Revnut

This is a pretty addictive game. I’ve been playing it with 2 of my kids. It’s been quite enjoyable to see them learning some of the strategies. Check it out.

Mongrel is a fast HTTP library and server for Ruby that is intended for hosting Ruby web applications of any kind using plain HTTP rather than FastCGI or SCGI.

I recently moved Soapadoo from Lighty to a cluster of mongrels. The performance increase on the site has been significant. Some pages that were taking multiple seconds to load now come up in about a second. The site is much more responsive than it’s ever been. I’m quite happy with Mongrel. Zed Shaw has done some amazing work on it.

As of November of 2006, there are over 59 million blogs. That’s a lot of blogs. Unfortunately, there aren’t 59 million life-transforming blogs.

That’s why I’m excited to report that I recently discovered the blog named Light Along the Journey written by James Hollandsworth. A number of his posts have really got me thinking and I’m excited to be subscribed.

I was also excited to see the following statement on the site: “I strive to have several friends who are pastors to regularly review my content for doctrinal integrity and accountability.” That’s excellent. Check this blog out.

I agree with Bobby and Russ. It’s tough to complain about Netflix.

Their website does what you need it to do and they get movies delivered to your door fast. They’re focused on doing a few things quite well. Netflix is a remarkable business.

I started listening to this podcast because of Matt’s excellent review. I’ve now listened to about 4 episodes. It is wonderful and I have been greatly enjoying it.

Like Matt said, Venture Voice’s reason for being is to explore how entrepreneurs build their businesses and live their lives. The basic idea is that they interview an entrepreneur in each episode.

Gregory Galant conducts the interviews and he does an incredible job of asking useful questions. He’s an excellent listener and is able to ask insightful questions based on what the interviewee has answered so far.

This podcast is a great way to learn from the successes and failures of entrepreneurs. I highly recommend it.

http://venturevoice.com

This is another excellent web-based application created by 37 Signals. If you need to chat with more than one person at a time Campfire is for you. There are a ton of reasons why using your instant messenger application for group chat is a bad idea.

Campfire works wonderfully and it’s free.

I’m a big fan of Vonage. I don’t know how the regular phone companies can compete.

Here’s how it works. Vonage sends you a small appliance about the size of a cigar box. It allows you to make phone calls by connecting your regular phones to your high speed internet connection. It’s only $24.99/month for unlimited long distance and local calls. This price also gives you every phone feature you can imagine (like 3 way calling, call waiting, etc.)

Voice mail can be emailed to you. You can also check it through the phone or through the Vonage web site.

Guests using our phone would never know that it’s an internet phone. The call quality is excellent.

I can get you a free month of Vonage with a referral email. Feel free to email me a request for a free month.

I was given a chance to spend some time with a gifted artist named Jonathan Daniel. He makes some incredibly detailed artwork and sells it to help fund the ministry work he’s doing for the people of Zimbabwe. His artwork is pretty amazing.

If you’re looking for a gift for that hard to shop for person, JD Wire Art could be the place for you. He even makes custom orders.

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.

I have had web hosting accounts with a number of web hosting providers over the years. OCS Solutions is by far the best experience I’ve had to date. They are truly a remarkable company. They have an extensive variety of web hosting plans and their servers are rock solid. I currently have a virtual dedicated server account and a shared hosting account with OCS. Both plans have been unbelievably stable and quite fast. One public example of their servers is the Soapadoo web site which is hosted there.

I haven’t yet mentioned the best part of OCS Solutions, that being their customer service. The level of customer service they provide is extremely uncommon today. I have been amazed at what an excellent job they do.

I highly recommend OCS Solutions.

I’ve bought a number of bound journals from them. They’re excellent quality. A wonderful business. They make record books, journals, lab books, custom notebooks, etc. They get them delivered very quickly.

See the website.

This is a wonderful web site. Steve Pavlina has written a number of life changing articles. I think he’s impacting people. He’s certainly impacted me. I wonder if Soapbox would exist if I hadn’t read some of his motivational articles.

Steve’s spiritual beliefs don’t correspond to my own. He would be the first to say that he’s not a Christian. This means that we have fundamentally different worldviews. Even so, I’ve still learned a ton from him in the areas of personal development, efficiency, goal setting, and polyphasic sleep. I’m grateful that he’s been willing to share so many of the things he’s learned. If you’re looking to improve yourself in some way, Steve’s web site can help.