This is a follow-up to my last 7 free ideas, which you can read here. And the excellent discussion that happened on Hacker News. Why give these ideas away? I have too many ideas and too little time. If anyone wants to take these and run with them, go for it! If you do, I would [...]
Last year, I spent a couple of mornings working at Santropol Roulant, a non-profit group in Montreal that prepares meals for elderly people. Every morning they prepare hundreds of delicious meals that are then delivered by bike and car throughout Montreal. As a volunteer, I cut, chopped and prepped the food. It was a lot of [...]
Flying out of Hong Kong is an amazing experience. You hop on a bullet train downtown and before you know it, you are whisking past rice paddies to the airport. Travelling is stressful, especially when you are a bit late. Waiting for a train to take you to your flight has a certain element of [...]
In light of my promise to show some great design that has a big impact, here is a urinal. I took this photo in the Copenhagen Airport (I think). Basically, the urinal has a little fly printed at the exact spot that, if peed on, leads to the least amount of spillage. This makes cleaning up [...]
Ideas are worth little to nothing, execution is everything. So in light of that, here are a few ideas I simply do not have time to work on. If anyone wants to use them or build on them, go for it, if you want to join forces, send me an email at jbrun@jonathanbrun.com Update: there [...]
I just purchased a one-way ticket to Toronto on the Via Rail website. The experience was decent enough, though one thing did baffle me. Take a look at the screen-shot below of the last screen before the purchase. It states that the ticket is “Non-exchangeable and non-refundable” and below it says it is “Fully refundable [...]
Earlier this year, I had to service my bike. Tire was crooked and I had not done a tune up in two years of intensive use. Not knowing better, I went to Vélo Villeneuve on Villeneuve and St. Urbain. The team there is very nice and quite knowledgeable, but very expensive. They overcharge for both [...]
A June article in Harper’s magazine was fairly negative on the prospects of alleviating world hunger through the development of commodities market. Basically, the article outlines why markets do not work to alleviate poverty, citing examples such as the Irish Famine, Ethiopian famine and last summer’s spike in grain and other prices. The author is [...]
I work in environmental law, but I am also a web designer. Designing for the internet and it’s wide variety of users is very challenging, no one does it perfectly. That being said, it is becoming indispensable to design websites well. Users have many places to go for information, if you do not design well, [...]
Two interesting articles came my way today, one from the New York Times explaining the challenges with bringing talented foreigners to the United States to work. The other was an essay advocating for a new type of visa for people who want to found a business. It seems obvious to me that Canada should open [...]