
1: PNC Business Checking has RemoteDeposit: A scanner that you can use to scan checks at home and deposit online yourself. (Optional: extra service fee of $50/month)
2: The application over the phone was painless, took 5 minutes, then 15 minutes at my local PNC branch. Walked out with working bank account and starter checks.
3: Good Merchant services for when you want to accept credit cards online
The site looks good, the preview screencasts are good quality and the voice and inflection of the preview I looked at did not grate on my ears (like some other screencasters, not naming any names). Overall, I'd use this, as I have used others in the past.
Coupon not working for me either. "no longer valid"
How can anyone stand those nasty apple keyboards. Apple makes wonderful computers but their keyboards and mice are some of the worst I have ever had the displesure of using.
