BSOD debut's on Microsoft reader catalog at number 83

Quite pleased and surprised to find an MS Reader catalogue entry for the Blue Screen of Death when I ran my daily google search for the book this afternoon. The book debut at number 83, just after David's Vise' Google Story.

Thank you Microsoft and Vaqar Khamisani (I suspect).

Amazon update

Amazon.com terminates it's relationship with Ingram Micro, which in turn kills the Lightningsource catalog. The ebook is no longer available for sale on Amazon, though you could read the reviews and the product statistics.

Two options available now are to list it as an edoc - unprotected pdf or to sign up with mobipocket books, an Amazon subsidiary that wants the same distribution credit as a typical paper book. Not sure if I am too keen on that.

Lightning source forwarded another amazon email address that I have written to, lets see what they have to say.

You can still buy the book at Powells and Diesel Books

Hiring lessons from BSOD

The honest truth: No one wants to work for a small company with no money and possibly no future. Deal with it. You sell to every one you touch, starting with employees. If you haven’t already, learn to sell.

Hiring sources: Your network is your single best source of leads, referrals and future employees. Let it know of what you need and be patient. Job advertisements and recruiting agencies do not work for young businesses.

Hiring Motivators: People switch jobs because of boredom, change and desperation. Not money or opportunity or the chance to change the world. Hunt for passion in boring places.

Ask the right questions. Listen.

Be honest and fair: If you work with old technology say so; if you will not pay salaries on time say so; if you want them to clean cupboards say so. And if they still want to work with you, hire them and take care of them.

The Blue screen of death, revised edition

Running a business while at school

Your single biggest obstacle when it comes to entrepreneurship is opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is the size of your current pay check that you would forgo, if you stepped out as an entrepreneur. If you earn a six figure pay check today, letting it go to starve and struggle for a few years may not fit in your definition of moving up in society. At school you have already given up the paycheck (and the opportunity cost problem) in your quest for self improvement.

Can you actually do it? Graduate school is a walk in the park if you tackle the problem of mixing business with studies correctly. In my last term at school I structured my classes from 8 am to 6 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, wrapped up my assignments by 9pm the same day, and was free to work on Avicena for the remaining five days of the week.

In that term I made the dean’s list, competed in two business plan competitions, finished the proof of concept, marketing, strategy and financial projection documents, closed the Aleph and Appsys deals, managed an introduction with a recently retired head of a big five accounting firm and moved to California.

School is also interesting in that you have access to a unique microcosm of society that may open future doors and give you valuable feedback for free. My social network at Columbia had a Bankers Trust MD, a hedge fund analyst, a fund raiser for the Clinton campaign, a member of Reuters management team in North America, the son of IBM’s CEO, four actuaries, an F-14 pilot, two nuclear submariners, two engineers from Qualcom and Intel, a popup video editor, a fair mix of Indians, Pakistanis, Portuguese, French, Englishmen, Australians, Peruvian, Italian and exactly one Venezuelan (potential) contender for the Miss Universe title. This was just my network; imagine what the other 700 students looked like.

Revised edition coming out in August

With a foreword from Shane Chalke and a Takeaways section after Avicena emails.

New venture failure workshop in Lahore

The New Venture Failure workshop make its appearance at the Lahore PC - on July 24th 2006. For more details and reservations please contact Jehan Ara at PASHA. Courtesy of the outstanding folks at Punjab IT Board.

5000 hits, 100K in download bandwidth

Quick question? Apparent surge in traffic that I can't trace back to specific referals or normal behaviour of visitors. Normally when traffic goes wild so do downloads of book related content and referals from a specific source. Book reviews or commentary posted at specific sites normally drive traffic surges.

I suspect one of the spiders has gone wild and is slurping abnormally. Any one out there who is noticing the same trend on their web logs