Random this, miscellaneous that, etc., etc.

Dear AppSumo Lean Challenge,

(http://appsumo.com/leanchallenge)

For your consideration...

I decided to make unVault (www.unvault.com) to solve my problem of starring items in various places (Google Reader, Twitter) and marking other items to read later (Instapaper, Delicious), but then never getting back to reading them. (video of motivation here: http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7953875/unVault)

Perhaps because I enjoyed reading a few classic novels using DailyLit, I had the idea of combining daily emails with read-later items.

Is unVault cool? Hmm... Well, I'll tell you what's not cool. Bookmarked items that languish, unread, on some forgotten site. I thought DailyLit was cool, and the various read-later/readability sites are increasing in coolness daily. Two cool things unVault does now are 1) automatic detection of multi-page articles; 2) automatic splitting of long items into bite-sized parts (so you can read long articles or html e-books like with DailyLit).

Lean: unVault's first version was built in about 2 weeks. I work on it after my day job, and really work on it when my wife goes back to her hometown once a month. I use jQuery, PHP, and MySQL. I use SimplePie to handle RSS feeds. I use the text parsers from Instapaper, ReadItLaterList, and a PHP port of Readability to extract text from websites. I try to release something new at least once a week. Thanks to your Lean Startup Bundle, I'm about to start using Postmark to handle daily emails to users.

Funding: more powerful webhosting, better design, our own text parser, etc. Yes, funding is welcome.

I have plans to offer similar subscriptions as Readability but also to offer users who create popular reading lists a percentage.

From the landing page:

You have too much to read.
Read the timely stuff right away of course, but what about the other stuff? The stuff you want to read someday, what do you do with that?

Reading it later is not good enough.
You might have "read it later" or "to read" lists strewn about the web. That's great, but what if you actually never get back to those lists? It's like you're throwing newspapers, essays, and books into a vault which you forgot you had the keys to.

Let's "unvault" all of those great articles.
Or essays. Or online manuals. Or classic books. Whatever. unVault will send you an email a day (or more if you have free time) containing one of the articles you intended to read.

Connect to your existing lists.
unVault can connect to almost any web service: Instapaper, Read It Later, Delicious, Twitter, Google Reader, etc. (Anything that has an RSS feed is okay too.)

Use unVault's bookmarklet.
Similar to other "read later" bookmarklets available, the "unVaultlet" saves an article that you want to read later. (We are working on ways to make our bookmarklet even easier than pie. Stay tuned.)

You have control.
unVault lets you control how you receive items: randomly, chronologically, size, in custom orderings that you create. If you want to receive more than one item a day, no problem. Want to take a break? You can't yet, but that feature's coming soon.

Once outside, I rushed to the neighbouring parking lot and tried to
position myself in a safe spot. This was difficult as there were
numerous power lines in the air surrounding and passing above me.
There were also 4-storey buildings on three sides of me and a train
line on the last.

The shaking increased in intensity and I held on to one of the short
pillars that stand near the top of each parking space. I watched as
electrical lines swayed back and forth, antennas on tops of buildings
shook rapidly, and more and more people got out of their homes and
shops. Nobody knew where the quake had occurred or how large it was,
but it felt big and it felt close.

The ground was shaking violently and the thought passed through my
head that this was IT. This was the big earthquake that the Kanto
region was predicted to get. Six years ago, a student in a city in the
west of Japan, far far from Tokyo had said to me: "Within the next 10
years, there will be a huge earthquake in Tokyo and millions will
die." Six years later, here I was, remembering those words, wondering
if what that student had said was coming true.

All of this is describing about an interval of about a minute or two.
With the ground still moving, I called my wife. She was at home in our
5th-floor apartment. The shaking must have been a lot scarier up there
than what I experienced.

Once the shaking stopped (for a bit) I ran back into my school,
grabbed my coat, ran out, jumped on my bike, and raced back home to
collect my wife. It's only a few minutes bike ride from my office to
my apartment. I ran up the 4 flights of stairs to the 5th floor into
my apartment, grabbed a few things, ran back down with my wife, and
biked to the flattest, calmest, least-urban part of our town we could
think of: the big Cemetary Park.

We bought a few drinks and some food from a 7-11 and entered the
cemetary. We found a wide area of lawn lined with trees and benches
(http://goo.gl/maps/MjT7) and finally relaxed. Old men were walking
dogs, the sun was shining, and everything seemed normal.

Shortly thereafter, we jumped to our feet and ran to the centre of
this area as we felt one of the first aftershocks. A small nearby
wooden shelter started to shake and the trees were making creaking
sounds as we held on to each other and wondered if the ground was
going to cave in. Maybe 20 seconds later, we were again sitting down,
drinking our water and eating our rice balls.

We started cancelling the day's classes. At this point, people didn't
really understand the magnitude of the problem. We and the students
both probably felt a bit reluctant cancelling but it turned out to be
for the best.

The aftershocks continued through the afternoon and evening and into
the night. We spent some time at our school but then decided to head
home. We didn't know which building would be safest. They're both a
bit old. My school is on the second floor of a 4-storey building and
my apartment is on the top floor of a 5-storey building. We finally
chose home because it would be less likely for us to be crushed by the
floors above us.

We were glued to the TV all night, finally going to bed after 4am. On
this night, the number of casualties being reported was something like
40.

I taught two classes on Saturday. Some brave middle-aged and senior
students came for their lesson. I had offered to cancel in case they
were worried about aftershocks, but I guess nobody had checked their
email. I also taught a woman who lives in Shizuoka using Skype. She
hadn't felt the earthquake at all, her town apparently being on a
different tectonic plate. Within two days, she would feel a 6.2 quake
in her area. (Luckily for her, the quake felt like a 4 in her town.)

We thought we should stock up on food and drink. This must have been a
thought shared by many others as many of the shelves were empty (milk,
bread, meat, etc.) We bought some canned food, some drinks, and
anything else we thought would be useful. At home, all doors between
rooms remained open at all times, most lights were off, our power
consumption was at a minimum, our showers were quick.

The footage of destruction caused by the tsunami was simply incredible
and horrifying. Watching enormous objects being torn out of the ground
and tossed around by the water was astounding. The few videos showing
people trying to escape the oncoming wave were heartbreaking. We
wondered why these tiny specks on the TV screen weren't sprinting
away. Perhaps they were gathering their belongings, or perhaps they
were old and frail. Whatever the case, some of them didn't move fast
enough. I wonder why they weren't warned earlier by the
earthquake/tsunami alerting system to evacuate. The previous reports
of 40 deaths had ballooned to hundreds and soon would reach a few
thousand.

My wife was scheduled to fly out of Tokyo to her hometown on a monthly
business trip on Monday. On Monday morning, we both decided (well, my
wife decided) that she would cancel her plane ticket, and that we
would rent a car and drive across the country to her hometown. I was
quite surprised that a car was available. That morning we had seen
long lines of cars waiting to fill up at the local gas stations. I
expected the roads to be really bad, but they were not. Perhaps we
were overreacting in taking off so soon. But as we heard of more and
more aftershocks and news of the worsening nuclear problem, we quickly
agreed that we had made the right decision.

We stopped for gas whenever we could. The first gas station told us
that there was a 20-litre limit. As we bought gas each time we stopped
at a service area, we rarely spent more than $20 dollars to fill up.

On our drive two earthquakes happened along our route. The first
occurred before we passed by the affected area and the second after we
passed by its affected area. After we arrived, the aforementioned
Shizuoka quake hit.

Even across the country in Tottori prefecture, some of the shelves in
the supermarkets are becoming bare. The government is warning citizens
not to overreact or to stockpile food or water. But this is probably a
difficult urge to resist. Seeing the empty shelves makes people want
to buy even more.

We are now at my wife's brother's house, watching the TV. Every hour
or so, the news is interrupted by an emergency broadcast, detailing
some new over-5 magnitude quake. We just saw reports of two such
quakes which occurred off the coast of Ibaraki and Chiba, south of the
original big quake.

We have two connections to people who were directly affected. A
coworker of one of my students was visiting her family in Sendai when
the quake occured. They are okay but their house was completely
destroyed. The grandparents of one of my young students lives close to
the Fukushima plant. Yesterday, they were being advised to stay
indoors. I hope they will be okay.

(My experience of the quake was really not at all bad. Our hearts go
out to all those who truly experienced the quake and the tsunami. We
hope they can somehow reclaim a sense of peace and normality soon.)

(Not safe for Christians)

What if Jesus had died another way? Bizarro cartoonist Dan Piraro has contemplated this. And so have I. Having just seen Piraro's cartoon handling the electric chair, I thought I'd post my own similar unfinished comic. It doesn't seem original now, but here it is anyway.