I always enjoy Paul Graham’s essays, including today’s: Organic Startup Ideas.

There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to be necessary to some class of users other than you. Apple was the first type. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer. Unlike most people who wanted computers, he could design one, so he did. And since lots of other people wanted the same thing, Apple was able to sell enough of them to get the company rolling. They still rely on this principle today, incidentally. The iPhone is the phone Steve Jobs wants.

Serendeputy is definitely organic. I want this to exist, and I use it every day. I hope you like it, too!

The site is back up. Hooray.

One of the perils of cloud computing: if something goes wrong on the underlying hardware, you’re several layers of abstraction from being able to fix it. Ugh.

Anyway, one of the machines at Slicehost went down, which happened to be holding my web1 server. When the server went down ungracefully, it corrupted some of the files. So, I waited for Slicehost to rebuild the underlying machine, then I rebuilt my server. It wasn’t too bad: a little fsck goes a long way.

Thanks for your patience.