Aug 07

Lessons learned from 30 days of going carrierless

Lifehacks, Nerd 14 Comments »

July 7th I cancelled the account I’ve had with AT&T for the past twelve years and embarked on an experiment to see if it was possible to go carrierless and retain a somewhat normal existence. I’m happy to report after 30 days that this situation has worked surprisingly well. This post will summarize the key things I learned over the last month and offer some helpful nuggets of advice for anyone contemplating doing the same.

Context

The goal in cutting my mobile phone service was very simply to eliminate a non-critical expenditure in the effort of getting extremely lean financially while working on our startup. I had used skype on my iPhone prior to the switch and knew that it handled calls well. My concerns were primarily whether running daily phone calls over Skype via iPhone would be annoyingly cumbersome.

My setup

I have an oldschool iPhone 3GS, a Verizon 3G Mifi mobile hotspot (grandfathered in under the unlimited bandwidth plan they used to offer) and the Google Voice and Skype apps on my iPhone.

The Switch Process

I ported my AT&T number to Google Voice for $20. Doing so automatically triggers the cancellation process w/ AT&T. You’ll want to check what your early termination fee is if you’re still under contract – mine was $70 so I more than covered it in the past month. It took a day for the number port to complete during which time all SMS messages sent to my phone blackholed. SMS apparently doesn’t work like email where it will keep retrying to send until it goes through. It took about 3 days before I began receiving SMS after the port. Once completed I spent another $20 to keep my previous GV # as an alternate phone (it was printed on all the business cards I had recently ordered and I like the idea of keeping separate business & personal #’s).

Unfortunately the GV app alone on your iPhone won’t enable you to send and receive calls. You’ll need to setup a Skype account if you don’t already have one and get an online number to be able to forward your GV # to. Skype offers a $3/mo option that gets you unlimited calls in the US. With the Skype number configured as the primary forwarding number in GV I was now able to receive and send calls from my iPhone.

The Good

  • The obvious benefit is that this eliminated a $130/mo phone bill.
  • There is an undeniable psychological win in saying FU to AT&T.
  • I’m navigationally-challenged and rely heavily on the iPhone for directions. The good news is the GPS is a true GPS and works via satellites (the cell tower triangulation is apparently the fallback method when it can’t acquire a GPS signal). This means the location-based features continue to work in spite of not having a cell carrier.
  • An indirect result of going carrierless was that I picked up all the benefits of using Google Voice. Transcribed voicemails is an awesome feature that eliminates listening to long messages.

The Bad

Now, the not-so-good:

  • You lose the ability to send picture messages over SMS. This isn’t a huge deal and I’m sure there are apps out there that give this capability. I haven’t really missed this – it’s easy to just email photos but if you rely upon sending picture texts for some reason, this is something to consider.
  • I have no 911 emergency dial. This is an acceptable risk for me but if you have dependents or frequently commute through dark allies, losing this might be unacceptable.UPDATE: apparently 911 does still work – thanks Dave for the clarification. Now I can continue to live dangerously!
  • Call quality is flaky over slow connections. Skype degrades the call quality when you have poor connectivity. It hasn’t been a problem yet but there have been a few instances when I’m working over a shady connection that I have to relocate to continue a call. The Verizon Mifi has been surprisingly good for calls with the exception of about 10% of the time it just seems to be unreliable. If you have a 4G mifi card I’m sure this isn’t even an issue. The answer when making important calls is to plan ahead to be working over a solid ground-based wifi connection for the call.
  • Unfortunately there’s no way to disable voicemail on Skype – this is a known shortcoming and a lot of people have complained about it. So to ensure that GV handles your voicemail the workaround is to enable call screening on GV (formerly known as “call presentation”). It’s only mildly annoying but means you’ll have to answer calls and click the “1″ button to patch the person through.

Headsups

So here are some random tidbits of advice based on what I learned:

  • Use Google Talk when in front of computer and save on outbound calls. I went through $9 in calls over the past 30 days on the pay-as-you-go plan. If you have the unlimited plan then this is irrelevant but Google Talk is free for US calls and you can offload some of your paid outbound calls to GT while you’re in front of the computer.
  • You need to setup Google Contacts for caller ID to work. This is simple/obvious but you need to have all your contacts loaded in GV for it to be able to associate names w/ calls and text messages. Skype will automatically pick it up from your Contacts in the iPhone so inbound calls should still register with a name.
  • If you’re calling someone who happens to have Skype the call quality is way better if you can just use Skype instead of Skype->phone.
  • Get the Chrome extension for google voice. It’s pretty slick – it gives you a toolbar button that lets you quickly make calls and check messages.
  • You need to remember to launch Skype when you restart your iPhone to keep it running in the background. Otherwise your phone won’t ring when you receive a call- you’ll just get the missed call alert via GV. I have it running on both my phone and computer and will typically just answer via the computer when I’m on it. What’s neat is the iPhone earbuds w/ the mic will work for talking on the computer and actually perform pretty well even in a noisy coffee shop.
  • The battery life on the Verizon Mifi is about 5hrs which is not enough to last all day. You should turn it on when in transit and switch over to a local wifi hotspot when you get where you’re going. If you forget and leave the Mifi on all day you’ll kill the battery. It has a USB input so you can get a standard cigarette lighter USB charger if you do a lot of driving.

Conclusion

The bottomline is this setup has proven totally adequate for my situation. There is some admitted flakiness over slow connections and annoyances like lack of ability to send SMS picture messages, but it’s 90% of the service for literally 6% of the price. Ultimately the factors you’ll need to consider in determining whether it’ll work for you are 1) criticality of 911 emergency calling 2) tolerance for occasional call flakiness 3) guilt level for not supporting your phone carrier. In tight economic times, saving $130/mo is significant – I would be re-examining my core business if I were a cell phone service provider. If anyone else has cut the cord and successfully run a similar setup I’d love to hear what your experience has been and if you have any hacks you made that improved it.

Mar 22

How to do big conferences without getting your head blown off

Events, Lifehacks, Nerd 3 Comments »

Let me explain. I just returned from spending the last ten days at SXSW Interactive and Music. The attendance for Interactive was just shy of 20,000 people and Music this year was apparently about 10x that number. Having attended SXSW three years back the best analogy I can give is that this star of an event has super-nova’d into a Red Giant that’s borderline overwhelming. With such an intense amount of condensed human interaction it’s like trying to drink off of a fire hydrant: you better have a formalized system for taking baby sips or you risk getting your head blown off by the stream. So here’s the three-part “GTD-like” system I used to extract meaning from this event:

The goal is to wind up with meaningful connections and relationships. If you end up with a stack of business cards and a blurred recollection of faceless conversations, you failed.

Capture

At SXSW you’ll meet no less than 20 interesting people each day. These will be folks from all over the world with shared interests and with whom (if you had hours to sit and chat) you would almost certainly find incredible commonalities and opportunities to help each other via sharing contacts/advice/experiences. Sadly you have only limited surface area at an event like this though so you have a tiny window of interaction to make a meaningful connection.

Given the choice of breadth or depth of interaction, you should err on the side of connecting more deeply with fewer people. Stay in the moment, tune out distractions and engage. At this point you’re operating on two different levels though: 1) you’re 90% in it connecting 2) you’re 10% above it indexing. When you part ways, jot a three word trigger phrase on the back of the business card you received to make a mental note of the conversation.

Curate

At the end of the day (or even better, periodically throughout the day) stop and make notes that distill the anchor points and context of conversation with each person. The half-life of a conversation is less than a day so this distillation process is essential and should occur before the sun goes down. If you wait until after you return home, you’ve likely missed the opportunity to capture and process the meaning.

I use Evernote as a general purpose note taking app and I made a single note for SXSW that I just extended each day jotting down tidbits from interesting conversations. The key here to processing is to actively brainstorm about the interaction you just had and think hard about how you can help the other person. Curate the discussion mentally and jot down a concrete follow-up action you will make to advance that cause. I added an empty checkbox by the people I definitely wanted to follow-up with (Evernote makes this easy).

BTW I hate paper- it’s something extra that takes up space and inevitably you end up losing it. And yet in spite of all our ability to put a man on the moon we still rely upon paper as the lowest common denominator for exchanging contact info at conferences. Go figure.

I use a free iPhone app called “CardMunch” that allows me to quickly convert physical business cards into digital format. It lets you retain the associative value of the business card (the visual image you link with the person and recall) while giving you the more useful OCR’d data in a format that can be exported into your contact manager.

Contact

Lastly, all is largely for nought if you don’t ping the people you met after the conference to cement the connection and open the door for continued conversation. You should ideally offer something of value – an intro, a thoughtful insight based on a previous conversation. Even if it’s just a “hey it was great meeting you” compliment, do something that allows you to stake out a tiny piece of mental real estate in that person’s mind.

If you’re a true baller you’ll use a CRM system to develop relationships. Having used a handful (SugarCRM, Highrise, Salesforce, vTiger, Goldmine, Act) over the years I’ve become a huge proponent of Ming.ly just in the past month. In my opinion it strikes the golden balance of light-weight, frictionless and useful enough to where you’ll actually want to use it religiously. If you use Gmail as your email client this extension to Gmail unifies context across all your contact mediums and social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and even your phone). I recommend tagging new contacts with an identifier of the event like “SXSW2011″ so it’s possible to search against the pool of people you met at a specific event. Ultimately the mental index you make is king and you’re just tagging interactions with keywords and notes that can be used to retrieve context later.

Summary

So to summarize: capture, curate and contact. Do those three activities and you’ll be surprised how many interesting relationships emerge from events. The curation step is the one that typically gets ignored and yet it’s the lynchpin for extracting the meaning from the interactions you have that allows you to develop the relationship. Try practicing the curation step next event you attend and I guarantee you’ll more frequent and quality interactions following the event.

So what systems have you developed for getting the most value out of big conferences?

Jul 16

Change your tune: a neat trick for automatically syncing fresh music to your iPod

Lifehacks, Nerd No Comments »

Here’s a neat feature I discovered today with smart playlists in iTunes that automatically keeps some fresh music on your iPod. If you’re like me you initially sync’d a bunch of songs to your iPod/iPhone when you first got it and haven’t changed the music since. You have the new stuff via the “recently added” playlist but there’s a huge body of older music that resides exclusively on your computer in your iTunes so it never sees the light of day on your iPod. Here’s a technique to automatically keep your iPod fresh:

  1. In iTunes go to File > New Smart Playlist and create the following rule:

    Name that playlist something like “fresh songs.”
  2. The way mine is set up I have playlist called “iPhone” and my iTunes is set so it selectively syncs only that playlist to my iPhone. So now drag the “fresh songs” smart list on top of the “iPhone” list.

Now each time you sync it will scan your library and add 50 random new songs you haven’t listened to in the last 6mos. You’ll have a rotating body of new music at all times on your iPod.

Another suggestion for escaping a musical rut if you’re in one is to try the Rdio service. I was on their beta for a few months and I’m now a paying customer. I highly recommend their service. It gives you all-u-can-eat streaming music and works great on the iPhone. It even has the capability to sync songs for offline use so you can listen to them on an airplane. I’ve found the coolest aspect is the spontaneity of being out with friends when someone says “remember that one song” and being able to pull it up and play it on the spot. If you want an Rdio invite leave a comment – I have a few left to give.

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Mar 06

Takeaways from running a yardsale

Lifehacks 2 Comments »

I moved offices and residences recently and took advantage of the opportunity to sell off a bunch of stuff. There were a handful of useful lessons that came from this experience and I wanted to post them here for the benefit of anyone else considering hosting a sale.

Maintain a page of thumbnails and post feeder ads

takeaway
This technique worked really well. The idea is to have every ad you make include a reference to a single page that lets someone quickly browse all your items. Each ad becomes a feeder to this central page so while you might advertise a desk on Craigslist you include a link at the bottom showing the other great stuff you have available. I setup a free Photobucket account and used it to host this page which I kept current with photos and prices of stuff that was still available. It made it really easy to take pics with my phone and populate it with items and remove them as they sold.

Distribution before merchandising

takeaway
It’s a daunting task when you realize exactly how much stuff you have to get rid of. The temptation is to immediately begin pricing and organizing things. Resist this. All the merchandising in the world is pointless if nobody shows up. Your first order of business should be to get people in the door and worry about the merchandising task only once you have the problem of shoppers.

The two most effective traffic generation activities for me were making physical signs to get foot traffic and doing the Craigslist ads. For signs I recommend the big bright cardstock at an office supply store, a fat magic marker and taping it to a box that you anchor with rocks. Figure out the closest main traffic arteries and place the signs strategically so they’re visible from both directions and so there’s a sign of the same color visible at every turn until they get there. Start early (6am) – you’d be surprised how many people are up at that hour and looking for yard sales (the majority of my foot traffic came before 10am). There’s seemingly a whole culture of people who drive around looking for these signs and scavenging at yard sales. And that leads to the next point:

For many it’s about the treasure hunt, not the savings

takeaway
I had the preconception that people go to a yard sales because they can get stuff cheap. What I learned is that a lot of the people are there not for the bargains but for the thrill of the treasure hunt and what they might find. Foot traffic brings the treasure hunters and Craigslist brings the bargain shoppers – you need both. Craigslist will help you clear the major items but if you’re like me then you have all kinds of other random crap that there’s no effective way to advertise but needs to go.

One person’s trash is another person’s treasure

takeaway
This is essentially a corollary to the above but it deserves its own mention. I had amassed a huge pile of stuff that I was planning to donate to a shelter; stuff that I figured had no chance of selling but that someone might be able to use. On more than one occasion people made offers for things in that pile: old birkenstocks, ratty jeans, kitchen items. What you consider worthless has value for others.

Traffic sources by effectiveness

takeaway
I asked every visitor how they found the sale. Here’s my best guess at the breakdown of traffic in terms of effectiveness (absolute dollar amount attributed to that traffic source):

  • Craigslist – $600
  • Facebook – $100
  • Signs – $250
  • Blog post – $300

    • In retrospect I should have splurged for the $20 to do an ad in the newspaper but I missed the boat on that.

    Phones aren’t just for calling – think SMS

    takeaway
    This only happened a few times but a couple people texted me. I had listed my cell phone on the Craigslist ads thinking some would call and the others would email but I learned some people prefer texting. If you list a number make sure to use one that can receive SMS messages.

    Time is the key factor

    takeaway
    This is an obvious one but it bears mention because it probably is the single biggest determinant of your profit: start the process as early as possible (not early as in the day, early as in a week before if you can). The more time you have the more you can experiment with higher prices and not get pressured into doing bad deals. I started two weeks in advance and tiered the sale into two phases: reasonable mode and firesale mode. As you near the final hour at which you have to be out your prices approach zero (and actually negative because disposal of stuff costs time/$$). Of course there is a point of diminishing returns at which time spent optimizing prices isn’t worth it. But having the more time available allows you to…

    Ratchet prices up: establish a floor then raise the roof

    takeaway
    Keep a log of all the people that have made offers. A low offer in the beginning may seem like something to ignore but that offer becomes valuable if you haven’t sold the item in the final hours. Also once you have a buyer at a certain price, jack the price on the ads and see if you can do better.

    Competing bids and courtesy

    takeaway
    So I royally blew a deal where I had a couple firefighters looking at buying all the office furniture. Another guy I had spoken with earlier showed up while we were negotiating price, raced over plunked money in my hand and walked off with the filing cabinet. The firefighters looked at each other and left without saying a word. The lesson there is if you know you have multiple people that are after the same item, make them aware of the fact. Establish a protocol for “first come, first serve.” I should have stopped file cabinet guy and given the firefighters the opportunity to do the deal as they had come first.

    Keep power supplies plugged into their devices

    takeaway

    This was just pure idiocy on my part but I made a pile of cables and electronics and allowed stuff to get mixed up. In the end I had a massive snarl of cables and devices where it was impossible to find the corresponding power device. Leave things plugged in and tape stuff together so it stays consolidated lest you wind up with this:

    Oh and with computers either wipe the hard drive or smash it. The couple bucks you may get from selling it is trivial if it compromises passwords or important personal data.

    Anyways, those are my takeaways. Hopefully some of this is useful if you’re looking to do a yard sale. I gotta say there is something extremely satisfying about clearing out a bunch of old items and getting cash for it. And negotiating (when it’s not critical) is actually a lot of fun.

    Jul 27

    HNSort.com: Hacking Hacker News to make it sortable

    Lifehacks, Nerd 6 Comments »

    HNSort.com is an app I threw together this weekend that allows readers to sort the stories on Hacker News by various criteria (rank, points, comments, title, domain, submitter, and age).

    This mini project spawned from two frustrations: 1) my dissatisfaction with the interface for reading the site 2) a desire to have an atomic project that I could complete and be done with in a weekend.

    I check HN periodically throughout the day in between tasks. But rather than reading every headline I skim the site to find the posts that are most important (as indicated by a high number of comments and points). Unfortunately there’s no easy way to find those gem posts, you end up having to sift through each post. So in the spirit of the site itself (ie. hacking stuff to make it work they way you want) I wrote a different interface for it. For anyone interested in the details I’ll explain below how the app works and the backstory on how I made it.

    hnsort

    The backstory

    The main goal was to get a convenient way to quickly find the gems on Hacker News without having to manually skim through each story. Ideally I wanted something that would work both on my computer as well as my iPhone. And as a bonus I thought it would be neat to expose it so others could use it, and in so doing provide us some cheap, targeted advertising for JumpBox to an audience that would appreciate it. I knew given the nature of the app that it would probably do well on HN itself.

    I looked briefly into what it would take to write a Greasemonkey FF extension but my javascript skills are wretched and even if I were able to make that work, it wouldn’t help for reading on the iPhone nor would there be any promo benefit to JumpBox. So I concluded it would need to be a mashup that was accessible via the web.

    There is no public API to HN so the first step was to create one using Dapper. This was the easiest part of the whole project. Their wizard makes it ridiculously easy to turn any webpage into a feed of XML, JSON, RSS, whatever you need. It took all of five minutes to make this dapp to produce a real-time XML feed of stories off their homepage. So far so good.

    The next thing I tried was to head over to Mindtouch and fire up a free express account and use their Mindtouch Core product to render the results in a sortable table. Again this took all of five minutes to produce this result which was promising but lacked the sorting capability. Unfortunately adding the sorting feature would prove to be significantly more difficult. After a few hours of tinkering with Dekiscript (their proprietary scripting language) I eventually gave up – I’m sure there is a way to iterate over an XML result set using Dekiscript but I certainly couldn’t figure it out even with a ton of good documentation.

    At this point I tried one last gasp effort to solve this using a free pre-made tool: I knew Google Spreadsheets had the ability to import XML and JSON feeds. And a Google Spreadsheet can be sorted six ways from Sunday so all good there. Hopeful about this avenue, I went and tinkered for about an hour trying to get the import to work per the Google documentation but sadly had to give up. Apparently Google just didn’t like the XML feed. Sigh.

    Having run out of options I decided at this point to dust off the Coldfusion skills and try to code this thing from scratch. What would have been ideal at this point would have been a JumpBox for Railo or BlueDragon. Instead I futzed around trying to find an online sandbox where I could develop without having to install anything on my Mac. I opened an account here but sadly the CFHTTP tag I needed to use was malfunctioning on their system. I then opened up a $5/mo hosting account with Hostek only to learn that they disable the CFDUMP tag which is key when developing with nested structures and result sets. I ended up installing the standalone developer CF server from Adobe on my Mac and making the site there.

    After a few hours of tinkering I had it consuming and displaying the results in a table. There was another hour of scrubbing and transforming the data so all the numbers were sortable. The last step was to add in the Tablesorter jQuery plugin. And the final result was exactly what I wanted: a simple HTML spreadsheet of all the articles on the homepage of HN. For you coders here’s the single page of code that handles everything.

    Granted this ended up occupying most of my weekend but it was a great exercise in learning about a bunch of different technologies. I submitted the page to Hacker News and it rose to #3 on the homepage last night with significant momentum. Sadly when I woke up this morning my provider had experienced a DNS outage rendering the site unreachable since last night and therefore cutting it down while it was in its prime. You only get one shot at the homepage of HN so I have no idea how people will find it now :-(

    But all in all a good learning experience with an output that I can (and will) use from now on for reading that site. At $5/mo it’s worth it to me for my personal use alone. And the good news is that it even works on the iPhone. If you’re a fan of HN try it for reading that site and tell me what you think.

    Apr 22

    How to make inexpensive wall art

    Lifehacks, Tutorials 3 Comments »

    I like to support artists as much as the next guy but the fact is when you’re in a startup what little money you earn goes towards essentials, not luxuries. But having bare walls is uninspiring and a few small comforts go a long way. So I came up with a fairly inexpensive method for solving this problem and figured a I might as well document it. My goal was to get a giant 6′x4′ color print of a beach scene on my bedroom wall for as cheaply as possible.  This is my $35, two-hour solution that yields a satisfactory (albeit somewhat ghetto) alternative to buying an enormous single-piece print for hundreds of dollars.

    Find the art

    So first you’ll need to find a digital photo to use that’s hi-res enough where it won’t look completely pixelated once you blow it up to scale. I used the Flickr search and scanned through hundreds of beach scenes before I found a couple I really liked. Sorting by “Most interesting” made the search quicker (btw, you have to click the “all sizes” link on each photo to find one that has a resolution of 2000 pixels or more). Once you have a pool of candidates then you have the difficult task of boiling it down to the right one.  I decided if this is going to be a photo I’ll be living with every day, it was worth “living with it” as wallpaper on my laptop first to see how I would like it over time. So I installed an app on my Mac called “Desklickr.”  This is  a neat little donationware app that lets you automatically swap your wallpaper periodically and feed it with your Flickr photos that you’ve favored. 

    Prep the art

    Once you decide on the one you want the next step is to cut it up.  Photoshop is the ideal tool. You’ll probably be printing panels of the scene on 8.5 x 11″ paper so first thing is to size the image appropriately.  Use the Image > Image Size option to scale it, uncheck Resample Image and set the width to the target width of the desired final print (in my case 6″ or 72 in). It will tell you your resolution (your res will be pre-ordained as it’s not resampling the image):resizeNext you need to grid out the scene and slice it up.  Whatever your individual panel size is (again mine was 8.5″x11″) make a selection box that is exactly that size and put it in the upper-left corner.  Make sure that under the View menu both Rulers and Snap are checked. Now all you do is drag the guides from the rulers across to the boundary of your select box. This is a little tedious but as long as you have the snap settings enabled it’s not bad – drag a ruler, then drag the box, drag a new ruler, etc.  Do this until you’ve gridded out the entire scene like so: 

    griddedNow you’ll have some scrap on the right and lower edges. Crop the picture until it has only full panes (in my case a 6×6 grid). If you want to make any color adjustments to the image, now is the time.  You can get crafty and use the paint effects if you’re looking to simulate a watercolor or pastel piece of art.  Once you have it looking the way you like, it’s time to slice it up.  My antiquated version of Photoshop has a slicing tool that unfortunately assumes you only ever want to output .gif files for use on a web site.  Gif’s mean unacceptable compression for our situation though so we’ll need to bring the image into Imageready and use the slicing feature there. Once in Imageready simply do Slices > Create Slices from Guides to get this:

    slices

    Do File > Save Optimized As and choose “Images Only” (as HTML has no place in the real world). That will output a bunch of .jpg’s in a directory. That’s all we need now in order to print it up.

    Print it

    I printed mine at Kinko’s. If you have the patience you can use their online print tool to send the job but there’s no convenient way to add a bunch of images in one step. I found the bandwidth of burning a disc and delivering it via car to be faster than their online tool for this job. I printed on standard paper and instructed them to cut the white strips off the sides so that there was no bleed.  The entire order of 36 color prints cost under $30. 

    Hang it

    materials

    The last step is to hang this sucker. This is the most time-consuming part of the project and to do it right requires that you lay down a grid on the wall to get it spaced correctly.  If only it was as simple as dragging guides in Photoshop…

    For this step you’ll need thumbtacks (ideally 4 for each pane plus some extras for doing the grid) and thread.  Figure out exactly where you want the print to live and make sure it’s right because once it’s up, it ain’t movin’.

    The best thing at this point is to tack up one or two of the panes and figure out the spacing you want between them. I found about a 2″ gap between them was right. Stub out a few and then mark the upper-right corner of each with a tack. Snake the thread back and forth making the evenly-spaced horizontal and vertical rows flush with the upper-left edge of each pane. You should get something roughly like this: 

    halfwayNow it’s just an exercise in pain tolerance as you plug ‘n chug through tacking in the rest of the panes.  WARNING: now is no time for pride, get a thimble (or a bottle cap if that endangers your ego- some kind of thumb protection).  Tacking 150 pins into a wall I’m pretty sure is a twisted form of torture reserved for special criminals –  your thumbs will hate you for it (mine do days later).  After a solid hour of tacking you’ll wind up with an end result something like: 

    final

    The one thing I might recommend in retrospect is doing a proof with the entire image shrunk down to a single page in order to test how the colors will translate. This image turned out a bit warmer than it appeared onscreen. Fortunately it’s a sunset so that only enhanced the glow of it but the only true way to know how colors will print is to print out a small scale version first. 

    There it is though: a starving entrepreneur’s pre-IPO substitute to expensive wall art. I’ll update this post with the post-IPO version someday ;-) Hopefully this helps a few other startup ramen eaters to fix their empty wall problem and get a much-needed relaxing beach scene on their wall to enjoy.

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