Ramblemuse Touch Points

One of the books I’d gotten when I’d started thinking seriously of freelance writing a couple of years ago was Media Bistro’s first book — “Get a Freelance Life” by Margit Feury Ragland. I didn’t note it when I mentioned Media Bistro a few days ago, but the website includes sections for jobs and profiles, and also information on resume creation.

This morning, also, my periodic email update from Harvard Business School’s free newsletter “Working Knowledge” hit my inbox. The Working Knowledge website includes a section on entrepreneurship. I also ran into a NY Times small business article, Getting Paid, One Way or Another, part of the NYT’s small business resources. These include, Marci Alboher’s blog on Shifting Careers.

Also, back in February, the New Scientist had an article on science specific MBA’s: Science entrepreneurs need better business skills. My own mucking around in learning theory would indicate that the bottom line is to pick an efficient means of learning the concepts, vocabulary, and ability of use. There was also an article on Physics and Entrepreneurship in the February 2001 issue of The Industrial Physicist (no longer in publication).

Yesterday, I picked up two books, Consulting for Dummies and Larry Ullman’s PHP 6 and MySQL 5 for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide. Both struck me as being no-hype/high-content ways to brush up on their respective topic areas.

There’s also a good series of business and finance books put out by The Economist. Among them are:

• Business Consulting: A Guide to How It Works and How to Make It Work
• Business Strategy: A Guide to Effective Decision-Making
• Dealing with Financial Risk (The Economist Series)
• Guide to Business Modelling, Second Edition
• Guide to Business Planning
• Economics: Making Sense of the Modern Economy, Second Edition
• Essential Economics (Economist Essentials)
• Essential Negotiation
• Headhunters and How to Use Them: A Guide for Organisations and Individuals
• The Economist Style Guide: 9th Edition

About a year ago, I resurrected my Bibliography for Massage Practitioners. Last night, I started merging some of the technology in my homepage with that in the bibliography. The massage bibliography, which was created just prior to implementing my current homepage design, will also get an update to include the navigation menu. The home page uses server side includes a lot while the bibliography uses PHP and XSLT to translate the underlying XML to HTML. Last night I worked out the bibliography template, using PHP includes and replacing the server LAST_MODIFIED option with the PHP SERVER_[‘PHP_SELF’] and a call to ‘filemtime’.

The motivation for all of this isn’t just to improve the massage bibliography. I’ll be bringing up a more general bibliography to include sections on consulting, web development, … It will also have in it the various books given above. In the meantime, the business section of the current bibliography does include a number of general books on entrepreneurship — material on networking, working a room, running a one-person business, writing business plans, …

As a final note, for those looking for short term assignments, Craigslist has a section called “Gigs” toward the bottom of the page, with subsections on writing and computer tasks. Here’s the SF Bay edition.