10% Discount on Amazon EC2 Consulting
Perhaps you’ve heard of “utility computing,” whereby you pay for only the computing resources you use. It’s the perfect “pay-as-you-go” structure for on-demand computing to accomplish number crunching, analysis, video encoding and more. Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) is the world’s largest utility computing effort today.
With the service, anyone can take advantage of Amazon’s vast computing and bandwidth power to create whole new businesses with Amazon’s massive server farms. Imagine: Instantaneous computing power at the flip of a switch! You control how long the server runs, its function and more.
I am presently offering a 10% discount on Amazon EC2 consulting which will be good for:
- Establishing a web presence
- Hosting databases
- Telling friends you have a really big server farm
- Running an e-commerce site
- and more
I’ll be glad to assist in getting your first Amazon EC2 instance up and running. For more details about Amazon EC2, get started here. Once you’ve learned about all the wonderful things EC2 can do for you or your business, be sure to come back here and take advantage of my discounted consulting offer.
This site is running on an Amazon server I deployed with MySQL, Apache, WordPress, Asterisk PBX and other software applications custom selected to meet my needs.
Living and Working from Anywhere
Have you ever desired to live and work from anywhere in the world without confinement to a desk or cubicle? Would you give up your home, friends and family to explore everything on the face of this planet — right now? Would you sacrifice the comfort of your surroundings to embrace new ones several times per year? Would you be willing to break social conventions and your own “safe rules” to think outside the box and redesign your life?
Thanks to Timothy Ferriss and Lea Woodward, both are providing the world with the insight and tools to achieve such a life. Ferriss is doing so with his new book, “The 4-Hour Workweek” and Woodward with “X Marks The Spot: The Indispensable Guide To Living As a LIP And Working From Anywhere”.
Woodward’s focus is on living and working anywhere (”Location Independent Professional,” or LIP), while Ferriss’ is reducing your hours, outsourcing and enjoying your life to the fullest with an abundance of free time.
Both Woodward and Ferriss’ approach are both great, as they both enable you to live your life independent of any location while traveling the world NOW — not when you’re retired and older. Both challenge you to think differently and to throw out common concepts about permanent domiciles and the like.
So far, I’ve had the pleasure of reading Ferriss’ book and plan to order Woodward’s soon. In the meantime, I’ve become acclimated with Woodward’s approach via her lipliving.com site, which also features other LIPs (again, “Location Independent Professional”) sharing their LIP plans, challenges, goals and more.
I must admit that this lifestyle appeals to me greatly and is something I intend to pursue. I am also in a great position currently as I have no overheard (house, car, family or significant other) and am self-employed as an imagineer, social media producer (lifecaster, blogger and podcaster) and Internet marketer — all of which are ideal for living and working anywhere in the world. Thus, I am happy I chose the Internet as my full-time focus more than two years ago. It’s the best choice I’ve ever made, regardless of the pitfalls, frustrations, etc.
What about you? Are you ready to shatter the rule book and take control of your life? There’s nothing holding you back but yourself. It’s your life, passion and dream. Don’t place them on hold until you’re well into your 60s. Life is meant to be lived, and there’s no sense in waiting for “retirement.”
24/7: A Real-Time Social Experiment
A few months ago, I changed the name of this site from just “Ronald Lewis Dot Com” to “24/7 with Ronald Lewis”. The change, while simple, was also the beginning of an emerging experiment in new / social media. Now, as a consumer of social media tools and one who produces content for society as a blogger, podcaster and recently, lifecaster, I’ve witnessed an interesting transformation in my life.
In particular, I’ve been broadcasting my life 24/7 via various platforms for about three months now. I’ve found users of Justin.TV to be the most engaging, with BlogTV being a distant second. I’m making new friends, securing prospective opportunities, and engaging a crowd with thought-provoking topics and interests.
However, this new experiment in real-time engagement is more than just broadcasting one’s life. It’s an opportunity for human beings to learn, share, connect and learn together. It’s a social evolution for everyone involved. Let’s watch it flourish — together.
Google Analytics: The Numbers Are Missing
Google Analytics is a great tool. I use it for several sites. The in-depth information provided by this world-class service is priceless. Wonderful graphs, deep information mining and ease of use make it a wonderful platform for analytics and statistics for web sites.
However, because Analytics uses JavaScript, there’s a world of missed opportunity. For the past year, I took the numbers provided by Analytics and StatCounter literally. I assumed that my site only received 300-600 pageviews a day — excluding several stories which brought much traffic and attention to my site.
Well, I’ve been living a lie. Both Google Analytics and StatCounter weren’t showing me the entire picture. So, last month, I started paying more attention to my web server’s log and installed several stat tools on WordPress. I was blown away.
On a typical day, I receive thousands of pageviews. Just this past Friday, almost 4,000 unique readers (representing more than 12,000 pageviews) visited my site to read articles about Erin Burnett alone. Suffice to say, I was overjoyed by the new numbers, although I suspected that my site was doing much better than Google and other JavaScript tools were showing.
For the month of June, ronaldlewis.com saw more than 100,000 pageviews. Google, nor StatCounter, are showing numbers anywhere near this amount.
So, here’s a word of advice: Don’t take the numbers provided by Google and StatCounter literally. You are cheating yourself of the real, hardcore numbers. However, I would recommend that bloggers and web site owners continue to use these JavaScript based tools for analytics purposes. While they may not tell the whole story, they are still good to keep around.
Windows Server 2003 Migration This Weekend
Growers Organic, an organic produce distributor based in Denver, Colorado has been a client now for more than a year. They are Denver’s leader in organic produce distribution. When they launched in late 2005, I was called upon to roll out a Windows Server 2003 network with Exchange (e-mail), Peachtree accounting, faxing and Internet capability for about five desktops to run their operation.
Since that time, they’ve experienced a lot of growth and they recently decided to make capital improvements to their IT infrastructure. So, now, I’m tasked with migrating their current network to a new Windows Server 2003 64-Bit Edition server, which will replace their existing server. This project will keep me busy over the weekend and throughout part of next week.
The most important aspect of this migration is the “directory”, where all of the users, settings and other goodies are stored. There’s also their company data, network shares, etc. Here’s to a smooth migration for a great client!