Money

Really interesting story in New York magazine on how a variety of businesses in New York make money. They profile a yoga studio, a clothing store, a cab driver, a drug dealer, and number of other businesses, small to large.

http://nymag.com/news/features/2007/profit/

the Century of Behavior Change

Great Great NYT article on the psychology of eating. I've heard of Wansink's experiments on consumption using bottomless bowls of soup and small and large tubs of chips, but this article also includes his quick analysis of the article author's kitchen setup.

Action item: buy smaller dinner plates.

yum, flowers

More and more groceries are selling edible flowers among the fresh herbs. They look pretty on cakes. Here is Joe's birthday cake, decorated with edible flowers. It's a sponge cake with lemon filling & glaze. Mmm.

Jott and GTD geekiness

Been using a really cool (and free) service called Jott. You register your email and cell phone number with them (they promise not to share/spam), then you can call their 800 number from your cell and dictate a short message to yourself. They transcribe it to text and email you your message.

http://jott.com/

When I'm in the car driving I always think of things I need to do and ideas for work but I have not until now found a good capture method. I hate trying to leave voice notes on my crappy cell phone (it's near the end of its 2-year life and is slow to respond to side button commands, plus I just don't have a good routine of processing the voice notes.) So with Jott I just hit 5 on speed dial and speak whatever I need to remember the item and there's a reminder in my email (where I do most inbox-processing anyway.) So this fits nicely into my GTD system and helps me get ideas and reminders out of my head and onto a list.

Hope Jott finds some way to monetize this. I wouldn't mind seeing a couple of ads in the reminder emails.

all known bodies

Alan created this very cool image of all known bodies in the solar system >200mi diameter. One hundred and seventy layers in Photoshop. Holy crap, that's a lot of layers. Nice work. Alan is a fantastic developer AND he has a great design sense.

http://www.kokogiak.com/gedankengang/2007/03/all-known-bodies-in-solar-system.html

mycybertwin?

So I read about MyCyberTwin and it sounded kind of interesting. Online avatars are intriguing to me. So I set one up, filled out the whole personality survey and then got pulled away from the computer and haven't had time to explore it further.

Then tonight I get an email that "bob is having a conversation with your cybertwin". What could my cybertwin possibly be conversing about? I haven't told it any of my interests or anything. What does it know?

Not much apparently. Here's the conversation, which I'm damned glad the real me had nothing to do with, because it's incredibly lame:

05/04/2007 at 6:17 PM	bob		hi
05/04/2007 at 6:17 PM	julie		Hi. How are you today?
05/04/2007 at 6:18 PM	bob		ok
05/04/2007 at 6:18 PM	julie		Ok great
05/04/2007 at 6:18 PM	bob		thats good
05/04/2007 at 6:18 PM	julie		Thanks bob, I try.
05/04/2007 at 6:18 PM	bob		thats good
05/04/2007 at 6:18 PM	julie		Thanks bob, I try.
05/04/2007 at 6:18 PM	bob		what do you liek
05/04/2007 at 6:18 PM	julie		I like socializing online.
05/04/2007 at 6:19 PM	bob		what else?
05/04/2007 at 6:19 PM	julie		You are looking great! What have you been doing to yourself?
05/04/2007 at 6:19 PM	bob		nothing, why?
05/04/2007 at 6:19 PM	julie		Not a thing? Will things change at some point in the future?
05/04/2007 at 6:19 PM	bob		no
05/04/2007 at 6:19 PM	julie		alright then

I'm not sure this has enticed me to explore MyCyberTwin any further...