If you are at all interested in cloud-performance, this is a webinar that you should probably attend, whether or not you use Rightscale as your application platform, and here’s why.

At the simplest level, the “cloud” is really just a series of servers, pre-configured, sitting in a data center somewhere. However, there are significant differences between how you would configure your own servers for performance, and how you configure those sitting “in the cloud”.

While I don’t know what tips Mr. Saavedra will be speaking on, specifically (I’m definitely interested in finding out), but I can guess the general direction. Just like with anything else, if you work with the way the systems are built, you’ll have a faster example. For example, using the Amazon “ephemeral” store is faster than EBS block volumes, and you can ease out even more performance by connecting those volumes in a raid configuration.

As always, I’m sure that Rightscale will give us some great tips on how to performance-optimize applications for Rightscale (and the cloud, in general), and I’m looking forward to the talk.

I’m afraid that I wasn’t very succinct in my answer, so I’ll try again.

Granted, it had been a long day meeting new people and giving presentations, I was a couple of Makers Mark’s into the evening, and, with four kids, I haven’t been out much in the past 10 years. But, hell, I could have done  better than that.

Louisville really is a great place to live, though I’d prefer a little more moderate whether and a little less pollen.

So, here’s a little better reply …

My favorite hotel, by far, is the 21c Museum Hotel, and the restaurant, where my sister-in-law works, Proof on Main. Guys, you’ve got to visit the men’s room while your there.  I do love steak, and both Morton’s and Pat‘s Steak Houses are great once-in-while while treats. There are a few places I visit semi-regularly, including King Fish on the waterfront.

What to do in Louisville?

One thing does strike me … both cities love good food, but while wine tasting seems to be very popular in Santa Barbara (no doubt due to the local vineyards), in Kentucky, we do bourbon tasting (no doubt due to the local distilleries). What that says about the relevant cultures, I leave as an exercise for you, dear reader.

The Ohio River … that through a quirk of law is actually controlled by Kentucky … is a great place to go. I especially enjoy hanging out at the waterfront park, where we take family walks and Lee sometimes bikes. Outside of Louisville, we visit Bernheim Forest and Mammoth Cave (and the surrounding parkland). For beach time, there’s Rough River.

The truth is, though, I’m a pretty strong introvert and enjoy spending time contemplating the internal than out doing – hardly a typical “Louisvillian” (or typical at all). If you really want to know about Louisville, places to eat, and things to do you should probably head over to Consuming Louisville, where Michelle Jones serves up a delectable byte of Louisville every week.

Thank you, again, Rightscale, for the trip to Santa Barbara.

Upon account creation, it sent them the auto-generated passwords.

Something like: R%z”5N&I!jY8]

I received a one-liner response from Kayla: WHY SO HARD?

And here’s how I responded. Hope you’ll get some use out of the information.

The computer auto-generated a password for you.

Some “crackers” – people who try to get into other people’s accounts, will try to guess your password and log in to your account in order to steal your information and use your account for evil purposes (like spamming all your friends or getting into your facebook).

Any password that is a common name or a word in the dictionary, or a simple variation is easy to crack.

So a good password is very random, and has:

• both uppercase and lower letters
• not a word or name
• has at least one number
• at least one non-alphanumeric character (alpha = alphabet, numeric = number) so non-numeric means a “funny” character, one that isn’t a number or a letter … like: !@#$%^&*()_+-=.,/? etc
• is 6 or more caracters long. 8+ is better.

So the password wordpress created for you is a really good passsword, though somewhat hard to remember.

Once the new site is setup, you can go in and change the password to something you can remember – but remember it still needs to be a “good” password.

If you are needing to create paswords, I recommend this password generator from grc.

Here’s the details in case you are having trouble deciphering the details from the site.

What: WordCamp 2010 – come and interact with WordPress and other experts. Looks like there will be 3 tracks.

When: Saturday, December 4th. Registration begins at 8:00, conference will go on all day with an as-yet-to-be-announced after party.

Where: University of Louisville Shelby Campus at the Delphi Center (Inside the Founder’s Union Building.) Directions. Map.

How Much: $20 per person, plus a small ticketing fee. Proceeds go toward charity. Tickets.

Need more details? Visit the WordPress Conferance in Louisville: Wordcamp 2010 website

Yes, Sybil and I will be there through most of the presentations, but probably a bit late — Lee is having a Boy Scout function in the morning.

This one has been running for over 2 years.

This is what it looked like just before I took it offline (instance id i-bdee4dd4):

20:39:05 up 778 days,  4:44,  3 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

That’s the last “instance store” machine I had, now everything is running on the Elastic Block Store (EBS).

With EBS, I’ll be rebooting more often (monthly or so) in order to get instantly-available clones, so this will probably be my personal server uptime record.

The year is …

After ok’ing the upgrade, it went off downloaded the software then rebooted.

“About” Software information in Settings now reports Android Version 2.2.

I haven’t had a chance, yet, to look at the new features, but I’m looking forward to playing on it later this week.

Eric Holmlund’s “Epic Firesale” ends today. This is a series of 32 software and 14 ebook products that you can use or sell in your business. I’ve downloaded and looked at the source code (which you you can purchase additionally), and most products are pretty good. Some are PHP, Delphi and a little Visual Basic thrown in.  Note that you DO NOT need the source code to sell the products: the initial offer includes everything you need: the product, documentation and sales website, to make a fully functional reseller website.

However, with the source, you can take the products and brand them as your own, which is highly desirable from a branding standpoint.  You can see the bonus package I’ve put together at the Epic Firesale bonus page.

Remember, this sale ends shortly.

Also, Jeremy Burns has put together his latest source code goldmine package. This package consists of 10 high quality ebooks – you’ll want to read the Source Code Goldmine review to find out more.

Marketing Website Generator has released version 1.2.3 of the the open source Membership Management System. The MMS system is software you run on your website to manage your membership and products. This is a free download after account creation.

My company, Intellispire has released version 3.1 of the AWeber Jomlink software, used to connect your Joomla powered website to your AWeber auto-responder service (or any one of the many compatible systems, such as jvlistpro).

As you know, I’m a great fan of any type of software and digital products that I can use, modify and sell, and this package stands out among the crowd.

SCGM products have always been good, and this year is no exception.

The 10 items include:

• Law of Attraction Marketing – A new take on a popular topic
• Banner Ads are Back – I’ll use this when promoting my upcoming Traffic Exchange software for use with MWG
• Ben Franklin’s Guide to Internet Marketing – a unique twist on applying Franklin principals to marketing.
• Facebook Power Ads – I’m just “getting into” facebook, as many people are, so this is a particularly timely guide.
• Internet Guru Training Camp – looks to be good info if you are looking to teach
• How to Become a Work At Home Mom – I’m simply not in a position to have an opinion on this one
• Creating iPad Apps – I’ve been playing with iPhone, iPad and Android Apps for a while. I’m extremely skeptical that one can create any app without technical skill, this manuscript does a credible job of the types of things you’ll need to know to get started.  There are some shortcuts that it doesn’t mention, so if I decide to sell it (and I may), I’ll update it with my unique perspective, first. Like many reports of this nature, it can’t go into great detail, simply due to Apple confidentiality restrictions, if for no other reasons.
• Local Internet Marketing Empire – after the recent 6 and 7 figure launches in the local space, this item is also pretty timely.
• Micro Project Outsourcing – a different take on a classic subject. Instead of focusing on projects sites such as Elance or Scriptlance, it focuses on the Amazon Mechanical Turk and “micro tasks”. This has been one of my “secret weapons” for years.  I’m really impressed with this report, and that it makes such cool technology accessible to you. There is much more to say on this subject, but I suggest you read the primer, first. Major thumbs up.
• Social Media Manage for Celebrities – little in this book focuses on “celebrities” (one chapter shows you where to find celebrities to work for), but it does show you how you can manage social media for anyone. Since I’m trying to wrap my head around social media, I’ve found it a good primer for myself. It DOES contain good information on how to find clients, market your services and run a social media business, and I’m personally more interested in the chapters on how to actually manage the social media.

From a pricing standpoint, the package is an excellent value: he’s offering the entire package for $197, but there’s a $100 “rebate” if you act quickly. Since there is more than one product in the pack that I am personally interested in, and I know my subscribers are also interested in the same topics, purchasing this package is really a “no brainer”.

I am a little disappointed that, over the years, the SCGM sales have turned away from software and moved more toward PLR and digital products such as “ebooks”.  With the support that most software requires, I do understand why he’s done this, though: and 10 high quality products that cost under $10, each (after rebate, if still available) is a great deal.

Finally, a note on quality: each book reads like a “book” or manual, and not a fluffed up, triple spaced report written by a non-english speaker that you so often see. It contains a very nicely done cover, title page, table of contents and resource page at the end (which you’ll want to add your own resources to). Each book is about 100 pages or so, and are well done.

The writing IMO is mostly above average – it gets the information across. From my informal tests, the writing is a bit inconsistent in some places, reading at about a 12th grade level. The reading level is probably about right for the target market: my writing generally hits about college sophomore level according to the tests I run, before I struggle to clean it up.

The reports are definitely usable as-is, but to be top-notch I’d suggest spending some time and possibly making the content a little more accessible by editing the documents and smoothing out the rough edges. The great thing about this package is that you CAN go in and edit the documents if you so choose.

One note on a Mac: my Word 2008 keeps closing when opening some of the .docx files. I don’t know if that’s my computer or a problem with the package (I suspect my computer), but using the free OpenOffice program worked pretty well, and allowed me to create “one click” PDF’s as well. You can google for OpenOffice here, if you need it.

Overall, a qualified “thumbs up”:

If you are interested in any 2-3 (or more) of the topics covered in this package, then it’s worth getting for your own personal use alone.

If you have an online business, where your customers are interested in these topics, then by all means, get the package. You should be able to make your money back and more in a single mailing after implementation, or as an cross-sell to an existing offer.

If you are just starting out, and looking for some top-quality products to put into your product pipeline, then this is a way to go. You get timely reports on interesting subjects, and should be able to start building a list pretty quickly. Consider implementing a Marketing Website Generator site with OTO, affiliate program, and more.

The qualification? If you aren’t looking to sell any of the products, and you only want 1-2 manuscripts for personal use, you may be better off waiting a few days and purchasing from a reseller. Otherwise, I say “go for it”.

My affiliate link is:

http://www.intellispire.com/try/scgm

And I appreciate your patronage.

[Edit: A few people have asked if I will be offering a bonus with this purchase, and the answer is "probably". I can't reveal details at this point, but if you know me, you also know I don't leave my customers behind. I'm looking for good ways to create a  Source Code Gold Mine Bonus similiar to the way I did for the Epic Firesale.]

His is new 7-day sale includes over 40 software and digital book titles, sales material and documentation, white-labeled and ready to sell.

I’m putting together a bonus by taking the products, implementing them inside of the Marketing Website Generator software, and providing you a ready-to-go business in a box.

To take advantage of this Epic Firesale Bonus, simply follow the instructions you can find, here.

Here’s the “official” swipe copy, which I happen to agree with:

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If you’re like me, you’ve probably seen a lot of hyped up product launches on the internet lately.

Needless to say, it takes something special to REALLY get my attention any more.

So today I want to tell you about a CRAZY 7-day sale that will shock you even if you’re a jaded internet marketer

It blew me away, and that’s why I wanted to share it with you.

Check out this short video, and be sure to watch all the way to the price.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being perfectly normal and 10 being certifiably insane, this deal is an 11!

I still can’t believe this guy is basically giving away his 7-figure business (and more).

He explains his reasons in the video… and it does seem to make sense… but I still have to wonder.

Nevertheless, his insanity is YOUR gain!

I recommend going to this site and “ripping off” his amazing business before he changes his mind.

This page is going to be taken OFFLINE in 7 days (or sooner if he comes to his senses), so be sure to check it out right away!

This would be a great way for you to start a new business or expand your existing online business.

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