Dear Lovely Simplerista

On Thursday last week, Phoebe and I moved into a bigger apartment in the same building. We have almost double the space now (so I can get a drum kit!).

It's fun to think about my moving/apartment karma/strategy. The move happened this way:

I started thinking about it 2 weeks ago. Emailed the leasing office asking if any of the units I wanted were available. Never heard back. 

Even though we love the area and the building we live in, Phoebe and I started looking around for other apartments in the city, just to get a sense of what's on the market once we step up to a higher price point.

Monday last week it felt like it was going to take a while to find the right place, so we had some new shelves hung on our wall, that we'd bought but not hung yet.

There are only maybe three units in the building that we could possibly move into, because the numerology has to work out as well, and the chance that any of them would open up quickly were slim. I hadn't heard back from the leasing office, so I assumed that meant there wasn't any availability right now. 

But then things started to move really quickly:

• Tuesday Phoebe felt a hunch to go talk to the leasing manager directly. Turns out an ideal unit was vacant, and they'd just finished cleaning and painting.
• Wednesday we negotiated the rent and signed the lease.
• Thursday morning we moved!

By 3pm Thursday, everything was installed in the new apartment, and the movers were on their way out, and the shelves were up on the new wall.

The thing about the shelves is interesting. It feels like, the moment we invest in improving our current place, the doors open up to a new place. I've experienced it before: Right before leaving India, we had all of our stuff shipped over from a storage unit in California to India. Within days of getting it, we decided to leave India and move to New York, made exact plans for how we were going to do it, and they worked out perfectly.

Interestingly, we got our stuff from India - which we've been trying to get since July - and they finally show up Wednesday, the day before we move to our new place.

It may all be a coincidence, it may be that it's simply wasteful to get things shipped from India, only to have them shipped back, or to have shelves hung, only to have them taken down and put back up three days later. But it doesn't feel that way to me. It feels to me like investing in my current living situation really helps open the door to a new situation that I really love. I believe that loving where we are is the precondition to getting someplace even better. And not just with where you live. With everything in life.

I'm really enjoying it here. We have double the space we had before, and it feels so great. It's also more quiet, the view here is really wonderful, too, and Yasmine loves being able to run from one end of the apartment to the other.

So now you know why you didn't hear from me last week.

Simplero is moving too

But I'm not the only one moving. Simplero will be moving as well. We'll be in a new hosting facility by the end of the month. I have the new server almost ready to go, the database is already cloned to the new server, and I just need a few days of peace of quiet to work with my sysadmin on getting everything switched over. It should be pretty clean and uneventful.

Interviews, interviews, interviews

I'm still game for doing interviews, if you want to interview me for your blog, or you want to introduce me to someone that you think should interview me.

Also, I want to do more interviews of my awesome customers. So if you're willing to get on Skype with me and share your story, your successes, your challenges, your business tips, what got you to where you are today, then I'd love to interview you. Typically 20-30 minute interviews via Skype, and then I post it on the blog and send it out in the newsletter as well. Get in touch if you'll be willing to do that with me.

New features in Simplero

With all the moving, there haven't been that much feature activity. But I did get a few things done.

I added a search for participants, so if you have a course with a lot of participants it's now easier to find them.

Admins can now edit the gift settings for a participant.

I've upgraded the Google Analytics tracking code to their "universal" code, and we're working on getting ecommerce tracking to work with that.

I've boosted performance of the dashboard by up to 75%, and optimized some things across the entire site.

Make sure uploading a new version of the header graphics apply immediately instead of being cached.

Default the "Return money" dialog to the amount we currently owe, and the "Register payment" dialog to the amount we're owed.

The preview will now show a real (fake) name instead of the string "(first name)" or "(last name)".

Fixed responsive header rendering in emails in the default template.

Simplified the login flow, especially when logging in the first time.

So I guess I did get a few things done over the past couple of weeks. One thing that I love abut doing the customer service myself is that I get an opportunity to make lots of polish and improvements.

Random things from around the interwebs

I love this thought experiment.

The secret to the Uber economy is wealth inequality. Rings true to me.

Calvin to Michael Lewis: Good luck with that!

This is just too good. An anti-gay group puts of a billboard featuring pictures of two identical twins as evidence that "nobody is born gay". Turns out the pictures are of the same man, and that he is indeed gay. Whoops!

This old piece by Einstein on "The Negro Question" got a lot of play when I posted it to Twitter.

Have an amazing Holiday season!

With love,
-Calvin