it’s called the vintage ad browser (www.vintageadbrowser.com) and it does what it says. you can search for and browse through over 100,000 vintage ads. this is what mad men fans like myself live for (i bet the writers for that show knew about this site way before we did)

here are some of my favorites:

this one i couldn’t resist. gotta love the floppy disk he’s holding up…

and, this sure looks like a great deal. 64K RAM for $1,495!

this was the predecessor to Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum – my first computer that i started coding BASIC on when i was 9… oh, good old days…

believe it or not, i still have that Sinclair ZX Spectrum. it’s hanging on the wall in my office. here’s a picture of it.

vintage ads also have a sister site called coverbrowser (http://www.coverbrowser.com).

enjoy!

starting is easy. finishing is hard. to keep going is harder.

that’s how i feel of this small piece of web real estate called raif.com. hard to believe i haven’t done a single post since august.

besides launching carsala.com, hiring, moving, holidays and many other lame excuses, what’s really happened is called twitter.

twitter has officially replaced my need for ranting, writing, and exposure.

however, lately i’ve been wanting to put together pieces that require more thought than 140 characters. which i believe is a key strength and weakness of twitter. the quickness and immediacy of the 140 characters is very powerful. however, it does lend itself to way too many retweets without commentary or insights, half-baked thoughts and just weak arguments.

as people flock to twitter and the doomsday of blogging is reported everywhere else, i think that there will be a wave of people coming back to blogging for things that they just can’t quite fit into 140 characters.

true, twitter has changed self publishing forever. however, i do believe that both blogging and tweeting will have their place in anyone’s toolbox who believes they have something worth sharing.

sometimes starting a company is like playing house… especially when you’re setting up your office.

both my co-founder tyler and i have always felt strongly that the environment we set up now will play a significant role in shaping the culture and the values of the company we’re building at carsala. we are also both pretty frugal to a fault, so we started off for our interior decoration with a very (VERY) limited budget.

we ended up with some pretty cool looking desks with trestles and somewhat comfortable chairs, each under $100.

next challenge was to find some art for the walls.

my pick for the technology and marketing room was the photograph above by renowned photojournalist w. eugene smith called “dream street”. i felt it was very appropriate for a handful of people who have set out to change the single largest retail segment of the US economy (44M used cars are sold every year, representing $365 billion).

the entrepreneurial spirit is really one with the spirit of the dreamer… the pursuit of  creation of something out of nothing… the pursuit of something better and greater…

“dream street” embodies this entrepreneurial spirit – the spirit we have at carsala.

as i’d stopped daydreaming about napping, i came across this in the latest springwise newsletter: barcelona hilton reserves rooms for a siesta. now that’s an innovative idea that should be embraced in north american hotels. especially one that is preferably within walking distance of the carsala offices ;)

it’s a shame. but i’ll make an attempt at an excuse:

in the last three months, along with my co-founder Tyler Elliston, we’ve been ridiculously busy founding and raising seed funding for carsala - an innovative service that will revolutionize how people buy cars. we will make the official press release soon but i’m thrilled to report that we have some top notch vc’s in the mix that positions us beautifully for the future of our company. we’ve recruited some brilliant people that are already busy building the product which should go into private beta this fall.

stay tuned for more frequent updates as we build this great company…

as I near my graduation and face the decision of staying in california vs going back to toronto, I decided that I should dig into this and see what the gap was…

well, it turns out that you do pay a little more in ontario, but not as much as everyone will have you believe… in british columbia, the difference in negligable…

this calculation does ignore the higher sales tax we pay in canada which is 12% in BC and 13% in ontario compared to 7.25-8.75% in California.

however, when you couple this data with better public education, universal health care (compared to the 45M americans that don’t have any) and the lower cost of living compared to US metros (NY, LA. SF, Chicago), Toronto or Vancouver seem like a steal…

Sources:
- US Federal Tax Estimation from Roscoe & Swanson Accountancy – Quick Income Tax Calculator – http://www.rscpa.com/cgi-bin/taxcomp.cgi
- California Tax Estimation from Franchise Tax Board of California (State of California) – http://www.ftb.ca.gov/individuals/tax_table/index.asp
- Canada Federal & Ontario Tax Estimation from Ernst&Young Tax Calculator – http://www.ey.com/GLOBAL/content.nsf/Canada/Tax_-_Calculators_-_2007_Personal_Tax

the true test will be whether i actually do keep up with it, and people find something worthwhile to read…

time shall tell…