Lone Gunman

Twenty years from now you will be more dis­ap­pointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bow­lines, sail away from the safe har­bor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Dis­cover.
– Mark Twain

Travel Inde­pen­dent thinks it has “every­thing you need to know about inde­pen­dent bud­get travel”. After just a quick browse of its many sec­tions (‘What to Pack’, ‘Where to Go’, ‘Before You Go’, ‘Coun­try Sum­maries’, and ‘On the Road’), I’m inclined to agree.

But how much is this going to cost you? For a quick guessti­mate, Sav­ing for Travel is your pal.

Thanks Andy

You may have noticed that I’ve recently been fas­ci­nated by every­thing cog­ni­tive bias. With the release of Nudge—a book look­ing at how politi­cians around the world are using cog­ni­tive bias—the gen­eral pub­lic are now going to be hear­ing about it a lot more too.

The Times has a nice case-study where the the­o­ries are used to guide the pub­lic on the issue of envi­ron­men­tal­ism and ‘going green’. This quote sums up what I believe are many of the public’s thoughts on the many ongo­ing green campaigns:

Like mil­lions of oth­ers, Heath had found that sim­ply being told she ought to save energy had lit­tle effect on her habits – and she actively resents the idea of being pun­ished for dis­obey­ing gov­ern­ment dik­tats on envi­ron­men­tal­ism. Drive a big car? You’re bad – pay a penalty.

via Mind Hacks

BBC Busi­ness’ How to Write a Busi­ness Plan has some sound advice for that basic busi­ness plan. How­ever, being writ­ten by a multi-national cor­po­ra­tion, I had an inkling that it wasn’t going to be very—I hate say­ing this—Web 2.0, so I went to the usual sus­pects.

This Ask Y Com­bi­na­tor thread has some good advice and fur­ther resources. I was expect­ing this:

Keep work­ing on your prod­uct, get a user base, and worry later about ver­bal­iz­ing the specifics of your pro­jected mar­ket share and what day exactly you plan to go cash flow positive.

Instead the com­ment got debunked numer­ous times.

Extra-special resources include: Sequoia Capital’s ‘Ideas’ and Paul Gra­ham (of Y Com­bi­na­tor) on Viaweb’s first busi­ness plan.

The Seat­tle Post-Intelligencer has been scour­ing Microsoft’s inter­nal emails (released through var­i­ous law suits) look­ing for an insight into Gates’ per­son­al­ity and to get a pic­ture of his role at the top of Microsoft.

From this epic email rant, it is obvi­ous that even Gates him­self isn’t immune.

I am quite dis­ap­pointed at how Win­dows Usabil­ity has been going back­wards and the pro­gram man­age­ment groups don’t drive usabil­ity issues.

Some­one decided to trash the one part of Win­dows that was usable? […] What an absolute mess.

The lack of atten­tion to usabil­ity rep­re­sented by these expe­ri­ences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low…

via Link Banana

Time has just released the results of its 50 ‘best’ web­sites of 2008 vote.

Present are many you would expect, but there are a few sur­pris­ing entries too. The top 5:

1. Penny Arcade
2. Gaia Online
3. Kon­gre­gate
4. Gas­Buddy
5. Free Rice

via Mind Hacks