A reminder to those with short memories – tomorrow is the Philly Geek Dinner. Look forward to good food and good drinks while meeting up with Philly’s tech community.
Put your name in on the Upcoming or Facebook group.
7pm at National Mechanics: 22 South 3rd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106
The New York Times published Say So Long to an Old Companion on the 28th of July.
The image above is the invitation from the audio department at Hachette for a party to mourn (read: celebrate) the passing of the cassette technology. Their final audiobook released on cassette was “Sail,” by James Patterson and Howard Roughan in June of 2008.
Cassettes held out far longer for audiobooks than music because they allow the listener to resume wherever they left off, in any device that supports a cassette (getting harder to find these). CDs took up about half of the audiobook market and digital download is already looking to surpass CDs in music.
This is great for me and the team, working on audiobook digital downloads. Developing software distribution allows an amazing amount of flexibility and ease of use. Digital allows us to resume where the customer left off (benefit of cassette), as well as provide a deeper connection through metadata and images. Through our Zip process, we help make it easy to put the audiobook on a device such as an iPod, WMA player, Windows Mobile or PalmOS phone.
Kind of like ice sublimation, audiobooks will sublimate directly to digital. No need to stop at a usurped physical media.
A Saturday thought on failure…
I’m not kidding in the title. You should be looking for areas to fail in. You can’t succeed without it. If you’re not accustomed to pushing yourself to the limit, you’ll never reach a goal that exists at the limit.
You should put yourself in situations that significantly challenge your ability to persevere as often as possible (without being reckless). Be used to being in this situation. The most successful people are consistently diving in to difficult situations and using the experience to push them to the next level.
It might mean you have to push yourself to the physical limit while running a marathon. It might mean having to cram 14 hours per day of studying to learn a new technology. In the end, the push to overcome potential failure makes you stronger. And in the beginning, you’ve calculated some risk and chosen a course of action to succeed.
Partners, friends, co-workers, and bosses who push your limits are the best kind. They keep you going and stretch your abilities. You’re on the right track with these folks. These people are the ones who will mercilessly help you reinvent yourself and bring you a better career and appreciation for life.
Get out there and find things you could fail at, calculate the risk, and choose the course of action that overcomes.
If you haven’t been to National Mechanics, you need to go. In fact, you should go this Thursday at 7:00pm so you can join the Philadelphia Geek Dinner first meetup (RSVP on Upcoming). I got to spend some time hanging with Jason, an owner of the place, and I’m stoked this is the kick-off location.
For starters, Jason isn’t a restaurateur by trade. He’s a developer and entrepreneur who has helped build WebLinc. While you’re here you’re right under a star Philadelphia company.
When I dropped by, Philadelphia’s Fox News was filming a 1-year follow-up to National Mechanics winning the “Trendiest Bar” award.