Kotrotsos.com

Yesterday- during a business pitch. Someone brought the appearent (well actually, his own) issue to light that it is not possible to really focus on more than one business at the same time- and succeed.

I think his thinking is really old fashioned thinking.

When you are performing a task, like working on a company, on a business idea or some other concept. You can easily fill all the time that is available for that particular task. Work is like gas, it will fill up all space that is available. But in my experience if you segment your space (it this case time, on different companies) it would only fill up that amount of space. 

It's not really his fault that he thinks this way- it is what Higher Education Business school teaches him to think. 

I started a company (well, multiple) to be creative, and to have the freedom to work on whatever creative things come to mind. Not to work inside a box I create for myself. 

Steve Martin began as a comic performer with a unique brand of humor. Over his career, he has mastered acting in films and on stage, playing the banjo (he is currently on tour with his band), and he has written novels and screenplays. He doesn’t credit his talent as a comedian, but his ability to tap into his creativity to tackle all kinds of different mediums.

Would you say to Steve Martin that he needs to focus? 

Part of beeing an entrepreneur means you have the desire to create and to be creative. If you are happy doing what you do in a single company on one thing, sure- go ahead. but remember though- it's dangerous- holding only one key to your kingdom...

And there are some other people who really want- and really can execute on more than one idea. And still have time for their families. They hold multiple key's.

I am working on something truly exciting. I can't really tell you what it is yet, but all will be revealed over the coming weeks.

But it's new, it's fresh- and I really think it's awesome.

It Grows In A Forest

Everyone knows them- and everybody hates them. Advertisements that haunt you from place to place. If you browse for something at say Bol.com or some travel site , then those ads will keep pestering you until times end.

There is a solution, If you wish to opt-out from receiving those incredibly annoying ads. You can try these links:

Google Ads preferences

And the one for Criteo: Opt-out from Criteo

Fetchback: http://www.fetchback.com/optout.html

I will add more if I find them, or leave them in the comments.

So I converted myself again from a sit down slouch to an awesome standing superhuman (tm) But this time I wasn't content with a desk on top of 2 chairs, I wanted something solid- efficient and of the right standing height. So I set out to build my own. 

Here is how it turned out.

(download)

Click here to download:

ikea-standing-desk-hack-znlgJEyBAyramlwsqEbb.zip (10.87 MB)

I took a small (Everything Ikea) Expedit and put some legs under it;

http://www.ikea.com/nl/nl/catalog/products/20135300 and http://www.ikea.com/nl/nl/catalog/products/20054563)

The Capita legs give it some initial height and it looks real nice.

I then added the big Capita brackets on top of the Expedit;

http://www.ikea.com/nl/nl/catalog/products/40051196

Which is a bit of a hassle since the screws don't reach the nuts too well, the Expedit is a tad too thick. I didn't -but you'd better use some glue as well as bolting the thing on top of the Expedit.

I used a Galant desk I already had as a desktop;

http://www.ikea.com/nl/nl/catalog/products/S09847787

To rest my iMac and second screen I used a long Lack wall shelf, and a very small one (the square one) attaching it to the desk using only double sided tape (the strong kind)

There is no reason not to choose a larger Expedit and then (and only then) a larger Galant desktop. Be careful though that the whole thing is in balance. The Capita legs should be right on the outer edges of the Expedit, or it will not be stable enough. 

(download)

Click here to download:

ikea-standing-desk-hack-kahdhasqCdypCfEgHmfB.zip (851 KB)

1. The way to play the jigsaw instruction tapes are always labeled clearly.

2. The rules of the game are very simple and always straightforward (eg. poke out eye- get key)

Bonus: Playing the game successfully brings great reward...usually.  

Please- follow me on Twitter- I tend ramble with a greater frequency there. :) @kotrotsos

I needed a solution to quickly (and manually) extract certain text fragments (job titles) from text (in this case tweets)

I could have just selected > copied > other window > newline > pasted. But doing that a thousand time would get tedious real fast. So I fired up trusty Textmate and created a new Text command. Here is what I did.

So now I only have to select the text, and hit the designated key combo and it appends the selected text to a text file.  (in this case /Users/me/newjobs.txt) Instant 1000% increase in efficiency- easily.

Because we like easy and simple things, we currently work on what we hope are going to be two very useful web apps.

One is called Taskflo which is going to be a simple task management app and the other is called Echo and tracks Twitter keyword performance over time.

These are like trow away and no sign-on type of apps. Which means that you get an (very secret) URL from where you can access your list or keywords and that's it. No registering or login to remember- We send it to your email adres just in case, but the only thing you need is to bookmark the URL and off you go. We really would like to see how people use these apps- and if the no sign-up (or in) format is useful and secure enough. These apps will be minimal viable products when released and we want lot's of feedback about tweaks, hacks ,stuff that doesn't work or works like crap. Anything. So here's Taskflo.  Still has it's multi user interface, but we will strip that and make it like Echo- where you can only access it through a (again, very secret) URL.

There are only two lists, one big and one small. You can drag items to and fro. You can add headings (the orange type bars) text and todo items that you can check off. You can include HTML (will be sanitized) so you can add pictures and references to files and sites. These will probably get some sort of nice interface later on. But for now we will see how useful these are. And yes, we are looking to compete with Backpack. :)

And here is Echo. Both apps look about the same which mean we can get these sites (and there are more coming) out there -real fast to get feedback on them.

    As you can probably tell- these interfaces are a work in progress. But are coming along nicely.