Revnut

A gifted author and an expert in the field of marketing and the way ideas spread. I have read almost all of his books (Purple Cow, Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Ideavirus, All Marketers Are Liars, and The Big Moo.)

I have been studying marketing for a number of weeks now and Seth’s books have been the first part of my study. My primary motivation in undertaking such a study was to learn about ways to market this site (Soapbox).

These books have been quite eye-opening. I hadn’t realized how marketing has changed so much in the last few years. Reading Seth’s books actually caused a number of feature changes to this site and it affected a number of fundamental decisions that were made about the site’s philosophy. I’ve also been shocked about how little of marketing I understood and how vital it is to growing a business. What was I thinking being so completely focused on the technology?

I have greatly enjoyed these books and they’ve affected my thinking. I highly recommend them. I’d also recommend that you check out Seth’s Blog.

The BEST publisher of technical books out there bar none. I have purchased many books from them primarily because they know the books that software developers want written.

They pioneered the idea of beta books by incrementally releasing updates of books in pdf form. These pdf’s are high quality documents full of pertinent hyperlinks. Then when the book is really completed, I can choose to have a hard copy mailed to me.

This beta book service they provide is of tremendous benefit to developers because we can learn about technologies much earlier and we don’t need the initial copies of a book to be perfect. I also think this service makes the eventual released book much higher quality because they’re getting the feedback of paying customers rather than paid-for editors.

Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt (the Pragmatic Programmers who head up the Pragmatic Bookshelf) are experts in the computer field and they’re quite gifted authors to boot. This makes them the perfect publisher because they’re intimately familiar with their customer and their supplier.

I know authors have been quite happy working with the Pragmatic guys because of the tools they’ve developed to help authors write books, generate pdf’s, retrieve old revisions of books, etc. They also share much more of the profits with authors than the old school publishers do.

You can tell they’ve got a winner because the other publishers out there are attempting to imitate some of the Pragmatic strategies. I don’t think they’ll be able keep up as Andy and Dave refine the business and improve it over time. I highly recommend the Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Check out their website.

If you find yourself putting more and more Tabasco on your food and it doesn’t seem hot enough, you might want to try the Viper. My brother in law Jeff introduced me to it and it’s some pretty hot stuff. A few drops go a long way. I think it has some pretty good flavor. I’ll be a repeat buyer.

This is an incredibly gripping book by Corrie Ten Boom. It is the true story of a Christian family living in Holland during the holocaust. I loved this book. I was amazed by the courage of this faithful family.

This is without a doubt the worst popcorn maker humans have ever devised.

My kids loved it because it shot un-popped kernels everywhere. It was crazy. It wasn’t a popcorn maker. It was a popcorn kernel machine gun.

Toastmaster sells a number of popcorn makers. I can’t remember which model we purchased but I will never purchase another popcorn maker from Toastmaster.

This book by Mark Douglas is one of my favorite books about trading the stock market. That’s saying a lot because I’ve read a ton of books about trading. There aren’t many books that I read more than once. Trading in the Zone is one of them.

I’m currently reading the book for the second time and it’s been interesting how my perception of it has changed now that I’ve been trading for a few years. I’m really enjoying it. It details so many of the mistakes I have made as a trader.

Why are some traders extremely consistent winners and others are emotional train wrecks? This book will get in your head.

These audio CDs were produced by Focus on the Family. They did an amazing job. Sound effects, voices, the works.

My kids are addicted to them and they’ve memorized parts of them. I think they’d listen to them every day if we let them. I’m now much more motivated to improve my reading aloud skills.

I have eaten this sausage dip and it is delicious. Everyone seems to love it. I have eaten far too much of it.

My brother Russ introduced us to this recipe and we’ve respected him more ever since. I think Russ learned of the recipe from Nancy.

This is a 5 mega pixel digital camera we recently purchased. It’s the first Canon camera we’ve owned and I’m quite happy with it. Adjusting the settings is pretty cinchy and the quality of pictures is excellent. It seems that Canon really understands digital photography. It even takes video which I thought I’d never use but I find I’m actually using on occasion.

One downside is that it seems to have more of an issue with red eye than our previous camera did. The red eye is easy to remove using iPhoto but it’s a bit annoying. If I were buying a new camera today, I think I might consider one of the really small models which would make it easier to bring the camera places (especially if it could fit in my pocket).

Even so, the A610 is a high quality camera.

TextDrive is a web hosting provider which offers everything from shared hosting accounts to fully managed dedicated servers. I was quite excited about them because the language they used to describe their services seemed to indicate that they understood what developers needed in terms of web hosting. I liked them so much in fact that I purchased a lifetime account.

I’ve been quite disappointed with them however. I found their shared hosting account to be extremely unreliable. It seemed to go down for some time most days. Over and over again I’d see status messages like “The server became unresponsive and needed to be rebooted. It should be up again soon.” No explanation. No description of what might have gone wrong. Their webmin interface was incredibly slow. So slow in fact that I found it almost unusable.

This is why I’ve switched all of my important sites to OCS Solutions. I’ve been quite happy with OCS.