so true.

we started geocaching a few months ago, following tips by mundoo and vera. in shanghai there wasn’t much to hunt and besides, people are everywhere and they’re especially curious of us, the foreigners acting suspiciously…

in portugal though, there are tons of caches, hidden a bit everywhere, so there are really no excuses not to go find them. i especially enjoy the ones that take us to far away places, make us climb rocky hills or wander around in the middle of bushes that scratch our knees… or discover strange geological phenomena or some little known historical fact.

it’s fun, there are caches everywhere, and it makes another great excuse for a roadtrip! :) who knows what you’ll find?

currently browsing the colors and patterns on colourlovers.com, and falling in love with their names. somehow “vintage mount dew”, “vampire dribble”, “Ursus horribilis”, “tomato sneaking out” or “tummy ache” all make sense as colors, at least as soon as you see them. :)

also on the subject, how cool is this collection of 500 coloring pencils?

and of course, impossibly expensive at $33/batch of 25 crayons/month. also, who would have the courage to actually use such a perfect collection? sigh.

Marketing (in all its forms) is unlike everything else an organization does, because it’s always different. There’s no manual because everyone does it differently, and what successful marketers have in common is that they are successful.

The only way your organization is going to make an impact is to market in the way only you can. Not by following some expert’s rules or following the herd, but by doing it in the way that works. For you. Don’t worry about someone else’s invented standards for new media, invent your own. Avoid obvious mistakes, don’t follow obvious successes.

Find your voice, don’t copy someone else’s.

Seth Godin, spot on as usual.

there’s a new shop on dongxin road that sells make-up plus a panoply of useless yet very entertaining items. while inspecting them, i stumbled upon a few samples from the body shop, and bought a couple of them: coconut and mango body butter. it’s sooo hard to resist their scents and lovely packaging… *sigh*

when i got home, i checked their reviews on amazon (geeks shall be geeks after all). very moisturizing, smells divine, blablabla and then this:

I am a huge fan of the Body Shop and I absolutely *love* coconut, so I was really excited to try their new Coconut Body Butter. I was very disappointed, however, when I actually started using it. It claims to help your skin, but I’ve eaten it every single morning on my bagel and haven’t noticed any results for the past two weeks. Furthermore, it doesn’t taste very good. It smells fantastic, which is why I gave it 2 stars, but the taste isn’t as creamy or sweet as I would expect from a coconut butter.

I’m also disappointed that there is no nutritional information. It seems very high in fat, but I can only guess. I hope it’s not clogging my arteries.

i really hope so too! :D

i stumbled upon a brilliant comparison between cooking pasta and launching a startup a while ago, and it’s been on my mind since then. here it is:

How do you cook linguine? Yesterday, I made linguine. I cooked the pasta while my wife made a delicious lemon basil sauce. After about eight minutes, I tasted the linguine to see if it was done. It wasn’t, so I cooked it for a couple more minutes. Now some people don’t taste pasta to see when it is done. Some people throw it all around the kitchen to see if it sticks on the walls. That seems odd to me. The point of cooking pasta is to make it edible, not sticky.

Attitudes about starting companies, especially web companies, are not unlike methods of cooking linguine. Some people think that you “throw something out there” and see if it sticks. If it sticks, it’s done and you’ve cooked up a startup success. Figuratively speaking, there are a lot of awful-tasking starchy strands of uncooked linguine sticking all over the web.

The best way to get a startup right is to cook it for a reasonable amount of time and then taste it to see if it’s done.

All metaphors break down if you push them too far. So I’m not going to keep stirring the pot here. Startups that make news and make people happy are cooked to taste. The founders are personally interested in the product. They don’t throw the idea out to see if it sticks (i.e. see if millions of people happen to think it’s done). Founders of successful startups know that if it tastes good, people are going to like it.

Here’s a lesson learned. Entrepreneurs need to learn how to cook.

these days of instant startups, it seems to be all about “sticking”, and much less about doing something remarkable, or being the best at something.

sigh. fatigue 2.0, anyone?

meiadeleite is switching to a new server over the weekend. “things might get a little shaky for a couple of days”, my systems administrator tells me. (i forgive him because he’s cute).

see you all on the other side!