Part of the idea is for the four of us to have a venue that we can use to keep in touch with each other and continue our friendship, despite living in very different parts of the country.  The other part of the idea is to generate dialog between people about things they like.  Most people who check things out here probably know about the site already, but if you don’t, please stop by and poke around for a while.  Engage us, because we certainly want to engage with you.  Tell us stuff you want to see, read, and learn about.  Send us cool stuff you like and think we might like too.  We want it to be a community, so come and play.

Crush It! is a book about following your passions. It takes the stance that everyone has something that they are deeply passionate about. Whether it is the rise of social media on the Internet or tortilla chips, everyone has a deep passion for something, and chances are that 99.99% of people with a passion are not employed doing anything related to that passion. The recent college graduate who loves nothing more than knitting might be slaving for a huge corporation in a job they aren’t really super thrilled about (or even hate utterly), or maybe heading to law school because they think that’s what they should be doing. Vaynerchuk asserts that you should be doing something you love, not something you hate because you feel like you need to. Maybe that college grad should start a blog about knitting and build a community around him. Maybe he’ll get sponsored by a yarn company and be able to do it full time before too long, who knows?

This book will teach you not only to follow your passion, but also how to make yourself a marketable brand. Using the extraordinary social platforms available on the Internet, like Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, and Tumblr, you’ll be able to create an incredible personal brand and develop a loyal following, not around your product or your skills, but around you as a person. The upshot? You are instantly more marketable than every other person out there who is just a set of good skills and experiences on a resume. You are accomplished and somebody people have heard of. Who do you think is going to win out here?

Overall I found this book to be an extremely interesting and compelling read. I finished it in two reading sessions, though had I had time to get through the whole thing the first day, I would have without a doubt. Gary takes you through the decisions and actions that have made him so successful and show you how you can apply them to your own circumstances. This isn’t a book where the author says, “Look how great I am,” all the time, either. The stories provided are anecdotal and never to do more than prove a point. He is the first to admit that the specific actions he has taken may not work for you, but using similar philosophies, you can find the way that does.

Problems with this book? It’s too short! I found myself wanting more of Gary than I got in these 130 pages. That said, his personal e-mail is plastered all over this book and he urges you to send him any questions you may have about anything. I know from personal experience that this is not lip-service, and that he actually responds to these in a timely and thorough manner.

Anyone who wants to make something out of their passions and turn themselves into a successful personal brand should pick up this book immediately. Anyone who doesn’t want to work hard (probably harder than they ever have before), should stay at home.

Have You Seen Luke This Morning? (Breakfast)

• “It’s a Flap(Jack)!”
• Yavin 4-Egg Omelette
• Royal Hairdo Cinnamon Rolls
• “See if You Can’t Lox It Down!”
• “TK-421, Why Aren’t You At Your Toast?”

Greedo Shoots First (Appetizers)

• Mon Calamari
• “So Bean Dip, Jedi”
• Shrimp Coruscampi
• WanTaunTaun Soup
• “I Have You Chow(der)”
• “Vader’s On Those Chips”
• BBQ X-Wings (Intensity: Reds 1-5)

Death Starches (Sandwiches)

• Aunt BeReuben
• “My Hoagie This Is!”
• Ham Solo Sandwich
• Pulled Porkins Sandwich
• C-3POpen-faced Sandwich
• Grand Moff Turkey Sandwich
• “That’s No Moon, That’s a Steak Sandwich”
• Chewbacon Cheeseburger
• Scruffy-looking Nerf-Burger
• Lando Cowrissian’s Bespin Burger

I Am Your Fodder (Entrees)

• Thai Fighter
• E-Wok Stir Fry
• “Steak on Target!”
• Asteroid Field Filet ($37.20 each)
• “I Find Your Rack of Ribs Disturbing”
• “I Might Have Expected You to Be Holding Vader’s Quiche”
• “Jumping Through Hyperspace Isn’t Like Dusting Crabs, Boy!”

Greens of Endor (Vegetarian)

• Ratatooine
• Padme Thai
• Boba Feta Wrap
• Tusken (Raider) Salad
• “As If Millions of Voices Suddenly Cried Out in Terror and Were Suddenly Salad”*

*Our apologies to anyone who lost loved ones on Alderaan….Ask for our Skywalker Ranch Dressing!

Dark Sides

• Vader Tots
• Potato Wedge Antilles

Younglings’ Menu

• Midiclorioni and Cheese

Desserts of Tatooine

• Frozen Carmelite
• Obi-Wan Cannoli
• “This is No Cake”
• Dagobahnana Split
• “Let the Cookie Win”
• Salacious Crumbcake
• Princess Leia Cake (Can be served Princess Amidala Mode)

Jar Jar Drinks

• Twin Sun Tea
• Hoth Chocolate
• Orange Juice (Extra Pulpatine)
• “Do or Do Not, There is No Chai”
• “That’s Great, Kid, Don’t Get Coffee!”
• Darth Malt
• “I Can’t (Milk)shake Him!”
• Qui-Gon Gin
• Shuttle Ti-Beer-ion
• “You, Like Your Father, Are Now Wine”
• Bottomless Sarlacc Pitchers

• Windows 7 is Not Vista: I agree, Windows 7 is going to do much better in the marketplace than Vista did, but the strengths of Windows 7 are not going to be on netbooks, but on high speed computers that have processing power to spare for all of the nice new features the OS offers.
• Microsoft is working on its own browser-based OS: Microsoft May be conducting research into new browser technologies and implementations, but they will never commit to a complete browser-based operating system, and that is because with a browser-based system, programs no longer become platform specific. Suddenly nobody needs Windows to run Microsoft Office, a majority of games, and nearly all business apps, and Microsoft loses.
• Google will be busy competing with Ubuntu: You seem to suggest that Google only has the capacity to fight a single-front war. To be sure, Google will be trying to leverage market share from Ubuntu, but I can imagine it won’t be any larger priority than Windows. Google wants market share, plain and simple, and that share is found down the path of least resistance. Ubuntu has a solid netbook implementation, while Windows does not. Google recognizes this and will target those users first (all the while pointing out that ChromeOS is a lot more free than Windows).
• Fully web-based Chrome OS cannot run Windows apps: This is true, but when you think about it, how well does Windows on a netbook run Windows apps? It’s a slow platform that offers sluggish results, unless you stick to things like Office and the web. Netbooks are aimed at people who want to do word processing, web browsing, and watch the occasional movie, and with HTML5, Google can do all of those things in a browser with minimal effort.
• Google has not succeeded against Microsoft in the past: *cough*choke* I’m sorry what? Google hasn’t succeeded in the past? Google search? Gmail? Chrome? Google search has clearly surpassed Microsoft’s search offerings, and while Gmail and Chrome currently have smaller market share than the Microsoft equivalents, look at the history of each: Hotmail launched in 1997, while gmail opened to the public in 2007. In 2 years, gmail’s number of registered users has reached half of what Hotmail’s have reached in 12. As for Chrome, yeah, it has low market share, but it was released less than a year ago and has already taken share from IE, a browser that comes preinstalled on 90% of computers sold in the last ten years.

Edit: Misattributed the original article. This has been fixed

My question is this: when these users consented to have their data sent to a third party when they signed up for whatever it was they signed up for, how many of them thought it meant they would just get added to some advertiser’s mailing list and how many of them actually knew that they would be sharing their financial data with Google and anyone else who wanted to pay for it? How many of them signed up on sites with the checkbox to allow this data to be used in an out of the way place so that it was checked by default and they didn’t see it to change it?

It is well within Google’s rights to keep stats and usage data on all of its websites. I don’t personally have a problem with some computer algorithm searching through my gmail in order to target ads to the contents of those e-mails. I start to take issue, however, when I can unknowingly authorize Google to be able to track me across the web and look at my personal financial history. Sure it is a computer that is looking at everything as I do it, but what’s to stop a Google employee from pulling up the history from that computer? When does it stop being a help to me as a consumer and a danger to me as a free citizen?

Of all of the speeches I have heard him make, I think this is the most presidential I have ever heard him sound. Of course I have always thought he was a great speaker, and speeches like his acceptance speech in Chicago on election night simultaneously give me chills and move me to tears. But this is the first that I have heard in which he has spent the entire speech actually trying to govern and make the United States the better nation he so often promises.

He began by giving his audience the best summary of the events that led up to the current economic crisis that I have ever heard. It was clear, concise, and could be understood by anyone with any sense, while at the same time not make those people feel stupid. He addressed what actions his administration has taken to start fixing things, and promised what further measures he intended to take in the future. He addressed the concerns of his political opponents on issues and defended his ground beautifly.

More than a different direction in policy and agenda (which I think was desparately needed as well), it is exactly this quality I think was lacking in George Bush. Regardless of ones political views, it is pretty widely acknowledged that he was not a good speaker. Had Bush had the confidence and poise to describe to Americans and to the world what he thought needed to be done and to be able to rationally explain why he thought so, he would have had much higher approval overall, in my opinion.

When we were leavning the auditorium, the crowd was at a standstill for several minutes, and when I looked around, I realized that I was standing very near to Van Jones, an activist and a leader in the movement towards a more sustainable and green economy–and himself an excellent speaker–and realized he had just been watching the speech as part of the crowd, only a couple rows ahead of me. I introduced myself and asked him what he thought of the speech. He responded enthusiastically (and i paraphrase):

“Barack Obama is one of those presidents. In a hundred or a thousand years, he will be held up by history as one of the great men of the world, like Abraham Lincoln or Alexander the Great. In a thousand years, you could be on some other planet in another galaxy and you’ll get a smile if you mention Barack Obama.”

To put it mildly, I find the entire free software movement to be a bit too obsessed with this notion of using only free property. There exists another version of Firefox that is called Iceweasel. This is because, despite all of the source code of Firefox being free and open, the Firefox logo is copyright by the Mozilla Foundation, and therefore the program is not free. Iceweasel replaces this logo with a free one. Richard Stallman and friends need to understand that we are living in a world in which people like to take ownership for their work, and that often, it is this ownership that helps promote the work. The Mozilla Foundation has a copyright on the name and logo of Firefox because it is the most important part of the program’s image. It is the branding and name recognition of Firefox that has allowed it to capture such a large portion of the browser market in such a short period of time. The average user, if presented with two identical programs, one containing a brand name they know, and one with a “free” equivilent that they’ve never heard of, will say that they prefer the brand name every time, even if both are available at no cost to them.

This brings me back to the specific topic at hand, that of free javascript. The idea that for every major webapp, there should exist a set of third party javascript to replace what exists already in order to perform the same function is absurd. Technology and the web haven’t evolved as quickly as they have because someone wrote the exact same piece of software as someone else. These things have evolved because people have taken that software and changed it to get rid of things they don’t like and add things they feel are missing. If you don’t like something about Google Docs, don’t rewrite it. Write your own (free if you want) Ajax web application for document editing. The field will evolve because there is another quality contender and we will all be better off.

The problem with charging for the service is that most users are in it for personal use and fun. They don’t drive business to themselves or their company, and as a result, the cost wouldn’t be worth it to them. There are several people and organizations who rely on Twitter as a part of their marketing strategy to drive additional traffic.

I propose the developers at Twitter write a suite of tools designed for companies and individuals with this in mind. By implementing a number of useful communications tools, they could provide a number of incentives for companies to purchase a subscription to the service. Things like being able to do mass messaging, organizing users into different groups, and an analytics and data mining application designed to quickly see things like the most important followers, most popular tweets, and most active time of day for your user demographic would all be invaluable tools and could be used to effectively drive traffic and profits even higher. Hopefully it would serve to drive Twitter’s profits anywhere at all.

I strongly disagree with this trend toward pushing beginning programmers toward “simpler” languages when they are starting out. I think learning c++ teaches certain programming concepts that many (and in some cases almost all) programming languages cannot:

Strongly Typed

C++ requires every declared variable to have a declared type, which brings with it several advantages. First, any type errors caused by things like trying to implicitly convert from one type to another or by calling invalid methods on a function are caught at compile time. This allows a developer to have much finer control over program flow, and reduces the number of possible run time exceptions dramatically.

Object Oriented

Anyone seriously interested in entering the world of modern software development must absolutely be familiar with the object oriented programming paradigm. This means that data can easily be represented in more complex ways, allowing a program to abstract data into more manageable forms. A program could for example, perform a series of functions specific to all pets, functions specific to dogs, and then functions even more specific to golden retrievers. C++ features support for all of the major aspects of object oriented programming, including public, private, and protected methods and variables, polymorphism (and even multiple inheritance, allowing a student employee to be both a subtype of student and a subtype of employee), and generic templates.

Procedural

C++ is also very well suited to procedural programming. Procedural programming replaces the objects, attributes, and class methods of object oriented programming and instead breaks tasks into data structures, variables, and functions (subroutines). By eliminating objects and their associated memory and processing overhead, well written procedural code is generally much faster than equally well written object oriented code. This functionality is particularly well geared to writing low-level applications like device drivers that need to be as fast as possible. Procedural programming is also excellent for quickly prototyping applications.

Unmanaged

Most modern programming languages have a feature referred to as “managed code,” which means that the compiler or interpreter automatically handles the allocation and deallocation of memory when a program runs using so-called “garbage collectors.” This eliminates memory leaks in a program, which is an excellent and useful feature.

As useful as garbage collection is, when someone is learning to program for the first time, any obfuscation of the way things work is not in that programmer’s long term interest. A C programmer (and c++ programmers to a lesser extent) knows the ins and outs of a computer’s memory system, and can pass pointers and pointers to pointers around with ease. This translates to being able to develop software that is fast, efficient, and that features well designed data structures.

Rarely does one see a group of people with such passion and excitement about what it is they are doing, and that is such a refreshing thing to see. I have been recording the keynote speeches every night for the production of the podcast, and to see the reaction of 12,000 people to everything said is astounding. Last night when Jessie Tolkan gave her speech, she challenged the crowd to get up and shout for change, and it is one of the most incredible crowd responses I have ever seen. I urge everyone to check out the Power Shift website. Watch the videos, read the blogs, and hope and pray that one day you are as excited about something as those I have met this weekend are about building a new, green economy.