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Showing posts from 2013

The 100 Calorie Diet Plan

Just released on Kindle, Nook and in Print, here's my latest book in the Health and Fitness genre. The 100 Calorie Diet Plan It presents a simple method to lose fat fast using simple math based on medically sound and accepted principles. What this means for you is one of the safest and most effective fat loss plans available today. This 62 page book is filled with the math you need to calculate your own needs, customized to your own body and activity level and explains how to develop your own nutritional goals for a series of short cycles as you work your way almost painlessly toward your success in getting the body composition of your dreams. This book briefly touches on how to properly utilize goals and affirmations to support your rapid progression to a new you. Break down your daily food intake into small simple easy to measure, easy to use, easy to prepare, easy to combine small portions and eat at your own pace. Skip the fads and mythology about eating. No

iBook Store and Personal Publishing

There used to be a loophole for PDF uploads in the iBook Store. A few of my fans on Seven Summits Quest Facebook asked if I could provide my books in iPad format so I went through a near-exhaustive process of signing up as a publisher in the iBook Store. This was a pretty serious undertaking. B&N was the easiest to sign up for. Amazon was fairly simple. Apple was a long complicated process of bank and ID verification. After over a month of that, I finally was ready to publish. There was no way to publish. I dug all over the place, and apparently the PDF loophole was closed. Uploading wasn't possible, even for properly formatted and converted ebooks. Frost covered leaf The only way to do it on your own as a publisher was to buy a relatively expensive new computer and install their free software and rewrite the book in that software. The second option was to hire one of their preferred providers to do all that for you. For a fee. In both cases though it was expensive eno

Elbrus Race 2013 - ebook publishing on Kindle and Nook

I've finished writing the ebook "Elbrus Race 2013" about the adventure race in Russia that I and Todd Gilles, national figure skating champion, competed in. It was great fun in spite of the whiteout along the course between cliffs and crevasses. When the book is live, presumably tomorrow, I'll put up links for you to buy it. Post by Seven Summits Quest .

Amazon Travel Book Promotion

I was privy to an email from Amazon recommending a slew of various travel books. In the list were my Orizaba, My Almost Free Mexico Adventure and Elbrus, My Waterloo . If you see the headline there "Travel Books" - Orizaba is the first on the list. Elbrus was about 5th on the list. I'm really happy that Amazon has done this bit of promotion for me. I hope it pays off in the long run. That being said, I'm in the process of creating the second edition of the Orizaba book, including my successful climb of 5 March 2013 with my good friend Todd Gilles. I call this "My unintentional climb of Orizaba". We weren't planning on going to the summit that day at all. It was supposed to be a lazy day of acclimatization a couple days before the summit climb. Then of course we got lost in the dark on the way down ... Hang loose and I'll let you know when it's ready. On Amazon, B&N and in Print.

Napster Limewire and Digital Rights Today

I think most adults my age in business understand that sometimes people just own stuff. Most of law is predicated on that fact. Kids though. Wow. Because of all the file sharing craziness in the years surrounding the transition into the 21st Century, they expect that everything is free and no one really owns anything.    Their iconic heroes of free everything sadly became part of the whole big business cashflow machine after discovering that yes indeed, the law was on the side of the owners. Then we get into the era of the mashup - a bit of this and that from everywhere and nowhere. No one really owns any of it because everyone owns a tiny part of it. This evolves into crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. Can the 3,000 people who each gave you $10 to fund a board game project ever hope to get together to sue you for mismanaging the project?  In fact, Kickstarter backers are exchanging something for nothing except a pledge that they will, at some estimated date in the future or very

Trade Shows part 1 - National Association of Broadcasters

A very long time ago I did some video production work. I wrote, shot, and edited commercials for a local business. I also shot and edited some commercials for some physicians in California. I was an extra in some indie film productions in Utah. I shopped some screenplays, treatments, and pitches in Los Angeles. As part of that process I also attended the NAB Show. This is an annual trade show in Las Vegas. The NAB is a trade organization for people who are employed by television and radio stations in the USA. You can also be a member if you're studying various broadcast technologies, acting, drama or theater. Then there are advertising agencies and other support industries, camera and equipment manufacturers and distributors. Boom camera and jumbo screen at Psicobloc Utah 2013 But this show was pretty much open to the public. Anyone with $75 could get in and have total access to the trade show floor. As well, you had access to a variety of training sessions (editing softwar

First 2-star Review for Elbrus

Descent read but strange delivery. Author/climber seemed way out of their element would have liked to hear more of the cultural experiences as well. At the wool market in Cheget while acclimatizing for Elbrus I read this over and over trying to figure it out. At first I was really confused, and mildly miffed. My book Elbrus, My Waterloo [ HERE ] has been one of my best selling books on Amazon. It's gotten quite a few 5-star reviews and one 4-star review. But 2-stars? I'll address a few of these thoughts here. 1) Descent - I'm pretty sure the reviewer meant "Decent" and decent is good enough for me. If everyone that reads it believes it to be decent, then I did my job well enough. 2) strange delivery - I think this refers to the fact that it's my journal notes expanded slightly. I make no secret of this in any of my marketing text. I kept a journal. I fleshed it out and made it into a book that could be read by someone who is not me, and doesn'

How my internet went to heck - Digis Takes Over

For the past dozen or so years I've been all of: Developer Programmer Systems Administrator Database Administrator Video Producer Photographer Writer Community Manager most of which require huge chunks of bandwidth and roughly 100% uptime. I've had Comcast and been quite happy. Qwest and been relatively unhappy. A neighborhood T-1 and been exceedingly unhappy. Rapidwave and been quite happy. So happy I resisted getting Comcast when it finally appeared in my neighborhood after a ten year letter writing campaign by my neighbors in the development. Rapidwave was one of those microwave antenna providers. I got the business class service with a dedicated IP and a lot of bandwidth and no service caps. I've had excellent service with only one decrease in bandwidth that they fixed in only a few days after I called about it. A handful of months ago they sent an email saying they were changing their infrastructure and that we needed to redo our settings in our route

Kicking Back for a Chill

I got back from Carstensz with a lot of issues to resolve. I think anyone who had been held against their will and detained in what amounts to an Indonesian jail would understand, right? Anyway, I had torn rib cartilage to deal with that made breathing tough. I have several other climbs coming up that I need to be in shape for. I had an Ultra coming up that required me to almost immediately fall back into my 24 miles per week running training. I had to finish writing the most intensely personal and painful to recount book ever in my career of writing Carstensz, Stone Age to Iron Age [ MORE HERE ]. I think Iron Age might be a veiled reference to Iron Bars - what do you think? I was able to seclude myself for a week in rural Colorado and convert my transcribed notes to the final book. If you're an author writing primarily autobiographical books and articles, and have to endure the intensity of your emotions and physical pain while writing, then please, do everyone important in

Film Festival History

A very long time ago when I lived in Kansas City, I attended a workshop on how to write a screenplay. At the time I was already editing my own fanzine that I later sold for an outrageous profit. I was also writing regularly for a handful of local magazines including New Age and Health topics, like the kind you find in massage studios. I did quite well and kept in touch with the instructor, who was a Hollywood Reader - the people that pre-screen submissions to studios. I wrote a screenplay and shopped it around some, getting a call from a VP at Viacom at my job in landscaping. I was completely and totally unprepared for that call and botched it terribly. I kept that bug in the back of my mind for a few years, and later when a company moved me to Utah for a tech job, I ended up hanging on the periphery of the Indie Film crowd. I went to a very professional Short Film Fest in Nevada, and decided I would make one for a Utah fest. The topic of the short was supposed to be something

What About Elbrus Race 2013?

I went to Russia twice in 2010. Both times to climb Elbrus, the highest point of the European Continent. It's also the highest volcano in Europe. That puts it on the list for the Seven Summits, as well as the Volcanic Seven Summits. Training on Mount Rainier for Elbrus Race 2010 In May of 2010 I went with a group and sadly, on our acclimatization day the weather was perfect, and at 15,300' at Pastukhova Rocks I felt just amazing and wanted to continue on to the top. This tactic actually worked quite well for me on Orizaba in May of 2013. I topped out on the highest volcano in North America on May 5 2013. On Elbrus though, for our summit day, the weather was horrible, blowing high winds and I was quite underdressed, not being very familiar with the European (at least Russian) way of doing things. Slog slog slog as slowly as possible to the summit wearing every single item of clothing you own. Quite a bit different from Rainier. So I ended up with stiff frozen finger