How To Bend The Universe Aug 31, 2010

I know a guy who's grandfather has bent the universe once.

Long time ago he worked at a plant and desperately needed a special kind of grindstone for his machine. The grindstone of a specific diameter and shape that he could not find anywhere, it's not something you just buy in a hardware store.

"I kept thinking and thinking about this grindstone" - he said - "It was the only question sitting in my head. I went to sleep and woke up with it. I really needed that stone, I would love to buy it, but where? I kept thinking and thinking about it and all of a sudden - I just found it. Just like that, it was lying on the ground next to the bus stop. I've bent the universe in my favor."

That's exactly how it works in sports - when your body follows your eyes. I played tennis for 10 years when I was a kid and my tennis coach used to say "Look ahead! Look where you want the ball to be, your body will do the rest."

15 years later, on the racetrack, my motorcycle coach used to say "Look ahead! Don't look at the tarmac, look into the corner and your body will do the rest and make the bike follow your look. Don't use the handlebar to turn, use your eyes instead".



Our body is constructed that way - it follows our eyes, reaching for something we're looking at.

And just like the body follows your eyes, the reality follows your thoughts. Keep thinking, keep trying. Keep visualizing your dream, turning a dream into a goal. Then add deadlines to your goal and make it real. Keep your eyes on the goal and "your body will do the rest".

Developing a Haul Truck (MS Employee Interview) Aug 8, 2010

I just had a Skype-chat with a close friend of mine who works at Microsoft. With his kind permission I'm posting some of the quotes below (translated by me):

"...you know, working on a gigantic project is somewhat annoying. And most projects in Microsoft - really are huge. It's like fine-tuning a small screw in a haul truck.

You can't just add some feature to the core engine and go home with a "yeah, I made something" feeling. Instead, you spend three weeks developing a couple of small things, spending 40% of your time in meetings, emails, researches etc. Then it's another 2+ weeks to test it, review it, polish it, discuss it (more emails & meetings). Then there are 24+ hours of deployment. And finally you see that some tiny thing has changed by 1% and, well, "this rocks". At least it's supposed to.

And that's my web-development team, which is considered to have a relatively FAST development cycle. Windows team is like three times slower, you're lucky to ship something once in two years. Not to mention the guys from some "Windows Installer Testing Team" - those guys are real samurais, I would never be able to work there.

...It's not that bad. I guess it's just the size of the "haul truck" that makes it this way. If you tune something wrong in a haul truck and send it back to the mines - it'll smash everything in sight and then blow itself up. Unlike tuning a bicycle, tuning a haul truck requires lots of thinking, lots of talking, lots of planning and lots of developing... This sucks to me though."

Another reason why I should buy from a small software company.

Looking for Product Ideas Aug 3, 2010

Even being extremely busy constantly improving our existing products, we are now looking for new product ideas and decided to launch a contest.

If you have an idea of a great web-application (both hosted and installable on a server) or a desktop app that will ease your everyday work - please share it with us. The winner gets a free license for the product with free upgrades for lifetime, mentions on our homepage, copyright notices inside the product, and huge - I mean Huge - discounts for all Jitbit products. Please use our contact form to send us your thoughts.