Jamie’s Weblog

I spent this Saturday at BizCamp Limerick — a thoroughly enjoyable, interesting and educational experience. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend every presentation but here’s some brief notes from those I did attend.
Mary Carty gave a great introduction to email marketing: It’s free; Be personal; Start a conversation; Get permission, never buy a list; Make it regular [...]

I took two days holidays last week to attend the FOWA Dublin conference and thought I’d contribute to the wealth of blog posts on this event:

Ryan Carson gave a very practical, actionable talk about starting a small web business. A terrific start to the event and well worth listening too. If nothing else, it pointed [...]

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is an inspirational book; not in that fluffy, chirpy plastic way of too many popular books but in the shear darkness of the author’s story and his attitude during it.
Part of the appeal of this book lies in the historical account from a survivor of the holocaust, told [...]

My review
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
First off, you’re probably not going to get to a 4 hour week and certainly not working as an employee. However, this book is a must read simply because of the way the author makes you look at things differently and turns established notions on their head. [...]

My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
A very interesting book about how an overabundance of choice creates stress and depression, particularly for a certain class of people (maximisers). Interestingly, it seems that I’m not a perfectionist but a maximiser (someone who always tries to find the absolute best course of action/choice).
As an example, I’ve recently [...]

My review

rating: 5 of 5 starsA fantastic book that every PhD student should read.
The advice is obvious but presented clearly and simply, making it a very powerful message: Winners quit (the right stuff). Basically, you can either quit your project (to focus on something else more worthwhile), stick with it (til [...]

I’m finally getting started on Shutter Scouts, a website for photographers to share and discover interesting locations.
Initially my principle tool was a blank pad of A4 paper and a biro for sketching out the data relationships, templates and pages.  After searching for a good cheap website template I decided to make my own — just [...]

I’m big into anything that means I don’t have to walk up and down the stairs at the moment. One of the annoying things was getting the laptop in the same place as the backup drive, which meant that I wasn’t actually making any backups. With lots of priceless baby pictures that kinda [...]

Due to the miserable weather, we saw both the Harry Potter and Transformers films this weekend.
I was kinda disappointed with the Potter film: it seems like you need to have read the books to enjoy the films. There are just too many characters, with similar names, and huge past histories to make the film [...]

Myself and Hilary went to see Aerosmith in Marley Park on Tuesday night.  The concert was pretty good but not enough of the older stuff for my liking.  Still, it did give us the excuse to spend 2 days in Dublin shopping and revisiting our old haunts:

Books in Hodges Figgis, of course!  €100 in [...]