“If you bankrupt a company before you’re 25, that’s like a badge of honor! Get out there.” – Jim Coudal

Just under a year ago today I was probably heading down that path, but having the lease pulled out from our budding venture nipped our costs as well as the opportunity in the bud.  We folded 6 months later having spent only a fraction of the raised and anticipated capital expenses. A great article that discusses some of the conundrums designers face in finding both a paycheck and a bit of happiness with work. Comparing working for “the man” or setting off on your own path to financial self reliance. Whatever your feeling about the quote check out the full article via DesignGlut.com

I’ve been testing out the Peashoot App. It’s a mix of google analytics, bit.ly, twitter, and an automatic growth generator. Very cool.  When someone inserts this http://pea.to/dyd into a twitter post or reference link it will track it. Also you can setup keywords to send their tweet to your pea inbox or automatically add users referencing the keyword. While it does have the ability to be abused if you choose an overly broad keyword I think it has a good potential to help you efficiently build followers and interact with those discussing your product online. I’ll followup after having more experience with it on real campaigns.

This past week it was all over the news how “Organic Food Not Healthier, Study Finds” But when you look deeper the study says something different. It says the study found that organic food was not richer in nutrients. This makes sense because organic food has almost nothing to do with the genetic varieties (although it can’t be GMO) and ALL about the use of pesticides and other chemicals on the food.  The study did not look at the levels of harmful substances in the organic food but merely the level of positively identified nutrients. An organic apple of the same variety as a normal apple isn’t going to have any more potassium in it. The seemingly illiterate media picked it up as saying there’s no health benefit to organic food. Codswallop. Having an apple doused in chemical pesticides is far less healthy than an organic apple even though they might nutritionally be the same.

A few weeks ago I went backpacking into Park Meadow in Three Sisters. It was Eric and I’s third or fourth venture into this particular area, we have rotten luck actually ascending anything completely mostly because we don’t take to the trails and/or go the correct route but thats not to say we don’t have good times. This would be no different in terms of failing to peak but we did get up onto a ridge and did some crazy rock climbing, rock and glacial shoe skiing. The mosquitos were particularly pesky but that just kept us moving or fully rain geared up. Photos in the beginning courtesy Eric you can find more and a cool t-shirt at lonelydinosaur.com (at the blog). and the ones at the end by Isaac: http://isaaclanekoval.com/