http://www.jperla.com/blog The site design looks much more balanced when this sentence is long Tue, 29 Jul 2008 04:37:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I updated my booklist which I link at the top of my blog.  Please let me tell you a little about it. Generating the Page Organizing the Books I use GoodReads to organize my books.  James Currier, proprietor of MedPedia, invests in GoodReads.  It lets me add books quickly and easily, plus I ... http://www.jperla.com/blog/2008/07/29/books-i-read/ I love to read about others' unique creations.  I love to get ideas from them. By pure chance, I happened up on David Friedman's excellent blog called Ironic Sans where he showcases designs both illustrative and mechanical.  He recently created a funny (punny) little graphic: It reminds me of XKCD, a beautifully ... http://www.jperla.com/blog/2008/07/28/font-comic-attempt-1/ The Germ Theory of Disease saved billions of lives from early deaths.  It identified a root cause, as well as solutions, to the population-threatening problems of contagious diseases. [caption id="attachment_220" align="alignnone" width="241" caption="BlackBerry"][/caption] Today, email apathy plagues the workforce.  Whenever you send someone an email and he or she never replies to ... http://www.jperla.com/blog/2008/07/26/blackberry-theory-of-email-apathy/ In PE in middle and high school, I always remember taking my pulse and having a very high resting heart rate relative to others.  I forget the exact number, but it might have reached 80 beats per minute or higher.  I always thought I counted incorrectly or double-counted. I've started running ... http://www.jperla.com/blog/2008/07/24/heart-rate/ YCombinator, a kind of mini- venture capital firm, invests tens of thousands of dollars ($$$) into very early seed stage start-up companies run by smart technology hackers. I applied to YCombinator two times.  The first time, when I applied with my friend Mason for the Summer 2007 round,  I arrogantly presumed ... http://www.jperla.com/blog/2008/07/20/ycombinator-application-guide/ I stopped writing in this blog once I realized that people actually read it.  I received a few comments in one technical blog post.  They pushed me over a cliff.  Instead of publishing whatever popped into my mind regardless of the quality of the idea or writing, I hesitated over ... http://www.jperla.com/blog/2008/07/19/steve-yegge-rules/ XKCD solves Ghost The XKCD guy not long ago wrote about the game Ghost.  You start the two-player game Ghost by saying one letter.  Then, your opponent says another letter.  Concatenate the letters together, they should not form a word.  Continue adding letters to the concatenation of letters one by one ... http://www.jperla.com/blog/2008/05/12/games-to-play-with-just-voice-and-memory/ I have already written about my distaste for advertising. Sometimes, however, these newspapers and blogs manage to make something of value. A particularly hard-hitting expose in a newspaper, or a particularly helpful guide in a blog, offers to people real value. Nobody can create this kind of content every ... http://www.jperla.com/blog/2008/04/20/tipjoy-ingeniously-simplifies-and-enables-micro-payments/ I just bought a Mac Mini.  I love it.  Apple spent a lot of time polishing OS X. I configured OS X to create a chime, a 21-st century chime.  In the Date & Time settings, I selected it to tell me the time every hour.  At 6pm, a voice from ... http://www.jperla.com/blog/2008/04/17/make-your-own-chimes/ Tim Ferriss popularized the idea that you should limit the amount of time you spend checking email every day.  He espouses a philosophy of life called the low-information diet.  By following these guidelines, you get more done and, more importantly, feel less stressed. One of his suggestions about email spread across ... http://www.jperla.com/blog/2008/04/15/how-to-check-email-two-times-a-day/