There’s a valuable resource available to students, starving artists, savvy entrepreneurs and everyone else that often goes unused and forgotten: The Public Library.

Let’s face it, books (and other media) are expensive. While others think of Amazon first for books, I look to the library.

The American Library Association and the Dewey Decimal System date back to 1876. But in the age of smart phones and streaming media, we sometimes forget that we’re paying for this service (via taxes) and we should be taking full advantage.

Continue reading

Thinking outside the box

Jim Collins, author of Beyond Entrepreneurship (recommended by Cory Miller of iThemes at Pressnomics), suggests that budding entrepreneurs can innovate by studying something that may seem completely unrelated to your craft – “thinking outside the box.”

Lately I’ve been interested in cycling. When I’m riding, rather than putting my mind on auto-pilot (like many drivers do), I find that my mind is more alert. It’s partly due to the fact that I’m trying to avoid getting killed by drivers on auto-pilot. But it is also because I’m going slower, exposed to the air and the elements. I can hear a deer in the passing woods or smell fresh bread from the bakery. It turns out that “slowing down” is an excellent approach to problem solving. In my case, “thinking outside the (computer) box” had just become “thinking while outside.”
Continue reading

Jessi got me a Kindle Touch for my birthday and of course I have been geeking out, looking for free/cheap content to put on it, so I can put it through the paces. I thought I’d share a couple freebies.

According the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons Attribution licenses for the GNU Emacs Manual and Version Control with Subversion (respectively), I’m within my right to reformat – in this case from HTML to mobipocket e-book format – and redistribute these works free of charge:

GNU Emacs manual – Richard M. Stallman

Version Control with Subversion – Ben Collins-Sussman,_Brian W. Fitzpatrick

If Emacs or SVN seem too old school or “so last year” for you (again, respectively), I recommend getting the very professionally done – and also free – Pro Git book.

Continue reading