Digg.com had a link to this guy who does cartoon portraits/icons he calls: Iconize Me!. I REALLY like the style and would like one for this site. However, it looks like he only does a few a year and closes the site down for new purchases for months at a time. As it looks like it's too popular for what he can handle*, I'm wondering if anyone else is offering something similar online? I do NOT want a carnival caricature. Those are all over. These are more like a comic book. That's actually where I'd expect this service to pop up. Are there some comic book artists who'll do portraits of people in their style? With all of the attempts to make money with online comics, I'm surprised I haven't seen this somewhere before. Maybe I'm just not searching for the right words.

*Basic economic theory he might want to think about: if demand outstrips supply, you raise your prices to manage demand. Especially if the price isalready ridiculously low. I read that the reason he can't do more of them is that his day job gets in the way. If you're so busy with people lined up to give you money for your hobby, you may just have a viable business on your hands and you can quit your day job.

With the 5AM wakeup solidly in hand, I'm taking on a more consistent reading pattern as my next one. I read a lot, but it tends to go in spurts. I whip through 3-4 books in a week and then don't read for a couple of weeks. I've got a pile of books sitting here that I haven't read and am itching for another challenge.

My rules are: read 100+ pages per day for 30 days. On average, this should take me about an hour a day. Only printed books count. No magazines, no websites, no RSS feeds, no audiobooks. Content in that form tends to be much deeper than content in the more digital forms. I'm not going to restrict it to non-fiction, though that's most of what my reading "inbox" has in it.

Anyone up for joining me?

I've just completed my 30 day challenge to get up early. I originally aimed for 5:30AM, but ended up going for 5AM for about 3 weeks of the month. I won't pretend that I ended up with a perfect record. Getting home at 1:00AM on a Friday night doesn't lend itself to getting up 4 hours later for no reason other than a challenge. However, even that morning, I did get up at 7:00, trying to at least keep with the spirit of the challenge.

It's proven to be an interesting experiment. I have discovered that I was getting too much sleep. I never would have believed it if I didn't have a month's worth of experience to prove it to me. After all, every productivity expert, health teacher, talking head on TV talks about how Americans don't get enough sleep, etc. And, if you're one of those people trying to get by on 3 hours a night, you probably ARE getting too little sleep. However, I'd been going to bed at 10:00 and sleeping until 6-7AM on the weekdays and 8-9AM on the weekends. Over the course of this month, I've found that when I get right around 6.5-7 hours, I'm most alert, spend FAR less time yawning through the day.

On top of just plain getting more hours per day, putting them in the morning has tended to let me more productively use the time. I'm less likely to waste the time doing things like spacing out to TV like I would staying up until midnight. Those first hours of the day are more quiet, more productive and my brain just seems to work better then than it does.

I know just how that sounds. You're "more productive at night". You stay up all hours, etc. I know because I WAS you. In college, I stayed until they closed the computer lab every night. I didn't get going until at least 10AM, etc. I was the most anti-morning person you'd meet. Thing is, I was full of crap. You might not be, but have you thought about giving it 30 days to make sure?

I'll be keeping with it, primarily by aiming for that 6.5-7hrs/night mark adjusting for circumstances. I'm happy with the time and energy it's given me to do thing things I want (the activity on this site in August as one of those things).

I discovered this product by accident a few days ago and was intrigued, but discouraged that the place I found it only carried it in 50 pound bags. It then turns out that one of my favorite obscure food sources on the Internet carries it in much smaller amounts: Bob's Red Mill: Oatrim. Essentially, it's a fat substitute derived from oats that takes over for fats and oils in mostly baked goods (doesn't hold up to frying, etc.) that replaces the 9 calories per gram in fat with 1 calorie per gram instead. Plus, it carries many of the health benefits of oat bran, making it doubly intriguing. I ordered a bag and I'll see what I can do with it.

The primary client site where I'm working these days has several internal apps that are IE only. Whether that's good or bad is irrelevant. The fact that I have to use them is. Unfortunately, one of these uses an ActiveX control that crashes IE on such "rare" events as your session timing out. Other reasons seem to include mostly, "just because". Unfortunately, due to the tight integration of IE into Windows, having it crash usually means that you have to reboot. I've been getting around that for years, but based on the number of people who seem surprised when I show them my basic technique, I figured I'd share it here.
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