I’ve always been amazed at the artists who can make incredible imagery on the iPad using just their fingers. Rachel Smith, now with The Grove International posted a wonderful video on how to use tools on the iPad to make visual notes and diagrams. She then posts in amazing details how she took her notes into production to make the video on her blog. Definitely need to follow through after the video and check out her post.

Via {Ninmah Meets World}

Thanks to Katie Piatt for posting this on her blog as well.

Little details are everything. For example, Google Chrome marks the scroll bar with little yellow marks where search terms come up from a ctrl-F command. These little details, while not noticeable to most people, creates the overall user experience. For more great examples, check out the Little Big Details Tumblr.

via {Little Big Details Tumblr}

Here are three concepts designed by IDEO on the future of books. Each shows an interactive world where reading is more than just the text in a book. I still find that for certain books, particularly books that require detailed images that paper still provides the best experience. An eBook will never be able to have multiple pages open at the same time (maybe when they have flipping screens that spread out). What do you think? Do you see paper books going away?

Earlier, I had written how small we were in the universe. At one point, we believed the universe orbited Earth. Later we realized that we orbited the sun, which is just one of many in our galaxy. Our galaxy is just one of millions in this universe. That, in of itself, makes us seems so insignificant. Earlier this week, I saw a lecture by Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist. He postulated that there isn’t one “Universe” as we know it, in fact, there are many other universes. The terms we use are already obsolete. He believes that there are many, if not infinite other universes, or multiverses.

Below is a talk he gave at a TED event. I’m amazed at how he is able to communicate complex subject matter, orders of magnitude greater than any of our work, and explain it to a layperson.

Popplet is a great tool that I use, mostly for beta testing. However, if you had kept real data, chances are, you may be lost it. See their email below. Don’t let your guard down. Even backups can fail if the underlying system fails. Back up your data, especially if you’re using beta services.

Dear Popplet User,

As you know, Popplet’s servers went offline at 5:35 AM, Tuesday, February 1, 2011. We had been working hard on the problem when we received the first reports of missing data on the day before, but what we discovered was a much bigger issue than we had at first anticipated. As a result, we have kept Popplet offline until we could determine the scope of the data corruption in our system and, to our dismay, our backups as well.

Popplet has experienced a completely unanticipated database issue. Currently we are faced with the difficult proposition of either waiting longer to try to recover more data or bringing the system online with what we have recovered. We are doing everything we can to bring back all of your hard work, but we also want to bring the service online as soon as possible.

We do know this: data has been lost, and we apologize deeply for this.

We value your data and used best practices to preserve it and back it up, including using 3 persistent EC2 instances backed by EBS volumes, backed up every night to S3. In our worst case scenario, we imagined that we might lose 24 hours of data, but in this case, the corruption in our data was undetected and passed into our backup system.

We know that you have been relying on Popplet for your daily work, assignments and presentations. At Popplet, we use popplet ourselves for our own workflows, and we have lost our own data. Being in Beta, we knew we might run into some bumps in the road, but we truly didn’t expect to be putting our users in this situation. We wish more than anything to be able to retrieve everyone’s data and are working around the clock to find a solution. We want to be transparent about the severity of this issue and how hard we have been trying to get everything back.

We will send out a tweet when the system is back online. If you have lost data or are unable to log in to your account, email us at support@popplet.com by February 18 to report the issue. We will do what we can to make up for this serious incident.

Please accept our deepest apologies and we sincerely hope you stay with us and continue to use Popplet.

Sincerely,

The Popplet Team:
Jared, Albert, Phillip, Tom, Young, Steve and Asli

I found this video to be very thought provoking. My ideas come when I’m not trying to find new ideas. As a result, I found innovation to occur during conversation, idle moments, sleep, and relaxing activities.

I get a lot of my ideas through reading and keeping up on a number of blogs. I checked my daily reads book marks and these are my top 10 (in no particular order):

1. Gizmodo/Lifehacker – Published by Gawker Media, this is the tech and productivity geek’s blog. A lot of the material is curated from other sites but they also publish a lot of good original content.
2. Jess3 – This is a young but kick ass awesome data visualization company ran by some really entrepreneurial geniuses. They make really amazing graphics and really make data fun.
3. Viz Think – This is the visual thinking community. Content is a little slow but when they post, it’s really valuable. The archives hold a lot of information on visual thinking and visual design.
4. xBlog – Now a part of the Dachis Group, this is the xplane blog. The visual thinking company ran by Dave Grey continues to publish invaluable thoughts on business modeling and change through visual language.
5. Duarte – Published by Nancy Duarte, author of Slide:ology. She posts some really useful information here.
6. Swiss Miss – Swiss designer living in NYC, Tina finds some of the neatest design examples and innovative products. She posts a lot which is good to keep entertained.
7. 99% – Published by Behance, they publish cutting edge ideas on a variety of topics. Very high quality.
8. Thinking for a Living – This is sort of a online web magazine with very well written content. The navigation of the site is amazing and a lot of work goes into generating their material.
9. Gamestorming – Another Dave Grey site, this blog/forum contains the collective knowledge of business gamers out there.
10. Change This – They curate some of the best presentations and documents on a variety of subjects. All the documents can be downloaded in either Power Point or PDF.

Any other sites you would recommend?

Now is the best time to buy. That’s the real estate agent mantra, regardless of what type of economy we’re in. Their incentive and livelihood is based on sales. Consider my alternatives below.

Case for saving instead of owing a mortgage

On a 30 year $300,000 mortgage at 5% interest, the payment schedule is as follows (Source: Wolfram Alpha calculation):

1. Year 1: $4,426 principal paid
2. Year 2: $4,653 principal paid
3. Year 3: $4,891 principal paid
4. Year 4: $5,141 principal paid
5. Year 5: $5,404 principal paid

If you paid your mortgage over five years, your total principal payments would have been $24,515 leaving you with a loan amount owed of $275,485. If during those five years, you were able to save $20,000 a year, you would have $100,000 in cash. Had you bought a home in year five, then your $300,000 mortgage could have been $200,000.

Home ownership comes with additional costs: maintenance, updates, remodeling, repairs. It’s more than just the mortgage payments. Consider insurance, utilities, etc. These costs could have been saved in the bank instead.

Case against the tax deduction

What about the tax deduction? Isn’t the interest paid tax deductible? Going back to the payment schedules, let’s look at year 1. In year 1, you would have paid $14,899 in interest payments. The standard deduction in 2011 is $5,800. The difference is $9,099. Assuming you’re at the 25% tax bracket, that’s a tax “savings” of $2,274.75.

What does that mean? Lets say your 2011 income is $80,000. You would subtract away $14,899 from your taxable income. The remaining amount is taxed. We subtract away the standard deduction to make better comparison.

As a result, you’ve paid $9,099 to save $2,275. Sounds like a terrible investment.

What does this mean?

This is not necessarily an argument against buying a home. Instead, it’s just meant to shine some light on the not so great math. The interest deduction is simply a subsidy by the government on a really bad plan. You bear all the risk from home ownership, the bank eats all the interest. You’re not a home owner, the bank is until the mortgage is paid. Equity is only built when a home has appreciation potential. Equity is lost when a home is sold due to real estate commissions (6%). Additionally, expenses from operating and maintenance eats away from your equity.

Before you buy a home, consider alternatives, including renting and using the savings to build a stronger cash position. The quicker you can pay the mortgage, the faster you can remove the chain and shackle.