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If you want sound bites, Schwab Impact 2011 in San Francisco had them. Chuck Schwab called Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's take on the economy "BS" and implied President Obama lacked the necessary strength to turn the ailing economy.
PIMCO head Bill Gross stuck to his usual no-nonsense style, saying that "for 20 years we've been making paper rather than things, and in the process we created a number of liabilities. We've been like bad squirrels, not putting enough away."
Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair lectured attendees on our geopolitical and economic situation, calling it unproductive to focus on who caused the financial crisis and how to prevent a recurrence.
"These are not dominant issues," Blair said. "The key is how to get the economy moving and create jobs. All else should be subordinated to that."
But aside from the headlines, advisor attendees of the conference, held Nov. 1 through Nov. 4, went deeper (pun intended), with educational offerings that included sessions on ETFs, alternative investments, retirement income, practice management and more.
Exhibiting firms also took advantage of the media attention surrounding the conference to make announcements of their own. Altegris Advisors, the alternative private fund and mutual fund shop, chose the show to announce the launch of the Altegris Futures Evolution Strategy Fund (EVOAX). The fund is a '40 Act mutual fund that combines the investing expertise of Jeffrey Gundlach's DoubleLine Capital in fixed income with a managed futures strategy led by London-based Winton Capital Management.
Impact Awards
Not forgetting to include advisors in the program, Schwab executives presented "Impact Awards" to three advisor firms and their leaders on the third day of the conference. The company also donated $45,000 to charity on behalf of the recognized advisors.
"This year's Impact Award winners raise the bar for excellence in client service and exemplary business practices for the independent RIA industry," said Bernie Clark, executive vice president and head of Schwab Advisor Services, at the event. "We commend them for their dedication to investors, the industry and their communities, and we thank them for providing a learning opportunity for other advisors by sharing their best practices and achievements."
Richard Stone, CEO of San Rafael, Calif.-based Private Ocean received the Leadership Award for his role in helping the International Association of Financial Planners draft a code of ethics for the industry. Walt Bettinger, CEO and president of Schwab, joined Clark to hand out the award. Stone's firm has $700 million in assets under management.
Schwab presented its Best in Business Award to Budros, Ruhlin & Roe of Columbus, Ohio, for its excellence in business management. The firm, founded by Jim Budros and Peggy Ruhlin and dedicated to the concept of fee-only financial advisory work, manages more than $1.5 billion in assets.
Lastly, Schwab presented its Pacesetter Award to Green Square Capital of Memphis, Tenn., which manages more than $1 billion. The team grew 30% last year and has instituted a policy of "client delight."
Gross Out
In the conference's opening session, both Bill Gross and LizAnn Sonders, Charles Schwab's chief investment strategist, spoke bluntly about the global markets and the economy, with Sonders a bit more optimistic than Gross.
Gross, who in his latest monthly commentary lamented the shortfalls of policymakers in both Europe and the United States as failing to encourage growth and said that more debt was not the way to get us out of our current debt mess, handled the first question from moderator Tyler Mathisen of CNBC.
Mathisen wondered whether, as an investor, he should be worried that "my money seems hostage to a Greek prime minister?"
"You should be very worried," Gross responded, in reference to Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou's suggestion that the latest eurozone bailout plan should be put to a referendum by Greek voters. "At this point," Gross continued, "it's a question of when rather than if Greece will default."
When Mathisen followed up by asking if Greece will remain in the eurozone, Gross argued that "they would do better to drop out and then come back."
Ever the blunt speaker, Gross then said that "Iceland is the only country that did it right; they basically told the banks to stuff it." He suggested that if Greece doesn't accept its bailout medicine, "it will be in trouble for the next 10–15 years."
Talk to Chuck
In an interview led by CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo from the keynote stage before roughly 2,100 advisors and other guests, the founder and chairman of the investment company that bears his name reiterated his critical views of both Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke and President Barack Obama's economic leadership.
Schwab echoed some themes he raised in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal in late September. He views significant change in Washington as critical to a turnaround in the U.S. economy.
On Nov. 2, Bernanke expressed support for the Federal Reserve's Operation Twist program, which, as part of its overall accommodative policies, will keep the target range for the Fed funds rate at zero to 0.25%.
"What Bernanke is saying is a bit of BS," Schwab said in response. "The U.S. does not have full control of prices and inflation, which can come from China or could be from oil or another commodity on which we are interdependent as a country."
"I should say that I am generally more positive than what I see on CNBC," added Schwab. "From a 39,000-foot view, the economy doesn't look so bad. We have 139 million or 90% of the workforce employed, liquidity is incredible, we've deleveraged the economy … many things are highly positive."
As for Republican leadership, the party has to have "someone electable," Schwab said, noting that he sees Dodd-Frank as a "disaster."
In terms of the Wall Street and other protests over economic inequality, he wants free-market mechanisms to lead the way: "Let's reward success and not suppress it, and yes, we need tax reforms," Schwab shared. "To level the playing field, we have to have a robust economic expansion. There's no other solution. Occupy Wall Street doesn't get how free enterprise works."
Tony's Take
Despite its challenges, Tony Blair was upbeat on the prospects of U.S. economic and political leadership moving forward.
Blair said on the morning of the second day of the conference that the resolution of today's global economic and financial challenges could get derailed by short-term political thinking, though he remains optimistic that leaders can address long-term issues.
"The best short-term politics do not make the best long-term policy," said Blair, who was prime minister from 1997 to 2007. "Right now is a moment of big decisions and key decision makers. And there is a danger that short-term politics get in the way of the best long-term policies."
He described the challenges and changes affecting the world as similar to those affecting the financial services industry. "The speed, scope and scale of change and the challenges themselves are immense. Challenges come together, though—when I was in office—I had hoped they would be sequential," Blair explained. "And if you think the [financial] markets are tough, try the Middle East," he added.
Speaking of foreign affairs, Blair acknowledged that there was some "wariness with our continued engagement overseas" in the minds of the American and British public. He urged those in the West and elsewhere to look at the security threats from terrorism as the direct result of extremism. "This is not a conventional battle, and we are unlikely to see a clash of the conventional kind between any of the larger powers," Blair said.
To defeat the extremist ideology, "You have to win not just with arms, but with ideas," Blair said, pointing to the continued spread of instability to countries like Kenya and Nigeria.
A Tiger Hug
The show closed with a presentation from Joshua Cooper Ramo of Kissinger Associates. Ramo told the assembled advisors and other guests that in order to meet the challenges of the 21st Century, they need to come to grips with the abundance of shifts happening globally—especially in China.
"The rise of China is one of the most important changes of our lifetime, and the outcome remains uncertain," said Ramo, author of "The Age of the Unthinkable." "For the U.S., it involves the challenge of ideas, economics and values and also the opportunity for cooperation," he said.
The Chinese, explained Ramo, see the major U.S. events of Sept. 11, 2001, and Sept. 14, 2008 (when Lehman Brothers went under) as related. "They are markers of big, powerful events," he said. Like the Arab Spring, the Chinese work to stay abreast and to understand the connections between events that cause organizations to change or collapse under new and different pressures.
"How do the Chinese look at this? It's the nature of the age. Looked at from their worldview, they are looking for instability. This is one of the fundamental cultural differences between the United States and China," Ramo explained.
Ramo described "the unthinkable" as trends such as the loss of U.S. jobs and the increase in Chinese ownership of U.S. debt.


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In the Blog
Canadian illustrator and comic artist J. Bone does so much adorable, amazing stuff. I love him. Here are some reasons why.
J. Bone drew this picture for Wonder Woman Day.
J. Bone has a blog entirely devoted to showcasing his drawings hot dudes. Superhero-y dudes, caveman dudes, sporty dudes or just plain hairy and muscly dudes.
J. Bone works closely with one of my favourite creators, Darwyn Cooke, and worked on the amazing Spirit series.
J. Bone draws the absolutely adorable covers for Super Friends.
J. Bone makes the BEST craft I have ever seen: tiny, crocheted versions of superheros!
Sigh. Thanks for making my world cuter, J. Bone.

subset: commoncrawl


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Vinyl! Vinyl! Vinyl!
I don't know what it is but I just love finding obscure Heavy Metal vinyl selling for big bucks on Ebay. Maybe it's because I have a turntable again but I started turning back to vinyl last year, without a turntable, as more of a nostalgia thing. I spent my formative Metal years scrounging through racks of LPs in local record stores looking at the covers and soaking in all the information. When searching Ebay, I found that a lot of obscure Metal albums on CD were readily available, in good condition, on vinyl for affordable prices. Economics dictate my collecting and I would rather spend $20 on an LP than $200 on a CD and some of the albums I was tracking were going for high prices just because they were CDs. That doesn't mean all vinyl is cheap! There is a vinyl revival that has been growing every year and it has infiltrated the Metal world, many bands now release their new albums with a limited vinyl pressing. That also means some original vinyl presses of obscure albums are skyrocketing especially when CDs are not available or the reissues of said albums have suspect sound quality or are shoddy bootlegs. Either format can bring out the best bargains or the highest prices.
So here are some rare high priced Heavy Metal records that I have found, maybe some of you have them……
Sunset – Forgotten Kingdom (1986) = $103.49
Seller: shermy67
Starting Price = $99.99
Bids = 2
Here's a band I've never heard of but someone must have because they decided that a starting price of 100 bucks was reasonable. I couldn't find much information on Sunset except that they were a Melodic Metal band from the U.S. and this is their only release. The only other thing I found is that there is a bootleg of this album on Racer Records but I haven't found any information online about it. There is a page at Vibrations Of Doom where you can listen to this album: http://vibrationsofdoom.com/test/test2/Sunset.html
Thunder Rider – Tales Of Darkness And Light (1987) = $258
Seller: sunset-bomber
Starting Price = $9.99
Bids = 17
I don't know much about Thunder Rider except that the band is from Canada. There really isn't much information out there except that the band released a second album in 2002 and that this album was re-released on CD in 1997. The band does have a website (www.thunderrider.com) but it doesn't seem like it's been updated in a long time. There is a page at Vibrations Of Doom where you can listen to this album: http://www.vibrationsofdoom.com/test/ThunderRider.html
Seller: j.piero
Starting Price = $9.99
Bids = 24
This one is on my Want List! You don't see this album all that much and I have been searching for this since 1998 when I found out Krokus had a self-titled album. In the last 11 years I've only seen two auctions on Ebay and both went over $100. The seller is from Switzerland and that makes sense because that's where Krokus is from. If there is any place that there are some copies of this album it's Switzerland! If you watch Ebay closely, you'll see CD versions of this album from time to time but I found out that they are bootlegs. This album has never been released on CD, I found that out straight from the Krokus website. The album was graded G+ for the cover and VG+ for the vinyl and this auction ended on Feb 11, 2009 and that is significant because…..
Seller: humblebeetree
Buy It Now Price = $380
Bids = 1
…..this auction ended two days earlier (Feb 9, 2009) with BUY IT NOW for a Near Mint copy (both cover and vinyl NM). This seller was located in Switzerland and the auction set the going rate for a really good copy of the record. That's probably why the other auction had so many bids and went so high.
Demolition – Hooker Hater/Axeman 7″ single (1981) = $886.54
Seller: rattlehead14
Starting Price = $3
Bids = 21
The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) always brings out the the rarest of the rare and the highest prices of all. This near mint 7″ single is no exception…..it started at $3 and went up to $886+, that's a lot of money! Birmingham, England's Demolition only released the two tracks and then disappeared like so many hopeful bands did back in the day. I tried to find some extra information on Demolition but there really isn't much online or in The NWOBHM Encyclopedia (by Malc MacMillan). I did find out that High Vaultage Records released a CD titled WRECKING CREW in 2006 and it compiled the two songs on this single, 5 demos and 12 live tracks from 1981 that includes some songs that never made it to vinyl. Save those pennies because you can find the CD from time to time for around $25.
I've saved the best for last…..the most expensive vinyl LP I've seen in a long time…..
Ritual – Widow (1983) = $1246.19
Seller: swirlingorgan
Starting Price: $1218
Bids = 2
I'm not sure if this is the "holy grail" of NWOBHM vinyl but the price sure dctates that somebody out there thinks it is. Congratulations to the seller for getting $1200+ for a simple record in this tough world economy…..at least it's in Excellent condition. Supposedly the seller bought two copies from the daughter of the band's former manager and the master tapes no longer exist. this pressing of the album has the distinction of the band name NOT being included on the cover, only the title. A lot of confusion surrounds the album and the band's actual name, many think it's Widow. Good news for everyone interested, Shadow Kingdom Records has reissued this album on CD with new artwork, 4 bonus tracks, extra liner notes and original artwork and photos. You can order it through CD Baby or through the band's MySpace page.


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Please direct me to the right forum, if this is already posted.
I have a BB9700, OS6 534, BIS.
My storage space is around 23MB, and after couple of days it drops to 5MB. I have less then 50MB of applications.
I'm checking this information from AppWorld; so it's telling me that i have 23 out 250MB free.
can someone explain if this is nornmal.


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Stories about Luxembourg
18 July 2018
What will it take to #savetheinternet in Europe? The view from Romania
Copyright proposals being pushed by European governance bodies must take into account the nature and potential uses of networked digital technology.
20 January 2014
22 November 2013
Racism, the United Nations, and the Dutch Saint Nicholas Tradition
While the children of Belgium, The Netherlands and other European countries prepare for the arrival of Saint Nicholas on December 6, the shadow of racism hangs over this tradition.
24 January 2013
15 March 2012
Macedonia: Fuel Prices Continue to Rise
Continuous increase of fuel prices is a cause of much concern for citizens of Macedonia, and some vent the tension through humor.
14 March 2012
Europe: Will ACTA Treaty Pass After Protests?
The ratification of the Anti-Counterfeiting Treaty (ACTA) by the European Parliament has been delayed in expectation of an opinion from the European Court of Justice on its conformity with fundamental...
1 April 2010
Qatar: Expats outraged by plans to scrap visa-on-arrival policy
Effective May 1, Qatar plans to scrap its visa-on-arrival policy for dozens of nations currently exercising the option. Dismayed expats worry about seeing their families and predict that the additional...


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Protect your motorcycle from road debris and dirt with the R&G Fender Extender. Crafted from durable ABS plastic, this guard is designed to block stones, grit, mud and water kicked up by the front wheel, adding protection to your cooling system, engine case, exhaust pipes and fairing panels. Simple to install, this kit mates directly to your motorcycle's front fender or mud shield using adhesive strips and push rivets. Available in black or "carbon look" finish and designed using 3D scanning technologies to match your motorcycle's existing lines, the fender extender by R&G offers tailored protection that looks great.
R&G Fender Extender Installation Video
- Durable ABS construction
- Specifically designed for your motorcycle using 3D scanning technologies
- Provides extra coverage for front tire
- Prevents damage and debris build up
- Simple to install
- Available in gloss black or carbon look finish
- R&G fender extender
- Mounting materials
- Installation instructions
- Ducati ST2
- Ducati ST4
- Ducati ST4


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80% of plastic found in the sea - comes from the land. So, how does the plastic get there? Plastic is light and can enter our water sources in many ways. Discarded plastic can come from people mindlessly dropping their litter in the street, from landfill sites or from products we use to exfoliate, whiten our teeth or clean our clothes. Our towns and cities are designed to drain water from our houses and streets to prevent flooding. These extensive waterways transport plastic waste through drainage systems ending up in canals, river and eventually the sea. Across the globe, 8 million tonnes of plastic ends up in our oceans every year and of this, 50% has been produced for single use.
A shocking 12.7 million tonnes of plastic is estimated to end up in our oceans every year. Everything from plastic bottles and bags to microbeads clogging the marine ecosystems and contaminating the wild animals who live in them. Travelling on ocean currents this plastic is now turning up in every corner of our planet, from British beaches to uninhabited Pacific Islands. It is even being found trapped in Arctic ice.
Our oceans are slowly turning into a soup of plastic and the effects on ocean life are devastating. Big pieces of plastic are choking turtles and entangling seabirds. Microbeads are clogging the stomachs of creatures who mistake it for food, from tiny plankton to whales. Plastic is entering every level of the ocean food chain - and if you eat seafood - in your stomach!


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Release Tour ~ Twisted Beauty ~ Kristen Flood
Author ~ Kristen Flood
Book ~ Twisted Beauty
Event Date - 7th - 14th April
Hosted by Hooked on books & Cherry0Blossoms Promotions
Cover info:
The cover was painted by Jessicca Boyer, my favorite illustrator. She also did the illustrations in my poetry book, The Museum: A collection of Dark Poetry.
author of Seeking Incandescence and The Museum, pens a riveting adult romance with a poignant examination of love, identity, and forgiveness.
Once the powerful prince of Renol, William is a shell of the man he once was. Living under the curse of a powerful witch, William has spent 100 years making deals on her behalf and mourning the loss of his first love.
Belle has spent her life confined within the limits of her city, Paylor, and is now bound to a man she does not love. When she dares to venture outside the city's gates in search of something she's lost, she finds more than she ever expected.
As Belle and William embark on a journey of love and mourning, passion and forgiveness, they discover that sometimes what we lose isn't as important as what we find.
UK :- http://amzn.eu/9fhwspe
US :- http://a.co/1vaLuZy
"Beauty and the Beast with a Twist"
"What if you and I made a deal?" Belle did not face him. She worried she might faint if saw the sword she knew he held by his side.
"I don't think you have anything more valuable than your life." His breath was warm against the back of her neck.
"But that's exactly what I could give you." When he didn't respond, she turned to face him, keeping her eyes on his, not daring to look at his hands. "You need a servant to take care of your house and cook. I could be that in exchange for the 1,400 I need to pay the debt."
She could see him thinking about it, his golden eyes flickering in the candle light.
"I would be obedient." He did not respond right away. "I could do whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted."
"For how long?" he asked. She heard him put his sword on the table.
"Until my death. A life debt."
"You wouldn't be able to marry. What would I tell your betrothed?"
"The dead can't marry anyway."
"It takes two things to make a deal."
"Vale more tae lan, mi Ven." Belle whispered, 'tell me what you want, my Lord.'
"In exchange for your debt, I will take you as my servant. You will be obedient and loyal to me."
"Of course."
"And as a symbol of your loyalty, I will take a kiss."
"As you wish, my Lord."
Belle closed her eyes and leaned in to kiss him. His lips brushed gently against hers, just as the golden light hit the room, the sun brushing a red tint through her hair.
When she pulled away, she grabbed her chest. It felt as if someone had wrapped a hand around her heart, squeezing tightly, and then the feeling was gone.
"Giving yourself to someone is one of the most powerful deals you can make. That feeling was your fate being tied to mine."
Kristen Flood is a YA science fiction author and poet. At twenty-two, Kristen published her first book,
The Museum: A Collection of Dark Poetry. Now twenty-three, she has released her second book, Seeking Incandescence. Kristen lives in Missouri with her husband and son.
When she's not writing or chasing her toddler she spends her time cramming for tests and turning in assignments, last minute at the University of Missouri St.
Louis. Kristen plans to release two books this year but until then she is just trying to get through finals.


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America Saves Week, which began Feb. 24, is a chance for individuals to assess their saving status and take financial action.
America Saves Week, which began Feb. 24, is a chance for individuals to assess their saving status and take financial action.
Having a savings plan with specificgoals can have beneficial financial effects, even for lower-income families. Next week is an opportunity for organizations to promote savings behavior and a chance for individuals to assess their own saving status.
Okaloosa Saves, which promotes the effort, is the local coalition of the America Saves initiative.
America Saves is offering a five-week challenge that will help you meet your goals by providing daily encouragement and assignments. There will be weekly prizes and final challenge awards at the end of program.
You can enroll at the Rutgers Cooperative Extension website, http://rutgers.ancc.net.
Set up a user name and password and download a one-page user�s guide with instructions about how to proceed.
Select the option to enroll in the �2013 America Saves Challenge.� This option will be among a list of names of online challenges currently available.
When people track their behavior and measure their performance, they are often inspired to do better and achieve positive results.
Participants in the America Saves Challenge are on their honor to report their activities accurately.
The America Saves Challenge is based on the performance of 10 recommended financial practices. Ten points are given for performing each one, with a maximum of 700 points per week.
Participants will receive daily motivational messages. Paper tracking forms are available for self-monitoring your activities.
Doing even one of the 10 recommended daily financial practices is a great way to get started on your financial goals. The more America Saves Challenge activities you do, the better your financial progress.
Elaine Courtney is a Family & Consumer Sciences Extension agent at the Okaloosa County Extension office in Crestview.


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When our founding fathers first considered fighting for freedom, it was not an easy decision to make. Many lost their lives before America could call itself a nation.
In the past 235 years, America has fought countless other wars and sacrificed millions and millions of brave soldiers' lives. None of those involved made the easy decision. They left their families at home and took on the nation's struggles as their own, fighting for a dream they hoped would become reality.
The fight for fiscal freedom
No Trackbacks


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Lucid Games
Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions Evolved update drops March 31
Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions Evolved will release as a free update for current owners.
Lucid Games headlines
Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions release date confirmed
Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions will be upon us by the end of the year, Activision has confirmed.
Lucid Games racer 2K Drive is out now on iOS
2K Drive is available now on iOS, courtesy of developer Lucid Games, which is comprised of former Project Gotham Racing devs.
2K Drive dev diary explains Race Face mechanic, features gameplay
2K Drive developer Lucid Games has released a new dev diary that expains the game's Race Face mechanic, and features new snippets of gameplay.
2K Drive first dev diary promises 'console-like' racing
2K Drive is an ambitious racer for iOS devices, and the first developer diary shows off the scope of the game. There's plenty of gameplay footage, and it's genuinely impressive that this is a mobile game.
2K Drive confirmed for 'Fall' release on iOS
2K Drive is the iOS racer from Lucid Games, a studio comprised of former Blur and Project Gotham developers. It's heading to a device near you this Fall.
Lucid Games racer revealed as iOS title
2K Drive is an iOS racer from the group of former Bizarre Creations staffers at Lucid Games – which is great, obviously, but it's not Project Gotham Racing 5.
Xbox 720 reveal teased by car-maker McLaren
Microsoft is revealing 'something special' at its Xbox 720 unveiling, according to car maker McLaren Automotive. The company's cars have featured in previous Forza Motorsport and Project Gotham Racing games, suggesting a new instalment in either franchise could be announced tomorrow.
Jacob Jones and the Bigfoot Mystery hits PS Vita, iOS this week
Jacob Jones and the Bigfoot Mystery developer Lucid Games is gearing up to launch its quirky episodic puzzle game on iOS and PS Vita this week. If Lucid sounds familiar, it's the studio currently linked to Project Gotham Racing 5 development rumours.
Lucid Games teases project, PGR5 hopes reignited
Lucid Games has teased that "mid-May" will be an interesting month for the studio.
Jacob Jones and the Bigfoot Mystery announced for Vita
Yesterday, Sony announced on the PS Blog that episodic adventure game Jacob Jones and the Bigfoot Mystery would soon be gracing Vita. Unfortunately the button was hit too soon on the matter, and Sony pulled it, so we are just telling you about it today. Still, huzzah, right?
Project Gotham 5 rumours hot up, suggest Rare as co-developer
Project Gotham 5 has been scrutinised heavily over on the NeoGAF boards, and collected evidence suggests that Rare has been hiring a lot of talent from top racing studios lately. Assess for yourselves here.
Project Gotham 5 in development for Xbox 720 launch - rumour
Project Gotham 5 is said to be in the works for Microsoft's Xbox 720, according to a fresh report this morning.
Fur Fighters to release on other platforms if iPad version does well
The Dreamcast favorite Fur Fighters is back, but this time, it's heading to iPad thanks to Mark Craig and Jeff Lewis of Muffin Games, both ex-Bizarre staffers and current Lucid Games developers. The duo have spent 200 hours of free time porting the gamer to the system, using the PC version of the game. According […]
Lucid Games formed by ex-Bizarre devs
Seven days after Bizarre Creations shut down, some of its ex staff has gone on to form Lucid Games.
Lucid Games latest
2K Drive dev diary explains Race Face mechanic, features gameplay
Jacob Jones and the Bigfoot Mystery hits PS Vita, iOS this week
Project Gotham 5 rumours hot up, suggest Rare as co-developer
Project Gotham 5 in development for Xbox 720 launch – rumour
Fur Fighters to release on other platforms if iPad version does well


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I am beyond impressed by the items offered for the Summer Harvest Hunt! So many fun items, gorgeous clothes and accessories. My two favorite are the offerings from PNP poses and Trompe L'oeil. What great additions to the Raynier's cozy home. Be sure to get your hunting gear on, Summer Harvest Hunt starts tomorrow September 1st, 2012! For a list of participating stores, check here. Happy hunting!
What I Am Wearing:
Skin-NIVARO Crow Skin summertone
Hair-EGO TAK – Light Noir
Hairbase-Entente Hairbase – B&W – Midnight black
*Eyes-ID Warrior Mesh Aqua (Available @ The Mens Dept)
Shirt-Kal Rau Basic Tee
Pants-Razorblade Jacket Jawbreaker Mesh Shorts (Available @ The Mens Dept)
Socks-LEAGUE Gartered Socks -Off White
Shoes-2Real F-WINGS
What Gabriella Is Wearing:
Skin-Belleza Elle Dark Deep
Eyes-Mayfly– Deep Sky Mesh Eye (Red Mahogany)
Hair-TRUTH Gabriel – espresso
Shirt-{mon tissu} Slouchy Sweatshirt ~ Pink Ombre
Pants-{mon tissu} Nora Skinny Jeans ~ Indigo
Shoes-Slink MESH Feet
Summer Harvest Hunt Items-Trompe Loeil – Stone Slab Bench & PNP ~ Picking Apples


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Fun. says "Carry On" for next single
The band Fun. says their next single is "Carry On†and they've already filmed the video, but not yet released to the public. Nate Ruess said: "I'm excited about the video because we're not doing anything groundbreaking, but steak isn't groundbreaking either."  Well, we love a good steak and good fun. So we'll let ya know when the new video is on.


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Regular price $74.95
"Peeling Bodies" Blanket.
- Each blanket features a premium suede polyester print for beautiful color vibrancy.
- Cozy underside is constructed from an ultra-soft micro fleece fabric.
- Machine washable with cold water gentle cycle and mild detergent.
*Please allow 7-9 days to receive a tracking number while your order is hand-crafted, packaged and shipped from our facility. Estimated shipping time is 2-4 weeks.*


text:
Puppy Linux Discussion Forum
Puppy HOME page :
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[9 Posts]
Joined: 19 Nov 2008
Posts: 604
Location: Oslo, Norway
Posted: Sun 11 Sep 2011, 14:02
Post subject:
JoomlaOnPuppy Unbranded(Web-Server out of the box)
Subject description: Joomla 2.5.1 on top of Puppy Lucid 5.28.004 with LHMP
Due to publishing JoomlaOnPuppy on Joomla Extension website, I must except a lot of downloads. In the Joomla world it is normal to require a registration for a download. I do this as well, due to the file being 173mb and I will get complaints from my webhost if I go to far as in downloaded gigabytes from the site.
Yet I hope there is someone that can grab the file and host if for a direct download for Puppy users as this is normal in Puppyland.
Joomla is a very very large community and I got to be prepared for a thousands of downloads in a short time, or maybe none:-)
The new download link is
Thanks to those that made this possible.
Please post any feedback here.
The reason for this release is FEEDBACK:-)
Last edited by Atle on Sat 07 Jul 2012, 12:05; edited 2 times in total
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Joined: 12 Sep 2008
Posts: 719
Location: Down-Under in South Oz
Posted: Thu 15 Mar 2012, 11:57
Post subject:
Hello Atle,
I think you have a very interesting concept here and i'm downloading your iso now.
It's quite a novel idea, AFAIK, to preinstall a CMS application such as Joomla into any OS, and i can't imagine that it's a very easy thing to do.
I wish you success with this project and i hope you receive a lot of support with your efforts.
The mud-elephant, wading thru the sea, leaves no tracks..
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Joined: 16 Jun 2008
Posts: 3903
Location: 500 seconds from Sol
Posted: Fri 30 Mar 2012, 20:46
Post subject: How do to start joomla?
Hi Atle,
I agree with russoodle that this is an interesting project. I'd add, perhaps an important one considering your target users.
I downloaded the iso and did a frugal install. Perhaps if I knew enough about joomla I'd be able to start it. But I don't. And I would guess your target audience won't be able to either.
There is no menu listing. Thinking that perhaps the arguments in the desktop file were wrong I checked applications. No joomla.desktop file. Typing joomla in console produced "bad command." pfind locates a joomla folder with many binary files at usr/local/var. Browsing to it revealed a mysql folder, which having played with Wordpress and SFM I suspect would be required by joomla.
Then I noticed that your last post was in September. If you're interested in reviving this project, I'm certain that I'm not the only one on the Puppy Linux Forum who would be willing to help. Just repost with "Help Needed" in your posts heading.
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Joined: 19 Nov 2008
Posts: 604
Location: Oslo, Norway
Posted: Sat 31 Mar 2012, 16:10
Post subject:
Hi Mikeslr
I think if you retry your frugal install and simply hit the "home" button in your Firefox that is preinstalled, your in your Joomla right away...
The path is http://localhost/joomla/
For administrator is the same, but also /administrator
Password is woofwoof, but I think Firefox has that saved for you.
Can you try that?
Thanks for downloading and trying.
You know.... Joomla is running from the webserver that starts from boot.
But I like the idea of making a desktop icon or a menu item out of it, as this is meant to finally serve those that really starts from scratch, so thinking of all possibilities of misunderstandings are a part of the development.
This is like a feedback release before i make it official in the Joomla extension as a competitor to ALL
of the
Joomla Stand Alone Servers
So I trust in Puppy as a platform to WIPE the others as platform and hopefully get some synergy as new users and merging of interests
Lets see if rain or anything else comes along so I can make the custom Wallpaper and the logo.16 in and its ready to roll...
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Joined: 16 Jun 2008
Posts: 3903
Location: 500 seconds from Sol
Posted: Wed 11 Apr 2012, 15:29
Post subject: joomla > start firefox
Hi Atle,
Sorry about the delay. Joomla wasn't on my radar, i.e., threads I read daily. Just thought about it, read your above post, and edited Grub4dos to replace precise with joomla. (Precise is just too early in development for me to be much use). I'll boot into joomla later and report back.
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Joined: 18 Jan 2012
Posts: 103
Location: Oregon
Posted: Sat 30 Jun 2012, 20:58
Post subject: Login not effective Joomla Alpha ISO
Subject description: kind of a letdown man
I've been at this for five hours. I did get to the Admin page like so...
But no matter what you enter for user & password, no go.
I tried USER root
with PSWD woofwoof
Here's what's returned: Username and password do not match or you do not have an account yet.
If I try the first user name I gave it five hours ago, SAME ERROR MSG.
I guess I need to read more. (sh*t)!!!
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Joined: 25 May 2005
Posts: 4843
Location: Manila
Posted: Sun 01 Jul 2012, 02:07
Post subject: password
There is a discussion
The password is stored in the MySQL database jos_users table password field. (change this for your table prefix if different)
Use a MySQL utility such as phpMyAdmin or MySQL Query Browser to edit this field. Open the table, find your admin username, and then select that row for editing. The password must be hashed (MD5), you cannot simply enter text into this field.
Set the password to a known value eg: - admin = 21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3
Source: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=10985
For woofwoof, the md5 hash is
Puppy user since Oct 2004. Want FreeOffice?
Get the sfs (English only)
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Joined: 19 Nov 2008
Posts: 604
Location: Oslo, Norway
Posted: Wed 04 Jul 2012, 07:32
Post subject:
Hi dennis-slacko531...
I think the username for the Joomla is admin and password is woofwoof.
Actually, as by default the superuser account of Joomla is admin during innstallation.
I will have some time for double checking this info later on today. If I do not remember wrong, this information is present at /localhost/joomla at the frontpage there...
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Joined: 18 Jan 2012
Posts: 103
Location: Oregon
Posted: Wed 04 Jul 2012, 19:36
Post subject: Username was admin -- Joomla working now.
Hey thanks for that (admin). Joomla looks alright. I'll be learning it.
I inserted a sample PNG (bananas of course) if I can post it here.
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The increasingly popular TuneIn streaming-radio service today gets a new feature that helps users better customize their listening experience. Dubbed TuneIn Live, the feature is available now both on the TuneIn Web site and in the updated iPad app.
On TuneIn's homepage, TuneIn Live can be found via a small Edit button atop the featured-content tiles. This button lets you pick up to eight different interests -- anything from Top 40 to Hip Hop to News -- to use as filters for recommendations. Once your interests are marked, the tiles update to show only stations that you might like.
While this sort of filtering isn't exactly a groundbreaking innovation, it is certainly an important addition to an already rich service. With TuneIn Live, users get more relevant recommendations pushed in front of them, which is a lot easier than sifting through the service's more than 70,000 stations manually.
Again, TuneIn Live is available now on TuneIn.com and in the TuneIn iPad app. According to the folks at TuneIn, the feature will be available on other mobile platforms sometime later this year.


text:
Eight years after the first volume of Jason Lutes' three-volume, 24-chapter graphic novel Berlin was released, Lutes offers Berlin Book Two: City Of Smoke (Drawn & Quarterly), collecting the middle eight chapters of his epic study of Germany's Weimar Republic. Berlin: City Of Stones ended with the 1929 May Day massacre, which hastened the German citizenry's demand for order and thus the quick rise to power of the Nazi Party, whose 1930 triumph in the elections marks the end of City Of Smoke. Lutes foregrounds the history by having his characters react directly to it, and though there are smaller, human stories throughout the book—including the crumbling romance between a journalist and an art student, and the tale of an African-American jazz combo booked in Berlin for an extended engagement—much about Berlin feels programmatic and overthought, despite sequences that are undeniably erotic, suspenseful, or heartbreaking. Lutes' ambition is admirable, and when it's complete, Berlin may well be a counted as a classic on the order of Maus or Jimmy Corrigan. Right now, it's still burning too slowly and evenly… B
It's been a long wait between issues of Image's stellar Mice Templar, but the handsome hardback collection of the first six issues, Mice Templar: The Prophecy, is waiting in the wings to catch newbies up and get them waiting for the next installment along with the rest of us. Writer Bryan J.L. Glass and artist Michael Avon Oeming both rely heavily on darkness, producing a dense, eerie story laid out in pages dominated by oppressive heavy blacks. Even without all the wild mysticism and looming evil, Oeming's art would still convey what it's like to be at the bottom of the food chain in a night full of predators, and the terrific story and well-defined characters give the likes of the Redwall books and Mrs. Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH a run for their money… A
Wondering what David Fincher's The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button might have looked like had screenwriter Eric Roth taken any of it whatsoever from the original F. Scott Fitzgerald book? The story is readily available for free online, but the graphic-novel version The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (Quirk) sticks close by the story's original text, and in Kevin Cornell's slightly cartoonish, but well-textured sepia drawings, it finds a visualization more in keeping with Fitzgerald's tone. The author stated at one point that "Benjamin Button" was his funniest story, but the humor is dry at best, and onionskin-thin might be a better description. It's mostly a curiosity, as if Fitzgerald had no more complicated agenda than thinking through what it would be like for people to be born old and die as infants. It's the high-toned literary equivalent of a 3-year-old's "my shoes are on my hands!" gag, a simple reversal of the standard order. But this accomplished little book places the story in a well-crafted frame, including an essay explaining its origins, Fitzgerald's trouble in selling it, how it fits into his body of work, and more. It's like an interesting little lit-course classroom session in one volume… B
Paul Di Filippo and Jerry Ordway's 2005 attempt to reboot of Alan Moore's Top 10 series fell distinctly flat; it crammed in new characters and plotlines featuring old ones, but never found the humanity in the characters or the sense of wonder in the story. Original series co-artist Zander Cannon has been doing a much more respectable job with the four-issue miniseries Top 10: Season Two (Wildstorm), which wraps in February. From the first issue's irresistible mystery to the subsequent ones' respect for Moore's characters, it's a more faithful and more compelling Top 10. And hey, Gene Ha is back on art as well, which makes a major difference to the feel of these issues… B+
Carol Lay has spent decades making quirky, hyper-intelligent indie black-and-white comics that generally tell entire tiny stories in 16 panels or less; longer threads, like the one in her book Joy Ride, have been rare but welcome. So her latest, The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude (Villard) is a departure for her in several senses: It's a memoir, it's a stand-alone book, it's non-fiction, and it's shockingly sincere, given her usual playful tone. Growing up around 100 pounds overweight—she blames her need for attention—she had a poor diet and obsessive eating patterns; this book doubles as a personal story and a guide to weight loss, complete with recipes, sample daily menus, tips, calorie charts, and more. Much of it reads as disappointingly standard, given Lay's talent and humor; interludes like the one where she imagines junk food as a sleazy, leather-jacketed biker offering her a fun quickie, and her current diet as a well-muscled, Tarzan-like nature boy are too few and far between. But while her advice is absolutely basic—eat less, eat healthier, exercise more—and she sometimes slips into the condescending tone of the religious convert, this is as entertaining, approachable, and practical a guide to weight loss as any, and Lay's personal story keeps it lively. It isn't quite the Understanding Comics of diet guides, but close enough… B
Steven Soderbergh's two-part biopic of Ernesto "Che" Guevara stays so narrowly focused on a few incidents in his life that it's possible to leave the theater after four hours of artfully rendered guerrilla warfare and know very little about Guevara's past or his personal convictions. Legendary underground cartoonist Spain Rodriguez goes in the opposite direction with his Che: A Graphic Biography (Verso), cramming as much information about Guevara as possible into 100 straightforward, simply drawn pages. And yet Rodriguez doesn't do any better than Soderbergh at capturing the essence of the man or his mission. Che is a well-researched, well-assembled, deeply passionate book—one that argues unequivocally for Guevara's vision of radical equality—but it doesn't attempt to dig beneath the icon and consider the contradictions, or to dwell on the human moments that make Guevara more relatable. Rodriguez gives more detail to the face on the T-shirt, but he fails to make that image three-dimensional… B-
Following last year's stellar collection The Early Years Of Mutt & Jeff, NBM's "classic screwball strips" series Forever Nuts returns with a well-chosen anthology of Frederick Burr Opper's early-20th-century newspaper comic Happy Hooligan. Drawing mostly from the first decade of the 1900s, this set is cruder and less witty than Mutt & Jeff, but Opper's basic formula still works. Each six-panel Sunday strip in this book begins with well-meaning wanderer Happy Hooligan trying to make himself useful, and ends with him inadvertently irritating some person of importance, and thus getting kicked out on the street or thrown in jail. The joke is the same on every page, but the joy of the strip is in the way Opper sets up his dominoes before knocking them down. Opper delighted in filling the frame with as many figures and objects as he could, and then figuring out how to put them all to good use… B+
Batman's dead! Or something. Grant Morrison's "Batman R.I.P." storyline concluded in issue 681 of Batman with a literal bang and a figurative whimper, a whole lot of fuss, and moments of brilliance, emptied out into more confusion in which we learn the true secret origin of Bruce Wayne's alter-ego. Except we don't. The following issue begins the two-part "Last Rites" storyline, which marks the end of Grant Morrison's time with the Dark Knight for the foreseeable future. And, again, there's a lot of brilliant ideas at work here, as there have been throughout the run. Most notably, Morrison attempts to squeeze every Batman story—from his '40s origins through '50s silliness on up through the present—into a single continuity, a mad conceit that connects to the madness at the heart of Batman. But there are so many frayed edges that it's going to take a lot of work to smooth them out, and it's a shame Morrison won't be the one doing the smoothing. Also, we'd wager we haven't really seen the last of Bruce Wayne… B-
By 1969, Charles Schulz had been the most popular cartoonist in America for almost a full decade, and Peanuts had long since saturated the culture at large, spawning toys, TV shows, and common references. The two years' worth of strips in The Complete Peanuts: 1969 To 1970 (Fantagraphics) find Schulz trading on the public goodwill and familiarity by spinning longer stories that rely on readers' knowledge of the characters and tolerance for whimsy. As the '60s came to a close, Peanuts had Linus' favorite teacher, Miss Othmar, getting fired; Charlie Brown's baseball team discovering the benefits and detriments of Gatorade; The Little Red-Haired Girl moving away; Snoopy writing It Was A Dark And Stormy Night; Freida reporting Snoopy to The Head Beagle for his failure to chase rabbits; Charlie Brown trying to meet his baseball hero Joe Shlabotnik at a sports banquet; and Snoopy's speech at The Daisy Hill Puppy Farm getting disrupted by demonstrators. ("Apparently there's been some trouble about dogs being sent to Viet Nam, and then not getting back…") In short: this book contains 300 pages of Peanuts at its glorious peak… A
When Dan Clowes began serializing Ghost World in the pages of Eightball, he gave no immediate indication that this was going to be his next graphic novel, following the nightmarish Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron. The Ghost World stories just started appearing, issue after issue, offering what seemed at the time like unrelated vignettes featuring two snarky teenage girls and their irony-steeped daily lives. By the time Clowes reached the final installment, the tone of the series had shifted, from sharing Enid and Rebecca's above-it-all point of view to skewering them for it, then finally showing some pity for them, as Clowes made it clear how ill-prepared the girls were for adulthood. Ghost World remains Clowes' most popular book—in large part due to the deeply flawed movie version—and it looks better than ever in Ghost World: Special Edition (Fantagraphics), a handsome hardcover that contains the graphic novel, the movie's original screenplay, and several pages of adjunct strips and samples of Ghost World paraphernalia. To some extent, Ghost World now reads like a trip back to the remote, alien landscape of '90s Los Angeles, where the pop-culture obsessions were quaintly low-stakes. But it's also a reminder of how Clowes became one of the premier cartoonists of his generation, by tempering his own acerbic take on modern life with a measure of sympathy for all who endure it… A
So… who are the Dan Clowes of today? There are a number of young cartoonists who share Clowes' fascination with the intersection of the bizarre and the mundane, and a few who share his skills as an illustrator and a dramatist. One of the best of those is John Pham, whose Sublife: Volume One (Fantagraphics) also recalls Chris Ware, Paul Hornschemeier, Kevin Huizenga, and Adrian Tomine in its impressionistic study of intertwined lives in downscale L.A. Outside of a puckish science-fiction story on the endpapers, the entirety of the first Sublife is taken up by the first installment of the serialized graphic novel 221 Sycamore Street, which follows the residents of a low-rent boarding house (an aging teacher, a scattered college student, and an Armenian immigrant with a sensitive nose) and their white-supremacist neighbors. Pham is still in the introductory phase with the characters and their intertwined stories, which means that at the moment, not everything in the book makes complete sense. But 221 Sycamore Street is remarkably sure-footed so far, and poetic in its descriptions of the comforting smell of a drool-stained pillow, the unexpected kindliness of racists, and the importance of a good concealer. Pham is a formidable new talent, and a welcome one… A-
Kevin Smith returns to comics-writing with Batman: Cacophony #1 (DC), the first of a three-issue series about a Joker-stoked gang war in Gotham City. Smith has done creditable work in comics before—most notably in his Green Arrow run—but he falls back on bad habits here, using the Joker's loquaciousness as an excuse to fill page after page with unnecessary patter. The dialogue tends to run to the vulgar, too, with Joker cracking jokes about his green merkin, and warning a fellow criminal that when it comes to gay sex, "I bottom from the top." It'd be easy to slam Smith for putting self-indulgence over the integrity of DC's classic characters, but do DC's characters even have any integrity these days? Or will the company let just any hot writer come along and piss wherever they like? C-
The new miniseries Sandman: The Dream Hunters(Vertigo/DC) does little more than retrofit Neil Gaiman's 1999 novella of the same name with art by P. Craig Russell. Still, there's that art by P. Craig Russell to consider; it finds an intriguing middle ground between clean line comic art and Japanese prints… B+
Brian Lynch's Angel: After The Fall got off to such a promising start, taking up where Joss Whedon's TV series left off (with Whedon's blessing and story assistance) and getting even more ambitious, as all of L.A. literally went to hell, taking the series characters with it. It was a braver departure than what Whedon is doing with Buffy Season Eight, and without the publicity-stunt lesbian tryst at that. But the series had barely got off the ground when it halted on a cliffhanger and suddenly switched over to a lot of tedious flashbacks and fill-ins. Those can all be found in the series' second graphic novel, Angel: After The Fall—First Night (IDW). While there is some key information to be had about how Wesley, Gunn, and others ended up in their particular radically changed situations, most of it was stuff readers had already guessed, executed in extreme brief in a page or two per character. The series is back on track, so now it's just up to collectors to decide whether this irritating sidebar is worth buying just to fill the gap on their shelves… C-
The first eight-issue plot arc of Brian Wood's Northlanders seemed to drag on forever in a Hamlet-like way, as the protagonist did nothing for too long, then did too many of the wrong things all at once. The whole thing is collected in Northlanders Vol. 1: Sven The Returned (Vertigo), a softcover graphic novel that at least makes the story move along a lot more deftly than the single issues. With that storyline over, the series continued in a radically different time and place with the two-issue miniseries Lindesfarne, which visualized the invading Vikings through the eyes of a child unsatisfied with his father's harsh take on religion. The latest arc, The Cross and The Hammer, is still underway, but it, too, represents an improvement. And Ryan Kelly's art is superb, the best of the series so far. Things just keep looking up for this series, in spite of the spotty start. Northlanders Vol. 1: C; issues #9-12: B+


text:
SuzAnna's Antiques in October and the past few months have flown by, but I've really loved being a vendor there so far.
Friday, January 11, 2013
A New Color, Booth News, and Future Projects
SuzAnna's Antiques in October and the past few months have flown by, but I've really loved being a vendor there so far.
24 comments:
- Linda@Coastal Charm said...
Your booth looks outstanding...love that china cabinet. Looking forward to seeing the bigger booth.
- Fri Jan 11, 08:51:00 PM 2013
- Kathy @ Creative Home Expressions said...
You've got a great booth, Kristen! I'm sure your bigger space will be great, especially with the furniture you do over. I'm hoping to get a booth this year myself.
- Fri Jan 11, 09:07:00 PM 2013
- Unknown said...
What a luvly assortment in your booth. Congrats on the booth space and the getting a bigger on next month.
Cheers, Gee
PS... luv the 2 blue side tables.
- Fri Jan 11, 09:17:00 PM 2013
- Blondie's Journal said...
I would LOVE to visit your booth if I were ever in the area. You have some many gorgeous pieces. Keep up the good work!
- Fri Jan 11, 09:58:00 PM 2013
- Debra@CommonGround said...
Love your space, and that blue is really wonderful!
- Fri Jan 11, 11:02:00 PM 2013
- Meredith @ The Laundry Can Wait said...
I wish I lived close by so I could shop at your booth!
- Sat Jan 12, 01:07:00 AM 2013
- Sandy said...
Just discovered your blog while visiting Kim at Savvy Southern Style. I love your style! I'm folllowing along now.
- Sat Jan 12, 01:56:00 AM 2013
- Sissie's Shabby Cottage said...
Hi Kristen,
I love your booth and I'm hoping to see it in February when I head to my brother's in Raleigh. My sister and I love to come there.
- Sat Jan 12, 06:16:00 AM 2013
- Sharon said...
Your booth looks great! I'm hoping to visit my sister in law in March in Fayetteville, and I'd LOVE to add your booth to our list of "must see"! I love your work!
- Sat Jan 12, 08:10:00 AM 2013
- Mary Ann Pickett said...
Love your favorite room at Savvy Southern Style. You did a beautiful job. It's a soothing, comfortable and elegant room.
- Sat Jan 12, 01:28:00 PM 2013
- Gypsy Heart said...
So many pretty things! Now, I'm a lover of color so that table would be perfect here. :)
Good luck with the new space!
- Sat Jan 12, 05:44:00 PM 2013
- Gypsy Heart said...
So many pretty things! Now, I'm a lover of color so that table would be perfect here. :)
Good luck with the new space!
- Sat Jan 12, 05:44:00 PM 2013
- SImple and Serene Living said...
Love your booth and your mater bedroom is fabulous. Happy to have found you from Savvy Southern Style.
- Sat Jan 12, 07:28:00 PM 2013
- Shirley@Housepitality Designs said...
Kristen...your booth looks wonderful as always...just today I was looking at the Aubusson blue with a neighbor friend of mine....I really love the color!!
Can't wait to see your "expanded booth"
- Sat Jan 12, 08:14:00 PM 2013
- srpprcrftr said...
I'll take one of everything, don't I wish. lol I'm loving everything I see in your booth and those blue tables I drool over. Love blue anyway but the combo you made is excellent with the Aubusson blue. I'm making a note of the colors you combined.
I love tables and ones that are different shapes and style so your cute little blue kids are perfect. Will you be selling them as a pair or seperately? Wish I lived closer to you. Probably good thing I'm not as I'd be in trouble all the time.
Good job
- Sat Jan 12, 10:32:00 PM 2013
- Unknown said...
Oh.. love the Aubusson Blue table with tacks all around it. And Blues are making a huge comeback..
Think we can always edit and add to a pale color scheme with a few wonderful accessories. You should do well with the addition of new colors.. congratulations on your new booth. Hoping it does
well. Looks like fun shopping !
- Sat Jan 12, 11:27:00 PM 2013
- Something Nice and Pretty said...
I'd be in trouble too if I lived near by, love your booth and you do beautiful work!
- Sat Jan 12, 11:45:00 PM 2013
- Kelly said...
You have some beautiful pieces for sale in your booth! That XL doughbowl looking thing is amazing. I bet it's fun to find pieces to paint. I would probably want to keep everything for myself though.
- Mon Jan 14, 07:43:00 PM 2013
- Unknown said...
You always have such wonderful projects! I love reading your blog. I wanted to invite you to come link up at a party on my blog. It is a link party for OLD projects--so that we can hopefully get more traffic to our blogs using projects we've already posted. Come over and remind us of some of your favorite projects!
The link-up is live now.
Hope to see you there!
- Mon Jan 14, 11:34:00 PM 2013
So happy to have found your blog through From My Front Porch To Yours... what a wonderful feature on finding your style. I'm a North Carolina gal too and so glad to know about SuzAnna's Antiques. I will jump over there soon when I am visiting my daughter in Chapel Hill.
- Sun Jan 20, 10:53:00 AM 2013
- Katarina said...
You have a lovely booth! :-)
- Wed Jan 23, 12:10:00 PM 2013
- Dina said...
WOW! I really like your work!
- Fri Jan 25, 06:20:00 PM 2013
- Tammy said...
Hey fellow furniture painter and junker..love it all. It looks like Clines in one of those pictures from your Iphone..did you finally make it out there?
- Fri Jan 25, 06:46:00 PM 2013
- Melissa said...
Just found your blog and I love your work! I live in Cary, NC and paint furniture, too. Would love to stop by and see your booth sometime in person!
- Mon Feb 04, 01:24:00 PM 2013


text:
The Y Combinator offices sit at the dead center of Silicon Valley, in Mountain View, on a street called Pioneer Way. Outside, the traffic hums along CA-z85 headed either south to Cupertino or north toward Google headquarters. Inside, the decor of the main room combines modern office (big whiteboard, bright orange noise-dampening panels) with camp dining hall (long trestle tables). Y Combinator shares space with a company called Anybots—which makes robots that can be controlled remotely—and occasionally a droid will motor through the room on a Segway-style base.
On this November day, the Terminator itself could be roaming around the main room and the young men (and the occasional woman) gathered here wouldn't notice. They are attending Interview Day, a chance to compete for a spot in what has become the tech world's most prestigious program for budding digital entrepreneurs. The interviewees include former product managers at Google, a Midwestern accountant, and a 17-year-old high school student. They hail from Philadelphia, Minnesota, Greece, Russia, England, Spain, and San Francisco. And like would-be starlets flocking to Hollywood, they have come to Mountain View in the hope that Y Combinator will turn them from nameless coders into Silicon Valley celebrities.
by Steven Levy (52.5 MB .mp3)
Technically, Y Combinator is a launchpad for startups, but that description doesn't quite capture the experience it provides or the influence it wields. Twice a year, the company—under the tutelage of its founder, Paul Graham—hosts a three-month boot camp. Each team that's accepted receives seed funding—$11,000 for the group, plus $3,000 more for each member of the founding team. In exchange, Y Combinator gets a small stake in the startup, usually 6 or 7 percent. But the seed capital is almost beside the point. "Really, the money is just for living expenses," Graham says. "Like a scholarship to go to college." The program's real draw is an unmatchable entrée into the otherwise closed world of high-stakes Internet entrepreneurship. Over a period of 13 weeks, enrollees hobnob with some of the industry's most powerful investors and innovators as they attempt to turn their embryonic ideas into full-fledged businesses. And, at the end of their tenure, they get to participate in Demo Day, a kind of funding free-for-all during which they present their plans to the world's most respected venture capital firms and angel investors.
Anyone accepted to Y Combinator joins a group that includes many of the elite startups of the past five years. The founders of Dropbox, Reddit, Loopt, and Scribd were all discovered and nurtured by Graham. Indeed, his picks have been so prescient that getting chosen by Y Combinator has become a geek version of the Good Housekeeping Seal. Tech blogs always cover the launches of Y Combinator companies. Angel investors clamor to fund them. Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb—a breakout Y Combinator startup that matches travelers with private lodgings—compares Graham to legendary music producer John Hammond. "Just as Hammond found Bob Dylan when he was a bad singer no one knew, Graham can spot potential."
He can also make an impact. Graham has upset the balance of power in Silicon Valley, creating an environment in which investors compete with one another for a chance to fund the next hot startup—and drive up the amount they must pay for the opportunity. He has also inspired a legion of imitators. A startup accelerator called TechStars runs boot camps in Seattle, New York City, and Boulder, Colorado. Dave McClure, a PayPal alum and angel investor, recently launched 500 Startups, a YC-esque incubator at which McClure plays the role of Graham.
Before Interview Day—which actually lasts several days—winds up this week, 120 groups of founders will pour through the Y Combinator offices. They'll each have 10 minutes to convince Graham's team that they deserve a slot in the winter 2011 class. The pressure is palpable as the first batch of applicants mills about the main room. They whisper their rehearsed pitches to themselves as they wait. People have quit their jobs at Google, Apple, and McKinsey for this moment—proof of their commitment. "YC is the perfect environment," says Tim Shea, a candidate who flew up from LA for the interview. His partner, Brandon Kleinman, nods. "The best of the best."
The interviews are held in the back office—which doubles as a pantry, stuffed with boxes of Glad bags and 2-liter cola bottles—where the Y Combinator partners sit at a long table. Besides Graham, there are his cofounders: MIT associate professor Robert Morris, Anybots founder Trevor Blackwell, and former investment-bank marketer Jessica Livingston (who is also Graham's wife). Two new partners join them: YC alum Harj Taggar (his company, Auctomatic, was purchased for $5 million by Live Current Media) and FriendFeed cofounder and Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit.
Over the course of the day, 20 teams come into the room. They are dressed, almost invariably, in T-shirts and hoodies. As they enter, Livingston sets the alarm on a funky Westclox timer for 10 minutes, a cue for applicants to begin their spiels. The encounters have some of the nervous energy of an early-round American Idol episode. Graham and Buchheit rarely wait to hear an entire pitch. After listening to a few sentences, they start circling the table, raising questions about the site or service, wondering why it doesn't do this, suggesting how cool it would be if it did that. At some point, Graham will ask his favorite question: "What's your long-term plan to take over the world?" Eventually the Westclox buzzer goes off, Livingston snaps a picture of the candidates, and the next group is ushered in.
Ten minutes is more than enough. Indeed, the YC members sometimes make up their minds in the first 60 seconds. Graham tends not to pay too much attention to a candidate or team's business plan—it's likely to change during the course of the program anyway. Instead, he zeros in on the character and intelligence of the applicants. After one team's presentation, Buchheit says that he would use the product. But Graham is skeptical. "Are these guys winners?" he asks. "It's all about the guys." The group is not accepted.
As the yeses pile up during the week, it becomes clear that the winter 2011 class will be the biggest Y Combinator cohort yet: 43 companies, a total of 99 founders. Their would-be products and services include a network for conference attendees, a location-based flirting site, two music sites, a catering service, a smartphone fitness app, an iPad app for doctors, and several companies that connect people to local events—not exactly the next Google perhaps, but Silicon Valley is filled with small-seeming ideas that grew to multibillion-dollar companies. Qasar Younis, 29, wins acceptance based on his idea for a text-message- and app-based feedback system. He has an engineering degree and a Harvard MBA and has spent the past few years working in Chicago on behalf of a swanky investment firm. For the next three months, he will share a small apartment with his two cofounders, spending the bulk of his days in a living room dominated by cheap computer tables and a huge whiteboard. "I was making well into six figures. I had a place with a marble bathroom in Millennium Park," Younis says, beaming. "I traded it for this."
Paul Graham calls for quiet. Though there's a bit of bulldog in his build, at 46 his face is still cherubic. Like many in Silicon Valley, Graham affects a kind of studied informality; pretty much everyone calls him by his nickname, PG, and tonight he's wearing his standard attire of shorts and a polo shirt. It is the first of the weekly Tuesday-night dinners that are a staple of the program. During the week, Y Combinator founders work in offices, apartments, or houses—some find places in San Francisco, and others live in the Valley. But every Tuesday, they gather at YC headquarters to eat chili or similarly humble fare, compare notes, and pepper a guest speaker with questions.
Graham calls everyone's attention to the whiteboard, where a timeline labeled "The Process" depicts the steps that every entrepreneur must navigate on the way to building a successful startup. It looks like a mountain range, climbing and falling as it enumerates a series of small victories and crushing setbacks: The TechCrunch of Initiation, Wearing Off of Novelty, Trough of Sorrow, Releases of Improvement, Wiggles of False Hope, and finally an upward slope climbing to the Promised Land, where Acquisition of Liquidity awaits.
The class's schedule is similarly codified. The coming weeks will be dotted with milestones—presentations of prototypes, coaching days with VCs—all leading to the climax: Demo Day, scheduled for March 22, when the founders pitch their companies to the Valley's most powerful investors. Graham tells the assembled startup teams to think always about that deadline—work like mad for these three months, launch a product that draws customers, amass proof that the business model can work, and take advantage of the feedback from Y Combinator partners, all to ensure that they give the best possible presentation on March 22. "There are 77 days until Demo Day," Graham tells the group. "After that, anything you do will make you better—but it won't make you better on Demo Day."
Graham had no such formalized plan when he started Y Combinator on a whim in March 2005. He was back at his alma mater, Harvard, to give a speech to the undergraduate computer club. It was a paean to startups, something Graham knew a bit about: His own company, Viaweb, had been acquired by Yahoo in 1998 for $49 million in stock. Graham told the audience to look for angel investors who had actually started their own companies, because they best understood the needs of founders. Then he noticed that people were looking at him, he says. He decided to create an organization so he could start investing himself. He thought he may as well coach some of the hopefuls, offer them funding, and take a stake in their companies in exchange. Graham drummed up a few geek-trepreneurs for what he called a summer founders program and took on eight startups. (Three eventually wound up being bought by larger companies.) The group coaching he provided was more efficient than schooling one company at a time, and the participants learned from one another's setbacks. In 2006, Graham began an annual winter session in Mountain View to complement the Cambridge summer session. In 2009, he relocated the summer session to Silicon Valley as well.
Over the course of his career, Graham seems to have worked with or befriended everyone of consequence in the tech industry, and he's happy to tap his contacts for the benefit of his Y Combinator classes. This session's speakers will include Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, eBay CEO John Donahoe, superangel investor Ron Conway, and Quora founder Adam D'Angelo. And the perks won't stop there. YC offers free incorporation services from its in-house lawyer. Investors from Sequoia Capital will provide one-on-one coaching. Free office space at AOL's Palo Alto headquarters will be given to one of the YC startups. Rackspace will supply $20,000 worth of web hosting to each company. And Facebook will invite the entire class to its headquarters for a dinner with its top engineers and founder Mark Zuckerberg. (During the dinner, Zuckerberg will take an interest in one particular YC company, which is building a social Pokè9mon-style game called MinoMonsters—and urge its founders to work harder on a Facebook-compatible version.)
Tonight's alumni guests include the founders of Heroku, members of the winter 2008 YC class. A service for software developers, Heroku was acquired the month before by Salesforce.com for $212 million, the largest amount ever for a YC company. (Several other YC companies appear to be worth similar sums: Airbnb, Scribd, Dropbox, and Weebly are all estimated to have eight- or even nine-figure valuations.) To celebrate, they'll be forgoing the usual one-pot meal. For the first time in YC history, the class will dine on steak.
Prototype Day is held in late January, three weeks into the program. It's a chance for each team to give a two-minute presentation of its project. Some of the YC companies are already well on their way. LikeALittle, a flirting site for college students that launched last fall, is expanding to new schools at a furious pace. Grubwithus, a site that sets up restaurant dinner parties at which strangers can "eat with awesome people," as the founders put it, has launched in its second city and is selling out tables regularly. Graham is so optimistic about Grubwithus that he refers to it as a potential "square on the periodic table"—a company that seems almost organically preordained, like Twitter and Facebook. Then again, Graham is a bit hyperbolic about most of his companies, routinely referring to them as "the next eBay" or talking about how they will unseat established, billion-dollar businesses.
But some startups have barely come up with a plan. One group of founders knew from the beginning of the session that they were going to have to ditch their original idea, which was a tool to make real-time plans with friends. They used it as a way to get into the class but always intended to abandon it once they came up with something better. The trio—two engineers and a derivatives trader with degrees from Stanford and MIT—has been spending 14-hour days in front of a whiteboard, trying to brainstorm a promising concept. Time and again, they have proposed potential businesses to Graham; none of them worked out. But just before the first weekly dinner, they lit upon the idea of building a curated mailing list of high-demand jobs linked to college alumni networks. Graham gave them the go-ahead, and they are just getting under way with their new company, Insider Posts.
That kind of radical reinvention is standard practice here. Indeed, a sizable percentage of YC companies will, at some point, drastically rethink their business—a process known in the startup world as pivoting. During last winter's session, an 18-year-old Israeli founder named Daniel Gross pulled the most notorious pivot in YC history. Two days before Demo Day, soon after his cofounder quit on him, the young engineer realized that his original business plan was fatally flawed. Gross concocted an entirely new idea, a site that would allow users to search all of their social networks at once. He quickly coded a demo and gave the pitch. Within a year, he had launched the product. Now his company, Greplin, has $4.8 million in funding.
Helen Belogolova and Christine Yen are trying to accomplish a similarly successful pivot. When the two MIT grads interviewed for Y Combinator, they outlined their vision for Citythings, a site to help people discover local events. Over the next few months, they realized it wasn't working and dropped the idea. But as they researched, they discovered another potential business: Because venues for special events often sit unused even as party and conference planners spend days trying to find space, Belogolova and Yen decided to set up a system that connected planners with available spaces. Citythings would become Venuetastic. Pivot completed.
A couple of days after Prototype Day, the class convenes for a special Friday-night session at YC headquarters. Nobody knows why they are there; when Graham announced the mandatory meeting, he gave no clue as to what he had planned.
There has, however, been plenty of speculation. Is there going to be a big party for Jessica Livingston's 40th birthday? Is Steve Jobs going to speak? Is Barack Obama?
Now Graham stands before the class. In an early sign of the evening's significance, he is actually wearing long pants. He introduces the group to Ron Conway, the noted angel investor. Then Graham introduces a special guest, Yuri Milner. Milner has been conducting a relentless campaign to become a prominent Silicon Valley investor, putting hundreds of millions into Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga. Milner is not in Mountain View; he's attending the World Economic Forum in Davos. But Trevor Blackwell has set him up with one of the Anybots, which Milner can control remotely from Europe. A tiny screen atop the wheeled robot's saucer-shaped "head" carries a projection of Milner's face, allowing him to talk to the group.
"So, the surprise," Graham says, gesturing to Conway and the Milner-bot, "is that they want to invest in all of you."
For a few seconds there is stunned silence as 99 founders try to process this news. It's like a denial-of-service attack on their brains. Finally, there's a collective exhale and a round of applause. This is good. Then Graham explains the terms that Milner is offering in collaboration with Conway's firm, SV Angel: "$150,000 on a convertible note," he says. "No cap."
Translation: Instead of demanding a relatively large share as their ground-floor stake, Conway and Milner are agreeing to invest at whatever valuation the next round of investors sets. In other words, they get no advantage from taking such an early position. These are the most founder-friendly terms imaginable, with no downside. The room erupts into applause, hoots, and shouts. The budding entrepreneurs look like an Oprah audience after learning that everyone is getting a free Pontiac.
Conway and Milner are essentially betting on Paul Graham, investing in all of the companies that he has handpicked for YC. That's one way of looking at it. Another is that Milner has just dropped more than $6 million on companies he knows almost nothing about—indeed, some of which haven't yet decided what business they're in—at terms that even one YC insider admits are "just crazy."
The announcement, quickly picked up by the technology press, adds heat to the simmering animus among some angel investors toward Y Combinator's increasing influence. Before Graham came along, angels held great sway over startups. Entrepreneurs clamored to take meetings with angels, fell all over themselves trying to impress them, and more often than not parted with sizable chunks of their companies in exchange for the investors' money and imprimatur. But now, thanks in large part to Y Combinator, it is the angels who are scrambling. Whereas they used to be able to set their own terms, now they must compete with one another on Demo Day, when the Y Combinator entrepreneurs meet all of the prospective investors at once. Some grumble that the result has been "YC inflation"—higher valuations driven by the abundance of bidders. What's more, entrepreneurs can pick and choose which investors they'll deign to do business with, often relying on inside knowledge among YC alumni and advisers as to which investors are the best connected and most trustworthy. "Investors are uncomfortable with this disruption," YC partner Harj Taggar says.
Some moneymen have begun to revolt. Last year, a handful of the Internet industry's top angels held a secret meeting to discuss, among other things, "Y Combinator's growing power and how to counteract competitiveness in Y Combinator deals," according to a TechCrunch post that blazed through Silicon Valley. The incident, which became known as AngelGate, generated a small controversy, even as some investors claimed that the event had been blown out of proportion. Still, nobody could deny Y Combinator's disruptive influence.
But there's one group that isn't grumbling about Milner's investment: the YC entrepreneurs. They will use this money for all kinds of pressing needs: to take on an engineer, hire a freelance web designer, buy new computers, or simply enjoy a longer grace period before they need to raise more cash. Neal O'Mara, cofounder of a company called HelloFax, is temporarily speechless when he receives his check a couple of days later. "I moved here from Boston to be in the center of the Internet world," he says. "Now I'm really part of it."
By mid-February, most of the companies are progressing nicely. Many of the founders have been doing the unglamorous task of going door-to-door, trying to drum up customers, like hoodie-wearing Willy Lomans. Some of them are starting to find success. Three founders of a company called Tutorspree close a deal with Henry M. Gunn High School in nearby Palo Alto to connect tutors and parents. Qasar Younis, the investment-firm refugee from Chicago, has been hitting up local restaurants and cafés, trying to interest them in his team's customer-feedback platform; he has already installed the system in cafè9s and local frozen-yogurt franchises.
When the companies run into questions—and they all run into questions—they sign up for office hours with one of the YC advisers. Taggar, Buchheit, and Livingston have all made themselves available. So has Jon Levy, YC's in-house lawyer. Garry Tan, the founder of a YC company called Posterous, advises on design issues. But appointments with Graham are the most coveted. A few times a week, he and the other partners announce their availability in a private section of Hacker News—a news site hosted by YC—and founders can book a time slot.
Graham often conducts office hours while perambulating. He favors a quarter-mile circuit around the cul-de-sac at the end of Pioneer Way, dispensing wisdom while founders scamper alongside him like acolytes of Socrates. One day in February, he has several of these meetings, one after another.
The first group asks about its financial situation—should they begin seeing investors? Graham explains that the YC program is designed to let them create the best product possible, shutting out distractions. "Money comes with Demo Day," he says.
"But when do the best startups raise money?" one of the founders asks.
"It's random!" Graham says. "The best startups do things when it's right to do them."
Another founder confesses to having trouble getting customer leads. After some discussion, Graham realizes that the company is focusing its efforts on huge potential clients. "Find smaller companies that will be faster," Graham says. "You have to find out who is the most desperate to launch your product!" Then his voice takes on a cheerfully conspiratorial tone: Yes, it's important to sign up new business, he says. But it's more important to have a good, proven idea. "By Demo Day," he says, "all you have to do is show that it works."
The phone call for Joey Flores comes at 3:30 pm on Wednesday, March 9. Flores is hanging around outside the YC office, relaxing with a few other founders. But as soon as his iPhone buzzes, he knows it's TechCrunch. The launch is on.
At Y Combinator, a company is considered launched when it gets its first significant press notice. Most often that's a posting on TechCrunch. Michael Arrington, the site's founder and coeditor, says any company chosen for YC is newsworthy by definition. "Someone has already done the due diligence," he says. The process works with assembly-line precision. When a company is ready to launch, Graham will sit with the founders and brainstorm key points, writing them down on a whiteboard. Then he uses those points to craft an email to TechCrunch. A day or so later, a reporter interviews the founder; an article gets posted soon after.
TechCrunch isn't the only news outlet paying attention to this session's companies. Slate runs a mind-blowing article about HelloFax. CNET calls another YC company, Like.fm, "how social music is supposed to work." That kind of attention brings new users, always welcome as Demo Day approaches.
Flores, a 33-year-old former LA musician with long dreadlocks, takes the call and begins fielding questions about his company, Earbits, a collection of streaming-music channels paid for by labels and artists. While he talks to the reporter, his partners converse nervously. "When he used to work in affiliate marketing, he could sell anything," one says. After half an hour, Flores trots up to them, looking relieved. "It went well," he says. "It was all about the business model. He asked all the challenging questions, but those were the ones we had prepared for."
A few hours later, an item goes up on TechCrunch, describing Earbits as "an online radio startup with a twist" and praising its design. Flores spends the evening monitoring the article's comments section and replying to particularly skeptical or snarky readers. "We've had 600 to 700 tweets of the headline," he says the next day. "We broke 1,000 daily listeners for the first time in company history."
In their hunt for new customers, YC companies have special access to one particularly attractive group of prospects: other YC companies. Mailgun, which offers email systems for web-service companies, boasts that almost 60 percent of this year's startups are using its product. But that access goes beyond current YC companies: Many of the hundreds of entrepreneurs who have been through Y Combinator remain in close contact with one another and with YC and offer guidance and new business to the latest class members. (That may not mean much to a music-streaming site—which needs thousands of customers to be profitable—but it can make a real difference to a business-service company.) Graham compares the effect to a coral reef, a self-generating ecosystem whose members provide nourishment for one another. "Pick the right founders and help them—and the coral reef will just happen," he says.
Still, most YC companies build traction the old-fashioned way—by sitting at the computer, churning out code. That's the case with MinoMonsters, the social Pokémon-style-game company that won Mark Zuckerberg's attention. Its founders, 19-year-old Josh Buckley and 17-year-old Tyler Diaz, spend all day in their drab apartment in a downscale area of Santa Clara—the only place they can find that will rent to people so young. For two months, they prepared their game to launch on Facebook, working with artists in Chile and Poland that they'd never met in person. Just one week after that launch, Buckley and Diaz have more than 25,000 users. MinoMonsters has traction. In honor of the man who helped bring them such success, the pair has introduced a new monster. Its name: PeeGee.
Beginning March 16, the rhythms of the winter class change dramatically. There is less than a week to Demo Day, and until then the entrepreneurs will work ceaselessly to hone their pitches into 130 seconds of perfection. The doors to headquarters will be open all night for those who want to practice, and the tables that usually fill the main room will be replaced by folding chairs, in preparation for the big event.
Over the next few days, every team will meet with Graham, whose usual cheerful excitement is taking on a new intensity. He urges the founders to boil down their presentations to four main points that investors will remember. Even four, he admits, is pushing it—the audience will be numb after hearing 43 pitches. The key is getting something to stick in investors' heads.
It's all about selling. In this last week of the session, Graham has transformed from product consultant to marketing coach, fanatically focused on getting the founders to make the most of their few minutes in front of investors. "You should say why you're better," he tells the Grubwithus guys. "You're better than dating sites because yours isn't creepy! You're better than Groupon!"
He also chafes when a pitch focuses too much on the product. "You're talking about why users should be excited," Graham chides. "You have to say why investors should be excited!" What gets investors excited? "Traction! Show it's working!" If possible, he says, include a hockey-stick growth chart showing the number of users jolting upward. One company even put its growth chart on T-shirts that all three founders will wear on Demo Day.
Next, Graham plants himself in a chair and listens to each company's pitch. To founders who talk too fast, he advises they focus on talking too slow. To the foreign-born, he suggests imitating an American accent. To those who sound like they're reading a script, he tells them to pretend they're talking to a friend. And every time he hears a dull sentence, he raises an objection: "That's when they're going to look at their BlackBerrys!"
There are so many teams in this class—and so many potential investors—that Demo Day actually stretches over two days. In 2005, 15 investors showed up to the first Demo Day; this year, 365 are expected to attend.
And that doesn't include the 100 or so YC alumni who show up at a warm-up event the evening of the 21st. Although it's intended to be a low-pressure dry run for the formal Demo Day, the tension is palpable in the minutes before the first presentation. "It's like the moment in Saving Private Ryan when you can hear the lapping of the boats as they're headed to the beach," says Younis. But by the time Livingston calls for order through a bullhorn, the founders appear ready to storm the beachhead. Almost everyone gets through their presentations fine, even the ones who seemed ill-prepared just hours ago.
The one exception: HelloFax, the online fax service that is generally considered one of the stars of the group. Graham feels that their presentation is still weak. So when the two founders—Joseph Walla and Neal O'Mara—show up at YC headquarters the next morning for formal Demo Day, Graham is already there waiting for them. He takes them to a side room and hammers out new text. For the next two hours, Walla stands in front of his partner, repeating the new script over and over.
That afternoon, a scrum of investors and founders gathers at Y Combinator HQ, chatting over the hors d'oeuvres and waiting for the first presentation. The angels and VCs are handing out cards before they've heard anything about the startups. Even though this is their moment, the climax of the entire session, the entrepreneurs don't seem as tense as they did the previous night.
It's 1 pm when Rick Morrison, cofounder of a firm called Comprehend Systems makes the first presentation. His company's mission is complicated—it involves cross-database interactions that streamline the process of pharmaceutical drug testing—and a couple of days earlier, Morrison and his partner were squabbling with Graham about how technical the presentation should be. But now, taking Graham's advice, Morrison emphasizes the importance of efficient testing, the long experience of the founders, and the huge potential market. The audience sits in rapt attention. One demo down.
Throughout the day, investors are treated to a rapid-fire barrage of polished pitches. Chris Chen, a timid 20-year-old, delivers his spiel with newfound conviction. Laura Valverde, a CEO from Sevilla, Spain, who has struggled with her English, speaks authoritatively and clearly. And the Insider Posts team—which barely a week ago changed its business yet again, from a curated job list to a site that coordinates care for ailing relatives—breezes through its presentation.
Halfway through the program there's a break to let investors mingle with founders and swap contact information. But some investors don't wait, texting or emailing the entrepreneurs immediately after their presentations, making sure they'll get an audience later. They continue the rapid-fire highlights_texting throughout the day, until the chairs are folded, the bar is opened, and the investors and founders are free to schmooze away. The two camps finally converge, creating a din that the noise dampeners can't contain. "It's a feeding frenzy," one investor says. The next day, two more groups of 130 investors will respond with the same fervor.
Three weeks later, most of the companies in the class have won at least some funding, and several have closed their entire seed rounds. "Last summer the companies did very well, and this year it's as good or better," Livingston says. "And the valuations are higher." Grubwithus closed a round of more than $1.6 million after Demo Day—the founders canceled 10 meetings they had scheduled with other prospects. Tutorspree also roped in $1 million. One team—Humble Bundle, which distributes software—raised $4.5 million in a round led by Sequoia before Demo Day began; they didn't even present. And Josh Buckley says that MinoMonsters "has closed $500,000 and has another $500,000 on the table. It's looking very promising."
Some of these startups will die. Over the past six years, about a quarter of Y Combinator companies have folded, and many more are barely hanging on. That's a relatively small failure rate in the risky world of Silicon Valley startups, but there's still no guarantee of success. Still, the next Airbnb, Heroku, or Dropbox may be lurking within this group. Many of the investors that now attend Demo Day once passed on the opportunity to put money in those companies—as well as into the likes of Facebook and Twitter—and continue to regret it. At this point, they are scared not to invest.
It's hard to blame them, considering how quickly opportunities can vanish. In April, just five months after Qasar Younis interviewed for a spot in the winter class, Google acquired his startup, TalkBin, for an undisclosed sum.
Meanwhile, the Y Combinator team is already poring over applications for its summer session, which begins in June. Submissions have spiked—more than 2,000 startups are clamoring to be part of YC's lush coral reef. Interviews begin in less than a month, and the clock is already ticking down toward the next Demo Day.
Portraits of the Y Combinator Entrepreneurs
Michael Friis
Rune Sørensen
Troels Thomsen
Collin Jackson
Laura Valverde
Miguel Angel Martinez Triviño
Arend Naylor
Denis Mars
|Comprehend Systems,
Jud Gardner
|Comprehend Systems,
Rick Morrison
Corey Pierson
Jon Pospischil
Daniel Kivatinos
Michael Nusimow
Benjamin Bryant
Joey Flores
Yotam Rosenbaum
Jof Arnold
Jonathan Pines
Kapil Kale
Nicholas Baum
Daishin Sugano
Eddy Lu
Joseph Walla
Neal O'Mara
|Humble Bundle,
Jeffrey Rosen
|Humble Bundle,
John Graham
Kevin Gao
Wei Hsu
Eric Migicovsky
Natalie Downe
Simon Willison
Chris Chen
Eugueny Kontsevoy
Taylor Wakefield
Josh Buckley
Tyler Diaz
Sandy Spicer
Matt Huang
Jake Klamka
Wil Chung
Darshan Shankar
John Egan
Zac Morris
Anthony Nemitz
Steli Efti
Michael Ma
Qasar Younis
Sunny Dhillon
Courtland Allen
Niccolo Pantucci
Conor Lee
Jason Corwin
Jonathan Deutsch
Ryan Nielsen
Aaron Harris
Josh Abrams
Ryan Bednar
Michael Woodworth
Stephen Hamer
Zak Homuth
Christine Yen
Helen Belogolova
Nick Baum
William Ferrell
|YouGotListings Inc,
Gordon Chen
Photos: Robyn Twomey
Senior writer Steven Levy (firstname.lastname@example.com) is the author of In the Plex, an inside look at the history of Google.Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.


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