If you sign up as a reseller, according to this press release, you can get domain registration years for $5.99 at Gossimer.com.  This is not an affiliate pitch.  I am not familiar with the company even though they are based in my home state, Florida.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

I read this book a while back and keep bringing it up again and again in conversation because its lesson is so profound.  During our childhood, kids and grownups alike admire those children with “natural talent.” They learn the piano faster, they  learn faster how to throw and catch a football or baseball, or they pickup chess and beat their peers soon after learning the rules of the game.

The problem is that all this attention and positive reinforcement is for something that is not that valuable in the long run.  What we admire (and pay for) most in the long run comes from practice – thousands and thousands of hours of productive practice.

The most amazing conclusion from the research discussed in this book is that the “natural talent” advantage actually evaporates in the long run. Chess players that beat the pants off their peers in the first couple years of playing have no advantage at all against those same peers if and when they get to a higher level of play.  What matters then is how much and how effectively they practiced.

The most talented people in the world did not achieve their skills by nature but by more and better practice.  Colvin describes how Tiger Woods became the best in the world at golf  – Mozart at composing symphonies – and more.  Practice worked for the best doctors, the most successful business leaders, and the most popular artists.

Read this book and get inspired to work hard and get great at something.

Thanks to the awesome creative talent at Appency, here’s a promo video for Custom Hangman, my first iPhone app project:

And here’s the press release on prmac.com.

I’m behind on my blogging because this post is about a movie I watched over a week ago.  It is so inspiring that I actually made my kids watch it.  (Hey, other parents make their kids go to church for inspiration.)

My son has Asperger’s which increased my interest in the movie.

This movie is about the school years of Temple Grandin who was diagnosed with Autism at age 4, but went on to revolutionize how the cattle industry handles cattle, write books, get a PhD, and become a famous speaker on Autism.  (The movie also made cowboys look pretty stupid but that’s beside the point.)

Temple’s mother was advised to institutionalize her at 4 years old, but her mother worked hard and “fought the system” hard.  She insisted her daughter get the education she needed – she was different, not less.

This movie is very, well, moving, very educational, very recommended by me.  Must see.

Find it on HBO.

To get more users interested in sharing their word lists with others, I released a web app version of Custom Hangman.  Its in beta.  Check it out at CustomHangman.com.

I’m been delving more deeply into the world of front-end development recently, and after trying out a few different JavaScript unit testing tools I selected FireUnit.  I installed the Firefox extensions Firebug and FireUnit – you need both for unit testing with FireUnit.

However, sometimes Firebug doesn’t work for me and I want to use Safari for debugging JavaScript.  I also found some tests that worked in Firefox but failed in Safari just because of differences in how the browsers handle UTF-8. Running your JavaScript unit tests in multiple browsers is clearly a good idea.  So, the obvious drawback to using FireUnit is that it only works in Firefox.

My solution is to create a stub version of FireUnit so when I run my tests in Safari, the stubs are defined, but when I run them in Firefox, my tests use the real FireUnit functions.  The following code at the top of my test files make them work in any browser, with or without FireUnit.

<script src=”FireUnitStub.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

Of course, I need my stub source code in a file FireUnitStub.js in the same directory for the above line to work.

I’ve only implemented a few of these functions so I hope someone else will do it properly and completely, maybe using the source code for FireUnit itself.

Hereby forthwith released into the public domain.  Have fun!

Here’s a screen shot of my tests after a successful completion in the Safari browser, with the debugging enabled.  (Click on the image to see the whole image.)

Just wanted to share what I’m reading now. Super Freakonomics is the sequel to Freakonomics. If you like non-fiction at all you’ll probably love both books. Authors Levitt and Dubner shock you with facts and statistics in several important areas which make you conclude oppositely from conventional wisdom. Don’t read it if you don’t like questioning authority.

I found a new blog by a PPC marketing specialist, PPC Ian, who went to his first domain conference. I think it is valuable for people in any niche industry to understand how other similar-but-different business professionals see their industry. That’s why I advised domainers to learn more about the affiliate marketers in a recent post. We learn a little more about the forest whilst we’re working dilligently among the trees. (Sorry, are Americans allowed to say “whilst”?)

Ian’s summary of domainers is revealing:

There are two main schools of domainers. The first school are those that buy domains with the goal of selling them for a profit (this is the more traditional side of domaining). The second school are those that buy domains, develop them, and then enjoy passive income.

What is interesting is that he does not mention parking.  True that, Ian!  Here’s a link to the whole post:

PPC Ian writes about TRAFFIC.

Even though it only lasted two or three months, there were a lot of twists in the story of how my brother and I purchased Afternic.com in 2002.  It was a comedy of errors that in the end worked out great for everyone.

I had called Register.com to discuss a referral deal when they turned the discussion towards purchase.  Of course, I said, “how much?” and they said make an offer. They had announced they were shutting it down, so I said that means they must value it at about nothing. Right?  Somehow, we agreed on an amount around $400,000.

Only one problem: we didn’t have the money.  I had an MBA but no track record in business and in hindsight I was naive about how hard it is to raise investment quickly. The biggest bank in South Florida laughed at the idea of borrowing funds for a website, so that option was off the table. My rep there didn’t get it – she thought I wanted something like a home page. LOL. Friends and family were not interested.  I did raise $25,000 from two former classmates in my executive MBA program but one of them – the one who put in $20,000 – got cold feet and I refunded her investment about two months later.

I thought I was going to have to cancel the deal.  My brother and I discussed how it might go when we told them. Then, out of the blue, Register called. Said, very sorry, but after legal review, they could not sell us the user list – the database – because of the privacy agreements with their customers.  They were canceling, not us!

We agreed to leave the database and the software that ran the website out of the transaction.  It would become a domain name only transaction (plus some email marketing service for some emails to the old customer base). And they would drop the price about 75% to around $100K.

Deal! I was able to handle that with a home equity loan, which was easy to get back then.

Turns out even that refunded investment was a twist of good luck – we had needed just that much money for just that period of time to cover an earnest money deposit before my home equity line funds became available!

Michael and I thought we already had a better website on NameBuySell.com – I just had to rebrand it – so we didn’t value the technology that ran the old Afternic.

Register agreed to email the old user base up to 12 times for a fee each time. We used two emails and passed on the rest.

I finished up a software development contract developing the software for an embedded Linux USB module for aircraft for Gables Engineering in Coral Gables, FL about one week before we closed the transaction.  I became the first full-time employee of the New Afternic, working from a spare bedroom in my house in Plantation, FL.

I rushed to rebrand NameBuySell.com to Afternic.com in one week.  We came up with a promotion to sell all memberships for $1 to celebrate our becoming the New Afternic.

I was extremely nervous because none of my websites had ever had to handle as much traffic as Afternic.com would get.  Turns out one managed server running PHP/MySQL replaced several servers running Cold Fusion for Old Afternic.  And it worked great.

We owned the #1 site in the US for aftermarket domains according to Alexa.

Before the recent cold snap I got a chance to cut up on the lake.  I attempted to barefoot after not doing it for a few years. The result was I bobbled back and forth for about a hundred yards and then face planted.  Just thought I’d post one personal item to shed some light on the new name of the blog: Internet Lake.  Enjoy my embarrassing demonstration.