Alex Pooley's Blog

After work I caught up with an old friend over a beer and some wedges with the sole purpose of discussing business. It was an awesome atmosphere, and I think we made good progress. One important point that came up is that we both have lots of good ideas. Bucket loads! But for the most part, they’re not things that many people want. We’ve decided to approach the whole creativity/brainstorming thing from another angle - instead of thinking about goods/services that would be ‘cool’ we’re going to actively _look_ for problems that need to be solved.

I’ve been aware of the need to think like this for a while and I think I’m getting better. But I found that when myself and Dave were talking we would wander in to coolness exploration (and that was only after a pint). We’re going to make an effort to bring up interesting opportunities to each other from now on by starting with something like, “people need this problem solved…”, rather than, “wouldn’t it be cool if…” I think this conscious effort on our behalf will help us progress in our thinking.

We’re doing this each Tuesday after work, it should be fun!

For a long time now I have found that my entrepreneurial spirit is being driven partly by enjoyment, and partly because I have no other choice. The fact that I am eaking out a living working a full time job and that I am generally discontent with my situation is forcing me to work out a way to reach financial freedom. In my world, it is a necessity that I innovate to better my position. This is not an old concept, but it’s a strong theme in my life at the moment.

I recently watched the start of a cult movie called “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”. At the start a knight rides over a hill pretending to ride a fake horse while his loyal servant “Patsy” is clopping away two halves of a coconut to sound as though the knight were riding a real horse. While watching this I couldn’t help but think that they may have been on a tight budget and found creative ways such as this to save on costs. It’s creative and funny to watch, and it also leads on to some great dialog.

I have been working with javascript a fair bit lately. Previously I had tried to stay away from the language because of cross browser issues, and all the previous code I had seen was pretty ugly. Anyway, after playing with javascript I am definitely hooked. Some of the code can be very elegant and javascript’s integration with HTML is excellent.

For example, you can add attributes to the XHTML elements as meta data for the javascript to process and effectively create your own HTML extensions. Take a look at “Lokesh Dhakar’s Lightbox code”:http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox/ to see an example.