Howdy there, Lovely Simplerista

Wow, so Burning Man is really close now. Leaving on Friday, and not coming back until Tuesday September 2nd. Swanand and Kristine are going to hold the fort while I'm gone. Please be nice to them.

I had no idea it was going to be this involved. All the shopping, the travel, the setup, the teardown. I'm going to be part of a 72-person camp. 

I've seriously considered backing out. But hey, it's an instruction. It's been on my bucket list for years and years. Time to go and find out whether it really is for me or not.

Be Where You Are

As entrepreneurs, it's easy to want to be further along than we are. To want to be more successful, have more clients, make more money. And that desire is great. But it's really really important that we enjoy and appreciate where we are. In fact, that we want to be where we are, right now.

Because this is the only now that exists. And if today you want to be 3 steps ahead of where you are, guess where you'll want to be when you're 3 steps further than today? That's right, you'll want to be another 3 steps ahead. So you can live your life in a perpetual state of not-quite-there-yet, not-quite-enough.

And that place sucks. Trust me, I've lived there most of my life.

Read more on the blog.

An update on the fast

I decided to drop it. After four days of fasting over two weeks, I concluded that that particular scheme was too much of a struggle energy for me. I did learn something very valuable, though. I learned that hunger is entirely manageable, and it goes away. I learned to appreciate eating more, and how quickly it can go unconscious again. I learned how effective a day of severely restricting calorie intake can get my weight down very quickly. And I think I will take advantage of that in the future. But it doesn't have to be a fixed schedule for me. In particular, the whole counting of calories drives me nuts. I end up eating silly things like a single hardboiled egg, just because it's measurable, vs. a mixed home made salad, which is impossible to measure, but probably healthier. So in case you were wondering, that's where I am with that. Worth the experience, but not worth continuing.

New features in Simplero

We deployed a big one today. Yay! Contact fields, the ability to add any kind of information about any of your contacts, and to collect those on your opt-in forms for your lists, or on order forms for products. This is something that we've been working on behind the scenes for a very long time, so it was great to finally get it deployed and out in the world. An unshipped feature, no matter how much effort we've put into it, has zero value for our customers. So better get it out there and share it. More on the new feature on the blog.

We're slowly but surely working our way towards a much more flexible system for segmenting contacts and automating actions based on events. It'll take a while, but we're getting there, and this was an important piece of the puzzle.

Thank you for your support. It means the world to us.

We've also added a few smalller things, like thumbnail screenshots of your broadcasts. Let us know if you find them useful.

We've also changed the checkout form so it says "Complete Purchase" if you're actually completing the purchase (ie. you're entering your credit card information right on the form), and "Continue" otherwise (it used to always say "Continue").

And we changed how the admin interface explains the "auto-renew" option on prices. I hope this makes more sense. It was something that caused a lot of confusion previously.

Random stuff from around the Interwebs

Excellent and very funny skitch by Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Seinfeld, Veep). Really nicely done.

Excellent coverage of the stuff going on in Ferguson right now by John Oliver. His new show is amazing.

Humans Need Not Apply, a sobering mini-docu about the future of robots taking over jobs. I strongly believe the way forward is for each one of us to dig deep and find what we're about, and find ways to express that in the world. There's always going to be a need for human beings, for human connection, but jobs that can be done better by a machine will eventually by, generally speaking.

Okay, that was a bit of a heavy note to end on. So here's a woman is using Nike+ to draw dicks (and other symbols) on the streets of San Francisco by running. How awesome is that?

Have a wonderful week.

I love you very much!

-Calvin