I started using Ventrilo while playing mmorpg's and ended up using it in my business for realtime voice collaboration among team members. More personal and more efficient than IM, it's like a group walkie talkie through your computer. Or a VOIP conference call that's always on.
[ventrilo.com]
I'm a big fan of throwing things against the wall until something sticks. Success is not about having THE great idea; it's about being persistent and determined. Don't think too much about HOW to start, just START! Then never give up, and success will come (probably sooner rather than later).
I know it's extremely geeky, but in my journal I use the number of days since I was born as a kind of "stardate". For example today (for me) is day 10872. I'm 29, it's been a little over ten thousand days since I was born, and I figure I've got at least another ten thousand or so barring some unforeseen accident or illness.
Seemed kind of pointless to do this at first, but this "numbering convention" stuck with me because it lets me keep in my mind the idea that I _do_ have a limited number of days left on this earth -- and I'd better make the most of them!
I'm a fan of playing DDR (Dance Dance Revolution). It's kind of an emo-ish game BUT it's fantastic cardio, and in a game structure it's easy to keep the motivation up (I'm a very competitive person, I think that comes with the territory for intelligent people).
In Paypal, under History ~ Download History, you can download your paypal transactions to many different file types, including Quicken (.qif), Quickbooks (.iif), comma-delimited, etc.
Alternatively you could use the Instant Payment Notification feature of Paypal to have them send your web app your transaction information, and your web app could possibly... I dunno do something with it to get it into quickbooks. A lot harder to set up but could possibly be totally automated, whereas downloading your history to a quickbooks import file would have to be done manually and periodically.
"I've studied Javascript: The Definitive Guide and can use closures, recursion, object-oriented Javascript using prototypes, and jQuery. I would have no problem whipping up a demonstration app."