Creativity and Depression

Very recently, the New York Times ran an article on the correlation between depression and certain mental disciplines. It’s definitely a thought provoking read, and the title “Depression’s Upside” is bound to spark some controversy. If you experience depression or know someone that experiences depression then it’s well worth the 7 page read, as it’s probably one of the most well crafted pieces of text I have ever read on the topic:

Depression’s Upside @ NYTimes.com

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Amazon AWS EC2 vs Rackspace – High Level Comparison

Let me start by saying this is in no way an in-depth comparison of these two excellent cloud based hosting services. It should serve, however, as a good resource to help you determine which of the options is better suited to your needs at a high level, and point you in the right direction for further investigation.

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Time to leave the corporate nest?

A little over five years ago now, my wife and I arrived back in Australia from a year over in the UK. It was a great year, and I’d enjoyed the work I’d being doing over there (coding at a smallish Biotech) as well as the ability to travel. Additionally, I’d left on good terms with my employer and had the opportunity to do some work with them from Australia. Great, I thought – an opportunity to get my own software development business started; which I guess has always been my dream.

While, I think the idea was good in practice, it wasn’t the right time. My current struggle is attempting to determine if now is the right time.

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Monitoring Keyword Bounce Rates with Google Analytics

It’s confession time. Firstly, I have a blog. Secondly, it has a very high bounce rate. Now I’m not trying to make money from blogging or anything like that, but I do shed a small tear when I think: “Most people stop by for a quick visit, and then leave without looking around.”

Now there are a lot of articles out there that give pointers on how optimize your blog/site to reduce bounce rate, so I’m not even going to try and talk about that here. If you are after a good source of information, however, I’d recommend checking out problogger. What I am going to talk about though, is how you can use Google Analytics to determine where to focus your efforts. Google Analytics is very good at showing your overall bounce rate, but you can get more detail and start targeting particular posts and keywords to reduce that bounce rate.

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