View high resolution
Guard dog (Taken with Instagram at Blue Hill at Stone Barns)
-
-
-
Uncontacted Amazon Tribe: First ever aerial footage (by Survival International)
Vimeo is so rewarding!!!
It’s amazing that there are “uncontacted” people living less than 4,000 miles away from NYC.
-
Girl Talk was insane in a “when did I get too old to go to concerts?” kind of way.
-
Less can be more in online networks
Sam Lessin (founder of drop.io; now with Facebook) described traditional social media sites as “uploading something and then pushing it across a network or making it searchable.” With drop.io, Lessin created a service that did the opposite; instead of making things public, individuals and businesses used drop.io to pull information online, secure it in a private place, and share that “exact location with exactly who [they] wanted.” *
The idea of private networks is fascinating, in part because it runs counter to how most people that I know use social sites like Facebook and Twitter. The goal is to accumulate as many friends as possible, safe in the knowledge that we can un-friend people later. But as we increase the number of online relationships that we have, the intimacy of what we share and the connection that we have with our networks decline. MySpace lost its credibility as a social site because users hyperactively expanded their reach to the point that an overload of porn and spam devalued real online connections.
Instead of half-sharing with lots of people, I would rather share lots of things with the handful of people that mean the most to me. At least a few media startups (including Path) are exploring this concept, but I’d love to see companies apply this theory to other spaces that would benefit from fewer, higher-quality interactions (e-commerce and online dating come to mind).
*Source: VatorTV Interview
-
Hiring a Virtual Assistant
Everyone I know is busy. Whether it’s work or school or an overbooked personal life, no one has the time to accomplish everything that he or she wants to.
I spent the long weekend in NYC and got back to Chapel Hill last night. As I unpacked, I realized I had no idea what was going on this week. I hate not being organized, but I also hate wasting time leafing through class syllabi and undigested e-mail. Even if it only takes an hour to get organized, that’s time I could have spent doing something I value more.
So, I created an oDesk account and posted a job opening for a virtual assistant to aggregate my class assignments for the quarter into an Excel spreadsheet. It took 20 minutes to create an account and post the job listing. The results were immediate; within 45 minutes, I had:
- Received 41 job applications with an average salary offer of $3.44/hour;
- Hired a contractor from India to put together the spreadsheet for $3.33/hour (with a cap at 3 hours); and
- E-mailed the contractor the relevant files to complete the work.
Sixteen hours later, the contractor sent me the completed spreadsheet in near-perfect condition. He had spent two hours working on it, meaning the final cost to me was $6.66, which I’ll charge to my credit card at the end of the week.
I’m amazed at how smoothly the engagement went and how quickly the contractor was able to turn the product around (I was asleep for part of the 16 hours). Granted, I spent extra time—including a 15-minute Skype chat—making sure he understood the job clearly, but I did that out of a genuine interest in the process. I don’t think I’ll use virtual assistants very frequently (I can’t think of any recurring projects that someone would be able to help me with), but I’ll definitely pay up to use one when the opportunity presents itself again.
-
-
View high resolution
Williams College — View of Chapin Hall (Taken with instagram at Paresky Center)
-
"To succeed in a spectacular fashion you have to be spectacularly unusual."
Michael Lewis; The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
Theme: Linear by Peter Vidani
