Hi everyone,

Unless you were one of the lucky few, you probably missed out on seeing a picture of 18 year old me with my most recent post. It turns out that I was storing the image in way too high resolution and was hitting a bandwidth limit with the folks over at Geocities.

The picture should now be viewable, sorry for the mixup.

—Pete

After about a week and a half of template editing, data migration, plugin installation, and DNS manipulation, I’m happy to announce a brand new platform and look for http://nerdguru.net! Come take a look when you get a chance. The new WordPress rendered UI includes:

• A new and improved subscription widget that incorporates my current subscription count in a different way and brings email subscribing one step closer to the user
• A front page the now has snippets of multiple articles instead of just a single one
• Highlighting the other places that have been generous enough to run my content
• Easier navigation between individual posts and improved grouping of archives
• A view of my Twitter feed

My hope is that this improved UI helps my conversion rate of visitors to subscribers, but I’d love to hear what you think about it as well. I’m still fixing a few links for “General Stuff” posts, but am otherwise through the transition pretty smoothly.

As always, don’t be afraid to tell a friend. My goal with this site is to help people learn from my failures and successes to have better careers. The more the merrier!

Special thanks to Jason Alba, Tac Anderson, and Nilay Soneji for their guidance, coaxing, bullying and other support along the way. I’ve got a new article queued up for tomorrow (Tuesday, April 1) on a key to asking for help from others, so be on the look out for it.

Howdy,

I’m in the process of moving Nerd Guru to a hosted Word Press installation and as a result, there might be some outages or links that are temporarily broken. I’m pretty excited with this change and the extra flexibility it will give me. Thanks for your patience, I should be through the worst of it by the time I post fresh content on Monday.

—Pete

Congratulations to the winner of the First Annual Blogoversary Scavenger Crossword Contest Spectacular, Philip Chen!

Here’s what Philip sent me about himself:

“I’m a hardware/IC design engineer working on networking chips for enterprise switches. I’ve been working (and living) in Silicon Valley for the past 10 years. I think blogging is one of the most significant and revolutionary things that could have happened in the our new Web 2.0 era. I’m a fan of Web Worker Daily and its articles: I found out about the contest when I was reading Pete’s insightful article on ‘Get Mad But Don’t Get Even - Turn an Insult Into a Favor.’ Thanks Pete for the wonderful articles!”

Thanks for the kind words and for the hard work on this, Philip. It took him just over 3 hours, on and off, to complete the puzzle. Somewhere, Dan sighs at missing his chance at the money 8).

Here’s his solution:

Besides the admiration of all Nerd Guru readers, for his accomplishment Philip also wins a $50 Amazon gift certificate. Not only did he solve the puzzle (and figure out that Henry Jones, Jr. is more commonly known as “Indiana” for #14 Across), he did so despite my inadvertent misspelling of the answer for #9 Across, which I idiotically spelled “tobbacco”. I’m sure that embarrasses my crossword fanatic mother and former spelling bee champion wife as much as it does me 8).

Congratulations to Philip and thanks to everyone else who attempted the contest!

After all the hoopla and anticipation, here it is.

To repeat from the post earlier in the week, here’s how this works:

1. Download and print off the JPEGs below
2. Complete the puzzle, making heavy use of the blog search
3. Scan your finished puzzle
4. Email it to me at petecj2@gmail.com

I suppose if you can figure out a way to overlay the letters of your solution on the graphic below, I’d accept that too. The first person to send in a completed puzzle will win a $50 Amazon.com gift certificate. People related to me by marriage or birth are not eligible (sorry, Mom) but people I work with or their children are (that means you, Dan, how busy can the first week of your semester really be?).

I think 14 Across (because of the obscurity of the reference in the Easter Egg) and 18 Across (because I fear the wording of the clue sucks) are the toughest ones. If you can’t get 11 Across, you should be ashamed of your lack of nerdiness and turn in your pocket protector to me immediately. Feel free to complain if a clue isn’t clear. If I get enough complaints about the same clue, I’ll post a hint.

When a winner is determined, I will reveal that persons identity (with their permission) so we can all bask in their glow of superiority and post the solution for all to see. If nobody wins by the time the Super Bowl begins, I’ll wimper off by myself and buy a new DVD.

Good luck to all!

The Puzzle (click to enlarge):

The Clues (click to enlarge):

The Nerd Guru First Blogoversary Scavenger Crossword Contest Spectacular!

Yes, that’s a mouthful but it could win you $50.

On Thursday, January 10, 2008 I will put up a special post very early in the morning Eastern Standard Time. It will be a JPEG of a crossword puzzle (2 JPEGs actually, one for the puzzle and one for the clues) whose clues refer to posts I’ve made since this blogs inception (meaning, it includes the reference topics). Most of the answers can be found directly in the posts, but some you have to be clever and derive the answer from something in the post and your own knowledge.

Here’s an example of the harder kind:

“The jersey number normally worn by the rookie Isiah Thomas burned bridges with.”

If you do a search on this blog with the phrase “Isiah Thomas burn bridges” you will discover a post telling the story of problems NBA Hall of Famer Isiah Thomas had with a particular, rather famous, contemporary. Unless you’ve lived under a rock the past 20 years, you probably know that players normal jersey number once you determine his identity. So, if this were a clue, the correct answer would be:

“twentythree”

So here’s what you do:

1. Download and print off the JPEGs I will post on Thursday.
2. Complete the puzzle, making heavy use of the blog search
3. Scan your finished puzzle
4. Email it to me at petecj2@gmail.com

The first person to send in a completed puzzle will win a $50 Amazon.com gift certificate. People related to me by marriage or birth are not eligible but people I work with are. When a winner is determined, I will post the solution.

If there is such a hugely underwhelming response that nobody wins by the time the Super Bowl kicks off, I’ll keep my $50 and pout in a corner 8). Hopefully, somebody will be ambitious enough to go for it so I don’t look like an idiot (or, a bigger idiot than I already am, depending upon your perspective).

I’m not sure “blogoversary” is a word (at least no spell checker that I tried recognizes it), but it is my attempt to combine the words “blog” and “anniversary”. I doubt I’m the first to try, so I’m not trying to take credit for anything, but I probably need to explain that before I share some statistics and announce the details of the contest I’m running to commemorate the occasion that will culminate in somebody winning a $50 Amazon gift certificate.

Why January 11 and how I got here

But first, you might be thinking, “Dude, your date archive goes back to September 2006, how can January 11 be your blogoversary?”

As Obi-Wan once said, “You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” I refer to myself as being bald despite the fact I still have some bit of hair left too, so sue me 8).

I started this journey in January ‘06 when I had the idea to write about this topic I’ve embraced: how the key to a growing engineering career is in the soft skills, not in the technical know how. First there was an outline of ideas I shared with a few friends. That grew over the next 9 months into 5 book chapters and a proposal I sent off to an editor.

While I was waiting for a response, I figured I’d see what kind of grass roots interest there was in this topic and I started to post the chapters in snippets that September. This, along with two original topics on interviews and resumes became the “reference material topics” prominently displayed on my right side bar. It let me experiment with a few things and I started to learn about what the blogging community was really about.

Then in January, I got my “no thanks” email from the editor I sent my proposal to and decided to get serious about the blog. My first post was a Book Report on Naked Econmics and, except for my 2 vacations, I’ve posted twice a week since. The people I’ve met in the past year and the lessons I’ve learned are far too many to list here, but it has been an extremely rewarding experience I plan on continuing.

Some Stats

As long as I’m going off topic, I might as well go waaaay off topic and share some stats. Most of the time, I have no idea whether or not this is good or not, so laugh or cheer depending upon your perspective:

Click to enlarge
So, not as big as Mark Cuban but some nice steady growth there. You might notice the big traffic spike in August without a subsequent growth in subscribers. I did a lot of StumbleUpon marketing during that time and found that it got me the general population but not necessarily the audience I was targeting. Over time and a variety of marketing techniques, I found that guest articles on sites where my target audience already had a much bigger effect on the subscriber number. That’s what has worked for me, anyway. Your mileage may vary.I’ve learned a ton in the past year doing this and hope to continue that in the coming year. Look for some minor navigation UI changes here over the next week. On Monday I’ll announce the details of the Nerd Guru First Blogoversary Scavenger Crossword Contest Spectacular and on Thursday it’ll go live. As mentioned before the holiday break, the winner will get a $50 Amazon gift certificate!

I’m off for two weeks for the holiday break, but I wanted to wish everyone who has read and supported me in this effort the very best this season.

I’ll be back on 1/4 with some information on my pending “blogoversary” on 1/11, which will include what I hope will be a fun and challenging contest, with a $50 Amazon gift certificate going to the winner.

Take a break yourself and enjoy the people who mean the most to you!

Starting tomorrow and for the 5th year in a row, my family is off to Disneyworld! I’ll be returning with new content on Monday, November 26, but until then, here’s a list of my Disney related posts from the past 10 months:

• Restrictions breed creativity - Disneyland Haunted Mansion
• The old Disneyland Matterhorn
• Invent a multi-billion dollar industry in your spare time
• Watch This DVD: Tomorrowland, Disk 2 - The EPCOT video
• Watch This DVD: The Little Mermaid Disk 2 - Behind the Ride that Almost Was
• My nerd crush on Ed Morgan and Karl Bacon