Evil heat is running through me (through me).

[reddragdiva]

It is spring and I feel for the trees and flowers that torment me so. The sap has risen and I am ridiculously agitated. Half my friends list appears to feel this way; I think we need to match half that half with the other half. CALL ME. CALL ME NOW.

Today I went to yet another appointment about my sleep apnea. It's not a case susceptible to surgery, so he's going to send me to someone else for a mandibular splint. Hopefully in less than the year it took since my last appointment.

ewtikins came to visit our lovely abode this afternoon for the first time. redcountess likes visitors, since an attack of *splat* left her too unwell to attend a drinkies this evening. Today is the second anniversary of Liz's arrival in Britain!

arkady came with me to the appointment to describe the remarkable noises I make in my sleep. On the way we engaged in more businessy blur talk. Go express interest in a custom articulated doll. Not Barbie™-price, but very good indeed. I have been researching my own competitors and am slightly boggling that I can't find any that appear to be putting any effort in. Stuff I'd already put on my to-do list as stupidly obvious. Be vewwy, vewwy quiet ...

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

To encourage you along, I shall tell you that the guy who founded Hotmail used to start every day by checking to see if anyone else had launched a free webmail service. At first, he was just being careful, but as the months passed he became more and more incredulous that noone else had thought of this idea. It took MUCH longer for someone else to jump on the bandwagon than he expected...

[reddragdiva]

What gets me is that I have lots of competitors. But they're all either (a) backed with stupid amounts of money or, if working on a shoestring like me, (b) just not doing all sorts of SIMPLE and OBVIOUS things that were the first things I scribbled down.

(By the way, an excellent reason to start a business: you get to indulge in all manner of stationery pr0n.)

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

Hmm, and here I was thinking I was a bit odd for enjoying the whole stationery pr0n thing when I started my company...

[kest]

Tuesday night? Wednesday night? I will call you.

[reddragdiva]

Indeed! Although we should see if we smell good to each other first ;-p I shall introduce you to the Dev while it's still here ...

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

I occasionally ponder crazy business ideas:

Decent online shared calendaring. Evidence existing providers suck - I know many geeks who've tried to organise social events online, at no point has a tool been used to manage this, if there was a good piece of software they're exactly the natural people to use it.

Decent dating website (see throwaway comments from Paul Graham at http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html which is also interesting on generic startup-fu). I have vague ideas about social tagging a-la del.icio.us, but that may just be crazy.

The "hosting provider that doesn't suck" space - see blackcatnetworks.

The really overambitious one - one of these days someone has to sort out email.

[reddragdiva]

For ideas like these, a useful way of thinking is to make something fantastically usable by technophobes but which geeks can twiddle to their hearts' content. Examples: LiveJournal, MacOS X, Firefox, Fotopic.net, Gmail. (Gmail is slowly adding twiddlability. As I said in an early feature suggestion email, "There should be nothing I can do in Thunderbird that I can't do in Gmail.") That way, both the early-adopter geeks and their technophobe friends and families can get right into it.

The shared calendar thing is just waiting for someone who can mentally map the entire space to zero in on the simple and elegant solution that's obvious in retrospect.

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

I think there's a common core of Simple and Right to focus on that hooks both technophobes and hardcore geeks and for some reason seems to pass over the people in the middle.

My vague thoughts on calendaring which I will not implement as there is already >120% of the day I'm meant to be doing stuff in:

Look at the calendaring standards for interesting cases to handle, then ignore them otherwise. You can add import/export later.

Everything gets a simple REST xml api for the geek tendancy.

It *has* to be simpler to organise a social event when you're the only one using the system. Possibly it sends emails to everyone and gives them yes/no buttons to click (in a HTML mail client) (or urls in a text only one). If the recipient just replies, that's stored and flagged for you to look at.

Vague pondering on RSS feeds of things you need to turn up for.

For jabber users with recorded ids it instant-messages them to remind them to turn up.

[reddragdiva]

"I think there's a common core of Simple and Right to focus on that hooks both technophobes and hardcore geeks and for some reason seems to pass over the people in the middle."

For the middle we supposedly have Windows, which infuriates the geeks, makes technophobes feel like they're stupid and has the people in the middle running like hamsters on wheels chasing the illusion of knowledge as power. And keeping a lot of techs in work, of course.

Who in the middle do the mentioned examples miss? MacOS X misses Windows reverse-snobs who don't want the illusion of knowledge as power taken away. MacOS 1-9 misses geeks. Leegnux misses technophobes badly and doesn't do much for the middle.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Stop snoring, sleep better, and do a convincing impression of a Nick Park animation. (Or is that just the thingy the model is using to hold their cheek out of the way so the photographer can get a good shot?)

[reddragdiva]

No, I believe that's the thing itself. Somewhat lacking in bedtime s3xx0rn3ss, but that's why people get married.

/me runs away from Liz

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Mmm, Wensleydale.

[reddragdiva]

Kisses may fade, but cheese lasts a lifetime.

[paula-angela.livejournal.com]

Pretty!

[arkady.livejournal.com]

The dolls or the splint? ;-)

[paula-angela.livejournal.com]

Well, given that redragdiva's snoring is not currently relevant to me...