Self-Publishing Advice from the experience of my first book I had the wonderful opportunity to guest lecture at Emerson College this week on the subject of “Self-publishing”. It caused a bit of retrospection, it being a full year now since I published Blue Ice. My most important self-publishing advice, the elephant in the room, as voiced by one of the students: “If you had it to do again, would you self-publish, or go with a traditional publisher?” That really gets…
Looking back at 2013 for me personally, I’m amazed at the improvements in my life, and I’d like to both acknowledge and give thanks. Let’s take a look at the picture of where I was just a scant year ago: Living with my mother after separating from my wife. Didn’t have a steady job. Saw my kids on weekends, if that. Was barred from buying health insurance by the State of Massachusetts (a joy many in the US will come…
Okay, here’s one to help you get in touch with your inner Worcesterite. You might be from Worcester if: You know that they had to fill the Polar Soda Polar Bear with foam because Worcesterites had gone “Catniss” on him on more than one occasion. You know that the Polar Soda bear is named “Orson”. You know that Worcester has 7 hills like Rome, and has 9 colleges within it’s boundaries. You can name the 7 hills of Worcester. (Hancock,…
Nearly two years ago I wrote about the pain in the a$$ that is wireless printers. They’re still a pain, but I thought I’d share a little trick that I’ve found that makes them a whole lot less bothersome: configuring a static IP address for them. HP has a decent video on how to manually setup a static IP address for your printer which you can see here. On many of their newer printers, if you go to the web…
No need for a review, I reviewed Grace Potter last month, and there is precious little I could say that has not been said before about The Allman Brothers. I will share this video of Grace and Benny Yurco on stage with Les Brers playing The Weight. Trully moving…even if the smartphone video howls and is generally a C- effort (but it’s still the best of the stuff I find on Youtube).
Just a year ago, I proclaimed my freedom from the Tyranny of the Commute in a post on this blog. The chief culprit in the absurdly long commutes I’d suffered for over a decade was the incredulously Rube Goldberg style design of the the traffic pattern at the on ramp to Rt. 95/128 north coming from the Mass Pike. Numerous merges and crossover created an automotive version of a battle royale; a free for all in which everyone lost… This…
There is hope for music after all, and it comes in the form of a hippy chick from Vermont Rock isn’t dead; in fact it turned up at one of the least likely venues, Tanglewood in Lenox, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra on Monday night and it came on the bus that brought Grace Potter and the Nocturnals to town. From the minute they took the stage, the crowd was on their feet, and they remained that way…
Over the past couple months I’ve had a customer with on going issues. The biggest single issue was the site was slow to respond in the afternoon. The site is built on WordPress, and this was a nationally known WordPress hosting company. Whenever we asked them about the issue, we got the standard response that it was due to “your code”. However, they could not point to a simple example. We’re talking about the site taking 10-15 seconds to respond…
Preface: I’ve done some small amount of work with big data, and have a general understanding of how it works. I haven’t really seen a decent breakdown of what is happening, and felt it necessary to share. Over the past decade, Business Intelligence has really come into vogue. Companies all have many large and often unconnected databases, full of information about their customers. Thus is makes sense that they’d want to find ways to connect this data together, to reach…
Last Sept. I promised a certain 15 year old girl that if she managed all A’s and B’s she could basically name her reward. Warped Tour Tickets were it…so I got to go. All in all, a pretty enjoyable day of music. Quickie reviews of the bands I saw: Never Shout Never – these guys are real musicians. I think they might have almost fit in better at a jam band festival, but the crowd really dug them, and so…