Category Archives: Miscellaneous

South by Southwest 2012 Part 1: Panels

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This article is part of a 3-part series recapping my experience at South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive 2012. It is split into the following sections: Panels, Parties, and Personal. As a reminder, everyone has a different goal and thus a different experience with SXSW. This is one extrovert’s take on 2012’s conference.

SXSW is full of panels. From 9:30am till 7:30pm for 5 days straight, you can gorge yourself on information across 15 different campuses, with a metric ****ton of content. I categorize all of the panels up into three categories: Learn, Interact, and Entertain. You can think of it like a Venn Diagram:

panel-venn-diagram
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My Words, My Voice: Gourmet Magazine and the Pingdom Podcast

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I’ve been pretty lucky lately. I spent an hour in January speaking to a writer for Gourmet magazine about my experience with Kickstarter. He then wrote a fantastic article about crowdfunding food items through Kickstarter, where I was proud to end-cap the article. The same day that the article was released, I recorded a guest spot on the Pingdom podcast (episode #5), talking about an article I published on SEOMoz regarding page speed improvements. We talked about a few other things (okay, I talked a lot).

Pingdom #5 by Pingdom

I don’t know what February will bring, but I was glad to be a small part of both the article and the podcast. Not that I love to talk or anything…

Switching Gears: Author Mode

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It’s tricky switching gears. I had a tough time doing it transitioning to an entrepreneur, and it’s still tricky now. The simple act of doing something completely different takes time. Sure, I did have some minor distractions for a few hours that interrupted my flow previously, but the amount of mental fortitude required was not as great as writing fiction; especially well written fiction.
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Mi Vida Loca Vocabulary – Online Spanish Flashcards

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I’ve been working on learning Spanish again, partially inspired by recent blog posts on GetRichSlowly. That is also how I discovered a wonderful beginner Spanish learning series by the BBC that is very interactive, natural, and a lot of fun when learning a language! It’s called Mi Vida Loca, “My Crazy Life”. It’s flash based, follows a story, and encourages listening, speaking, reading, grammar, and vocabulary. It’s a 12 week program with a total of 22 episodes, and will even email you a weekly reminder with your next two episodes.
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New Page Added: MASHD

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Just a quick note that there is a new page available on MarioLurig.com: MASHD. It’s an Active Monitoring tool for people who are using Dreamhost‘s Virtual Private Server (VPS) for their web hosting. It graphically displays their CPU and Memory usage while the webpage is open, and requires only copying a single file over to your web server before accessing that file through a web browser. It does the rest by creating 3 more files and running immediately; no configuration required. It works on any Linux based VPS or Dedicated server, I just happen to use Dreamhost VPS.

Getting Started Requires a Working Motor

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This isn’t a story of building all the parts before you have a working product. No, that would be obvious. This is about needing a working motor before you can even get started on the trip. After years of going into an office, accomplishing tasks from 9-5, and trying to fit in the other priorities of my life around that timeframe, it’s tricky to build out a day and a schedule where you can balance all those priorities in your own way. Continue reading →

The Adventure Begins: Level 1 Entrepreneur

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I thought I would let everyone know that after just shy of 3 years with SurveyGizmo as a customer support rep, sales engineer, technical training manager, and business development manager, I’ve decided to pursue my own interests and become a self-employed, poor for a little while, entrepreneur. I tried this three and a half years ago with limited success, but thanks to personal learning efforts and the wealth of knowledge I’ve gained from my coworkers at SurveyGizmo, I’m 5x’s as knowledgeable and capable as I was back then.
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