CrowdSPRING is a great platform where:

1. As a “buyer”, you can give requirements on a design you need (logo, website, etc), give a price, pay it, set a deadline and wait for designers to start working on your project. At the end of the competition, you leave with the best design. If less than 25 designs were sent your way, you can take your money back.
2. As a creative, you get to design and compete with other designers. If you win and are the buyer’s first choice, you leave with 100% of the money.

I think that’s a great place for designers and people in-need of designs; a service easy to use and pleasing to the eyes.

Smoking King Size Slim De Luxe has always been a leading paper brand, especially in Europe. A brand of choice for its thin high quality paper.

Well a couple of months ago, I discovered a new brand which completely out weighted the Smoking: it is called Raw and made by Rolling Supreme. Below a few paragraph on where they come from and why the product is so great. I want to emphasis on the quality of the paper, with a highly soft feel.

From the Rolling Supreme’s website:

Because RAW Natural Rolling Papers contain a hybrid blend of unbleached (not chemically whitened) fibers, the paper is a translucent natural light brown color. RAW is the culmination of a 12 year project to produce the most natural rolling paper possible.

RAW was a project that came to mind after smoking a pack of additive free cigarettes in 1993. The thought was, if they can make an additive free cigarette, can they wrap it in an additive free paper? There are many stories about gunpowder rings and strange additives in conventional mass-marketed cigarette paper, these additives can actually increase carbon monoxide (read http://tobaccodocuments.org/product_design/954799.html). We became determined to produce and market the purest cigarette rolling papers possible.

They say “the devil lies in the details”, and now that we had an idea the problem was how do we bring this idea to fruition. It took years of research and development (and many failed attempts) until we finally produced the first pack of what would later become known as RAW. We sent out hundreds of packs for testing by smokers and received extremely positive reviews. A few older smokers that had been rolling their own for many years mentioned that they felt our papers made their cigarettes ‘taste different’. This was something that took us a long time to figure out the cause of. After analysis, it was conclusively determined that our papers didn’t taste ‘different’ but rather these smokers were so used to the taste of certain chemicals or whitening additives in their cigarettes that when these chemicals and additives were reduced, they ‘missed’ the taste! We proved this point by conducting tests with specially designed tobacco pipes. The pipes were made out of labglass to be sure that they would not add any flavor to the smoking experience. Our determination was that RAW papers are so natural and pure that smoking a cigarette rolled in RAW is parallel in taste to smoking through a pipe, whereas using conventional cigarette paper presented the added ‘taste’ of the level of chemicals and additives used in their processing.

We later designed a watermark that accented the burn qualities of the paper and helped to prevent uneven burning. The unique criss-cross HBI watermark is another proprietary technique we used to accent our papers and help deliver a smooth, even burn. We are very confident that you will find RAW to be the best cigarette paper you have ever used.

RAW is a trademark of BBK/HBI. The thin, translucent brown RAW paper is protected by various intellectual property protections including pending or issued patents 29/25824, 29/261575, EU N° 00607841 and color/design related trademarks etc…

Interesting, isn’t it?

I am a big user of Netflix. I really enjoy their services and web interface. I would of course change a couple of things, especially with the new community features they are currently adding.

Until recently we had Cable+DVR. We were tired of having to skip the commercials. Yes it gets really tiring for ultra lazy people. So good bye the Tila Tequila Reality TV Show, the Ninja Warriors (as well as the women edition) and other better shows…

I had been a Netflix user for over 2 years, using the 2 DVDs at a time plan. So we got back into it, although I must admit that 98% of the time, we use the *watch now* feature. We already had both our profiles set up. We loved our profiles from the beginning. We each have our own queue and we get to each choose our own movies. This feature probably helped us bringing down the number of daily home fights.

One thing that lacks is the fact that I, as the primary account holder, only can use the *watch now* feature. Therefore, if she watches something without me and want to rate the movie, it completely affect my own ratings and recommendations.

On June 18th, Netflix sent the following email:

They were announcing the removal of the profiles feature by september 2008. I emailed them as many other people did.

The results is on Jun 30th, they decided to bring the feature back !!