-
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.
-
If that sounds like something you're into, you can subscribe to blog updates via RSS or email, or follow me on Twitter. You can get in touch by leaving a comment or through email at
Monthly Archives: November 2009
Let the Fun Begin!
Last night Mike sent out the Detailed Image Black Friday newsletter (shown below). There are also some killer deals coming on Cyber Monday. Last year we were a bit rushed but managed to put together some awesome specials and have an amazing weekend. This year we’ve had a lot of time to plan everything out. We surpassed our November 2008 revenue by the second week of November this year, so it’s not a matter of if we’ll improve but a matter of how much we’ll improve by. It’s a good place to be. I’m very excited. For the next few … Continue reading
snailmailr is Brilliant!
I recently discovered snailmailr, a nifty website that lets you send real mail (i.e. “snail mail”) online for only 99 cents per letter, postage included. As you can see from the picture, the interface is dead simple. You can write your letter with their online editor or you can attach a Word Document, PDF, Powerpoint Slide, etc. They use laser color printers, 100% recycled paper, and even purchase carbon offsets for their paper use. And it works internationally. You can opt to pay 10 cents extra to have the snailmailr.com logo removed from your envelope, and you also have to … Continue reading
Create a Simple, Shareable Holiday Wish List with My Wish List
My business partner Mike just released a nifty little web app called My Wish List. I think most people have used “wish lists” in some capacity on an e-commerce site. I know I use the Amazon wish list to help me keep track of books I want to read. There are also these large super wishlist sites like WishList.com where you can organize anything you shop for. But nothing (that I know of) where you can just create a simple list, get a permanent URL for your wish, and share it with people. So that’s what Mike created. It’s dead … Continue reading
I Just Tried Google Chrome OS And…
I think people are kind of missing the point. If you haven’t had a chance, watch the short video below and read the live blog of the event from TechCrunch. I installed it as a virtual machine using VirtualBox, as you can see in the picture above. Given that there aren’t any guest additions, it’s somewhat limited – even with a ton of memory allocated, it lags a bit and has a 800×600 resolution. So I’ll withhold my real review until those are released. Some people in the comments on TechCrunch and Lifehacker don’t understand this and are blaming these … Continue reading
Simple IP Geolocation Using Javascript and the Google AJAX Search API
I recently started looking into IP geolocation/geotargeting for some projects. By “geolocation” or “geotargeting” I mean serving different content to users based upon their physical location as determined by their IP address. Now, as we all know IP addresses are far from perfect so the best you’re going to get seems to be ~80% accuracy. That said, there are still a lot of great things you can do for those people if you know where they are coming from. An example for Detailed Image around holiday time would be showing different content to people who are past the safe cutoff … Continue reading
How to Judge Anything You Read
I love to read. Almost every day I read blogs, magazines, and books. Much like Mark Cuban, who claims to read 3 hours per day, I make it a huge priority even on the busiest of days to find some time to read: Most people won’t put in the time to get a knowledge advantage. Sure, there were folks that worked hard at picking up every bit of information that they could, but we were few and far between. To this day, I feel like if I put in enough time consuming all the information available, particularly with the net … Continue reading
Customers Never Cease to Amaze Me
This weekend we’re running a 20% off coupon code on Detailed Image. Coupled with our free shipping on orders over $150 for the rest of the year, it’s a pretty enticing pre-holiday sale. Apparently it’s not quite good enough for one customer. Said customer decided that he was going to outsmart our system by buying a gift certificate at 20% off and then turn around and use the gift certificate to then place his actual order for 20% off, effectively double-dipping and getting 36% off (20% off of 20% off). Since we do not allow discounts on gift certificates, this … Continue reading
The Common Sense Check
In the first two years of any engineering degree you generally take all of the same classes as any other student at any other engineering school in the country. You take your Physics, your Chemistry, your Calculus and Differential Equations, and your Statics and Dynamics. Engineering Dynamics is generally considered one of the hardest classes at RPI. The professor was not my favorite professor. The material was difficult and explained poorly. I know a lot of people who went to the local community college to take the class over the summer. Despite the extra expense, they found it worth it … Continue reading
The Best Google Feature in Years
I suppose that the measure of any new feature on a website is how frequently it gets used and actually improves a user’s experience. If that’s the case, the “Show Options” feature that Google is the best they’ve unveiled in years. It allows you to drill down your results by time, type, and other criteria depending on the type of search. There are soooo many instances where I want results from only within the last week or the last year. In particular, any time I have a programming question, I want an answer within the last year…not something similar from … Continue reading