I love Moleskine notebooks. I was first introduced the them by my business partner, Ken Pettit, a few years back and have used them ever since. This Christmas I received a new Moleskine from my mother (they can be SO thoughtful, can’t they?) and I turned it into my official 2007 goal tracker.


A side note — I don’t make New Years Resolutions — I make New Years Goals. Goals are about the desired result or the aspiration, and resolutions are about the decision or the plan. To illustrate this look at the following two lists of synonyms from the thesaurus:

goal: objective, aim, end, target, design, intention, intent, plan, purpose; (holy) grail; ambition, aspiration, wish, dream, brass ring, desire, hope

resolution: intention, resolve, decision, intent, aim, plan; commitment, pledge, promise.

An old teacher of mine, Cyndi Laurin, who teaches on Quality, Leadership, and Organizational Greatness, sums it up quite well:

“Consider creating goals as launching pads to something far greater.”

Goals carry more power and are more flexible whereas resolutions are to stiff and formal. Goals help lead you to the objective and beyond it whereas resolutions offer nothing beyond their stated plan.

Ok, back to the main point — how am I going to use the Moleskine to track my goals? I first needed to organize it into categories, so I referenced this article by Dave Terry and added tabs to the Moleskine.


Then I needed a calendar in a couple of the sections so I customized this compact calendar from David Seah. The first one, pictured on the left below, has been turned into a two-column layout with the months on the outside and the days on the inside. The second calendar on the right has been more heavily modified with an extra column added to each day.


Each section has enough room for an index page and introduction notes. Certain tabs offer a single line per day for the sole purpose of tracking data — like miles ran. Others offer a few lines per day for more detailed note taking.

And for the finishing touch Dickies makes these wonderful pants with a Moleskine pocket — I take this thing with me everywhere.

This is awesome — we gave all the employees of BIG Images iPods wrapped in origami boxes that were folded from $100 bills — and each iPod Shuffle was wrapped in two of these boxes!



If you like it go digg it here.

Hopefully everyone knew that the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack just passed. This devastating attack has been recreated in many movies — if you want to see some very good photos taken in the heat of the attack go to this site. It has images like this one below of Pearl Harbor from above just after the attack. Some of them are quite intense.

I am going to let everyone in on one of the Mac's little secrets. It, and software like it, is why all entrepreneurs looking to bootstrap a business NEED Macintosh computers. That little secret is RapidWeaver. Well, it is not a secret in the strictest sense of the word, but most of the Mac people I meet do not know about it so it seems secretive.

Since there are reviews all over the internet about this piece of software I will not reinvent the wheel — I just want everyone to understand why this is a valuable application for a small business.

Simply put — it is THE way to simply and elegantly create a web page for your company with the flare and panache that only Mac software can deliver. Its extensive use of web standards means that Google will index it quite easily.

To quote VersionTracker “RapidWeaver is a next-generation web design application to help you easily create professional looking web sites in minutes. No knowledge of complex code is required, RapidWeaver will take care of all that for you. RapidWeaver now produces 100% XHTML & CSS based websites.”

While certainly not perfect — it has some very annoying bugs and performance issues — it is easy and fast. When you want results and do not want to spend alot of money or time then seriously consider buying RapidWeaver.

And for those times when you have questions the support from the community is unparalleled…I must hand it to the guys at RealMac Software for setting up the tools that encourage such open sharing. Any question can be posted to the bulletin board and are often answered within minutes.

To see what can be done check out BIG Images web site and visit the official RapidWeaver Site Showcase.