Life in Balance: Amit Chaudhary’s Blog
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True face in the mirror

In the yogic world, an air of unreality permeates discussions about the real. What is the use of being able to dissolve body into light, to lose subject-object separation in deep states of samadhi, if we cannot even bear to see our true face in the mirror? Ch. 13 in in Yoga and the Quest for the True Self by Stephen Cope

Victory or defeat

Far better it is to dare mightly things, to win glorious triumps, even checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat. Theodore Roosevelt., Ch 7 The Portable Personal Trainer by Eric Harr

First law of success

The first law of success is concentration, to bend all the energies to one point, looking neither to the right nor to the left-William Mathews. from the book: Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy

HDR Image courtesy petecarr on flickr.

Creating companies on the cheap

It started by reading in John Cook’s Venture Blog: A $50,000 burn rate which talks about Newsvine which claims to have a $50,000 burn rate with 6 employees.
The above blog entry was in turn triggered by the article: WallStreet Journal: Tech Start-Ups Have Money to Burn, But Choose Thrift which talks about Silicon valley companies having a typical burnrate of US $150-200k per month, it does compare unfairly with Paypal which used to give money away for opening accounts or referring another user.

Interestingly, most of the startups mentioned in the WSJ online article was in nice locations: Membo, Riya and Sharpcast.

Two interesting view points

• glinden(Greg Liden of Findory) writes in a comment on Doing it on the cheap

O, sure, you can build some Web startups around two founders with a good idea and $50k in seed capital for the first year if the founders forgo their normal salaries, but, assuming the founders normally make ~$150k/year in salary + benefits, the real cost of that startup in the first year will be closer to $350k.

• Shelfari: Launching for under $10k – It’s the PEOPLE!

Capital efficiency, in and of itself, isn’t an achievement. The achievement is building a great team and great product on a shoestring budget.

My thoughts

Some basics should be there once you have outgrown the founders only (proof of concept) phase and are in round one funding. These might vary for each, I would include:

1. Good location (Reduce commute, Have atleast one conference room, etc)

2. Furniture which is Ergonomic (No Herman and Miller chairs, but no making tables from doors like amazon.com either) as one sits for many more hours and Fast computers.

3. Small break room (Coffee, Tea, Microwave, Refrigerator)

4. Competitive salaries to be able to hire good staff, Decent benefits.

Finally, it comes down to thinking what scale are you going for: Thinking in context of a startup, Do you want to start a MyBlogLog or Facebook. Sometimes you can choose, sometimes your idea and product space will decide it for you.

An event on bootstrapping

On the same topic, consider there is a TIE Seattle event on 24th Jan 2007 Wed in Bellevue, WA

Bootstrapping: The secret to entrepreneurial success

Update:

A different point of view in Fractals of Change: Web 2.0 – Greater Initial Investments Required and Changing Ingredients for Web 2.0 Success – Continued with Reader Help.

A indeed.com salary comparision for startups v/s venture backed (Idea from Fred of A VC Blog)

On an average, venture backed startups openings seem to have 10% more salary.

Update 2:

You might also be interested in Brad Feld’s article: Bootstrapping Top 10 List

Using Google Maps in WordPress blog

• Create a separate html page that uses Google MAPS API containing what you want to show in your wordpress blog entry. Link to a Google Maps example with marker, listener and info window.

• Include this html file in a iframe tag in the blog entry as shown below. This is best done by disabling WordPress’s visual rich editor under Dashboard, Options->Writing.

          <iframe width="500" scrolling="no"
           height="300" frameborder="0" align="
           middle" title="Google Maps Example"
          src="http://www.rajgad.com/wfiles/code/gmaps_hotyogacenter.html">
          An interactive Google Maps example </iframe>

• Here is how a custom interactive Google Map looks in a wordpress blog entry.

• If you need more details techrageo.us has them in adding Google Maps to your wordpress blog entry.

Google Maps API links

• Sign for Google Maps API key.

A Google MAPs API key is needed per top level directory where the html pages containing the Google Maps will reside on your web server. The API key generation process is automated and you get the key right away.

• Google Maps API tutorial and Google Maps API reference

The main documentation page that covers the basics and has examples for many features like marker (to show a location), info window(the popup), etc

• Google Maps API groups

For discussions by developers and ability to search old posts.

• Google Maps plugins for ruby

• Articles on Google maps and polygons (Areas like hike or jogging track highlighted on Google maps)

* Polylines from database (MySQL) Example and Polylines from database tutorial

* An interactive Google Maps Polygon creator, click on two points or more on the map to a create a polygon.

• Articles on Google maps and GIS\Geocoding (Long\Lat and zip codes)

* How chicagocrime.org shows zipcodes on Google Maps: Gets free GIS data from the City of Chicago, uses PostgreSQL’s PostGIS spatial-database package to import it and uses a Python script that encodes latitude/longitude points into Google’s proprietary line-generation format.

* Drawing zipcode boundaries on Google maps and tutorial on who to retrieve zip code data from maps.huge.info

Sierra club published a list of which Gas companies are better than others and reasons for that.

The environment record is a good reason to decide where to fill up gas from. Till now for me, location or credit card acceptance use to be the primary reason, but not any more. So, no more filling up gas at 76, I will be trying Arco and others.
Here is the summary list with links to Google’s local US search, just add your location.

First Tier (The Best):

• BP (Gas Pump Brands: AM/PM, Arco and Amoco Ultimate)
• Sunoco (Gas Pump Brands: Sunoco, Ultra Service Centers, and APlus)

Second Tier (The Average):

• Royal Dutch Shell (Gas Pump Brands: Shell)
• Chevron (Gas Pump Brands: Chevron, Texaco and Caltex)
• Valero Energy Corporation (Gas Pump Brands: Valero, Corner Store, Diamond Shamrock, Shamrock, Ultramar, Stop N Go, and Beacon)
• Citgo (Gas Pump Brands: Citgo)

Third Tier (The Worse):

• ExxonMobil (Gas Pump Brands: Exxon, Mobil and Esso in Canada)
• ConocoPhillips (Gas Pump Brands: 76, Conoco, Phillips 66 and JET in Europe)

1. Raising HDL and lowering LDL

1.1 Foods to eat
-Eat atleast 2 servings (preferably 4) of foods high in soluble fiber. This includes fruits (Orange, Apple & Grapes), wheat chapati (no white bread, flour\maida, etc), lentils (dals, rajma) and certain cereals like cheerios, wheat bran\flakes.
-For omega-3 fatty acids, eat atleast two dark green vegetable (Spinach\Palak, etc), Fish every week and cook only in oils such as canola, sunflower, safflower, olive, etc.
-Eat small amounts (10) of almonds every other day.

1.2 Foods to avoid
-Stop completely, food every high in cholestrol: Meat, Eggs(especially the yolk, yellow part). Also stop foods with trans fatty acids: Dalda\Vanaspati, Ghee, Chaats, Cakes, french fries, Puris, Parothas.
-Reduce milk products including cheese, have upto 3 tea or coffee and one or two serving of milk(1 cup milk or yogurt) Try to use low fat or fat free milk.
-Reduce sugar and foods containing sugar such as Cookies and biscuits.

1.3 Exercise plan
Consider doing these exercises in the morning.
-Brisk walk or run 3 times a week (Mon, Wed, Fri), atleast 20 minutes and upto max 60 minutes, work up some amount of sweat.
-Do yoga 3 times a week (Tue, Thu, Sat), join some class or do at home using DVD\VCD.
2. Side effects of cholesterol drugs

Serious side effects of long term use (6 months) include memory loss, real life examples, aircraft engineer forgetting all his knowledge from College including that needed for his work.

Update: As was obvious to some of the readers, the above is copied from an email I sent to someone who is a middle aged Indian person. I was sloppy in making it generic, now I choose not to correct as it might render the comment below irrelevant. And the humor is worth it. Do consider exercising in the evenings!