It’s Sunday again, TEXTURE TIME! Today you can download 6 high resolution [4288*2856 px] shutter textures. Some of them with a grungy feel attached. Enjoy
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This part of “the Creatives Guide to Twitter” goes out to all the nay sayers. What on earth do you need twitter for? After all it’s just a little blue bird… You don’t have to use twitter, but it can help you promoting whatever you are doing. Here are a few Pro’s and Con’s to the use of twitter.

The Pros

• easy to connect with others
• great way to leverage your works
• increase your fanbase
• promote your products
• share what you are doing/finding

The Cons

• Can turn into a time waster
• loads of your first followers will be bots and snake oil salesmen
• You need something besides twitter to leverage your presence
• High noise ratio if you choose to follow a lot people
• your output has to be unique

The Conclusion

Don’t think too much about why you are using twitter. It’s simply a tool to connect with other people, think of it either like a mini blog or a public instant messenger. It serves no bigger purpose than sharing ideas and having conversations with other people. Sure you can promote products, information and whatever, but you have to offer value outside of twitter to benefit from it. It’s pretty useless to add hundreds of people in the hopes of marketing your product. You will have no influence through that at all.

Sometimes things are not meant to be, which rings true with the 31€ Project. Actually I am pretty sure(90%) I would manage to eat for 1€ each day, there is only one problem, I can’t do it if I am moving around as germany tends to be an expensive country. This whole diet resolves around eating and cooking at home, and if I leave for a few days I can’t keep it up. Even though I will not pay for food and liquids the next days, it’s still a break of the rules as someone else paid for them and I have to declare this bet lost. I won’t give up this easy though and will postpone the whole project to a later date. This time it might be lost, but it’s not really my fault. I hate losing due to outer influences and won’t give up this easy. I will give it another run in 2-3 months when I am not traveling for more than a week.

[Trigami-Anzeige]
Extrafilm, a swiss photo company offers a coupon to test their products.
Simply use this link and get your free 10€ coupon to check out their products. I just ordered a bunch of photos and posters [I recieved a 35€ coupon to share this on my blog] and will write a longer review on the product quality once those items arrive.

Coupon Details

• Coupon Code: TRPR3944
• Value: 10€ + a 4,95€ coupon for your next order (instead of the previous free shipping)
• Minimum Order: none
• Valid until 31.07.2009

I have no clue how you can abuse free shipping, but not abuse the free coupon, sounds a bit odd to me.

The third day of the 1€ per Day Project is running and it’s the first day I have been trying to cook milk rice. I wonder how that will taste compared to the normal rice I eat.
So far everything feels better than I thought it would. I am not that hungry throughout the day, even though I eat a lot less than the weeks before. No vegatables and only very few fruits feels like a pain, but it’s just not within that tiny budget. The highlight of the day is the fresh breakfast while the toughest challenge in the whole project is the daily fight with the rice. Not that I don’t like rice(even though I overvalued it before this project), it’s more that I hate rice without vegetables or meat. Here is a picture of my daily enemy.

The daily intake

The daily kcal intake must be hovering around 1200 kcal, which is not a lot by any means.

The world does not need another twitter guide, so I am definitely writing one You can find the whole guide at “The Creatives Guide to Twitter”
Let’s cover the most simple question first…

what is Twitter?

To make a short story even shorter, Twitter is a so called social media platform where you can interact with other people. The interesting part about Twitter is that you can only use 140 characters for each message and are limited to a short output. It’s pretty much the sms of the internet, but so far without a fee for the messages you send. It’s a great free tool to give status updates or rather share what’s moving you at the moment.

How to use twitter

The first time I tried twitter I did not enjoy it at all. Check a website for updates regularly? Why should I do that? Oh boy, that was wrong! There are great tool’s such as twhirl, which is my twitter client of choice, or tweetdeck that transform twitter into an instant messenger. You get all your new messages and tweets right on your desktop and don’t have to check the website. It turns Twitter into a public instant messenger. Public as all your tweets are available to everyone as long as you keep a public profile.

Is 140 characters too short to be useful?

One could think so, and it probably is for some, but actually it helps to get down to the bone of the message and quit fuzzing around the hot cupcakes.
If you are still hesitating, give it a try, if you tried it without a client and disliked it, give it another go with a Twitter client, and if you still dislike it, just don’t use it

Starting today, I am going to spend exactly 1€ per day on food for the next 31 days. Today has been shopping day and 24,18€ are already gone… which leaves me with whooping 6,82€ for weekly shopping courses. Breakfast will be cerals, I bought 2kg and will eat it with around 200ml of milk. Perfectly fine breakfast. I already know that I will hate rice after this month though, as I decided to a 5kg bag of rice, evens out around 160g rice per day at lunch without anything else than curry. OK, probably Milk-Rice every once in a while. I got a pack of salt instead of hitting the fast food stores for the single serving friends, as it cost less than 20 cent. Dinner will consist of toast, strawberry marmelade and curd. I bought around 15-16 apples to either add to the cereals or as a snack.

Here’s a snapshot of my basic food stash for the next 31 days.

My weekly food reloading cost comes around 2€ for 2 Liters of Milk, one pack of curd & 1 Pack of Toast.