The Life of an Internet Bedouin
June 20th, 2006 — Conference, Rails, Ruby
Local Rails hacker Rick Olson has helped put together the RailsConf Facebook, a cool conference innovation. Why not know a little about your fellow attendees?…Hmmmm….
Of course, I had to add myself to the mix already. Why not add yourself already…you know you want to.
See you in Chi-town, sports racers!
June 4th, 2006 — Business, Publishing, VitalSource
There are high quality digital versions available for over half off the normal cost. With VitalSource textbooks, you also get note taking and highlighting and powerful search capabilities to go along with all that extra change jingling in your pockets.
Let’s take for example Cay Horstmann’s 1248 page tome on introductory computer science, Big Java, 2nd Edition. If you buy this textbook from the publisher, Wiley, you will pay full price which they have listed as $89.95.
Perhaps we should look at Amazon.com? On Amazon, you can get it for $86.95. Hmmm…a whopping $3 off.
Perhaps a college bookseller would be a cheaper way to go… On ecampus.com, you can get the book for $87.73 (standard, new), $83.35 (eVip, new), $62.07 (eVIP, used), eBook (unavailable).
Ok, so now we’re getting somewhere on price at least. If you can figure out how to become one of those VIPs then you can get the used book for a third off. One curious thing is that they say that the ebook is unavailable. Well, that’s true if you are shopping at ecampus.com. However, perhaps you might like to know that Wiley publishing is a VitalSource partner and there actually is an ebook available right now for download.
If I load up my Bookshelf client and poke around their store, I can see clear as day that I can buy a shiny new digital version of this very book for…wait for it…
$43.49
Pretty amazing, huh? Something to keep in mind the next time you are shopping for textbooks. You should at least take a look over there and see what’s what.
So check out the Ruby on Rails powered VitalSource Store sometime. You may just find that there is a better way to learn while saving money at the same time.
The VitalSource Store now supports web buying as well!
June 2nd, 2006 — Business, Da Vinci Code, Publishing, Remote Work
My wife and I have started a publishing business on the side and we’ve chosen as our first product to do a digital companion to The Da Vinci Code book (and movie). Essentially, it is a collection of beautiful imagery from sites in the book integrated with chapter summaries and an aggregation of over 450 links to explore the book material. You can access the information through The Da Vinci Code Library by category, or also by chapter as you read through. There really isn’t anything else like it out there. So if you are interested in this kind of thing, definitely check it out. A free demo is available by following the instructions on The Da Vinci Code Companion web site and you can keep up to date with the product on the blog.
I realize that I haven’t been posting too much lately. There has been a tremendous amount going on with my day job and getting this product to release has been a big part of this last month on the side.
Next up, I’ll be speaking at Austin On Rails and RailsConf in Chicago about Rails migrations. After that, I am going to become a father (if I’m not one already), so that should definitely be interesting.
Keep on keepin on, folks…
You can now purchase The Da Vinci Code Companion in your browser here!
