garry’s subposterous

Little snippets of the web that haven't formed into a full post or full idea yet. But you can see what's brewing. 

Working from home rocks. Rescuetime team worked from home and got half a man-month out of it!

It doesn’t look like much, but 5 people logged an extra 75 hours in a month, with the vast majority of those extra hours being productive development or design hours (about 63 extra dev/design hours were logged in the working from home month).

At posterous we are doing 3 day a week in-the-office, 2 days from home. Less interruptions = way more coding time. I pulled an all-nighter and got some gnarly architecture work done yesterday that there is NO way I could have gotten done in such a small amount of time if I knew I had to live on a normal schedule and get into the office the next day!

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30% of success is willingness to take risks

He explained that success in ski racing, or most sports for that matter, was only 40% physical training. The other 60% was mental. And of that, the first 30% was technical skill and experience. The second 30% was the willingness to take risks. With ski racing, specifically, that meant taking the risk of leaning harder into turns, balancing at a steeper angle to the slope, and placing greater pressure on the outside ski edge – all of which increased the chance of falling. My coach explained, though, that if I wasn’t falling at least once a day in training, I wasn’t trying hard enough. Indeed, to improve at anything, we must at some point push ourselves outside our comfort zone. Body builders call it the “pain period.” Only by trying something new, struggling, learning, and then trying again do we improve our performance.

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Deadline Schmedline: Arbitrary deadlines will ruin your life

Arbitrary deadlines are, in my opinion, the things that kill most of us. An arbitrary deadline is a date that you circled on the calendar because you wanted to launch something at that time. For no real reason. You are launching a product that will help people wash laundry better than before, you chose June 16th because that is your mother's birthday and that woman could wash socks like nobody's business. Working backwards from that date, you decided that staff had to be hired by February 2. It's Jan 15 and you still haven't found the right people, you're totally stressed, turning into an asshole and it's getting ugly. (And everyone in your house has Swine Flu and you really don't think you have time to care for them right now.)
--Alyssa Royse via seattle20.com

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Epic schadenfreude: Record companies are gonna lose their archive catalog copyrights. HAHA.

“The termination that’s going to be coming up is going to be a big problem for the record companies and publishers,” said attorney Greg Eveline of Eveline Davis & Phillips Entertainment Law.

“It’s written into the statute,” said entertainment lawyer Robert Bernstein. “It’s just a matter of time.”

The Copyright Act includes two sets of rules for how this works. If an artist or author sold a copyright before 1978 (Section 304), they or their heirs can take it back 56 years later. If the artist or author sold the copyright during or after 1978 (Section 203), they can terminate that grant after 35 years. Assuming all the proper paperwork gets done in time, record labels could lose sound recording copyrights they bought in 1978 starting in 2013, 1979 in 2014, and so on. For 1953-and-earlier music, grants can already be terminated.

The Eagles plan to file grant termination notices by the end of the year, according to Law.com. “It’s going to happen,” said Eveline. “Just think of what the Eagles are doing when they get back their whole catalog. They don’t need a record company now…. You’ll be able to go to Eaglesband.com (updated) and get all their songs. They’re going to do it; it’s coming up.”

This is awesome! Artists are going to get the cut they deserve, and middlemen get squeezed out of existence. *high five*

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Top brands by color (infographic)

Really interesting breakdown. Not a whole lot going in the yellow-green and the magenta, eh?

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Steve Blank on how startups are not little corporations. You don't need titles and VP's.

 

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50 Cent on ownership: You should own it all. Make it yours.

When you work for others, you are at their mercy. They own your work; they own you. Your creative spirit is squashed. What keeps you in such positions is a fear of having to sink or swim on your own. Instead you should have a greater fear of what will happen to you if you remain dependent on others for power. Your goal in every maneuver in life must be ownership, working the corner for yourself. When it is yours, it is yours to lose -- you are more motivated, more creative, more alive. The ultimate power in life is to be completely self-reliant, completely yourself.
--50 Cent via huffingtonpost.com

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How to tell if your product is ready for 1.0 release

The threshold for the release of the first product should be, 'What would Steve Jobs do?'

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How to pick a co-founder

Picking a co-founder is your most important decision. It’s more important than your product, market, and investors.

The ideal founding team is two individuals, with a history of working together, of similar age and financial standing, with mutual respect. One is good at building products and the other is good at selling them.

Venture Hacks has got it right.

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Women can't use the train in Japan without getting groped. Now there's a ladies-only train. WTF.

A sign on a train boarding platform in Osaka, Japan, showing the boarding point for a ladies-only car. These cars have become neccesary due to high levels of groping in mixed cars. Two-thirds of women between the ages of 20 and 40 say they have been groped on the train in Japan.

THAT IS MESSED UP.

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