I bought the domain name danperlman.com several years ago with the idea of writing a personal blog.  That never really happened.  Now this domain is becoming the heir to my web writing. 

Among other online toys and personas, I’ve used Techgolem and had planned to write  a blog about tech startups focusing on marketing as techgolem.com.  That never really happened.  So I’m pointing techgolem.com here, so if you’re one of the 3 – 5 people who landed on that site in a day and wonder how the hell you got here – now you know.

For the last year, I’ve written about technology and tools on enquiringmimes.com (I have an unfortunate weakness for stupid domain names). 

Moving forward, the plan will be to still write enquiringmimes.com.  There I’ll continue to cover the kinds of technology and tools that fascinate me and are supposed to make me more productive.

danperlman.com will cover startups, marketing, some technology and probably a little food and the occasional personal stuff. 

I’m also parking previous techgolem and enquiringmime posts here just because.

Image via Wikipedia

Commander Seth tells us why people are afraid to buy in this society.

“Whatever you sell, there are two big reasons people aren’t buying it:

1. They don’t know about it.

2. They’re afraid of it.”

If you trying to sell and who isn’t?  Now you know what your marketing needs to accomplish.

Declaring that I’m a fanboy for Gretchen Rubin and her Happiness Project is no new ground here, but watch this to see Gretchen on the CBS News giving “prosaic” steps you can take to make yourself happier. She mentions:

• Get enough sleep
• Get some exercise — a 15 minute walk is better than no exercise

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Gretchen has promised me an interview for this site after her up-coming book is released in December. I’m looking forward to it.

Dan Pink makes a case for why extrinsic motivators don’t really work.  In an 18-minute video Pink, a “career strategist”, explains the social science behind why contingent motivators – if you do that, then you get this – only work for small band of problems and especially don’t work if the problem requires creativity.

Pink has an interesting back story – his last “real” job was as a speechwriter for Al Gore and as a law student he was bad such that “he graduated in the part of his law class that makes the upper 90% possible.”

According to a Twitter post by an Android developer, it seems that the Tmobile G1 android phone, introduced last year, has so little memory space it won’t be able allow any other further full OS updates after getting the recent “cupcake” release.

That would mean if you have a Tmobile G1, except for minor patches, it’s as good as it’s going to get.

The G1, the first phone based on Google’s open source operating system, was always quirky.  It’s physical keyboard was nice — not as good as the Blackberry, but nice.  The overall phone has a clunky feel that seems almost more like a breadboard or a lab prototype.

More about this topic, including an underwhelming denial by Tmobile, on AndroidandMe.

Personal note: I have been using a Tmobile G1 since last November but the decision to upgrade was made for me by my 2-year old last week when he tossed the G1 from the bedroom window.  It didn’t bounce.  I chose to upgrade to a Tmobile My-touch, the next generation Android phone.  It doesn’t have a physical keyboard but seems much more polished than the G1.  In other news, Sandra’s iPhone didn’t bounce either.  Now she also has a Tmoble My-touch.

If you’ve always bought into the idea that Linux was written and maintained by geeks and hackers in after-hours ventures — all for other geeks and hackers, think again.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols on Computerworld analyzed a report from the Linux Foundation on who writes Linux and found that Linux is written by big companies for big companies.

Here’s the top ten contributors to Linux:

1. Red Hat: 12.3%
2. IBM: 7.6%
3. Novell: 7.6%
4. Intel: 5.3%
5. Independent consultant: 2.5%
6. Oracle: 2.4%
7. Linux Foundation: 1.6%
8. SGI 1.6%
9. Parallels 1.3%
10. Renesas Technology: 1.3%

Big businesses write Linux because big businesses use Linux.

From a Y Combinator dinner talk.  In startups, you get rich if you don’t die. 

What do you have to do to live?

“Whereas if a startup regularly does new deals and releases and either sends us mail or shows up at YC events, they’re probably going to live.”

It’s true, in my career with startups, I’ve done both.  There was DASCOM – get rich; RoverLive – die.

Unfortunately for snaptalent.com, a Y Combinator portfolio company – they’ve just announced that they have died due to “market conditions”.  They had tried a couple of strategies in the job recruitment market – not a good place to have been in the last 2 years.

Judging by the excellent Crunch Gear review of the forthcoming release of Snow Leopard, the new version of OS/X, this isn’t going to be the kind of release that makes you say “oh wow”.  Sounds like even at the $29 upgrade price, you might wonder what you get for your money.  It’s really is a refinement to the current Leopard 10.5 release.

It appears to be one of those OS releases that fixes some problems and puts new technology i place that will eventually allow developers to build cool new stuff, but for now, CrunchGear’s conclusion is probably going to be right for most users – it’s a release that you can wait for. 

Buy it on your next Mac.

Seems that the feeling of excitement that you can get from searching and then searching again is wired into our brain.  One researcher called the behavior “seeking”.  It seems “the pictures inside our skulls show that the possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one.” So we just keep Google’ing and reading Twits.  That the thesis of Emily Yoffe on Slate.

Read the Slate article.

Looks like fat is the new thin for guys.  The chiseled abs look is passé.   Blame it on the economy or having a super-president that stays thin, works out, shoots hoops and deals with world problems, making  it too hard for the rest of us to keep up.

Good news for me – I’m in style.

Read NYT.