This is just awesome. The hall monitor from highschool is apparently in charge of our HOA now. The last one is particularly comical. I can think of a couple situations they haven’t accounted for though… clearly needs to be an addendum to this. Feel free to submit any rules you’d like to see and I’ll suggest them to our HOA.
Our engineering team has kicked some serious butt lately. We dropped a release candidate this morning for the current suite of applications in our growing library. JumpBox simplifies the deployment of Open Source server applications reducing what has traditionally taken four hours to setup down to a thirty second task. Our virtual appliances are designed to make life easier for IT people everywhere and bring these powerful and complex applications within the reach of non-technical users. The following applications are now feature-complete and quarantined for final fixes before we ship:
Changes in this release include:
If you haven’t already tried them out, get ‘em now while they can still be unlocked for free.
It’s been a goal of mine to someday publish a kid’s book and that day came today. I’m officially a published author having used the Lulu.com system to self-publish my first book “Rebuild it with Moonbeams.” I wanted to condense some thoughts here after having gone through the process start to finish and I also want to publicly “tap” a few people I know to write a book of their own.
I looked at a couple different sites for self-publishing including Lulu, iUniverse and Cafepress and ultimately I went with Lulu. Their 5min video tutorial adequately shows the process for how to use their system – you basically create a word doc with the pages of your book, upload it to their site and then set a bunch of preferences about how you want your book to be printed. They take 20% after covering manufacturing costs which seems completely reasonable. Start to finish this project took a total of about 30hrs working nights the past 2wks with most of the time going towards doing the coloring on the illustrations. I sketched the illustrations at Starbucks then scanned them in and colored via Photoshop and used a creative fill technique with iStock photography. The publishing process via Lulu took the least amount of time of anything and was only about a 20min process. The book is a 40pg full-color paperback consisting of a series of whimsical “what-if” scenarios for kids in the same vein as Cooper Edens’ masterpiece “Remember the Night Rainbow.”
The “how” of this process was relatively easy. Perhaps the more interesting question was “why?” And there are a couple of reasons. I started the book as a birthday present for a girlfriend-now-just-friend but the more I got into making it, the more I was curious about trying this as an experiment to see if I could do it. One of our goals with Grid7 is to know how to do a bunch of different things, to help others to build stuff they’re passionate about and to create a series of small, passive recurring revenue streams. This project was consistent with those goals and also satisfied a goal I’ve had for some time of wanting to write a kid’s book.
Kathy Sierra has a great post here that talks about the power of embracing constraints and forcing yourself to build something good in thirty days. It’s a great exercise and truly does satisfy something primal to just go and make something. I think about the story of JK Rawlings authoring the Harry Potter series on the train to work every day and I imagine what the world would be like had she not done that. I also think about “what would it be like if everyone rode the bus once a week and used that time to work on a book of their own?” You never fully realize the ripples of what you do – the prospect of creating a moment of shared closness between a child and parent via one of the scenarios in Moonbeams book is mind-blowing and is truly at the core of why I wanted to do it.
So without any more words, here’s the book. You can get the PDF online or purchase the paperback via the site. I put 1/3rd of it up on WithMoonbeams.com so people can get a flavor for what it is. I’m also challenging the following peeps to write a book of their own because selfishly, it’s something I would buy and read if they wrote it:
Noah Kagan – The Burrito Diaries
Jamon Metz – The Cobblestone Thesis
Amanda Harbin – The Wishmaker’s Playbook
It’s a small win today but this blog just landed its 100th reader according to the feedburner stats. I’ve been writing for two years now and you better believe I’m hugely grateful each time that counter increments because it means there’s one more person out there that values the content here enough to spend a minute of their day to continue reading. So thanks for being a reader- I promise to keep the dubs spinnin’ ;-)
One of my goals for ‘07 is to get more interaction with readers and foster a dialogue here. I’ve added the ability to subscribe to comments on individual posts via email – that should help facilitate that. If you follow this blog take a minute to chime in and say who you are and what you do. At the very least you’ll get a free link from a PR7 web site and I’ll have a better picture of who’s reading.
I´m sitting here in an Internet Cafe on the last night of our yearly 2wk holiday break in Playa Del Carmen with all the shopping and packing done for a flight home tomorrow. I figured this is the perfect excuse to take a minute to do the ‘06 Kernel Dump and reminisce this trip.
I received some of the greatest Christmas gifts of all time this past month-
It’s a bit surreal sitting here pulling up the business section of the 9rules website almost 2000mi from home and seeing Scrollin´ sandwiched in between Guy Kawasaki’s and Kathy Sierra’s blog – two personal heroes who I’ve been reading daily now for over a year. Anyways, I made a New Year’s resolution a few days ago to come strong this year with quality, solid writing deserving to be placed alongside these superstars. This means probably cleaning things up a bit and dropping the first person tense but I’m thinking it’s still kosher to reserve the personal style for the Kernel Dumps so here goes…
-Get JumpBox cashflow positive
-Write more better
-Lose the weight I gained on this trip
-Record the Cold Turkey Stasis album
-Simplify
I have a handful of others but those are the top five. What are yours? If you believe in the power of the open source goals meme, publish yours on your blog and then leave a trackback.
Our favorite place on earth, Playa Del Carmen, has undergone some interesting changes this past year – namely a TON of development. We heard from a couple people that said this is the fastest growing city in the world right now for it’s current size. I would not be surprised. There has been a frenzy of development since our trip here last year. While it bodes well for local businesses, it´s sad to see the arrival of the corporate chain establishments.
It’s understandable why a place as magical as this one continues to draw enormous crowds this time of year (especially given that Denver is under 20′ of snow in some places right now). I’ve got great photos from this trip that will be up this week along with a post soon that explains a striking correlation I discovered today between entrepreneurship and the sport of kite surfing. Playa diffuses stress like no place I’ve ever been and I could write a page-worth of commentary on our trip, but in the interest of the new spirit of brevity and given that pictures are worth 1000 words, I´ll leave the Playa summary at this.
Music – all you need to know is Mike Doughty’s new one. Wow.
Books – I killed a ton on this trip. Crichton’s latest, Coelho’s Devil and Miss Prym, Scott Adams’ God’s Debris, The Prophet by Kahil Gibran, and Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham
Podcasts – check out the 43 folders podcast with David Allen, the latest couple from Venture Voice with the guy from Kiva.org and Jay Addleson of Digg and the Fresh Talk podcast.
We’re heads down on refining our virtual appliance offering for JumpBox to make it THE simplest way to solve business challenges with hassle-free deployment of virtualized, open-source software. We’re maintaining the mission of Grid7 to help people Build Something Bigger by continuing to deliver more quality audio interviews with local AZ entrepreneurs in order to share the wealth of experience from people who have been able to make their ideas reality. I have a handful of personal goals, the top five of which are listed above but the underlying thread of it all remains the same as last year- laser focus on the things that are most important. The mantra for this year I’ve decided is Rock steady. We got JumpBox off the ground in ‘06 and rocked it in many ways and we’re planning to do more of the same in ‘07. Happy new year all and may you rock steady in your pursuits in ‘07 as well.
-sean
So I was checking the server logs at 5am (because that’s what you do at 5am when you can’t sleep) and I noticed a spike in traffic from the 9rules.com domain. Digging further I came across this page on their site which lists the latest round of acceptances to their network. Wow. I’m peeing myself right now. This is the third time I have applied and I’ve been waiting to add their little 9rules flower to my sidebar for nearly two years now. Thank you Scrivs and Tyme for the add. Being the guy who was religiously picked dead-last in kickball and turned down by the fraternity the I rushed in college, it feels pretty freakin’ amazing to finally get accepted to a club ;-)
