Category Archives: Reviews

Save money AND make your site faster using a CDN

By Jacob Allred | Published: January 28, 2010
My most pop­u­lar web­site, the Fake Name Gen­er­a­tor, recently ran into two major problems: It was using too many server resources. It wasn’t as fast as I wanted it. To solve these issues, I turned to Sim­pleCDN and their awe­some “mir­ror buck­ets”. Basi­cally you setup a bucket, point it at your base URL (in my case, http://www.fakenamegenerator.com), then [...]
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Songbird

By Jacob Allred | Published: December 31, 2009
I have recently become a huge fan of Song­bird, a free multi-platform media player based on Mozilla’s XUL­Run­ner. If you are any­thing like me, you may be ask­ing your­self what makes Song­bird spe­cial or worth your time. Why not just keep using iTunes, VLC, or Win­dows Media Player? Here are my rea­sons for choos­ing Song­bird over [...]
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Buying glasses online

By Jacob Allred | Published: December 3, 2009
Recently, I’ve been hav­ing some trou­ble read­ing small print on my mon­i­tor. After talk­ing to my wife, I real­ized that my vision just isn’t what it used to be. After get­ting my pre­scrip­tion, we hit up Sam’s Club and found a nice pair that would cost $127 plus 5% sales tax. Yikes! I just need a pair [...]
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Review: What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson

By Jacob Allred | Published: November 19, 2009
I’ve had some bad luck with books lately. First, I fin­ished What Dreams May Come by Richard Math­e­son. Aside from the hor­ri­ble writ­ing style (oh wo is us! the after life for bad peo­ple is soooo hor­ri­ble you just can’t even imag­ine. like seri­ously. its really really awful!), the doc­trine it tries to teach is so [...]
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Review: Designing Web Usability

By Jacob Allred | Published: October 14, 2009
Just gave up on Design­ing Web Usabil­ity. I mooched the book on the rec­om­men­da­tion of dozens of smart peo­ple that stated this is the defin­i­tive usabil­ity guide for the web. Lies! This book was out-of-date when it was pub­lished. The guy rants for like 10 pages on the virtue of using blue col­ored links. Another 10 pages [...]
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Review: Gun, with Occasional Music

By Jacob Allred | Published: October 14, 2009
Just fin­ished Gun, with Occa­sional Music. This is one of those books that has some clever ideas, a some­what inter­est­ing story line, but part way through goes in a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent direc­tion. Some­times that is good. In this case, it was bad. It felt like the author backed him­self into a cor­ner and wasn’t sure where [...]
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Review: The Judas Strain

By Jacob Allred | Published: September 29, 2009
Fin­ished read­ing The Judas Strain by James Rollins. I get the feel­ing it is part of a series, but it was an okay read by itself. Just an okay read, you ask? Well, yes… The story line relied on overly dra­matic sadist antag­o­nists, bad sci­ence, and mys­ti­cism. Not exactly what I’m look­ing for in a seri­ous [...]
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Review: The Ugly Truth About Small Business

By Jacob Allred | Published: July 18, 2009
Just fin­ished The Ugly Truth About Small Busi­ness by Ruth King. I was deeply dis­ap­pointed by this book. To sum up the entire book: Run­ning a small busi­ness is hard so become a moti­va­tional speaker instead.
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Review: Negotiating Your Salary

By Jacob Allred | Published: July 4, 2009
I just fin­ished Nego­ti­at­ing Your Salary: How to Make $1000 a Minute by Jack Chap­man. Although a lot of the infor­ma­tion was out­dated (the book has a “What to say in Y2K!” promo on the front…), it was an amaz­ing read. I loved it! Chock full of easy and use­ful tips, sam­ple dia­log, and easy to [...]
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Review: Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

By Jacob Allred | Published: June 19, 2009
Just fin­ished Three Weeks to Say Good­bye by C.J. Box. The book is nar­rated by a man that recently adopted a baby girl with his wife. Life is great until the adop­tion agency calls to tell him that the birth father wants the baby back. To make things worse, the birth father’s father is a fed­eral judge. While [...]
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