I couldn't have put it better myself

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Church

A little hometown love

The Wedding (2)

Here's our wedding video. The password is: 102310

Brooke also posted more of our engagement pictures if you want to see them you can here.

The Wedding

Here's yet another post I mostly stole from Brooke's blog. Enjoy :)

(Our photographer was Kate Peterson)

More pictures here. (Or you can see a few other posts on the wedding by my cousin Leigh, my BFF Andrea, my sister Jen, and Derek's sister Shelly's blog here and here, and his sister Janene's blog. )

Ray Bradbury on Feeding Creativity

"Well now, when was the last time you ran to the library and took home more books than you could read, like stacked loaves of bread, warm in your arms, waiting to be chewed? When, for that matter, was the last time you opened a book, placed it to your nose, and gave a great sniff? Heaven! The smell of bread, baking. When was the last time you found a really great old book store and wandered through it hour after hour, alone, finding yourself on the shelves. With no list, no intellectual priorities, just wandering, snuffing the dust, plucking the pigeon books off the shelves to read their entrails and, not in love, putting them back, or in love, toting them home? To be lost in time is to find your roots."

- Ray Bradbury

LinkedIn Ad Campaign

So... I got an email from LinkedIn's marketing department offering me $100 in free advertising on their site. I'm a fan of hands-on learning, so I decided to advertise my derekchristensen.com site on LinkedIn. Here's a screenshot of the stats after the first 2 days.

I thought it was interesting which ads got clicks and which didn't, although I'm not terribly surprised. I had a feeling that the gimmicky "LinkedIn Gave Me $100" would be the most popular. We humans are interesting beings, aren't we.

Kayak Mashups

I love Kayak.com. It doesn't have the Farecast technology that Bing Travel has, but it's awesome.

Brooke and I are planning a trip for late February, and as we were weighing different options, we said "wouldn't it be great to have a site where you could just put in a time frame and budget and it would show you where you could go?". I started looking at the API's of the different travel sites, thinking I might code something like that myself, and came across two incredible mashups which use Kayak.com's API (and are now incorporated into Kayak.com).

Top 25

http://www.kayak.com/buzz

Enter your departing airport and timeframe and it will show you the lowest prices to 25 major world cities.

Explore

http://www.kayak.com/explore/

Interactive map showing airfare prices to anywhere in the world from your departing airport.

Wow! These tools are incredible. And the fact that I came across them right after re-reading The 4-Hour Workweek and then reading Eat Pray Love makes me want to take 6 months off of work and see the world.

Please use them, be inspired by them, and tell everyone you can about them.

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UPDATE

Also check out these two innovative travel sites:
http://www.travelmatch.co.uk/
http://us.lastminute.com/

65

I know some of you never actually visit my blog because you subscribe to the RSS feed, but if you did visit, you would see that I've kept a list of books I've read on the right sidebar. One of my New Year's Resolutions in 2010 was to read a book a week. I'm happy to announce that I read 65 books this year (I read some books twice), which, split up over 52 weeks, is an average of 1.25 books per week.

It's surprising how many books really aren't very good. However, there are tons that are absolutely phenomenal. I'll give you a simple Y/N after the title to let you know whether or not I recommend it.

I love talking about what I've read, so if you're curious about any of the books below, please ask, and I'd be happy to explain my rating. Enjoy!

The Gypsy Morph by Terry Brooks - N
The Elves of Cintra by Terry Brooks - N
Armageddon's Children by Terry Brooks - N
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki - Y
Tunnel in the Sky by Robert A Heinlein - Y (One of my favorites)
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins - Y
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins - Y
Mistborn by Brian Sanderson - Y (Read it twice this year)
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins - Y
The Giver by Lois Lowry - Y
Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni - N
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling - Y
ReWork by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson - N
Open by Andre Agassi - Y
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier - Maybe
The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin - Y
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson - N
The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Y
1776 by David McCullough - Y
Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen - N
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely - Y
The Google Way by Bernard Girard - N
Switch by Dan and Chip Heath - Y
The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson - Y
The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson - Y
Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson - Y
Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith - Y
Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard - Y
On the Road by Jack Kerouac - Y
Buzzmarketing by Mark Hughes - N
What is the What by Dave Eggers - N
Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferazzi - N
Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You by Sam Gosling - N
The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen - Y
The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright - Y
Seizing the White Space by Mark Johnson - Maybe
Tax-Free Retirement by Patrick Kelly - N
Connected by Nicholas A. Christakis - N
The Richest Man in Babylon by George S Clason - N
The Knack by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham - N
Execution by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan - N
Good Night by Michael Breus - Y
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer - N
Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss - N
Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich - Y
This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women - Y
Live Rich by Stephen Pollan - N (Read "Die Broke" instead)
E=MC^2 by David Bodanis - Y
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer - Y
Why We Buy by Paco Underhill - N
What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell - Y (The first third is boring, the rest good)
How to be Good by Nick Hornby - N
Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman - Y
Food Rules by Michael Pollan - Y
Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis - Y
The Road by Cormac McCarthy - N (Don't know why it got all the hype it did)
Believing Christ by Stephen Robinson - Y
The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks - Y
Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute - N (Read "Bonds that Make Us Free" instead)
The Elfstones of Shannara by Terry Brooks - Y
Superfreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner - Y
Chi Running by Danny Dreyer - Y
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson - N
Born to Run by Christopher McDougall - Y

The 9-Inch "Diet"

I'm skinny. It's genetic (thanks Mom). However, I recognize that what you eat has a huge impact on how you feel and your overall health, so I try to be conscious of it.

Dan and Chip Heath, in their book Switch, mention a study (performed by Brian Wansink from Cornell) where groups of moviegoers were given free tubs of popcorn which was five days old. It was stale and squeaky. The purpose of the study was to determine whether the size of the tub of popcorn had a causal relationship on the amount of popcorn consumed. Would people with larger tubs of popcorn eat more?

In short... yes. People with a large tub ate 53% more than those with a medium. The size of the container matters.

What did McDonalds do after the movie "SuperSize Me" was released and there was a huge backlash against the supersize value meal? They didn't get rid of it - they changed the names of all their value meal sizes. A medium became a small, a large became a medium, and a supersize became a large. If you continued ordering what you always ordered, you would now be getting significantly more food.

Alex Bogusky (of Crispin, Porter + Bogusky) purchased an old house and tried to put his dinner plates in the cupboard. They didn't fit. Intrigued, he began to do some research. He found that the average dinner plate in the 1960's was 9 inches. That size has crept up to the 12 inches it is today. Watch the short 1-minute video below for the precise details.



Brooke and I purchased 9-inch plates for our house. They're technically "salad plates", according to Crate & Barrel. If you're interested in them, they're the "Maison" line. We love it.

We did it because a person with a 9-inch plate eats 22% less than a person with a 12-inch plate. It's a simple issue of alignment. Since we want to always stay healthy, by purchasing 9-inch plates we're making it easier for us to accomplish. It's also an interesting talking point at the dinner table.

Since I'm spouting off on our food policy, I might as well mention Michael Pollan's book Food Rules. It's a phenomenal collection of actionable, common-sense rules on what to eat and what not to eat.

After you're done with that, watch Food, Inc., then Supersize Me, then No Impact Man (for good measure).