Take your butter and put it on a toothpick tripod. Pop it in the microwave and stop it right as the butter starts to slide down. Voila, turn refrigerator-cold butter into perfectly spreadable butter with no mess or melt.
I wish there were simple tricks like this to solve all of life's problems.
via The Spalenka Letters (hat tip Lifehacker)
In Slate, The Untold Story of Larry Page's Incredible Comeback (Hat Tip Jeff Lonsdale):
This is a pretty powerful idea. There are two sets of people in the world - those who are ambitious dreamers, and those who have capital to allocate. 99.999999% of the time, those two things don't really meet. Sure, there are VC's, and sure there are forward thinking people who invest, but that is still not enough."Page recognized that Google’s search-advertising business, with its insane profit margins and sustained growth, was exactly the kind of cash-generating machine that his hero, Nikola Tesla, would have used to fund his wildest dreams."
Israeli electric car startup Better Place ate through $900M in funding and died. In his coverage, Max Chafkin writes this gem:
This is very true, and startups die every other day of some form of this. The money comes tomorrow only when you perform. Even if it's easy now, it won't be easy forever.Entrepreneurs are frequently told not to drink their own Kool-Aid--which is to say, to remember that the stories they tell about how their products will save humanity are just that.
Privately, they are cautioned to focus on the small things; to make more money than they lose; to cut costs when needed; and, when necessary, to pivot to a more promising business. The caution seems especially important in a culture that increasingly celebrates startups, threatening to confuse their mythmaking with reality.
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
It's always great when a big company innovates, but just like a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, a little innovation can be that way for creating a million paper cuts of user pain.
Here's one paper cut by American Express's ReceiptMatch service, that can take posts by email. But unfortunately, when its servers are down (and they are down often), the service just starts instantly rejecting email.
This simply isn't the kind of thing a normal software engineer would do. Emails queue by default, actually — and receipts are rarely so mission critical that I need 200 millisecond response times on my receipt emails. So just leave the email in the queue and process it when you can.
A rare case of addition by subtraction — it's actually more work to send a rejection email than it is to let it sit in an email queue. That's the easiest thing in the world to do, and infinitely better than what they do now.