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Wednesday, 19 September 2007 |
We are pleased to bring you a new author video, filmed at the 2007 Virginia Festival of the Book.
Most people consider a trip to the islands to be good therapy. For some people this is more true than for others.
In Re'enev Luke and Meesha are taking an island sojourn in an attempt to rejuvenate their rocky marriage. Young professionals from Boston, they had been happily married until personal tragedy created an emotional gulf between them. Now, as they vacation in the rain forest, they attempt to create a fresh start for their relationship.
In this brief video Mike talks both about his book and the reactions it has garnered. His candid presentation of marital dynamics is discussed as are the parallels in real life. Divorce, avoidance and communication are addressed both in the framework of the novel and in the responses from his readership.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 12 March 2008 )
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Wednesday, 29 August 2007 |
In the last two years I have personally gone through 7 changes of address. A nomad prior to Hurricane Katrina, I've put my head to the pillow in over 50 cities during the same 2-year span. Using mail services, Vonage and Skype, I've been able to minimize the number of Change of Address announcements for my 2 businesses to a mere 4 re-routings.
Two years after Katrina came ashore, I live in the exact same apartment and work in the exact same office building as I did pre-K. Like a cyclone winding up, I've been chasing my tail all across America, ending up right where I started: in the path of devastation. And so are you.
In Seattle where I lived last year, a mediocre storm knocked power out to the entire city for days. When I lived there 20 years ago, I canceled the earthquake insurance on my house when the annual premium hit $5000. As insurers await The Big One in Seattle, very few homeowners or businesses carry earthquake insurance; it's not required by most lenders.
In Richmond where I lived two summers ago, the downtown entertainment district, Shockoe Bottom, suffered a devastating flood on August 30, 2004. The levee built to protect this historic neighborhood from the James River ironically penned-in a 5-hour, 14-inch soaking from Hurricane Gaston. Restaurants, galleries and nightclubs were destroyed to the second floor.
The neighborhood I evacuated to in East Nashville, Tennessee -- arriving on my daughter's doorstep at 6:10 a.m., August 29, 2005 -- was sawed off by an F3 tornado almost a decade ago and is still showing signs of recovery.
Wherever you live, whoever you are, one thing is certain: you won't last forever. The question really isn't where you should live; it's how you should live. That's why I'm still in New Orleans. Frankly, it's a better city after the flood: more thoughtful, more cohesive, more thankful for electricity, drinking water, and what passes for mail service. If you want to live, you could do a lot worse than New Orleans; if you want to die, well, you can do that anywhere.
Your Faithful Correspondent,
STEVE O'KEEFE
President, AuthorViews, Inc.
Executive Director, Patron Saint Productions
Resident of New Orleans, Louisiana, United States, Earth
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Last Updated ( Friday, 29 February 2008 )
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Tuesday, 28 August 2007 |
Many of us have wondered, What would it have been like to be stuck in New Orleans in the days after Katrina? How would we have handled ourselves at the Superdome or the Convention Center?
Now imagine those first few days with no electricity, no air conditioning, no running water -- inside the psych ward at the Orleans Parish Prison!
In this brief video, nurse Gavin Johnson talks about getting through Katrina with his elderly father in the psychiatric ward of a prison in downtown New Orleans where they had to shoot the windows out just to get air.
Don't worry -- this video is actually sweet, not graphic; many of the rumors about the prison -- such as a mass escape -- were flat wrong. For the full inside view, get a copy of Gavin Johnson's new book, Prisoners of Katrina.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 19 March 2008 )
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Tuesday, 21 August 2007 |
Comes the Darkness, Comes the Light is a revealing account of Vanessa Vega’s years of self-abuse, including "cutting" and anorexia. The book details factors in Vega's life that led to more than 30 years of self-harm, and reveals her coping methods and ultimate treatment process.
Vega is a high school English teacher and motivational speaker, presenting at conferences, schools, and special events on the topics of self-injury and eating disorders. She has a degree in English/Secondary Education from Texas Tech University and a degree in Health Education and Promotion from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Vega also has been nationally recognized for excellence in teaching.
In her continuing attempts to help others in need of understanding, Vega manages a blog where she addresses her 20 years of fighting anorexia and her 30-year struggle with self-injury. On her blog, she explores her past and current battles with her disorders, and offers guidance for others who suffer the same.
The excerpt from Comes the Darkness we have permission to display is a first-person account of cutting that might be shocking to some readers or act as a trigger for recovering cutters. Please use discretion.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 12 March 2008 )
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Tuesday, 21 August 2007 |
Patron Saint Productions, AuthorViews' sister company, recently embarked on an innovative online marketing campaign for this fascinating book. Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing is a pioneering work by social scientists Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper, research affiliates with the MIT Sloan School of Management.
In this elaborate lesson on trendspotting, the authors cover new media concepts such as swarm creativity, as well as "coolhunting" (finding trends) and "coolfarming" (encouraging the growth of creativity). The authors go a step further to explain that coolhunting is not as simple as uncovering the source of trends. It also investigates how groups of people work together in what are called COINs, or Collaborate Innovative Networks, which are nourished by swarm creativity. Moreover, three important principles of swarm creativity are revealed as to a) gain power by giving it away, b) share with the swarm, and c) concentrate on the swarm instead of on making money. These three elements make the book a significant contribution to the open source movement.
For a month beginning April 16, 2007, Patron Saint Productions produced a daily, live "coolhunt" with Cooper and Gloor. Using a FreeConferenceCall.com line, visitors could call in, log on, and follow the coolhunt as we navigated more than 100 original and imaginative websites in 20 days. Websites reviewed by the coolhunters included Creative Commons, Digg, Technorati, SpineConnect, ZoomInfo, and Minggl.
Transcripts of our daily coolhunts are available at the Swarm Creativity Blog, including a hotlist of all the sites we visited. Occasionally, we were fortunate enough to have special guests such as Raymond Miles, former Dean of the Haas Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations Group at UC Berkeley, and Scott Capdevielle, CEO and Founder of Syndicom and SpineConnect.
This was an educational and intriguing journey through cyberspace, and we invite you to view our results on the Swarm Creativity Blog.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 29 February 2008 )
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Tuesday, 14 August 2007 |
A blog named Facebook Secrets has published source code from the social networking site Facebook. Source code published over the weekend is from Facebook's front end, and source code published last night is for Facebook's user search interface. The second round of source code was published after Facebook's lawyers sent cease and desist notices.
It is feared that programmers could potentially analyze the architecture of the site and exploit any security weaknesses.
In a report from Heather Havenstein of Computer World, a spokeswoman from Facebook denies vulnerability:
The incident was not a security breach "and did not compromise user data in any way," the spokeswoman said. "Because the code that was released only powers the Facebook [user interface], it offers no useful insight into the inner workings of Facebook," she added.
However, Pete Lindstrom, a senior security analyst at Burton Group, said that anytime source code is accidentally revealed, "there is potential for an increase in risk." He added that when a company dismisses the security implications of such an incident, there likely really are security issues.
Trae McNeely is claiming credit for leaking the PHP code.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 29 February 2008 )
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