We are all driven to action. Often by a desire to avoid pain. Sometimes by a deliberate choice of our own volition. Martha and I have been talking about ideas for a while. But there’s a restlessness that arises when all you’re doing is talking. It’s tempting to pick the first idea which comes to mind and just work on it. More experienced minds, like Dan Norris🔗 mentioned by Martha have a set of criteria to help narrow it down.

“Martha eats books for breakfast”, Min’an usually says to others. I’ve read so many books about entrepreneurship and writing. I’ve read countless books about meditations. I probably will read books about swimming too. Instead of doing the action, I read a book about it. This post is about an author of books I recently read. His name is Dan Norris, and Australian Derek Sivers as far as I’m concerned. I like what he wrote in his first book The Seven Day Startup about the kind of startup that’s set up first-time founders to be successful.

Everyone dies. It’s the great equalizer. Everyone knows it’s coming, but I’m not sure if that many people accept that it may come at any time. I think about death occasionally. The one question which always comes up is “Am I ready for it?” The answer has been different each time I’ve had to think deeply about it. Life changes. There are some things I can put in place though. A will is the first thing which comes to mind.

In the same direction of reflecting on what kind of meaning we wanted from work, I frequently think about why Get Sandwich failed. We had customers, paying ones. We had repeated users, even in unusual places like Beirut (it was after the explosion too). We had corporate supporters. We weren’t the only ones who wanted the product to live. But it’s necessary to have a version of reality that I can openly discuss before we decide to give birth to another startup.

One of the things I missed the most while living in Australia and Sweden was the food. Not just the type of food (definitely a strong bias towards asian food), but certain qualities of the food experience. The sheer availability of food in Singapore, the price point for an average meal and the variety you can get is something you never fully appreciate until you’ve lived abroad for some time.

Climate change is here, so when thinking about generating ideas, my mind returns to a question: as me, what can I do to help fight climate change? A quick google shows that so many others have thought about the same question. So in this post, I’ll summarise some of the answers. As someone who can interface with computers and analyse data from our increasingly data-driven world, two big ideas hold sway in combating climate change.

Martha and I both enjoy listening to podcasts. She uses pocket casts while I’ve stuck with podcast addict for the longest time. They’re both perfectly fine and capable apps for listening to podcasts but there have been times where we’ve wished they could do just that little bit more. For example, I sometimes wish podcast adddict could sync podcast subscriptions with a desktop or web app when I’m on my laptop.

In this post, I will outline an idea that I find interesting. It’s part of our process to research the problem areas in detail before building anything new. As of now, we’re not building yet. What’s the idea? 🔗It’s creating music sheets from youtube videos using machine learning. If you want to learn how to play any musical instruments on Youtube, you will find an extensive collection of videos created using synthesia.