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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Monthly Archives: December 2008
Did I Mention How Much I Love Winter?
Wtf is going on this winter? My plans totally keep getting messed up. Today I have a cold/flu, and this is what it currently looks like outside of the warehouse (all of that is from the last 2-3 hours): New Years Eve plans officially canceled. Who knows when FedEx will make it out to us to pick up orders. At this point I’m just hoping to get home at a decent hour and get some sleep. Damn.
Productive Napping
In my quest to become healthy, happy, and productive, I’ve become fascinated with sleep over the past few years. I always exercise regularly and for the most part I eat very healthy, but a good nights sleep eluded me for a long time. The problem started in high school where I routinely got less sleep than I needed, and then just sort of continued into college and the workforce. Like most of us, being sleep deprived became the norm. However, since I started working for myself a few years back I’ve been able to experiment with what makes me … Continue reading
Hello Songbird, Goodbye iTunes
I love open source software. There’s something fascinating to me about a community of passionate developers being able to release highly customizable software that is equal to or better than the commercial alternatives. As I wrote in a post last year, our company uses almost all open source software, both because of the affordability and because of the extensibility. My office suite is Open Office, my email client is Thunderbird, my browser is Firefox, and my image editor is Paint.net (although GIMP is just as good). In my free time I like to mess with every flavor of Linux in … Continue reading
New Pure Adapt Inc Site (Finally)
I didn’t plan on posting again before Christmas, but I just finished and uploaded a new and improved Pure Adapt site so I figured it was worthy of something quick before I head off to dinner. The old one-page website needed some updating/expanding, so over the past few weeks I’ve been spending a few hours here and there developing the new site. Mike made the new logo and header, and I did the rest. Like everything else I develop, I tried to use this as a playground to learn a few new things. In particular, I practiced my AJAX skills … Continue reading
My freecycle Experience
During my tour of our warehouse I mentioned that we made the switch recently to anti-static biodegradable packing peanuts. Part of the reason was to protect our products better. Part of the reason was to create a uniform packing process (previously we had just been re-using all sorts of packing material from our vendors). And of course part of the reason was because it is good for the environment and – in conjunction with using 100% recycled paper – we can tell our customers that we’re “going green” with their shipments. George was able to strike a killer deal with … Continue reading
This Winter Sucks
It’s a winter wonderland outside right now as I’m writing this from my apartment. If I had a working digital camera, I’d snap a photo. In a way, I like snow days. They force you to relax and stay in. I could use a day to just throw on some sweats and a t-shirt and watch movies, read books, and get ahead on some work. That is of course, if this were a normal snow day. This snow day is pissing me off for several reasons: We’ll probably have a foot of snow by 6 PM. This matters because at … Continue reading
If I Couldn’t Run a Business…
Let’s just say hypothetically that for some reason I was not legally allowed to run a business for an indefinite amount of time starting tomorrow. What would I do? If you run a business, what would you do? I’m not sure why, but I think about this question quite often. I don’t really foresee myself ever not running a business, but I always wonder what I’d be doing if I wasn’t. If I wanted to return to the corporate world, I’d dust off my resume and start applying for either engineering or web development/SEO jobs. I’d research and contact only … Continue reading
What do you DO?
Ah, my favorite question. Nev wrote a great post about it the other day. Saying “I’m a lawyer” or “I’m a teacher” is a whole lot easier than saying “I run a web development company with three other twenty-somethings and we own a lot of websites with the majority of our revenue coming from our e-commerce websites which we run from a warehouse in Guilderland, NY”. IF I ever actually said that, I’d get a really perplexed look followed by about fifty questions. In general, when I’m out in a social situation I really don’t want to have a long … Continue reading
My Email Bliss
Back in September I wrote a post entitled Making Email Efficient about how much I detest the distraction of email and what I’ve done to minimize that distraction without hurting our business. The quote I posted from Tim Ferris pretty much sums up how I feel: E-mail (and all of its Crackberry/digital leash/Twitter cousins) is the largest single interruption in modern life. In a digital world, creating time therefore hinges on minimizing e-mail. Since then I’ve made some major improvements. Here is the addendum to that post, particularly to #4 “Only receive emails that you need.” I had two big … Continue reading
Prioritizing Work – Part Deux
Oke from Life is What You Make of It (one of my favorite blog designs, by the way) left a really interesting comment on my last post about prioritizing work: I got a question for you. I am having a problem with this myself and do a shitty job on getting back on track. How do you prioritize your work/hobby/activities on the side when none of the tasks deal with making money? I’ve been thinking about that for a while, and decided it warranted it’s own post. In many cases, prioritizing the work isn’t the hardest part. It’s figuring out … Continue reading