Ron Mertens’ blog

I’ve just finished yet another environmental book: The Ecology of Commerce (by Paul Hawken).  The book is from ‘93, which makes it rather old (can you believe it’s almost 20 years since ‘93?) – but it’s still excellent and highly recommended.
The main thesis of this book is that the markets today are not efficient, because [...]

Tags: ecology, economy, Environment, green

Avid readers of my blog (hey mom!) know that I usually blog on books I read. The good ones, anyway. Here’s the ones I read in Chengdu. I read all of them in Hebrew, by the way.

Long Lost, Harlan Coben. OK, it’s a Harlan Coben book, which is pretty lame. But it was a OK [...]

You probably know that Salman Rushdie is one of my favorite authors, and I finally got around to reading The Satanic Verses. I don’t know why it took me so long. It’s one of his best books, I really enjoyed it, recommended!!!

It’s been a while since I posted here… but don’t worry – I’m still alive.  Busy, but alive.  Abigail is still taking up most of our time. She’s growing nicely (well, not a lot, weight wise) and getting more fun by the day. Now it’s mostly saying “Abba” to everything and everyone (pointing randomly at [...]

A lot of people want to start developing a web site, and for some reason talk to me about it.  Many are developers,  just starting out with web development…  I always recommend reading a book called “Building Scalable Web Sites“.  It’s a great read, with lot’s of info on hosting, DB, programming, security, performance, scalability [...]

I just finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. That’s the last one (#7) – and I must say it was very good.
I really liked all Harry Potters. I remember reading the first one during my NZ Trip, I think it was in the buscot Station.  I thought I wouldn’t like it (too popular?) [...]

I just finished reading another book – The 4-hour workweek. My friend Costy recommended this one.
It’s basically about the ‘New-Rich’ – these guys are not rich in money, but rich in time. The author tells us that we should not work 40 years to enjoy a retirement – but rather have mini-retirements all the time, [...]

I just finished ready a new book ‘Building Findable web sites‘, by Aaron Walter. This is part of my quest to learn SEO.
So what’s my verdict? I’m not so happy with this book. The idea is good – talking about ‘Findability’, which is more than SEO. He defines the findability of a web site as

the [...]

I just finished reading ‘Guerrilla marketing’, by Jay Conrad Levinson.
You hear a lot of talk about Guerrilla marketing in web 2.0 firms – they usually mean ‘free marketing’ as in no-ads, usually forum posting, comments, social marketing, digg, etc.  In fact this is not what Jay (which coined the term 20 years ago) meant.
Guerrilla marketing [...]

Jin over from Displayblog.com has interviewed me about OLED-Info. It turned out to be a funny little interview, click here to read it.