If you watched the video, don’t bother reading - just post below!
I’m a closet design freak. I’m most at rapture when looking at brilliantexamples of typography, using software whose designers have clearly sweated over every detail, and having visions of all the brilliant design I’d be wreaking on the world if I could wrangle Photoshop more than just “adequately.”
One company, though, embodies the highest caliber of design on the web: Carsonified. They’ve created a number of great services and sites (including DropSend), and they host many great events each year, including Future of Web Apps and Fuel.
To the point! Carsonified is holding a contest to see who can do a little self-promotion. In the next 24 hours or so, I need 25 of my best friends to comment below - you can comment on anything at all (see the video above). So get to it! Thanks!
The number of readers and inbound links for this blog will probably double this week (which isn’t saying much), so it’s probably time for an update.
First, though, a preface: if you’ll be in Orlando for BarCamp or Stanford for Startup School, drop me a line(direct e-mail link).
As of one week ago, I had just gathered the courage to tell my family that I’d be working freelance in Atlanta after I got my degree (in August). The future has been looming large for a long time, and it felt better to make an executive decision and start shopping it around than simply maintain the que-sera-sera attitude I’d been nervously holding out to everyone who asked up to that point.
Making one choice for independence seems to start a cascade of successively more challenging and more tempting possibilities. Knowing that I wanted to work for myself was a certainty; getting there would take a little more thought (since my freelancing so far has not been fabulously lucrative). But really, honestly starting a company, with a co-founder and all the legal shenanigans required to get legit: that was a long-shot.
Then I got pitched by a friend on an idea that was just too outstanding to pass up. Then, that very same night, I was notified that I was accepted to Startup School. I just booked the flight to San Jose. Come Wednesday, we’ll be in the pool with a wide range of other brilliant startups, looking for seed capital and hoping to get set up in a startup hub where we can grow this thing into something valuable and excellent.
What does that look like? I don’t know. But I do know that things are moving along fast enough at this point that I won’t have time to slow down and think about it before it’s too late.
Over the last couple of days, I’ve put together a little program I’m calling RabidRead*. RabidRead was conceived when I read a forum post by someone about how he was able to achieve very high comprehension at very high speeds by using a piece of software he wrote.
Programs of this sort are called “serial readers,”and they work by presenting a single word (from a long text) at a time, in rapid succession (say, between 200 and 1000 words per minute).