I just put together a fairly comprehensive list of albums (15 of them to be exact) that you should be listening to while working.
The article is over at one of my new sites: Music to Work By: 15 Albums Necessary for Any Designer’s Playlist
The past 4 days were spent in Austin, TX at this years SXSWi Festival.
I met lots of new people and was able to finally meet in person many people I’ve conversed with over the past few years.
Overall the experience was a good one. There were a number of really good panels, though I do have to say that I was a bit let down by some of them. Seems a lot of the panels were good in theory but just weren’t executed well.
I would have liked a few more panels that weren’t on such a beginner level, but I understand a huge number of people that go to SXSW are really knew to this stuff.
Twitter remarkably withstood the onslaught of constant updates from thousands of attendees and was used for just about all communication between people getting together during the day and for parties in the evenings.
It’s good to be home and hit the ground running with some renewed energy about things and if I met you this year, it was a pleasure. 
We’ve just launched Adregate.
Go sign up for a free account…assuming you need to manage ads.
So generally I’m pretty weary about telling people to click on links and “Sign up for this and tell your friends to sign up and we’ll all get rich”. But this really has worked for me.
Blingo is a search engine that awards prizes on random searches. It uses Google search results so it’s the same thing as searching Google.
Each time you search, you could possibly win something from a simple as a movie ticket up to stuff like a car.
In the past month I’ve won 3 free movie tickets.
On top of that, what’s cool is if you get people to sign up under you, you win whatever they win. So say you sign up with my link and then you win a $100…I also win $100.
So, what are you waiting for? Sign up for Blingo!
I’m not sure what to think.
Ashley and I have been anticipating the premier of Season 4 of LOST ever since the dramatic ending of Season 3. We watched all of the Missing Pieces mini-episodes and then watched the hour-long series recap before the premier tonight. Needless to say our hopes were pretty high.
I would say that I’ll be careful about giving stuff away but honestly tonight’s episode really hardly gave us more info than what we ended with last season.
I really hope this season isn’t full of filler shows. I’ve hung on for 3 seasons and am entering a 4th season. I’m getting very antsy for some answers.
What did you think of tonight’s episode?
So some 10+ years ago I was really in to collecting baseball/hockey cards.
I initially collected hockey cards because I was a huge hockey fan but all my friends were collecting baseball cards so I inevitably switched to collecting those so I could have something to trade with them.
I estimate I’ve got some 2000-3000 cards stuffed away in the basement (about 60% hockey, 40% baseball). I’ve always wondered what my collection was worth but just didn’t care to look all the cards up.
Thankfully I’ve stumbled upon Beckett’s myBeckett feature!
I’ve started the painfully slow process of inputting all my cards where they will be eternally tracked by Beckett. So 10 years down the road when I wonder how much my collection is now worth, I just fire up myBeckett, hope I still remember my login info, and easily pull up how much my collection (as well as each individual card) is worth!
It could honestly take me the better part of a year to input all of my cards, but it will certainly be nice once they’re all in there.
Now for the participation portion of the show. What sort of things have you collected in your lifetime?
My list would be: Stamps, Coins, Baseball Cards, Hockey Cards, and (my current love) Urban Vinyl Toys.
I no longer need the 6 licenses for Mint that I own…so I’m selling them.
If you’d like a license, send me an email (josh at joshpigford dot com). I’m selling them for $20 each…they’re $30 “brand new”.
As Adregate is getting super close to launching I started thinking about the road it has taken to get here.
I initially came up with the name “adregate” for “aggregating” ad statistics. So it would have basically been a place to crunch numbers from all the ad networks you were using. That never really go off the ground but I had the domain name sitting around for safe keeping.
Then about 2 years ago I was getting really frustrated with the ad management solutions that were out there. Everything was just way too complex. All the extra crap in these other ad management apps just annoyed me.
I also knew I wanted to do a hosted solution. One barrier to entry for a lot of people has been the need to install things on their own server. So I wanted that problem solved as well.
The entire development process for Adregate has certainly been a learning experience. There have certainly been times where I just didn’t want to code anymore and frankly was just sick of the idea. There was a period of about 3-5 months where nothing was touched with Adregate. Developers moved on. Programming languages were changed. Tens of thousands of lines of code were scrapped because foundations and standards weren’t set right from the start.
I’m definitely a perfectionist and it’s taken a while to grasp the idea of not making things “perfect”, per se, but just getting something out there as a start. I can hack away at things all day long but it won’t necessarily make the product any better.
So right now I’ve set a tentative launch date for Adregate of February 5, 2008. The last 10% of things that take 90% of the time are all finally coming together and I really believe Adregate is going to fill a massive gap in the market.
I’m excited to see where things go with the app hope to see some of you using it.
Well, I’ve finally caught the bug and have become a tad obsessive with Twitter. We’ll see how long this lasts.
Oh. And happy new year.
Thanks to software like SpamAssassin, my email inbox only gets around 5-8 spam emails a day and about 99.9999% of that gets caught by Mail’s junk filter.
Unfortunately the USPS has not caught on to using any kind of “junk” filter for their service.
How is it that in the short time the internet has been around, there are already solid solutions for almost completely eliminating junk while the USPS, which has been around for over 200 years, offers no real solution for keeping my mailbox free of crap?
Over 90% of the mail that is in our physical mailbox is pure junk. Unsolicited, useless junk. Sure there are ways to opt-out of some of the things like credit card offers, but the real problem is the “local” unsolicited mail. Things like postcards advertising the new gym down the street or a brochure from the shop nearby that is having a big sale.
All these business have to do is include the line “Current Resident” in the address line and it will always get delivered to your mailbox. The USPS’s policy to allow this crap through the system without offering a way to opt-out is just as criminal as the spammers who send millions of spam email every day.
So, USPS, if the piece of mail doesn’t have my name on it, or even worse just has “Current Resident” as the recipient, don’t deliver it to my mailbox. I don’t want it.
