Julia Gilmor – Communication Crackerjack

These are Julia Gilmor’s good things.

Good things to read.

Danielle LaPorte, Fire Starter Sessions. Danielle gets at the heart of creating a life and career that you love. It’s based on the premise of deciding how you want to feel in your life (powerful, creative, abundant) and then do the things that make you feel that way. It’s like getting a hug and a kick in the ass all at the same time.

Copyblogger. An amazing resource for creating online content/content marketing that gets noticed and shared. It’s well written, not dry and incredibly useful, just like you’d expect good content to be!

Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden. A young Ojibway man returns to home after serving as a sniper in WWI missing one leg, addicted to morphine and possessed by the horrors of war. This was over the top, rich in detail and in character development. It’s a haunting tale that stays with the reader long long after you’ve finished the last page.

Good things to watch.

True Blood. This darkly humorous vampire series from HBO is a guilty pleasure that stylistically tips it’s hat to B horror flix, oozes hot and steamy and breaks down gender and sexual boundaries.

Grounded TV. An online, independent, video network of people documenting social change and the artists and change makers who are doing good and bringing positive change to the world.

The Horizon. Whether you live in the mountains, on the coast or in a city, watching the sunrise and sunset is a beautiful marker of time passed. It lifts your head up out of whatever you’re doing and allows for a moment of simply resting in the present moment.

Good things to use.

Lime squeezer. The best 25¢ I’ve ever spent was on a orange plastic lime squeezer in the city market of Guadalajara Mexico. Adding lime enhances nearly everything. Margaritas Mexican style tuna salad, soup everything tastes better with lime. The squeeze helps you get the most out of your lime and increases your lime squeezing productivity.

Evernote is to Bookmarks what Pinterest is to Social Media; well designed, incredibly accessible and highly useful for storing and retrieving information. I do A LOT of research online and I bookmark a lot of articles on the fly but once they’re bookmarked or in my RSS feed I seldom go back. Partly because I have a lousy filing system partly because it’s hard to scan Bookmarks effectively. Evernote is attractive and easy to use and it makes information retrieval incredibly accessible.

Handmade Pottery. Whether coffee obsessed or a tea totaller, bonding with our morning bevy is a biggie for most of us. If you don’t currently drink your morning elixir out of a handmade ceramic item, do yourself a treat and buy one! It’s an affordable way to support a local artist and as each piece is handmade, each piece is an original that you can celebrate with every day.

Justin Zollars – javascript author

These are Justin Zollars’ good things.

What are some good things you’ve read?

Jewish Wisdom for Business Success – by Levi Brackman.  Levi Brackmann takes religious stories we learned as children, and relates them to the business world. The book could be summed up in a few words: Believe in yourself and have dignity and courage along the way. When reading this book one can’t help but get excited imagining the possibilities in front of you.. This book connects moral guidance with decision making – a book that every business man needs to read.

The Lean Startup – by Eric Ries. San Francisco and The Bay Area have a startup culture second to none. Eric Ries teaches agile methods of development and offers startup entrepreneurs a way to measure, and improve on their success. He models different ways of doing business and teaches you ways to grow your startup successfully.

Metaprogramming Ruby – Paolo Perrotta.  I owe studying this book my job, and for this reason it deserves a mention. This is the deepest exploration of the Ruby programming language and teaches the most advanced techniques of programming in an elegant fashion. For all its faults Ruby is a beautiful language, and while technical, this book does its depth justice.

What are some good things you’ve watched?

American Horror Story – Mix Catholic nuns in an insane asylum, aliens, murder, lesbians, and twisted killers and you get awesome. Last week there was an exorcism and I was scared to death. The catholic characters are fantastic, moral arguments with such immoral methods. I’m intrigued, horrified, and entertained every Wednesday.

True Blood – Vampires are cool and have style. This show takes place in Shreveport Louisiana and I was immediately pulled in with fantastic characters such as Vampire Bill, Sookie Stackhouse, Jason Stackhouse, and fantastic places such as the Merlotts and Fangtasia. The Vampires just want equal rights; and again you mix religion, philosophy, and emotion in their story.

What are some good things you’ve used?

Sparrow.  The first added a little simplicity into my life. Sparrow is an email client that works a lot like a twitter client, its easy to compose a message and get through your email messages without a complicated User Interface.

Spotify. Few things have disrupted the music market. The first was cd’s, then my iPod in conjunction with torrents, I believed it would never change from that point of perfection. Spotify has changed the way I listen to music. I listen, and discover new music every day; its packed with millions of songs from the cloud. I no longer need to be concerned with disk space; why buy the 64gb iPhone, when the 16 will due? Why purchase a 1 terabyte solid state drive, when I don’t require storage space? Cloud computing is the future. And spotify has exemplified cloud – or collective computing.

Meteor.js Lastly there is Meteor.js. I picked a winner with ruby, and I believe the winner of the next decade will be Javascript and applications returning to the web again. Meteor.js provides a framework to do this. Remember in the 90’s where we had fractured platforms (PC and Mac), installed applications, and version issues? In the early aughts those problems were largely eliminated with web applications, but have returned with vengeance in our fractured cellular phone marketplaces. The future will ignore the app store, and we’ll return once again to web applications. Meteor is a good attempt of a javascript framework allowing developers to make live web applications for mobile devices. Its all in Javascript and its wicked fast. This team is doing some really cool stuff and I’ve found it a joy to develop in.