Day: August 18, 2006

What’s really important?

In yet another brief fit of work avoidance curiosity, I was taught something interesting.  Look at the main news headlines of CNN, Fox News, and Google News, and then at digg.com, a web site that tracks the most popular web sites at a given moment, and (I think) a pretty good gauge of what people care about right now.

CNN, Fox, and Google seemed to agree that the most important stories of the day are terrorist plots in the UK, the JonBenet Ramsey case in Colorado (and now Thailand), and the war between Lebanon and Israel.

Digg, however, shows us that what people really care about right now is an amazingly accurate recreation of New York City – with Lego!  This site gets more than 1000 digg points than the #2 site of the day.  And for reference, the first mention of terrorists, JonBenet Ramsey, or Lebanon or Israel is #39 on the list, and it’s an interesting sattelite image of oil spilled along the Lebanese coast.  It got just over 500 points, compared to Lego City’s 3,600+ points.

This was pointed out by Joe D’eon, a commercial airline pilot who does a very interesting podcast.  He sees this as a sign that the mainstream media aren’t really telling us what we actually care to know.

And you have to admit, a Lego New York City is pretty cool.

The best part of waking up….

One of the interesting things about running a small business where you sell software on the internet is that people can buy what you’re selling without you having to do anything.  In my case, they go to my web site, click a couple links, and make the purchase entirely online.  When they do that, I get an email and a piece of paper comes out of my printer.

Lately, for some reason, the vast majority of my customers have been in Europe.  So most of these transactions happen while I’m asleep.  My routine in the morning is to get up, turn on lights, and glance at the printer to see if there are any invoices on the printer.  Of course, with the number of “overnight” customers I’ve been getting lately, there has been paper on the printer nearly every morning.

While I know that it doesn’t really amount to money for nothing, I am slightly amused at the thought of making money while I sleep.  It’s always nice to go to bed and wake up in the morning with just a little more in the bank than there was last night.

Of course, that’s not quite as nice as when Marcia comes to town in the morning and I get to see her first thing in the day and make her breakfast… That really is the best part of waking up.