pinds.com

Hi friends

Just changed my name to Calvin Conaway.

Why?

Long story. You’ll find it here.

TL;DR: Because I could :)

Cheers
-Calvin

I’ve been wanting to say something about this for a while, and I’m going to do it here, because I don’t yet understand how it relates to Conscious Startups – though I know that it does.

Ranking and linking are two fundamental ways we humans relate to each other. They’re both natural and necessary, but they’re very different and serve different purposes.

Ranking is when we rank each other on some scale – you’re better, smarter, richer, handsomer, more powerful, more imposing, higher up the chain of command, etc., than me – or the other way around. This happens when we play sports, compete for a job, a mate, and so on.

Linking is when we say “good morning”, “nice to see you”, we hug, shake hands, when we see and listen to each other. Linking is when we’re just connecting, and there’s no ranking going on. We’re equals, we’re both humans. Love is a form of linking.

Something that struck me about my relationship with Denmark vs. the US is that Americans are much better at linking. When you’re at the supermarket or at the coffee shop or at the restaurant, you chat with your waiter, the cashier, the barrista, you chat with the other customers, you chat when you’re in line for the restroom, you chat with everyone around you. Linking, linking, linking, linking.

When I go from Denmark to the US, I’m always annoyed for the first few days that people are so darn chatty. Leave me alone, dammit! But then after a couple of days, I start enjoying it, and it becomes part of the general fabric of feeling joyful about your everyday activities, about just being.

When I go from the US to the Denmark, I again have to go through a period of adaptation. Eventually I get used to it, but I never start to enjoy it.

When we were in Phoenix last month, we found ourselves regulars at the Fair Trade Coffee Shop, where we started chatting with one of the barristas. Turns out she was half Danish, born and raised in Phoenix, and she actually spoke Danish fairly well. Neat! How often does that happen?

She told us that a few years back, she’d decided to spend one year living in Denmark. And the one thing she highlighted about Denmark was exactly this: That people don’t talk to each other on the street or at the supermarket or at the coffee shop and so on. And it really bothered her. And when she got back to the US she had the same reaction as me for the first few days, but then realized how much she’d missed it and just adapted to the Danish style.

I’m not going any place in particular with this, other than to introduce to you the concepts of ranking and linking, because I think they’re crucial in all kinds of relations.

You need to know when you’re doing what, because when there’s too much ranking and not enough linking, something crucial is lost. And that goes for startups as well – both within and without of the company.

I love using Jan Kovařík’s Glyphicons in my web app.

So much so that I’ve created a set of helpers to allow me to say things like

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<%= glyphicon :remove %>

and

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<%= link_to_glyphicon :remove, … %>

Here’s the code.

You’ll find:

• A Rake task to create the required data structures.
• The output of that Rake task (glyphicons.rb).
• And finally the helper that allows me to say.

Feel free to use it.

Enjoy!

Seth Godin over at The Domino Project:

But the most important thing an author can do is write a breakthrough book, one that makes readers gasp and talk and share. And the second most important thing an author can do is build a tribe, a significant connection with a growing number of people.

PandoDaily on Mark Zuckerberg in the light of today’s Facebook S-1 filing:

Zuckerberg didn’t just wait. He obsessively learned what being a CEO was about. He surrounded himself by people who had strengths he didn’t and absorbed from them like a sponge. Unlike nearly every other Internet wunderkind who came before him, he didn’t hire the grown-up to run the company. He became the grown-up to run the company.

Smart, patient, confident, knows what he doesn’t know. Something to learn from.

Four and a half years ago, I started my “spiritual path”, with the help of a teacher who had worked closely with Eckhart Tolle.

During that process, I had the big realization that the things I learned about life through that spiritual work was directly relevant to my life as an entrepreneur. And thus, my concept of spiriutal entrepreneurship was born.

So what does “spiritual entrepreneurship” even mean?

To me, it means several things.

It means to actively let your intuition as a guide to discover who you are and what you want to do. Thing such as what business to build, the values to build it on, the vision for what it is and wants to be, the products you create, and so on.

What I’ve found is that this isn’t something that you just make up as you go, it’s not something you can merely copy from someone else. It’s more like there’s a hard, non-negotiable kernel of truth inside you, sort-of like the Manhattan schist buried, underneath all the things that civilization has thrown on top, and your job is to uncover and honor that as the foundation of everything you do.

It means realizing that we entrepreneurs are artists and craftsmen, and our business is our expression our work of art. We’re not merely technocrats fulfilling a role.

It also means recognizing that we’re not on this eaarth to merely survive and build monuments to our mortality. We’re here to fulfill our soul’s mission, and the business or social movement or whatever it is you’re entrepreneuring, is a direct expression of that mission. We want to make put our footprint on the world, not for ego gratification, but because it is why we’re here.

It means realizing that a big part of our mission – if not _the_ biggest part – is the work within. Our own personal growth. We need to not only discover our true selves, but our egos need to grow along with our soul’s demands, or it will actively sabotage us and prevent us from doing the work.

It means looking inside for the answers. You can use others as sounding boards, to get ideas, strategies, input, feedback. But at the end of the day, you’re the only person who knows what you need to do. The final authority lies with you. In the words of Sting: “Let your soul be your pilot.”

It means actively striving for inner peace and presence in the moment, through meditation, relaxation, breathing, a good night’s sleep, massage, exercise, sex, a warm bath, or whatever works for you. Your body is the vessel through which you materialize your vision, so you need to take good care of it through exercise, sleep, and the food you stuff it with.

It means working with your conditioning, all the beliefs and thoughts that are crammed into your unconscious mind, guiding your life every minute of every day. All the things you were taught by grown-ups and peers, that you absorbed, but that aren’t actually true for you. If you don’t rid yourself of those things, your children, or your co-workers or your family or others around you have to bear the burden. It is your responsibility to work through it.

It means basing all your work on the knowledge that at a soul level, you are already perfect and perfectly safe. There is nothing that you need to do or become or accomplish or prove in order to be okay, acceptable and accepted, lovable and loved, safe, and happy. Everything already is exactly the way it is supposed to be, right now, and the world doesn’t need you to change it.

But, as it turns out, operating from the place where you absolutely know this to be true, is the exact best way to actually have the impact you so desire.

So this is the interest that I’ve been pursuing for close to four years now. And it can come as no surprise that Steve Jobs has been a great inspiration for me for a long time.

Right now, my beautiful and wise wife and I are touring the US, looking to meet people who do work in this area – tech entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, investors, yoga teachers, spiritual teachers, writers, thinkers, doers – people doing creative, crazy, caring, crass things, things that inspire, things that change the world.

If you are one – or you have suggestions, leads or contacts for us – on people working at this intersection that you think we should meet, please let me know at lars@pinds.com.

Thanks!

//Lars

About a year ago (a year minus three days to be exact), I boarded a plane from Denmark to the US. Right now, I’m sitting on a plane, making the same trip.

Back a year ago, I left my wife and two kids to make a new life for myself in the US. Not that I wanted to leave my kids. I still don”t.

About ten years ago, I lived in the US for a two and a half years with my then girlfriend, now ex-wife, and the mother of my kids. We had a great time. Initially it was just for a year, but that year passed quickly, and we decided to stay for at least another year. After two and a half years we were at a crossroads, where both of our visas had expired, and we needed to figure out what to do now.

We decided that we both definitely wanted to live in the US again, but that we didn’t want to cut our ties to Denmark completely at this point, so we’d move back home for 2-3 years and then move back to the US. And so we moved back, but the time frame for our return move to the US kept being the friedman unit $$$.

So nine years passed, we got kids and a house and a mortgage, and the day never came.

I have always felt like an american at heart. My dad brought computers and computer books home to me from his trips to the US when I was a kid. He took my brother and I on two trips to the US when I was around 10 years old. I taught myself how to read and write and speak English before we had it in school, because I needed it to be able to understand what the computers said.

When I first set foot in the US as an adult, in New York City in May of 1999, I felt like I’d arrived home. I felt connected to the place, the people, the energy. I felt like like a native.

In the nine years that passed between my move to Denmark at the end of 2001 and my return to the US in January of 2011, I never really got integrated into Danish culture. In the first several years my employees were Swedish, American, German, Croat. My customer were Dutch, Canadian, American, German. The only TV show I watched was The Daily Show. The only news I read were US news on the web. The only magazines I read were Wired, FastCompany, Inc., You get the picture: I felt and lived like an expat in Denmark.

So last year, after three years of therapy and trying to salvage the relationship, I left and bought a plane ticket to New York, and then on to San Francisco. Started to set up a business there and apply for a visa.

But things didn’t quite work out as smoothly as I’d hoped, Turned our there was a lot of processing to do. Breaking up with your wife after 14 years together, and with two small kids, and breaking with your father at the same time, lots of friends falling by the wayside, mid-life crisis. There was a lot of work to be done.

I still don’t have a visa, and so I ended up spending the second half of 2011 in Denmark. That turned out to be great for many things – my relationship with my kids, my relationship with my ex-wife, my zenbilling businesss which currently only has customers in Denmark. But it wasn’t the dream. The dream was to move to the US and establish a business there.

So now, after almost 6 months in Denmark, I’m on a plane back to the US. Second try. Let’s hope it works out this time. (If not, I’m going to keep trying. I’m not giving up.)

My new wife is by my side. A new business plan. A new visa strategy. A new immigration lawyer. A new lease on life.

And yet, my emotions are pretty mixed. I miss my kids already. I’m scared. Already I feel alone in a big, big, merciless country. What if I get everything I’d hoped for, and I’m still not happy? For so many years, I’ve been longing and longing to move back to the US, pretending I didn’t really live in Denmark. It’s a lot of hope and expectation to have riding on this small aluminum tube in the sky.

Also, the past several months in Denmark have been so much about survival. Making things work with kids that have to be in school by 7.55am when we live across town, living with my mom and in various sublets, financial struggles, and all kinds of stuff.

Lots of things have been postponed due to the day-to-day survival mode. “Let’s figure this out when we’re back in the US, or on the plane.” Well, that time is now. Now is the time to figure those things out. And that, as it happens, is scary.

What if I can’t figure them out? What if the ideas aren’t coming? I’m really really tired. It feels like I’m collapsing after all of the holding myself up I’ve been doing for the past few months, and in the collapsing, some of the feelings that were repressed are coming up to visit.

I know it’s all bullshit, of course. But the thoughts are there, rummaging around in my subconscious mind. And thoughts create emotions, whether we’re aware of them or not.

That’s why it’s so important that we become more and more aware of our subconscious thoughts and beliefs so we can choose to change them.

Continually shedding light on what’s going on in our subconscious mind remains one of the most important and powerful things we can do in our lives.

I’m playing with upgrading zenbilling to Ruby 1.9.3, and need to add the magic encoding comment to the source files that need it.

Here’s my poor man’s way of doing it in the shell:

grep "[ÆØÅæøå]" `grep -rL "^# encoding" ./**/*.rb`

It’s searching for the presence of one of the Danish characters in any ruby file that doesn’t have the # encoding magic comment. I guess I could’ve also just added the comment to all files. I didn’t.

Anyway, the command is here in case you need it.

I kept getting my CSS gradients in IE 9 messed up by the Rails 3.1 Asset Pipeline. The symptom was that the colors were off – way off! Like purple instead of white or gray.

It took me several hours to get this to work, so I figured I’d share the solution.

The colors were off because IE’s progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient filter doesn’t understand normal CSS colors like ‘white’ or ‘#fff’. It needs to have them fed just so.

At first I thought it was the YUI compressor that changed the value, but YUI actually has special handling of IE filters. SCSS is supposed to have the same, but it didn’t work for me.

Compass has a solution, which includes a custom helper method, ie-hex-str.

So I imported that, and changed my filter to use it.

But getting my own custom SCSS helper function to work and be called too quite a bit of tweaking. Most of the time it was just being ignored, and I saw ie-hex-str(xxx) in my output.

The result is this SASS helper file, dropped into config/initializers:

and this mixin.css.scss

See the entire gist here.

Enjoy!

I wanted to be able to see error traces in the browser when I’m the one visiting.

Here’s my hack, dropped into config/initalizers/

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if Rails.env == 'production'
  class ActionDispatch::Request
   def local?
     App.developer_ips.include?(remote_ip)
   end
  end
end

App.developer_ips is an array of IP addresses that I typically work from.