Last week I played ‘Satin Doll’ by Duke Ellington.

Today I played ‘I Got It Bad And That Ain’t Good’ (also by Duke Ellington).

I’ll occasionally post recordings of my playing here, to track my progress.  This is my first one.

To start, I thought I should learn a technically demanding piece, and I picked Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin because stride piano grew out of ragtime, but in ragtime, everything is written down, so it would be a good start.

This recording isn’t the best I’ve played it over the last month (or even the last day), but I realized this morning that I’ve been trying so hard to make a 100% perfect recording that I’m sacrificing time actually improving my overall technique.  Therefore, this is me playing Maple Leaf Rag this morning:

Maple Leaf Rag

Any suggestions for something I should record next?

You may have noticed that I’m not particularly dedicated to this blog.  Posts go up when they go up, and sometimes I go three months without writing anything new…  In addition, I realized that awesome blogs have a focus.  This blog doesn’t.

In my new blog, I’ll be focusing mostly on technology, python and javascript development, with some China and productivity influences.  Everything else will stay here.  That actually includes a lot, though, so I’ll try to update once a month or so – whenever I have time.

To conclude, here’s a picture of an awesome box of orange/mango Oreo cookies that I bought at 7/11 next week.  The orange side was ok, and the mango side was terrible.  Never again.

Orange Mango Oreos from 7/11

This time, two important factors stood out to me – measurement and accountability.  Timothy tells a story about the CEO of Evernote who lost weight just by rigorously charting his weight every morning.  He didn’t have a particular diet or workout plan, but the reminder every morning helped him make small healthy choices throughout the day, and eventually he reached his target weight.  Mr. Ferriss also talks about the founder of Icanteachyoutoberich.com who gained muscle by publishing his weight and letting his friends make fun of him if he didn’t reach his goal for the week.  This way, he forced himself to keep working at it.

So, I’ve decided to try this out for myself.  I have a goal for next year of being able to do 100 chin-to-the-floor pushups without pausing.  Of course, I won’t work on just chest strength, but it’s a decent proxy for working out in general, so hopefully my overall fitness level will increase as well.

Every Monday morning, I will do a test and see how many pushups I can complete without pausing, starting today.  Anyone is welcome to follow along and mercilessly mock me if I miss a week or if my number goes down.  The page you can use to track my progress is hosted on Google Docs here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AmKLuIku784vdEY3VnlRaUVIQ3FPVEh6d0dFNFhSYXc&hl=en&single=true&gid=0&output=html Bookmark it!

Please write a comment to let me if know you plan to track my progress and hold me responsible.  Thanks!

Regardless of the reason, I learned a lot from the experience of finally getting a lot of attention focused on something I had worked on.  Here’s the good and the bad of how I handled it, and also some financial results:

Results

• Upgrade of server to bigger plan on Linode: -$16
• Money from affiliate links on SFF: $0 (Really!  Experimenting to see if affiliate links would be a better way to make money was actually the original purpose of the site.)
• New customers for Bespoke Row: 5 (which was actually more orders, because some of them ordered a second time after getting their shirts)

Good

• Quickly responded to comments online – e.g. on Reddit where people thought I should make the connection to Bespoke Row more clear, so I changed the site in a few hours.
• Created a new channel to my main business – The visitors to Bespoke Row who came from SFF generally converted at a better rate than other visitors, which I think is because SF basically acts as a demonstration of why they need a custom shirt before they come over.  There are also now a lot more links to SFF than to Bespoke Row on the web, too, so I hope it will continue to work this way for a long time.
• Learned that affiliate links are also a hard way to make a living – The fact that I had thousands of people on my site and not a single affiliate sale pretty much answered my question about how many visitors would be needed to make money from affiliate links to clothing sites.

Bad

• No Analytics – I built the site so quickly that I didn’t even add in any analytics packages.  This is so easy to do, and I missed it.  Now I don’t even know how much traffic I actually got.
• No way for people to sign up for future news and updates – I have a feeling I lost a lot of potential sales here.  A lot of people visited the site, but I have no way to identify them or to follow up because I didn’t have a newsletter signup or a link to a Twitter account that people could follow, etc.  Even though part of the appeal of SFF was that you don’t need to sign up, you can just use it, some percentage of people would probably have wanted to leave feedback or hear about changes.  I will definitely remember this for any future projects.  I added a Twitter account pretty quickly, but all it could do was message people who had shared SFF or the LifeHacker link.  That’s a bit different than having a group of followers that would see any future tweets.
• No way for people to share – Traffic died off pretty quickly after about a week.  It was old news on LifeHacker, and people didn’t think to come back.  In combination with not having any way to remind them (see above), I also didn’t have any way for the current traffic to lead to more traffic.  In retrospect, SFF results would be great to share with family or friends right before people go shopping for Christmas gifts.  Even beyond that, just giving people the opportunity to tell their friends on Twitter and Facebook might have led to traffic that built over time instead of falling off.
• No way to grow the database – There are a lot of ways to get no results on Shirt Fit Finder – for example, if you’re taller than the tallest shirt we knew about, we don’t have anything to show you.  This happened to many people.  There were also a lot of people who didn’t own any of the shirts listed, so they couldn’t even search for something better.  A week later, I added a way for people to search with their own shirts and add different brands to the database, but it was a little too late.
• No way to know about the site going down during the day – I didn’t leave any way for people to wake me up during the night, and the notices from my host were all sent to my personal email so my partner in Boston didn’t even realize what was happening.  I fixed this by changing my linode account to be associated with a shared Bespoke Row email address instead.

Overall, though, Shirt Fit Finder was a huge success.  I will definitely be doing more side projects in the future to see what other ideas can gain traction.  They may or may not be related to Bespoke Row, but because I’m thinking quite a lot about the problems of choice and knowledge when making fashion decisions these days, they probably will be.

In any case, it might mean that many of your scripts won’t work because they are starting with ‘#!/bin/sh’.  Instead, you should have them point directly to /bin/bash.  Here’s a one line script that will update all the scripts in a directory:

find . -type f | xargs sed -i ‘s_#!/bin/sh_!/bin/bash_’

iWeekend Beijing bills itself as “a unique experience that brings together technology entrepreneurs and professionals with diverse talents to select an idea, develop the product, and launch a technology-based startup in just one weekend!”  It’s organized by a few of my friends from coworking, with help from the larger iWeekend organization.  iWeekend events have typically been held in Europe before, so they have a history with organizing an international group.  I’m going to be attending this one because it was announced first and my friends are organizing it.

Startup Weekend Beijing is essentially the same thing, actually.  I believe their roots are based more in the US, however.  If I weren’t going to iWeekend on the same weekend, I would definitely check it out.

With those two requirements, I built ShirtFitFinder.com, which lets you search for brand name dress shirts that will fit you well based on what you don’t like about shirts that you already own.  We’ll see if people use it, and if so, I’ll give it some more attention.  At the very least, it was great practice for iWeekend this month.

For now, though, I’m done with the project; I only had a week, so now I’m back to my regularly scheduled Bespoke Row stuff – we’re launching custom pants soon!

Cell carriers go through life hoping nobody notices the cellephant in the room: that once everybody starts making free calls over the Internet, it’s Game Over for the dollars-for-minutes model.