Braithwaite wallets: The best in men’s wallets
I forget where I came across Braithwaite Wallets originally, but ever since browsing their website I’ve had my eye on their “Cypress” model. Lately, however, I think I’m more of an “Orpheus” man:
I forget where I came across Braithwaite Wallets originally, but ever since browsing their website I’ve had my eye on their “Cypress” model. Lately, however, I think I’m more of an “Orpheus” man:
Top Gear Birthday Cards is a great little website I’ll have to remember to revisit when some birthdays roll around.
Embedded above is the trailer for the new Sony MMORPG DC Universe Online, available soon for the PlayStation 3 and PC. It’s supposed to have an all-new combat system the likes of we’ve never seen before (in a MMORPG). Interesting stuff, if not just for the 5-minute short movie that is the trailer.
Today’s Globe & Mail has an article by Doug Steiner about the questions a small business owner seeking investment capital should be ready to answer. He cites an old photocopy of a handout entitled “77 Questions Every Business Plan Should Answer,” but unfortunately only lists six of them. (In the comments, I inquire after the rest.) Here’s what he shared:
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Question 1 is meant to be a quick killer: “Why will this business succeed?â€
If you can’t answer that, then your hope of getting anyone other than mom and pop to throw you a financial bone is pretty slim. You say you have a unique idea? I doubt it. The only unique ideas I’ve heard pitched were complete eye-rollers — as in, “You have to be kidding.†One guy who came to see me during the Internet boom wanted to start a website that would help tenants trade their way out of building leases online. Could he have found anything more likely to fail?
When friends and family come to me for advice on starting up an e-commerce website of their own, I typically refer them to Magento, which is to date the most polished and full featured e-commerce platform I’ve ever seen. Even better, Magento Community Edition is available to download for free, and professionally designed templates are widely available.
There is, however, one rather sizable snag. While the technical installation of Magento is both easy to follow and well-documented, the basic install then leaves you with a blank home page and no real instructions on where to go next.
That’s what this tutorial is here to help with. By the end of this guide, you’ll have logged in as the administrator of your new Magento website, you’ll have become familiar with Magento’s category system, you’ll have created your first product for display and sale on the site, and you’ll have created a simple product listing layout to allow your customers to peruse what you have for sale.
Ready? Let’s go!
Stellar advice from Anthony Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential:
Brand name? Okay, most talented amateurs get a boner buying one of the old-school professional high-carbon stainless knives from Germany or Austria, like a Henkel or Wusthof, and those are fine knives, if heavy. High carbon makes them slightly easier to sharpen, and stainless keeps them from getting stained and corroded. They look awfully good in the knife case at the store, too, and you send the message to your guests when flashing a hundred-dollar hunk of Solingen steel that you take your cooking seriously.
But do you really need something so heavy? So expensive? So difficult to maintain (which you probably won’t)? Unless you are really and truly going to spend fifteen minutes every couple of days working that blade on an oiled carborundum stone, followed by careful honing on a diamond steel, I’d forgo the Germans.
Most of the professionals I know have for years been retiring their Wusthofs and replacing them with the lightweight, easy-to-sharpen and relatively inexpensive vanadium steel Global knives, a very good Japanese product which has – in addition to its many other fine qualities – the added attraction of looking really cool.
Global makes a lot of knives in different sizes, so what do you need? One chef’s knife. This should cut just about anything you might work with, from a shallot to a watermelon, an onion to a sirloin strip.
Here’s the Global 8″ chef’s knife on Amazon.com for $99.95. Occasional sharpening is accomplished with the MinoSharp Water Sharpener for an additional ~$40.
Lately I’ve only been taking pictures with Christabel’s new Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. Here are a bunch of photos taken at Toronto’s newest beachfront, Sugar Beach.
TIME Magazine’s excellent finance-focused blog The Curious Capitalist pointed me the way of this interactive Wall Street Journal graphic on what’s found inside the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. I highly recommend giving it a read.
I’m not a fan of Ms. Kay, but I couldn’t agree more with this statement.
Even the best-organized plans can be derailed by bad weather or glitches nobody can have foreseen, but whether the incidents or gaffes blow over quickly, or whether they become legendary tipping points has a lot to do with impressions that have already been formed subliminally in the public perception about the leader’s internal authenticity and confidence.
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When leaders have self-confidence — the real kind, that comes from within and glows in the dark, or rather glows in luggage-losing interludes — they can fumble the ball and shrug it off. If Trudeau had fumbled a football, he would have made it seem as though it were the football’s fault for being such a stupid shape. Barack Obama has all kinds of blippy things happen to him — the Rev Wright fiasco would have sunk a less confident man – but he never loses his cool because, say what you will about his leadership, he is supremely confident inside with an unshakeable sense of his greater destiny. That can go a long way to cover up gaffes. Clinton has it. JFK had it.