When you’re happy, you can start a happiness virus through your social network, according to a Harvard and UC San Diego study.
So update your Twitter and Facebook status with good things and spread the love!
No conclusive info about when you’re down, although I know that’s as good a people repellant as B.O.
10. Immediately set up a social networking community on Ning. If not now, when?
9. Find out what videos you’ve been missing on YouTube. After all you do want to be in the loop right?
8. Think about if you may actually owed a refund which might motivate you to do your taxes.
7. If you’re going to use TurboTax online sign up before the end of March when the price goes up.
6. Eat chips or celery.
5. Write a blog post about ideas for avoiding filing taxes.
4. Go for a run, after you’ve digested.
3. Check out the tax filing extension rules and see if it’s worth filing an extension. (Hint: You have to tell them how much you owe, which practically means you have to calculate your taxes to do this!)
2. Review your life list and add all those ideas you’ve been thinking you mean to do at some point. (Or if you don’t have one get ideas of things you could put on a life list - including a goal to stop procrastinating!).
1. Read blogs that help you avoid filing your taxes.
I’m at Barcamp LA, an event that’s hard to describe but in a nutshell is a tech community-driven ad hoc get together to talk about the Internet, technology and whatever else we want. So this guy put together a half hour session based on 5 powerpoint presentations that he found on the Internet, licensed through Creative Commons which means they were available for the public. (Go to the Creative Commons site and do a Google search on “presentations” to see some examples.)
5 people signed up to give the presentations, and I was first.
Mine was a technical presentation from some Sun Microsystems executive that had detailed bar charts impossible to read they were so stuffed with data. Pretending I was this tech person and trying to give a compelling delivery never having seen the slides before was hilarious, and a great way to put my Toastmasters skills to the test.
If you’re putting together a conference, a Toastmasters event, or even a party, this is a great recreational humorous activity. Not only are you improving being this person you know nothing about, you’re presenting material you probably won’t understand!
Have fun. 
Viva la SuperViva VivaPup - our brilliant mascot designed by Ronny featured on flattering American Apparel shirts.
It’s the beginning of day 4 at SXSW Interactive and I am compelled to share what I’ve found are good and bad about the conference so far because:
Good
1. I discovered Little City Coffee. Wow the drip coffee is full bodied, smooth, chocolatey. It’s worth the 8 block walk from the Austin convention center. Their slogan is "the fine folks that manufacture caffeine" but that almost belittles the delicious flavor they manufacture. For bay area residents, I can compare to Blue Bottle Coffee in pure pleasure and taste.
2. Ted Rheingold rocks. I’ve seen the founder of Dogster and Catster at 2 conferences and he always explodes with new useful information. This year he moderated a panel on Turning Projects Into Revenue Generating Businesses which a nice fellow transcribed.
3. Rafe Needleman mentioned SuperViva in his blog.
4. Hanging out with friends, meeting new people. That is the crux of SXSW for most people, the human social aspect. I also came to appreciate the power of Upcoming.org as a social calendar. Next year I want to participate in runing some events to help new people socialize more easily.
5. I caught a guy on the street resetting the time for daylight savings on a historic clock. It was tempting to interview him and discover how he fell into his line of work. But I hadn’t achieved my #1 goal (Little City) so pressed on.
Bad
1. The panels aren’t wowing me like in 2006. Maybe I’m in a different place but the ones I’ve been to often seem composed of similar people participating as if they were being interviewed more than imparting useful information. OK maybe I don’t get the point of a panel but it’s as if some are more inwardly focused on telling their stories than in thinking about communicating helpful information. Or maybe the confusion is in thinking that is one and the same. (I’m not sure if it’s my confusion or theirs.)
2. The 1.5 hour badge pickup was a bummer. Yes I came at rush hour but considering they used the photos from last year, there has got to be a better way. Last year I must have picked up my badge must earlier before the lines; people say this year’s was a great improvement. I would love to see interaction designers run a panel on optimizing the check in process.
3. Is Twitter multiplying the Continuous Partial Attention effect (a topic of 2006 SXSW)? Is it creating a divide between those who Twitter and those who don’t? I heard some twitter about that.
4. I bailed on giving a 5 minute Totally True performance at the Fray Cafe . All my friends were looking forward to a hilariously titillating-meets-technology story I had from last year. But the night wore on, I lost energy, and the crowd didn’t seem to fit with the story somehow. I’ll have to make my worldwide comedy debut some other time.
5. Little City is too far from the convention center. I did try to drink (coffee) locally. Popped into a cigar shop on 6th St. and got blasted by cigar smoke, as well as the heads of 6 men sitting around a table snapping over to see who walked in. Without walking in a force field pushed me backwards out the door with their peels of laughter trailing behind. I laughed too as it must have looked funny. It wasn’t worth local coffee to smell like a humidor the rest of the day.
