Hi, I'm Miles Long from Cult of the Dead Cow, and with me are my esteemed colleagues, Mr. Radman and Mr. Flack, and we're here to talk about self-publishing. But first, our pal, Adam, Java Man, has a few announcements he'd like to make. Two brief announcements. Just to remind everyone, tonight at 10 p.m. there is the CDC party sponsored by, again, the Coal of the Dead Cow, which will be at Crave. This is over by, it's a nightclub that's over by the Planet Hollywood. I don't know if you guys all know where that is. It's across the Strip from the Harley Cafe. Great place, everyone had a great time last year. It's free entrance with your badge. Two dollar drinks, 10 to midnight. And we have, I think, three excellent DJs. It's going to be a goth industrial night. It's, again, always a great time. And also, tomorrow night we will be having the TCPIP drinking game starting at 9 o'clock. We're going to do it in a slightly different format this year, but as always, it relies heavily on audience participation. So, if you want people to come and to ask as many complex TCPIP questions as possible, and if you stump the panelists, they have to get blitzed. So, please come to our party night and come by the drinking game tomorrow night. Thanks. Alrighty, so now we're going to talk about self-publishing.  Talk about content, investment that it will take, actually doing the publishing, marketing, return on your investment, how you can accept payments, how you can get reviews, and then we're going to tell you what it all means and answer questions. So that's me. As I mentioned, I am a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow. I'm the webmaster for the CDC website, the administrator for the CDC forum, so if you're waiting on your account to be activated, I'm the one you should book. Edit the zine, I've written for the zine, and then I edited the book that we put out last year. Where's the book? Oh, the book. This is the book that we put out last year, which is of course for sale. Come see me. Reasonably priced. Cool. I like the Osama bin Radman photo up there. Yeah, so I'm Radman. I started a group called Acid in 1990. You might be aware of it. If you're in the BBS scene in the 90s, it was an NCR group. I was also featured in Jason Scott's BBS documentary. Right now, what I'm doing is I'm organizing a demo party. We're going to be in our second year in 2008 called Block Party, which is going to be taking place in Ohio. I've been involved in a lot of scene publishing and importing for European demo scene publishers. That's how I fit in all this. My name is Rob O'Hara. I'm the author of Commodore, which is another self-published book. I'm a member of the Ninja Strike Force. I have to look at the list. I don't know what all I do. I write for Video Game Collector Magazine. I write for a lot of different websites. I write for Digital Press. I've written articles in 2600. I write for the logbook. I contributed to Retro Gaming Hacks, which is a book that came out through O'Reilly Press. Chris Kohler's book is a writer for Wired. That's me. Next. Here's some fine publications that were actually all originally self-published. That includes, of course, 2600, the CDC book, Rob's book, Commodore, and then some Freaks, I guess, and then some more mainstream type books like the Celestine Prophecy. It was a huge hit, I guess, in the late 80s, I believe. Also, The Joy of Cooking. These are pulled directly from the Wikipedia list of self-published books, so you've got to represent the WIC. That's what all these books have in common, even though none of us are best sellers. Oh, well. Okay. Self-publishing versus vanity publishing. Got to love the Wikipedia definitions again. Self-publishing basically is good, and vanity publishing is bad. Vanity publishing is where the printer is basically exploding the author. That's the definition that we're using here today. You might call it interchangeable. Self-publishing is somewhat analogous to shareware or freeware where the author maintains control of the content and receives most or all of the proceeds, and they're often niche-oriented. Lots of self-publishing is relevant to the computer underground. There's easy, such as Frac and Soljo and, of course, CDC. eBooks, websites, and blogs. I know you guys are all familiar with blogs and websites, so we don't really need to talk about those too much. Streaming or shared MP3s, Fluid, which is an acid production, I guess? Yeah, sublabel. Then CDC releases tunes, and we run a streaming radio station. Then there's Hacker Voice Radio. Offline, there's magazines like 2600 and Blacklisted 411, and then the CCC zine that I can't pronounce the title of. Lots of books have also been self-published. Of course, the three that we're talking about here today, as well as the end of days, and then some more, I guess, more technical type books like Practical Packet Analysis and Security Data Visualization. Then, of course, there's Hacker Radio, like, off the hook, off the wall, and then the Dark Domain DVD. Yeah. Got to represent for BenRab too. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Of course, these aren't exhaustive, and if we left your stuff out, then, sorry, too bad. So content. The main question most people would have is, is my work good enough to be published? And then the short answer to that is yes. If you have some content, if you've written anything, chances are there's somebody that would want to read it and might even be willing to pay for it. Yeah, I think even if your story, if you think that you're just like an everyday person that's ever seen that you're in at whatever time, somebody would want to read that. You don't have to be the leader of some ANSI group or demo group or Weres group or Hacker group. Just your day-to-day involvement and what your experiences were for that period of time. I think I would find that very interesting to read if somebody published something like that. And even if you're not a creator yourself, maybe you have a friend who writes or draws or does something and you could borrow or exploit or whatever their work and make a book. But just remember that getting sued is bad. Got to put that in there. Intellectual property rights are actually very important as many people can attest to. Yeah, don't get sued. Write original content, if possible, which Rob can discuss. Just write about your experiences. My book was basically about old BBSs and it's just kind of like my personal experiences. It starts with the first BBSs that I called. It starts out old 8-bit days like Apple and Commodore and it goes through that. Like I was telling these guys, it kind of ends like when this worldwide web came along and it killed our little hobby. The biggest comment I get from people about my book is they tell me, I feel like you told my story because it's not really a technical book. It's more like a coming of age or growing up at the same time, but growing up online like a lot of us did. And like we had talked before, when I first started writing it, I didn't really know that I was writing a book. I was kind of like writing my memoirs and all these stories down just because I didn't see anybody else doing that at the time and I got about two thirds of the way through and then Jason Scott's BBS documentary came out and I started seeing interest in that and I thought maybe there is an interest for that so that's kind of why I finished off and we've talked about how those are different. Mine's more like just one guy's story. It's not like the whole history of BBSs. I didn't interview a lot of people. They're just like my story as it goes through but a lot of people think well if you're going to self publish a book you have to do all this research and do all these things and you do have to do a certain amount of fact checking because believe me, I have got emails from people in Argentina who argue points about specific facts so you do have to do research but it's pretty easy if you're just writing about what you know about. And at the same time, you have the only book published of its kind out right now so that's the only thing on record that people can now use as a reference. I've had people, like I said, it's about my BBS experiences so I've had people email me and like chew me out because I didn't mention their cracking group and I guess I didn't run into your cracking group but then I tell them, you know, that's your story and they can do the exact same thing I did and I think there's a lot of those interesting stories that get lost somewhere on the web or they never get written down and these stories are just going to get lost so that's really the one thing I would say is that all of us have been through stuff that other people want to read. When I was writing this, when I first started, I thought, well, who's going to want to read my dumb old BBS stories? But the number one comment I get from people is, you know, like I said, I feel like you were telling my story. I was there, I remember those people. I remember calling those boards or whatever. Of course, you could also publish anything that's been previously published or if you can get the rights. There's a lot of underground related content that people most likely would let you use if you just asked or maybe you're affiliated with EZ and it's been around since 1984 and you decide you want to publish a book like we did. Okay, maybe there aren't that many of those but it's possible. Also, of course, then there's licenses that you can use to your advantage the Creative Commons and the free documentation license. Which I guess also with publishing, it doesn't have to be a book. In Radman's case, they did the Dark Domain DVD. So I ran an FTP site on ftpcdrom.com back when it was the largest FTP server in the entire world at one point. And we ran an ANSI archive and we had people that uploaded ANSI art packs and ASCII art packs and different artworks and we collected this for numerous years even after CDrom.com got sold out and transferred to three different companies and eventually it was becoming difficult to afford the bandwidth. So we put it out on a DVD for people to buy and basically we put it out there so that people could just have it. It's easily accessible on their DVD drive and they don't have to worry about are we going to be able to fund the FTP server tomorrow? They have it at their fingertips at any time. So we put that out. There's a lot of other. There's another DVD out called Mindcandy where a group called Hornet went out in FuseCon and they obtained permission from different demo scene groups and they put a bunch of PC scene and Amiga scene demos on DVD video to watch. So that's another example of scene publishing as well. You can also, as I said, you can obtain the distribution rights if you know somebody that has published something elsewhere. You just need to be careful to follow copyright law. Maybe you can talk about Freaks a little bit which is published in Europe originally, is that right? Yeah, it's actually written by a Hungarian printed in Germany so there's some really interesting... The book is in English but it has some very interesting English in it. So I import that book and sell it on Amazon as well as a site called freaksbook.com. And so when I started putting this out I had this out on Amazon for a while. Their pricing scheme is kind of not very competitive with other ways that you can sell products and we'll go over that in a bit. But I started receiving emails from people in Europe that were trying to sell stuff from the demo scene and they're basically asking for my help to sell it in the United States. So now I'm importing a whole bunch of stuff like some books, DVDs, some of it's in the vending booth. Today I brought some stuff. But yeah, there's a lot of stuff from Europe. Okay, aside from content, you need an audience which is actually much less important than the content because if you have the content you'll find the audience.  Of course you also need time. It does take time to put something together. And people will notice in nitpick if you don't take the necessary time and don't work on all your formatting correctly and things like that. It takes money. Online obviously cheaper than offline. I mean if you're just running a blog or something it's either free or very cheap. If you're going to buy a book or publish a book rather, most likely need to buy an ISBN which I say costs about $25 but they actually have to be purchased in blocks of 10 or more. So it's at least $250. Some publishers will give you the ISBNs if you publish with them. Or you can, if you're in the United States the person responsible for assigning ISBNs is Bowker. But it differs from country to country. There's also people that resell ISBNs. You kind of have to be wary of that if you're buying an ISBN online because there's no guarantee that they didn't just sell that ISBN to somebody else last week. So you need to make sure if you're buying an ISBN from an ISBN reseller you need to make sure that they're reputable. Your best bet though really is just buy the block of 10 from Bowker because then you're secure. You don't have to worry about that when somebody brings something up on a price scanner that it's going to show up your product and not somebody else's. You don't necessarily have to have an ISBN number or UPC code. It just depends on how you plan on selling your product. You don't have to do that. I know that on Lulu which is the cow's book and my book we both published through Lulu they have a package for it's $99. You get a UPC and an ISBN number and that worked out well for me because I'm not publishing a lot of books. It was just like a one-time deal so it cost a little bit more but it was from the same place I was publishing so it was a lot easier. You also mentioned UPC. Apparently $89 is actually on the low end. That's probably through a less than equitable reseller. So you might want to be careful of that I guess. Publishers as well can potentially offer you UPC code if you plan on selling it through Amazon. A video is going to require UPC if you're planning on selling a book on Amazon. You're going to need an ISBN period bar coded. Same thing, you have to buyer beware if you're buying UPC. It's almost cost prohibitive to try and get a UPC on your own if you just want it for one product. You kind of have to go through a publisher or find somebody that's going to resell that. You can also, if you're doing a serial get the ISSN which is free. I believe it's ISSN.org It's just a standard international standard serial number. Just kind of an identifier. And it is helpful if you want to have your magazine or your zine sold into store. I don't think it's necessary, but it is helpful. And then also you could get ISBN for a specific issue, but then it would have to be one for each issue. Whereas the ISSN is for the serial itself. Various types of self-publishing if you're doing a book. Print on demand or a short press run. Different costs involved there. Print on demand is like lulu.com. There's some other sites as well. Very little cost. You basically upload your manuscript and they print it whenever someone orders it. You have no inventory to manage. They do all the inventory, all the shipping. It could be free feasibly if you don't buy an ISBN and you don't buy a copy for yourself. So you could feasibly make money out of that.  Here's the book I wrote. Short press run. That's probably a little more professional. The printing is going to be a little higher quality. The binding, a little higher quality. But you have to buy between 500 and 1,000 copies initially. I agree. Okay. Here's some sites that you can use if you want to self publish. Both Commodore and The Book of Cow were published through Lulu. But we're not shilling for Lulu. It's just the one that we've used. They have pros and cons. Just like all the other sites. Several other sites here. Author House. I haven't used but it looks pretty promising. Though their site was a little difficult to find if there is an upfront cost or not. So that was a little disheartening there I guess. Though they will give help with professional design and layout, copy editing and promotion. And you only have to buy one copy. Book Surge is owned by Amazon. Are you familiar with that? They will do either print on demand or a short press run. It costs 100 bucks I believe They offer publishing packages and I couldn't figure out exactly what that meant. And total design freedom. Also not quite sure what that means. But the royalty depends on the distribution channel.  The royalty paid to them is pretty low. If you just want to sold through Amazon then it's going to be pretty high. Using their standard pricing. You can buy as little as one and recommend more than that because they want your money. Cafe Press print on demand. No upfront cost. No other services offered and not very good quality. But you can set the royalty so you can make however much or however little you want in addition to the cost of the book. iUniverse is supported self publishing. Costs at least 200 bucks up to about 1200 but they will help you with design layout and editing and marketing as well. You get 20% of your printed copies 50% if you sell online or like an ebook. Lulu which Rob and I are both more familiar with. Print on demand. Zero upfront cost. They'll help with editing. They'll help with graphics, translation, marketing, publicity and you set your mark up yourself and you can buy as little as one copy at a time. Then just to kind of change it up I included SnapFish on this list. They only published photo books between 5 and 20 bucks to set it up and no additional services offered. As far as I know you can't mark up the price. You're giving all your money to SnapFish but they are pretty professional looking basically photo albums, photo books. Again this isn't comprehensive this is just a few sites that we looked at and don't blame us if you pick one of these and they screw you over or something like that. Hey do you want to talk about the process like I'm dealing with Lulu? Sure. Basically what these sites do is they take your user created content and they turn it into a book. So when I dealt with Lulu they will let you upload a Microsoft dot if you want or if you want more control over the layout you can upload like a PDF they have several different formats that they accept but basically the way these websites work is you just go to a website and you've already created your content and you upload the content they have a certain amount of checking where they make sure that it's compatible with their books but like I did my cover in Photoshop and uploaded that I uploaded the book they have templates available all these sites that we've checked out have templates available online so when I wrote my book I just wrote it in Word and then when I was ready I downloaded their template cut pasted into that and when you're done they either you can upload through their web in our face or you can FTP it up but that's basically it's really really easy it's deceptively easy people come up to me and they're like man how did you get a book I just uploaded it it was kind of magic really so it's really easy to do and that's one of the things that we really want to convey is that if you've got that story and a lot of us you have something that you wanted to get out there this is a really good way to do it like Miles said earlier if you write what you know about we're not talking about writing things here they're going to be on the best sellers list they ought to be but they're not so if you have a smaller market this is a really good way to do it marketing you're selling yourself as much as you're selling your product so basically you're going to try to sell your friends your family your co-workers everybody you know because you want to get it out there you want to get people talking about your book maybe or whatever it is use every contact you have and then try to make sure that they use every contact they have then eventually you get a review published on Slash.ly like Rob did and you sell hundreds of copies of your book thank you Jason Scott so yeah talk to your friends tell them to talk to their friends and so on online marketing it could be its own domain it could be part of your other domain it could be even it could be on like GeoCities or whatever you just need a site for your book that you can direct people to I mean obviously if it's its own domain or if it's on your own domain it's better it's going to look better than if it's like a GeoCities thing and has Yahoo ads popping up everywhere but even if you have that I mean that's better than nothing because it's somewhere you can direct people to press releases Lulu and some of these other sites will actually give you templates for the press releases give you ideas how to set those up you can also go to like PR web and just read both press releases and kind of copy their formatting use some of the terminology that they use forums put links to your book in your forum signature that actually can get you quite a few sales same thing with blog if you have a blog or if your friend has a blog or whatever put it in you know put it in the comments comment about it in other people's blogs put it in the comments in your blog put it in like in your sidebar or whatever same thing with websites e-zines advertise everywhere you can if it's free or if it's cheap you want to get your story out there you want to get your book out there you want people to see it so that's the only way to do it did you want to talk about podcasts Rob? maybe not podcasts specifically but really like the way I advertised my book was if you have a big product you can afford to do this shotgun advertising you know you just blow it out there and then you hope people find it when you've written a book about hey I like to copy games on the Commodore 20 years ago you have to find your market that market is not at Walmart so what I did was I mean I you know I'm on lots of retro computing forums I'm on I found retro podcasts I found people that would be interested in my book and then I contacted those people so I did a more specific marketing I was at convex the Commodore Vegas Expo last weekend last fall I was at the Chicago Land Commodore convention so I mean I've sold quite a few books I guess I've sold more than the average or whatever but it's because I found those people you know if you're you know and like I said depending on you know like what you've done you know and even Miles it's all about finding those people because there are people out there we all know like with blogs and news sites they're dying for information so you just have to find the right people that are and you know be willing to give a little bit of your time and they'll really help you out yeah the number one way that I that I distribute this or you know kind of get the word out about the dark domain DVD that Acid put out which has all this ANSI artwork and seen magazines and everything you know archived worth of you know 20 years worth of releases is that I is basically cons and meetings and conferences, demos parties and everything like that we sponsor events if there's like a online competition where they're having you know who can program the best you know K demo or something or the best text mode animation or something like that we'll offer up you know DVDs and books as prizes and that I think that's one of the best ways you can advertise and get your product out there because it's like it's free advertising in a way I mean you're giving away your product you know but at the same time it's an offer of goodwill and it gets the name out there and even Cult of the Dead Cow they offered up some signed copies you know I don't know how many Cult of the Dead Cow members but that was an awesome I mean people were like so honored to receive that you know it was awesome because we're cool yeah he made a good point though giving don't be afraid to give away free copies that's going to help you get reviews which is going to help you sell more copies so you give a few away for free and you sell a lot more it hurts at the beginning I mean you know because it's not like you know you're here in a band and you've got you know a thousand promo copies they hand out every time I give out a copy you know it's coming out of my pocket it's copies that I've personally bought through Lulu or whatever but you know I mean one of the copies I sent out got reviewed in Video Game Magazine and one of them you know it was in Tips and Tricks last month so I mean it does pay off and those do lead to sales but you know at the very beginning when you're paying the money down and mailing them out it's hard I guess basically the same works offline as online press releases try to get mentioned in print magazines as well as online and then come to cons like this and talk about your product or set up at the vendor area or whatever Common Trap would be writing for marketing which I think we already mentioned don't write for the market the market will find you if you have something to say if you have something if you're at all creative in any way then the market will find you and I believe this was this was Flax Line which was thinking about marketing first is like writing pop music so you're just doing it to sell and that's not the right reason to do this type of thing selling is good but you know that's not why you're doing it you're doing it because you actually have something to say or something that you want people to see okay how many copies can you expect to sell if you publish a book that really depends on whether you're writing to make money or just to get your ideas out there if you're writing to make money most likely by self publishing that's not the way to make money you can make some but it's not going to be you're not going to be able to make a living on it most likely there are exceptions of course but it's pretty unlikely you can sell at cost so if you're not you don't really care about the money you just sell for whatever costs the site to do the printing and the binding of course you can mark it up for profit printing is cheap pretty cheap these days on some of these sites so we actually make about 32% on the book of cow and we sell it for $13.37 so make what like $4 per book goes back into buying more copies of it which is how I have some here today so actually we haven't really made any money it's just all gone back into the project the way Lulu or like I said again I should say we're not really shilling Lulu it's just the ones that we both happen to use but after you upload your book they have a set printing fee and then it's so much per page I think for black and white it's two cents a page or three and so then you get this total and like I think the total on my book is like $6 somewhere around there on Lulu and then after that you just name your price and then they have a split it's a 2080 split they get 20% of anything over that set amount and you get 80% so there is a lot of room for markups and are you do you have a slide later where you're talking about selling through Amazon yeah yeah but the highest profit margin is buying the books yourself and selling them to people you know just like everything else the more people that touch it everybody starts getting a chunk of that money and so we're going to talk about that later on also sales depend on your audience as I said audience isn't that important but I mean it is important if you're selling something that is very similar to something else that's already for sale a book that someone else put out the last year or six months ago or whatever you're less likely to have sales if maybe you held that for another year or so but differently I guess than traditional publishing it's print on demand works can be available forever essentially with no inventory because it's just sitting in a database on Lulu's site or whatever publishing sites server and just there's no physical inventory so it can be available ten years from now whereas a traditional publishing it would be out of print by that time which that allows the audience to find the work so maybe your book isn't selling right now but it could sell five years from now if it's still available whereas if it is out of print in five years no one's going to find it even if there is a market at that time okay the average self-published book sells approximately five copies in it's lifetime according to that site there Commodore in a little less than a year has sold about five hundred copies so apparently BBS memoirs are big sellers so as Flack was saying there's a lot of other people that have their BBS story so maybe somebody in the audience here or one of our viewers at home could write their story and mention those cracking groups that he didn't mention if it's something that affected them more I guess free, go ahead I was just going to say again though that's not like people just found my site and just bought copies that's been a lot of traveling around traveling to Vegas and Chicago and different kinds of shows you touched on it whenever you talked about being your own marketing person you're really your own everything from coming up with the content to the design, the editing and it doesn't end after it's out you're your own marketing you're your own promoter it's constantly working so it's a lot of work to sell that many copies just a footnote for Freaks that only represents how many were sold in the United States there's also distributors that can navigate a Hungarian website or a German website still that's 100 copies in the US essentially in about 2 years at $37 each that's a pretty good a pretty good deal there Book of Cow we've sold about 150 copies in a little less than a year all of its content has been available for free for more than 10 years but we've still sold 150 copies so that just shows that there is a market for previously published content even if it's previously published content that is available for free and has always been available for free Dark Domain has sold about 800 copies in 3 years that's also again previously published content that was available for several years before it was put out on DVD still is available for free too so it's just if you want it all packaged nice again same thing with the Book of Cow they're available on the Internet or freely available on the CDC site they're available on TextFiles.com they're available all over the place or you can get them nicely bound like this it's up to you and I heard a statistic from Jason he sold over 2,500 copies 2,800 copies of the BBS Documentary which is Creative Commons licensed so it's effectively free as well accepting payments if you're managing your own inventory basically if you're not using a site like Lulu right so everything that I deal with I manage inventory of physical inventory nothing's being printed or pressed on demand all the books that I have basically in my own inventory and there's a lot of different options you have to accept payments to sell these products that you have be it books, DVDs or something else the number one way that people use is actually if you want to get something on Amazon.com and it's not there already then you have to set up an Amazon Advantage account if you have distribution rights for that product I can't really see the slide that well but there's a lot of fees basically involved there's a $30 annual fee they take 55% of your sale which is a huge percentage and then if you know once they're ready to cut you a check you're offered over $100 they charge you a $15 check fee on top of that so this is like the least competitive program available but at the same time it gets your product on Amazon.com and that's the funny thing we're selling this book Freak's book for like $30 and on Amazon it's marked up to almost $60 and we're still practically losing money on it I mean it's just totally ridiculous but people are willing to pay that because they trust Amazon and there's the name Amazon behind it so one of the reasons that they do to be fair to Amazon I don't want to slam them too hard is they're managing that inventory so they'll order for example when you start the account they'll order like five or six books or DVDs or what have you from you and then some sort of an algorithm or something that tracks the success of your product because then later on give me 30 of these and then if nothing if there's no activity they'll go just give me three and so they'll keep reordering and re-upping like that and if it's really successful they'll order in the dozens if they're just trying to keep it available then they'll just order one or two so I have a lot of different products on Amazon.com you can actually compete with Amazon.com with your own product by joining what's called the Amazon Marketplace it's a lot, it's a little bit more competitive they only take 15% cut of the sale instead of 55 still have a couple other little transactional fees which add up to around a little over two bucks but you're still making you're still keeping a lot more of that money yourself the difference is that you're not shipping to an Amazon warehouse and then that goes out immediately from Amazon you're actually shipping directly to the seller like you would with just like eBay or something like that so yeah, just one point though the product has to be on the Amazon website before you can add it as a marketplace item my experience with Amazon since we're all talking about how much we love Amazon like I was saying if I purchase my book with no markup it'll cost me about $6 so if I sell it for $15 I make about $9 now if I sell it for the same price through Lulu they take 20% of that profit Amazon well Lulu so now you've got this certain amount now when I purchased the UPC and the ISBN they automatically submitted my book to 13 online retailers so now my book's available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble Borders.com all the online websites Amazon if you buy through Lulu at that point $5 maybe $5 something at that point Amazon has a $4.50 handling fee per book it's slightly less but I know that I get these checks for like $0.78 through Amazon so it is this thing if you buy it for me on the street I make a lot more money but the odds of that aren't very good versus when people say $9 you've got books in your backpack versus they'll go to Amazon they feel a lot more safe using their credit card at Amazon if you search for my book at Google for a long time my website shows up now Amazon starts to show up it is people feel safer dealing there but they kind of stick it to the little guy yeah of course there's always PayPal they're probably they're probably the most competitive in the marketplace if you want to sell your own products and you stock your own inventory they're really only taking around 3% unless you're in a really high sales volume they're basically going to charge you 3% it's not available in all countries but from my own experience with other credit card processors that's because a lot of these other orders from foreign countries tend to be fraudulent but they support 190 different countries and the base is growing all the time another really good credit card processing payment processing company that I use is called Kagi they charge a slightly higher percentage and then they also charge a credit card fee on top of that if the payment is coming in through credit card but they accept by far the widest variety of credit cards they even accept like JCB which is unheard of a whole bunch of other different off the wall type of credit cards or foreign credit cards and they don't discriminate on what country you're coming from when you place an order of course the best way is to set up a DBA account with your bank that means you have to go through the process of creating an assumed business name and that varies from state to state what you have to do in order to do that in California you have to place an ad basically in a local newspaper a fictitious business name statement announcing that you're going to conduct business under a certain name and that's just basically a check and balance to make sure that you're not going to say I'm going to conduct business as McDonald's or something like that and then you can accept and process checks under whatever business name you want and there's no fees ok reviews there really is no such thing because any press is good because it gets people talking about your book or your CD or your DVD or whatever it is good reviews come from people who are excited so you got to be excited about it I sound really excited right now I'm sure you have to be really excited about it if you want people to give you good reviews you have to say yeah this is great this is awesome this is the best book ever I can't live without it that sort of thing never stop promoting because we're all still being reviewed a year after we published or a year or more after we published it just takes time for reviews to come in find target websites as Flak was mentioning if you're writing about Commodore BBS you should find retro gaming websites and Commodore websites and things like that give free copies away again if you want if you want reviews you're going to have to give away copies contact websites these newspapers offer to give interviews you'd be surprised people will actually interview people who self publish books because they say oh I didn't know you could do that they're just curious so they'll actually interview you and maybe it'll run in some Pudong Town newspaper but it's a review and it's in print give electronic or PDF copies for reviews that's another solution or another alternative that would be cheaper free for you cheaper than giving out a print copy use people's positive feedback as a review so put it on your books website and say so and so said this in a MySpace comment or in a blog post or whatever even if it's not a formal review if they say hey this book was great you should mention that again talk it up to your friends and have them write about it and review it and what not make sure that you have everything set up before you start asking for reviews though or your reviews will be bad if you don't have your website set up they'll say well I couldn't even figure out how to order the book or you know if your website says under construction or whatever they won't come back they'll move on to something else move on to the next book so you guys have anything to add about reviews get slash dotted get slash dotted that would help I sold I started selling my book at a computer convention and over a month I sold about 30 copies and then after Jason's review of Commodore Grand on Slashdown I sold 124 hours so I highly recommend it yeah alright so the conclusion is that everybody should do this because there's really no reason not to thanks to the internet everyone can be a published author so you can all put on your resume that hey I wrote a book or hey I wrote a zine or I wrote an article in a magazine or I published a DVD or a CD or whatever and you should share the knowledge and share the wealth because that's the whole hacking thing right it's all about being free or cheap so there you go and that is that we have a little time for questions and then we will move to the Q&A room in a few more minutes when they cut us off so you sir me specifically this is the first this is the first event that we've been to with this book and we sold 150 copies so we I mean sold just through the website we did issue a press release and I think we got picked up on Boing Boing with that but we haven't done any face to face and we haven't really done much as far as reviews either so it's just been from our website of course we have a pretty high traffic website you guys pretty much the bulk of my sales have come from online I run asset.org the amount of traffic still it's kind of amazing actually the amount of traffic it gets and you know as far as marketing goes really the main marketing that I've done is through conferences and things like that and competitive computing events and that's about it most of my


What is up everybody bringing a duly here with three of my favorite daily fantasy golf plays for this week's Mexico Open at Vedanta, a brand new course for the PGA Tour. Jon Rom is a prohibitive favorite of plus 450 to win on Fandalsportsbook and while he's going to be the most popular play of the week, his recent performance might make him a little less popular than he truly deserves to be. The only nitpick you can make with Rom right now is the putting. He's been called from the 5-10 foot range which is a key, very key stat, but within 15 feet in total he's still putting really well. So the real main issue with Rom then is that this week should lead to tons of birdies given the resort level course and low scores mean more golfers can contend, but from a daily fantasy standpoint Rom is still the rock in this field and you can find plenty of ways to differentiate even with Rom in your tournament lineups for this week. Aaron Wise, former PGA Tour rookie of the year in 2018 has not exactly been dominant since then, but there is a reason for the high-ish salary of 10,700. Wise over the past 3 months ranks 10th in Data Golf's true strokes game to Teter Rienstadt which adjusts for field strength. He's 7th off the tee, 27th in approach play, and the reports about the course this week indicate large landing areas, meaning golfers who hit it long should have an advantage. The rare Pass Palum Green should level out the playing field in terms of the putting splits and that's what we need for Wise to make the most of his potential. With only a handful of big names in the field and mostly all of them at higher salaries than Wise, he's a great way to get different this week. Even though we have a strong 9,000 range this week relative to the field overall, I'm bumping down to the low 8,000 range for my final golfer here with Alex Smalley. Smalley's a name on the rise and that's already been reflected in his win odds which have shortened from 140-1 to 90-1 on Fandals Sportsbook. Smalley has good driving stats and putting stats so the issue primarily for him right now is the iron play. Typically that's the most crucial stat for me, weekend and week out, but given how easy this course should probably play, it's a little more forgivable, should be able to gain some strokes off the tee with a driver, hit a lot of greens and putt well on these greens this week. Smalley was T2 with the Corallis Putucana in March and that was a similar field strength. The famous cuts in his profile don't really reflect the field strength that he'll see this week. That'll do it for my three favorite plays for this week's Mexico Open at Vidanta. Best of luck this weekend.


Hey Psych2goers, welcome back. Why did this happen? Whether you saw it coming or not, the feeling is the same. You're shattered. You feel like your heart is broken into multiple pieces. Life dishes out many unforeseen heartbreaks. Though the experiences may be similar, every hurt is personal. Traumatic events from your past can leave you wounded. Over time they take shape of an emotional wound itself. Like a physical wound, it's always in your awareness. You're protective and sensitive to anything that might re-injure it, and the same sensitivity often makes you even more vulnerable. Here are seven signs of an emotional wound. Let's all learn together, shall we? 1.  Is there such a thing as crying too often or too much? Some people cry while reading a sad book or watching videos of baby animals, while others cry only at funerals. If you've ever had tears well up in a meeting or wept out loud in a movie theater, you may have wondered if it's normal. It is found that women cry on average 5.3 times per month, and men cry on average of 1.3 times per month. Tearfulness is commonly associated with depression and anxiety. This emotional state perpetuates when you've been emotionally hurt in the past. As a result, even the mere hint of anything that arouses emotions can cause tears to flow. 2. You lose interest in the things you used to enjoy At some point in their life, most people would lose interest in things that used to excite them. Emotional hurt, however, takes this loss to its limits. It becomes impossible to draw enjoyment from things that once elicited excitement.  Your world is drenched in gray and you don't seem to have the strength it takes to lift the paint brush. 3. You get annoyed easily by people's behaviors Irritability is the carbon monoxide of emotional pollutants. No one likes confrontation, but you can run from it for only so long. Anger has its own role. Both direct and indirect anger, or passive, is meant to communicate something important. What you really want is to connect and be heard. But when anger is involved, the result is often just the opposite. Aggression in any form is the biggest hindrance to emotionally intelligent communication. People often think passive-aggressive communication is somehow better or nicer. It's not. In fact, it may actually be worse. If you're looking for a true and meaningful connection and understanding with another person, you need a better strategy. Being compassionate with yourself and figuring out the source can help bring yourself down when you're feeling on edge. Be compassionate with yourself. 4. You feel worthless and hopeless How can you increase your sense of worth? Can you earn it through what you do? Happiness is not obtained solely by your achievements. Self-worth based on accomplishments is pseudo-esteem, and not the real thing. Feeling worthless often involves a sense of hopelessness and insignificance. Such feelings often arise commonly due to abuse or trauma, or difficult situations that pose a threat to a person's sense of oneself. Pim-pointing the cause behind these distorted thoughts can help you to understand and address factors that contribute to low self-esteem. 5.  Or a string of thoughts that just keep repeating and repeating and repeating themselves? The process of continuously thinking about the same thought, which tends to be sad or dark, is called rumination. Your history of emotional or physical trauma makes you believe that by ruminating you'll gain insight into your life or a problem you're facing. As when a ball is rolling downhill, it's easier to stop the ruminating thoughts when they first start rolling and have less speed. And when they've gathered speed over time. It helps to identify your trigger and find a distraction to break your thought cycle. For example, calling a friend or family member, doing chores around the house, reading a book, or walking around your neighborhood. This helps to challenge the onslaught of thoughts. 6. You feel too much until you're numb An emotional wound can also trigger what is called apathy. Emotional hurt causes you an emotional overload to the point that you become numb. It's a form of self-defense against future hurt. Apathy is a feeling, but it's also an attitude. And sadly, the attitude is one of indifference, unconcern, unresponsiveness, detachment and dispassion. Emotional hurt saps you of so much energy that you feel listless, almost too paralyzed to act, and certainly without the will to do so. This is why apathetic individuals are easily identified by their passivity.  To defeat this stagnancy within, you must be willing to commit to giving this apathy the fight of its life. Even though doing so feels like it will take a lot more energy and effort than you're capable of. 7.  Where the life you're living doesn't seem anything like the life you wanted. As if on autopilot, going through the motions but feeling unsatisfied? Your instincts are to shake it up, change your job or go on that vacation. But that provides only a temporary, not permanent solution. Instead, the solution lies within. Topping up your ways of thinking about events can actually help lead to new perspectives and diminish distress and anxiety. It's important to do away with your negative perceptions about yourself that interfere with problem solving. If you found this video helpful, be sure to hit the like button and share it with those out there who need to hear this. Don't forget to subscribe to Psych2Go and hit the notification bell for more new videos. And as always, thanks for watching.


Like, that's the stuff, like that's the effort that gave us the confidence and ended up getting us in, right? And obviously, you can't, for every opportunity, you have to know when to go, that all in for it. But man, when you get an opportunity that can really change things, like, that's the effort, at least from my standpoint, that I think it's required to get some of these breakthroughs. What's up, everybody? And welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week, and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. The mantra is we prepared well over 100 hours, probably close to 200 hours for a 10 minute interview. And it's just like, that's the stuff, like that's the effort that gave us the confidence and ended up getting us in, right? And obviously, you can't, for every opportunity, you have to know when to go, that all in for it. But man, when you get an opportunity that can really change things, like, that's the effort that at least from my standpoint, that I think it's required to get some of these breakthroughs. Well, I know many have heard mantras around, you know, build things that scale and automate everything and figure out the quickest way from point A to B. And it sounds like there's just a lot of blood, sweat and tears along the way before you even get your foot in that door, that I just don't hear many people sharing or glorifying. And it does lead people astray when they have their first failure, it doesn't happen as fast as they want, and then they give up. So it's so great to hear that story that you're sitting there manually updating page by page just so that the investor, the donation can register so that end user can feel the connection to the family, share it with their friends, see the impact they're having and really grow in an unscalable way. You can't carry your laptop for 10,000 families and update it by hand. But you can prove it. And then I'll tell one more, this is a really quick story, one more of those examples, when we were actually going through Y Commator, it was just me and my two co-founders, Matthew Marshall and Alexandria Lofsey. And once we got out there, we moved to San Francisco, and I mean, I've never worked so hard in my life for those three months. And we were fortunately now getting new customers or new donors every day, right? And there was a kind of a philosophy that the founder of Y Commator talked about called his name is Paul Graham, and he said, it's better to have a thousand people absolutely love you than a million people kind of like you, right, as customers, right? And it's, you know, somewhat of like a thousand raving fans concept, like similarly. And so, and he was talking about how when you're, when you're just starting off, one of your main advantages is you can do all these things that don't scale to create like real customer love, right? Or real donor love.   But man, we did all those videos for at least our first thousand donors and imagine their experience, right? Of I just gave, I get a personal video from the founders. And that's how we got a lot of our first like raving fans. And it's just, it's not rocket science. They don't teach you that at, you know, at Harvard Business School, it's just putting it's being creative, it's being thoughtful and it's being and it's caring. And it's actually just putting in the work. It's caring, but it's also being in love with the mission. You have to be willing to fight for it to go through all of this. When you know that the odds are stacked against you, when you know that there's better competition, when you, when you know that the odds are against you. And it's like, well, I'm still going. I'm still preparing. I still, I'm still putting in a hundred hours for this 10 minutes because I love this mission so much. You will be willing to sit there and make the thank you videos and all of that. And yeah, yeah, I love that. I mean, and for, for us in the, in the work and the fighting that we have done over the last 15 years, I can relate to that so much. And it's a, that's a big ingredient. That's not only loving it, but putting so much meaning behind that Y and with, with your story and your mission. I mean, there are so many different moments of certain people's faces smiling and being able to have a, to create a family around that and to, to lift up their experiences and enhancing their life. I mean, these are all great points. You can hang your hat on any one of them. Now joining Y Combinator, there had to be a sense of self-doubt entering that room. I mean, if the application process is so difficult, they take so few, then you're in and you're looking around at all these other incredible ideas and incredible founders who are talented and have maybe even some wins under the belt where you may not have. Paint us a picture of how you dealt with that self-doubt and maybe even imposter syndrome of being in such an amazing experience. We drop great content each and every week, and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. By far, that was the most imposter. Like, if you were to level imposter, if you were to measure the level of imposter syndrome, that would be at an all-time high for me, for sure. I think that, you know, my response to that and my team's response to that was, we just really did feel like underdogs. And we felt like we had to put in even more effort, be even more focused, and really make the most of the opportunity. And so I think we just, we did things that, you know, as far as like going above and beyond on building relationships, you know, at YC or outside of YC, and kind of just making the most of every opportunity. And having that underdog mentality. But then what really happened was, we started to get a lot of traction. And like, things really started to work, honestly, even more so than the majority of our batch mates. Because every Tuesday, you kind of come together with, they break you up into groups. And we had a group of probably about 10 or 12 other startups. And they're just, the partners are there, and they're just kind of grilling you under weekly metrics. And like, we were hitting ours, and we were kind of in the top percentile. And so going from holy smokes, we're not supposed to be here. They made a mistake, like, oh my gosh, what did we get into? To feeling like an underdog, putting in the effort, and then starting to see real traction, even more so than the other people that you didn't feel like you were qualified to be with. That builds a lot of confidence, you know, and they gave us this boost that, no, we actually do deserve to be here.  A lot of it is about your grit, your heart. Obviously, you have to be smart in how you're problem solving, but also just like boldness and courage and being willing to do things that others aren't willing to do. And I thought, we can do that. And that was how, and so that was how, you know, I think some of our disadvantages actually became our advantages while we were there. Absolutely. And I know that a big part of Y Combinator is getting you access to all of these incredible mentors and alumni of the program. What is some of the best advice that you receive that maybe is counterintuitive or was really shocking and fascinating for you to learn and then implement in your business? Yeah, one of the ones we've already talked about, so I won't go into detail, but it's very counterintuitive. It's in the beginning, whether it's with starting a company or starting something inside of your own organization, you know, it could be a new initiative. The thinking is the counterintuitive thinking is to do things that don't scale, right? Because you can get so programmed in designing something from scratch that has to perfectly scale, has to be perfectly automated, where if you could just get started on something so that you can learn and you can like make improvements and iterations and like start pushing up that, that boulder up the hill, that's one of them. And anybody has the power to do that listening. So that was one. The other one was Brian Chesky, who was the founder of Airbnb, came and spoke to us one night. And this was like almost six years ago, and I still remember it so vividly.   But he's like, the ones that actually believe me and like make their culture like the priority, you're going to be the one that builds like an extraordinary brand that recruits the best people. And I believed him. I took him at his word and we've invested so much from the very beginning into our culture and into our team so that would be probably the other one. Yeah. Well, I think that's very important because that puts other people in alignment to want to fight for your mission, your goal, for that idea. Could you speak a bit about that to what things you did in the early days after hearing that to get everybody aligned and to make that happen? Yeah, sure. I mean, I'll kind of do high level then I'll zoom in. So I think the first part is, you know, no matter how small of a team you're working on, you know, it could just be your co-founders like it was in the beginning, it could be even if you're not running your own company, but you're running, you're running a team within teams like you, if you're in a leadership role or you want to be one day, like the good news is you have, you have control over the culture, right? And I think what people don't do is they don't believe it's the most important thing. And so what that means is they don't actually invest into it. You know what I mean? Invest, I mean time, and I also mean money, right? And you try to create an excellent culture, or you want an excellent culture, but you're not willing to actually make the investment that's going to generate the return.  We would overpay for like off-sites that we would do, quarterly off-sites, we still do them, which costs a lot of money and a lot of time, but man, what comes out of it is so amazing. You know, different events that we put on, and yeah, and just like trying to listen to to team members, and you know, if they are really, if we think it'd be a great opportunity to provide, you know, free like mental health classes, like we'll do that, you know? And it's like just not being afraid to to spend money on things because it's going to have a great return. So we've always done that. Yeah, that investment in culture keeps the amazing talent that you attract as well. Oh, yeah. And in your space, you're competing against for-profit companies that probably have bigger benefit packages, bigger things to offer their employees. So culture has to be a focus for you to succeed.


All right, so I'm here to talk about experience that I had at a previous job where we grew from zero to 9,000 selenium tests So if you're looking at the conference guide, it says zero to 15,000 selenium tests. Sorry. I had an off by one error I'm a dot net guy the fact that I had any tests at all as a win So I'm a gym homes if you want to follow me on Twitter. I'm not the gym homes. I'm just one of them so the story is really about Going into an organization that didn't value automation. I had to figure out how to get some quick wins and Start to get us some good effective testing and then how to deal with a number of issues that happened along the way Went to this company. They had no QA department. They had no real testing. They didn't value automation I went in with my eyes open because I went to go work with a couple friends And I knew the ugly corners. So that wasn't the scary part there The sound of care. Do I need to move that down some? Good. Okay So when I first started things off, I had to make some quick traction To make the case for automation and show that there was some value around it So I used selenium IDE got a few test cases running there about a hundred wrap those into our build process and got them running three or four times a day So that we were starting to catch some regressions because there were plenty to be caught and People were starting to see the value of that my QA team grew. I got a couple developers We started writing some tests in selenium one because selenium IDE is totally inappropriate for any kind of larger Anything other than just sort of a proof of concept and we grew to about 1500 tests in selenium one Oh scattered over about a hundred hundred and fifty fixtures Selenium one we're having to deal with selenium RC. So it's a separate process. You have to stand up Selenium one didn't deal with page weights very well. So we moved over to selenium two using web driver And this was a big win for us because we got to get rid of the whole selenium RC Process so I didn't have to worry about it hanging. I didn't have to worry about it leaving orphan browsers around and At about that same time I Got another guy on our team and he helped us writing some backing API's He knew the platform that we were working on and he could help us out with things like very quickly creating setup data Creating prerequisites and conditions. So instead of having to use the browser to do all that which is just terrifically slow Now all of a sudden we've got a backing API So we're able to write tests much more effectively much more clearly and much faster So my two people that are doing the automation are starting to make some good traction on there I go away for a couple months Getting some focus on some other areas that needed my attention and I come back and they've got 9,000 tests Holy cow. So this is actually great because they're all high-value tests. But the problem is They're taking forever They're taking 16 hours to run. So instead of being able to get those things running Four times a day. We're having to wait until the weekend So instead of having any kind of a reasonable feedback loop all of a sudden it's seven days So they start losing credibility because nobody's paying attention to them because we're not getting any kind of quick feedback Functional tests are never going to be anywhere near as quick as your unit test or even integration tests So you just have to kind of buy off into that going forward But a one-week feedback cycle is just totally a mess so a Couple different ways that you can approach trying to solve that is Basically break things out into basic validation tests little small pieces that you can run on a much faster basis So we did that we looked through our eight or nine hundred fixtures and we said okay These are the really critical things that we need to run several times a day to make sure that we're not Completely screwing things up. We pull those out run them on a separate build cycle That takes about 30 or 45 minutes and we're getting some better feedback But we're still losing that comprehensive testing and the real answer to that is scale out Scaling out means taking a look at tooling that will allow you to run multiple tests in Parallel and then stitch everything back together And you should address this early on but here's the deal infrastructure is important and Infrastructure in many organizations as all is a battle I need more servers because I need to be able to run these tests faster rather than just once on the weekend It doesn't have to be going out and buying fancy servers. You can look to do this through virtualization You can spin up a number of virtual servers Look to your tool set to spin out those tests into those scales or into the multiple systems And then stitch everything back together a number of build server products So help you with that if you are running Selenium You can look to Selenium grid that'll put those out to those agents or those nodes and people will write this kind of Tooling themselves depending on their environment, but that's a really critical piece and frankly I screwed up as a leader of that group by waiting way too long to get that done I encourage you to look at the scaling early on as you're starting your effort Get that thing wrapped get it nailed down And then you don't have to worry about it later on when your tests are starting to take longer Add more nodes in add more agents in but approach that early early on So the next thing is And this was actually one area that I was pretty successful with my team Treat your test code like production code because it is dummy And that's targeted at me not y'all just to be clear So in our organization the people writing the Selenium test were not developers per se They were testers who had some coding skills And in those kinds of environments a lot of people a lot of time people don't understand things like Refactoring or keeping your tests dry but this is really critical stuff Constantly refactor it as aggressive as you refactor your production code The system you're delivering you need to do that same thing with your test code Get rid of tests that don't have value anymore keep things clean And dry is critical to find your locators things like ids how you're finding your elements that You have to interact with put them only in one place because if you don't all of those same Ugly things that happen in your production code will kill you in your tests as well The tests get very brittle and Selenium just by nature any UI test by nature is brittle And it's sucky enough already so don't screw yourself with overly wet test code So the next thing to focus on to help out is backing apis One common test case that we had to deal with was User b can reply to a forum post that user a had created So the test case for this required me first creating user a create user b Create a group to hold the forum create the forum Create the forum post and then I can finally get to the test which is go find that forum Post and reply to it and make sure that that works those five steps Trying to do all of that through the UI Add tons of time on your testing So push all of that off to factories baseline datasets or write yourself a backing api to get all of that done through your internal apis When you start doing this stuff very quickly you can Cut down your execution time and you can make your tests much more maintainable and get better tests going Focus on value we talk about lean and we talk about focusing Value on the systems we're building and that's a great thing because it keeps simplicity in place You have to do the same thing with your tests There haven't been many bullet points in the presentation. So I thought I'd just throw these up in case you wanted some Value is important and you need to focus on it in our particular application Crud tests were the really important thing for us. We had a complex security system We had a bunch of different roles And so crud was the very important thing that we needed to make sure everything worked on so fancy stuff like Validating layout maybe doing some intricate messaging tests It made no sense for us to spend the time writing those tests or running those tests So by staying focused on value that helps cut down that execution time So something else is look at how your tests are running because you need to keep them granular So in my example of replying to a forum post I get all my prerequisites in place and now I spin up my browser to actually do the tests that I need If I have to first drive that browser to log on as that user Then navigate to the forum post that I need to reply to In our particular environment that took 10 seconds So we had about 800 test fixtures or times that we needed to spin up the browser and do stuff 800 fixtures times 10 seconds is 8,000 seconds 8,000 seconds divided by 60 seconds per minute is about 133 minutes That's two hours out of your test run Doing stuff that you don't care about So figure out ways to creatively get around that kind of stuff in our case We were going to make use of cookies so that when you stood up a selenium browser You can pass the pre-generated cookie and the system could see that the user was already authenticated And i'm able to bypass that whole log on stuff that log on stuff needs to get tested But it gets tested elsewhere in very granular tests Skipping that lets me focus on can I go find that post? Can I click a reply? Can I put tests? Can I put some text in click submit and it shows up? That's my test Be very careful about what you're testing when you're doing functional testing any test, right? You don't want to pollute with things that aren't germane to that specific test So culture Matters no kidding there are entire conferences about culture. There are huge books about culture There are any number of people Including myself at conferences who hang out and drink large amounts of alcohol to try to deal with culture issues Yeah Been there feel your pain So if you don't have a culture that values testing and that values automation You're screwed How do you deal with it? I went into a company knowing that they didn't have any value about this But that I had a few allies and I had some people that were open to things So I started gaining more allies and I started gaining more Openness toward automation by showing small winnable things So I talked about using selenium IDE at the start of the project In order to what give me a couple quick wins I spent a couple weeks got some tests up got them running regularly We were catching regressions and my boss starts to see oh, this is worth the effort I can get you some more people to help out with this and we can see where that goes Doing that kind of thing starts to open people up to automation. The next step is Testability how many folks here have worked with? We'll say legacy uis that aren't necessarily the most test friendly Liars, okay. There's hands going up So in our particular case The platform that we were building Was at that point about six years old And so we're dealing with table driven layout nested table driven layout Tables within tables within tables in some cases like four levels deep gratuitous use of divs for things that we couldn't figure out And basically like one id on every page, which was at the top level of the form So when I have to try to go interact with a specific Field or something on the page more often than not The closest id value that I have is about six elements up So I am basically screwed and having to resort to x-path Does anybody here like x-path? I'm really sorry. There's therapy available for that It's not all about me So x-path is a large reason why at one point I was drinking about a bottle of scotch a week, but I had to get over that So if you're in that kind of situation look to solve some of that culture issue By getting closer to your ui developers in my case Every time that I'd go to a couple particular ui developers and I'd try to say look This is a really difficult ui to test Can you get me an id value that's on this particular element so that I can Have much faster much less brittle tests I'd always get a huge number of excuses why they couldn't do that I never got really good at winning that battle But what helped was getting a couple of those ui developers to spend some time each day with me writing tests So that they understood the x-path pain I was having to go through And it wasn't a hundred percent solution, but it was a step in that right direction I don't even pretend to have fixed it magically while I was still there Um unicorns were being killed on a regular basis, but you have to at least make that effort Because if you can't get that supportive culture in the supportive environment, you're never going to get over those hurdles so Kind of wrapping things up Long-running tests are tough and you have to look at how you can Get them running more effectively Look at running subsets those tests break them out into basic validation tests so you can get a much faster feedback cycle Look to do things like scaling things out get your infrastructure in place and get it nailed down early on Virtualization is a great thing. You don't need huge servers To act as agents or nodes for functional test stuff You just need to stand up some kind of a workstation A virtual machine without a lot of resources and be able to split your tests out So if those things run in parallel, let's solve that early in your cycle Treat your test code like your production code. It is production code Refactor mercilessly Look to do things of all of the solid principles as far as i'm concerned in functional tests The dry principle is your biggest ally Make sure that your test automation writers who may not be Regular developers understand the benefits of that Focus on tests that are extremely valuable Keep them granular and look to get rid of any actions in your browsers That don't specifically pertain to the thing you're trying to test And by all means and this is the toughest thing out of everything we keep hearing it again and again again It's not the technology. It's the people Look to try to address this Try to figure out how you can bridge some of those communication gaps when allies So i'm a gym homes on twitter. I love talking about this stuff. I'm very passionate about it If you don't hit me up here, you can reach me through my blog at frazzleddad.com. I have two small kids Which is why I have gray hair So that's it. I got a couple minutes left and i'd be happy to answer questions No questions for the dot net guy. Sorry All right. Thank you very much


First and foremost, when we're receiving the ball in these areas, these midfield areas, so the ball goes back into the big man. Midfield players, when they receive it, if you can, and only if you can, try and avoid receiving it in central areas. Lee, allow that for your centre forward players. I'll tell you why. When you're receiving it either side of the centre circle here, if he's stopping it, the ball being played into me, he's going to fire the ball into one of my strikers. If we receive the ball in these areas here, two things. Once I break the line, so broke the line of the first block, I'm in a position straight away where I can either create a 2v1 to try and score a goal here. Okay? If it's not on and I go the other side, all of a sudden on the big switch, I get the opportunity to create the 2v1 on the other side. Okay? Once you're in these central areas here receiving and it's midfield players, all of a sudden it's a big, big ask for me to play the ball into my wide player and then try and get beyond my wide player and try and get beyond their back line. Okay? If I receive it here on the half turn, slightly wider, okay, now I can bring myself into play. I might want to overlap him to create that 2v1. The big man comes into play. He might play a little give and go in a 1-2, so I'm the third one. All right? Or I might even at times want to underlap, which we'll talk about a little bit later. Yeah, when you're ready.


The fiery horse with the speed of light, the cloud of dust, and a hearty hyosilver! The lone ranger! The building of the first transcontinental railroad was one of the most important steps in the winning of the west. The railroad was of prime importance to the future of the country. But powerful forces, cattlemen, stagecoach lines, and steamship companies opposed it. Outlaw opposition sprang up, and the lone ranger was commissioned by the president to lead the fight against the enemies of progress. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. From out of the past come the thundering hoofbeat to the great horse, Silver! The lone ranger rides again! The construction crew of the great central railroad pushed its tracks further west. They came to a section of the plains that was notched with deep gullies and ravines, as though some prehistoric monster had clawed the earth. It was also the home of the hostile Cheyenne Indians. And as the little steam engine chugged along, pushing loaded flat cars toward end of track, the workmen became increasingly nervous. I tell you, Joe, I don't like it. What's the matter, Sam? This country, it gives me the creeps. Why do they have to lay a roadbed through these ravines? As it's easier than going round, I guess. Yeah, easier for some of them murdering redskins to get up there behind those rocks and take us off. We ain't seen Hydener have an engine for over a week. Sure, and that's the time when you better start worrying about redskins, when you don't see them. Pete, the foreman says there ain't no danger. Why are we packing guns, then? I don't know. Now, here we are, end of track.  Mother, I tell you, might as well start pitching the air, but I still don't like it. Perhaps Sam's fear was prompted by more than suspicion. For at that very moment, the construction crew was sighted by three men who crouched behind a large rock high on one side of the ravine. The leader of the trio was thin-lipped Doc Barlow. By his side stood a boy in his early twenties known as Angel Face. And Murphy, the third man, was dressed as a Cheyenne Indian. Listen, Murphy, you're too Angel Face. Remember, I've given the orders around here where I said go, see? Why not shove this rock over now? It's big enough to smash three of those cars. Maybe knock the engine over. Because I'm waiting for a signal. What kind? Never mind. You get a man down there. You got to weirdly move up the track a little ways. I could drill about 10 of them before then you would happen. Put that rifle down. There'll be no shooting. When I get the signal, you shove the rock. Murphy, you stand up so they can see you. Let out an engine war whoop, understand? Yeah. Don't I even get one shot? Not unless they try to drill, Murphy. Then what do we do? Get on our horses and ride from Plaintown. Oh, I thought I was hired in this job to do something.  Huh, fine job. You chance of forgetting, ain't you? There were just three pieces of long braids who came out to wear some Saint Joe. But the iron spurs another name for parlor games and pink tea. That's right. Parlor games and pink tea. Meanwhile, back at the end of track, a construction gang continued their work of unloading tires from the flat cars. They did not realize that high above them on a bluff overlooking the road dead, three members of a notorious iron spur gang were planning death and destruction. Pete shouted to his men, How men? All together on these rails. We'll take them one at a time. Grab it! Lift! Burn! Pete! I'm on the thirsty. I gotta have a drink of water. Well, go down the track and find the water boy. And send him back here. We all could use a drink. Thanks, Pete.  His face is steaming. Sure, Sam. Here it is. Thanks. Now another one, men! Things were beaten off and Pete and the railroad men bandaged the wounded men, put them on the train and headed back to the long line of construction shacks where the workers made their camp. Miss Barkley, Colonel Parkman's secretary, heard the news of the Indian attack and rushed to Colonel Parkman's office. Track. Yes, Joan. A big rock dropped from a ledge. You heard about it? Just a few minutes ago. Two cars completely smashed. And one man killed. Who was it? Joe McCullen, one of our best track men. That's too bad. Pete said it was Indians, Cheyennes, I suppose. And I was hoping we'd won their friendship. I'm not so sure it was Indians, Colonel Parkman. Pete said he saw one of them. It was timed too perfectly. White men can dress as Indians, you know. Oh, you mean... mean the iron spur? Exactly. They know that the best way to put fear into the hearts of every man working for the railroad is with Indians. They've tried to rouse them against us and failing in that, they're imitating them. Maybe you're right. I'm sure of it. I've asked for a detachment of soldiers from the fort. But the commanding officer seems to think I'm exaggerating the danger of this job. We still have the Lone Ranger to help us. Can you get word to him? I'm going to try. You know then what happened this afternoon out at end of track? Yes, I know. Railroad men expect serious trouble with Indians. I really can't blame them. One man was killed today and two flat cars were smashed. But it wasn't Indians who caused it. I know it wasn't. How do you know, Miss Barkley? Oh, it's just suspicion, I guess. I know how relentless the iron spur is. How anxious they are to prevent the railroad from going through. Yes, I think you're right. There's an Indian village near the end of track, isn't there? Cheyennes. Just a few miles east of the bunk houses. But the Cheyennes aren't especially war-like tribe. Only when they're aroused. Our men have done nothing to antagonize them. It must be the members of the iron spur. I know it is. What shall we do? Pete the foreman thinks the men will leave their jobs. Miss Barkley, go to the camp. Try to keep the men at work. I'm going to meet Tonneau. Oh, Silver, hello. Tonneau, I've been talking to Miss Barkley. Tonneau, wait. Have you been over to Plainville? Ah. Are there any strangers in town? Anyone who looks like a member of the iron spur? Three strangers. Two old, one young. Who are they? Well, Tonneau, not no. Maybe they're my iron spur. Are they still there? Ah. Come on, then. We'll see who they are. Get them out of the camp! Come on, Silver! A lone ranger in Tonneau rode into Plainville. And it took them but a few minutes to reach the front of the Silver Star Cafe. Inside was the sound of much celebration. The masked man and his Indian partner dismounted, walked up the steps of the cafe, listened for a few moments outside the door, and then entered. They saw three men standing at the bar engaged in a noisy conversation. Taking a table in a corner where they would not be noticed, they listened to the heavy-set member of the trio as he laughed about his exploits earlier in the day. You know the best part of it was when we tied that young Cheyenne into his horse and sent him home, eh? Yes, you must believe.  I told him that was a regular railroad haircut. He went in his old man's chief blackhawk season. Yeah, boys, I think we did a real sport. Those are men. They captured the young Indian and cut his hair off. Um, that'd be plenty bad. Yes, I know. It's the worstest grace you can happen to a brave. Cheyenne, she put blame on railroad men. How do you know, Chief Blackhawk? Tell him it wasn't railroad men who sent his brave home in disgrace. I'll wash things at the camp. I don't know. Let me do it. Get him up, scoundrel. Meanwhile, Pete, the foreman of the construction gang on the railroad, was trying to persuade them to stay on the job. Joan Barkley stood beside him to give what age she could. No, man! Man, please, you got to listen to me. What for? The thing that happened today was an accident. It wasn't an Indian raid. You men aren't cowards. Listen to Pete. It was an Indian. I saw him. Well, we all saw him. But it was just one red skin. We've got to expect things like that. We all knew it when we took this job. I didn't take a job as target for rock slides and engine bullets.  But we promised to do a job. And a certain amount of danger is part of it. Not for me. How about the rest of it?  Why didn't you ask Joan McCullen that question? He wasn't scared this morning, either. But he's dead now. But that doesn't mean that we'll all be killed. That's a good enough sign for me. All right, Sam. If you're afraid, why don't you quit? I'm just talking sense. Boys! Boys! I never steered you wrong. Have I? All you care about is this railroad with all their money. I say there ain't enough money in the world of paper getting killed by engines. Fire! Fire! And I'd feel the same way if I'd been there today when Joan McCullen was killed. Now you're talking. But that same thing is not going to happen again. How do you know? Have you got a treaty with the Indians? No, I haven't a treaty. But I have a lot of confidence in someone who's going to help us. Yeah? Who is it? I can't tell you. But I know it's real help. I suppose it's your fairy godmother. Boys! Don't listen to him, please. We've all got a job to do here. How about the engines? There won't be any more trouble with the Indians. I know there won't. I promise you that. Oh, maybe she's right. Well, of course she's right. Now let's all forget about this idea of quitting. Get some sleep and do a good day's work tomorrow. How about it? All right. Hey, you mummies must be crazy! Don't you know all this railroad is apt as to get the track built? They don't care how many men get killed building it. That's not true. I guess you're the only one who wants to get out, Sam. The rest of us are going to stay on the job. Thank you, all of you. I knew you'd stick. Listen! Listen! All of you, listen! Listen to what? I'll open the door and you can get a real earful. I don't hear anything. You don't? Well, just keep your ears open. It's getting louder all the time. You know what that is? I'll tell you. It's Cheyenne Wardrums. That means engines on the war pass! The curtain falls on the first act of our Lone Ranger story. Before the next exciting scenes, please permit us to pause for just a few moments. Now to continue our story. The Lone Ranger rode hard to meet Tonto at the Indian camp before Chief Black Hawk could attack the railroad men. He reigned up short at the edge of the camp with the sound of the Indian war dance was louder than ever. There's Tonto. Wolfsilvers. Teddy boys. Teddy. Teddy! Where's the TP of Chief Black Hawk, Tonto? Tonto shall wait. Alright, lead the way. I'll follow. TP. Raise the flag. We're going. There's no time to lose. Chief Black Hawk. Tonto come back. Bring white friends. Chey. Chief, I want to ask help of Black Hawk. Make talk, Black Hawk, no. Your braves are on the war path. They're going to attack the railroad men. What did they do this? Men from Iron Horse make fools shy and brave. I know what happened. I saw the men who did it. Black Hawk, not like. Make war medicine. But you're wrong, Chief. The men who cut your braves' hair are not with the railroad. Chief, tell Black Hawk. He was mistaken. The men who did dinner outlaws. If you make war against the railroad men, you'll be killing innocent people. Oh, Black Hawk, no white friends speak true. Because I give you my word, there's never been broken. Masked men always speak truth. Iron Horse, and you? No, I come alone. Because you're making a mistake, innocent people will suffer. Would you stop war medicine? Would you do this for me? For a white friend, Black Hawk, do it. For Iron Horse, no. It's for me. Black Hawk, tell braves. Thank you, Black Hawk. I'm proud to have such a good friend. Have a long, Tado. It must be done. We both will find out, Law. No, Tado, they can't do any more damage tonight. We'll keep an eye on the construction gang tomorrow. Steady, Silver. Steady, boy. Do you think Cheyenne will not make war? They won't unless they're provoked. It's up to us to see that it doesn't happen. All right, Tato, get him up! Come on, Silver! The Lone Ranger and Tato rode back to the high block that overlooked the railroad construction camp. There they kept a vigilant watch all through the night. Alert for any sound or sign of movement that would indicate the Indian chief had broken his promise. But Black Hawk was true to his word. The ominous throb of Tom Toms was heard no more. The braves had taken off their war bonnets and all was peaceful. However, the scheming members of the Iron Spur had also heard the war dance stop suddenly. They didn't know the reason for Black Hawk's sudden change of plans, but they realized the Indians would not attack. And on the following afternoon, their leader, Barlow, called a meeting. They found out why the British didn't make the attack last night. It was the Lone Ranger that stopped him. Hang it there, and Braceau is pulling out. I still got an ace up my sleeve. We're going to do something tonight that the Lone Ranger doesn't like him can interfere with. What is it, Doc? Fire. I don't get you. There's a square mile of dry buffalo grass between the Indians' camp and the railroad bunkhouse. And there's an east wind. That's all we need. Fire will sure wipe out them wooden bunkhouses. Yeah, and everybody in them, huh? I think the Indians did it. After that, the railroad won't be able to hire any man worse than Mississippi for any kind of wages. Hey, who is behind this iron spur we're working for, Doc? Honey of business. I was just thinking. It won't do you any good. Well, what do we do now? Lay low until the night, and we'll fire up the prairie and van moose. The job's done. Suppose this Lone Ranger... He couldn't stop it. Even if he knew about it. That's one thing nobody can stop. A prairie fire. Nervous and distraught with their strange sense of impending trouble, Joan Barkley spent all of that day watching the construction gang at work. She knew the Lone Ranger had somehow been able to prevent the threatened Indian attack the night before, but she also felt that the present lull was an unnatural quietness which might portend another outbreak from some new and unexpected quarter. If the members of the iron spur were unsuccessful in arousing the Cheyennes to declare war, would they try the same tactics a second time, or would they postpone the attempt until some future and indefinite time? These were questions she couldn't answer, and thinking about them only increased her fear and anxiety. At sundown, when the workmen had finished and gone to their bunkhouse, she returned to Colonel Parkman's office, tired and worried by a fear she could not put into words. I don't know what to expect next, Colonel Parkman. I wish I could feel that there was permanent peace with the Indians. The Lone Ranger is doing what he can but you think there'll be further trouble, aren't you? I'm afraid so. If only we could defeat this iron spur as long as there's one member left to fight against the railroad, we must look for... What is it, sir? That red glow. Look out the west window. You see it? Yes, it seems... Colonel Parkman. Fire. It's way up by the end of track. Very fire. The bunkhouses, the buildings and supplies, everything will burn. Come on, we're right out there. It's fire, Tutto. Somewhere between the Indians came with the railroad. How can it be? With this wind it'll get bigger every minute. Roll the silver. You're not scouting. Come on, Pete. What? Come back, they told you about me. Listen a minute. Mast! Hey, you... I've heard of you. You're the Lone Ranger. Yes, I am. Don't accuse the Indians of this. You men, get down here with more shovels. Get board, sticks, anything. Fight that fire. Beat them down. Now listen to me, Pete. Listen to me. Now listen to me, Pete. This fire was started between here and the Cheyenne camp. Hey, Pete, get in there and fight it. Don't let it get ahead of you. Fight it. Then we fight the Indians. Come on, Indians. Big man talking. Too little. Bring up that engine. Get her in place. Why bring iron horse? It's no good to fight fire. Yes, they want to use the water out of the boiler. Won't help much against this. Go your feet, men. Step it out. Big fire, plenty panned on prairie. Not bad any place, Tutto. Especially with wind behind them. Keep us up, Pete. Wait. Talk to watch sky. What about it? Take look at moon. The moon? What do you mean? Look close. See clouds over moon? I see them. Clouds not move east to west. Then move west to east. Tutto, you're right. The wind is changing. That means the fire not come closer. If go back. The railroad houses will be saved after all. But it'd be plenty bad for Indian camp. You mean the Cheyennes? Cheyennes have no place to run. Big mountain at back. No way to escape. Fire burn camp. All Cheyenne burn. That's right. They'll be trapped. Anyway, wind blow, fire blast. Wait a minute. The railroad goes by the south side of the mountain, skirts our camp. We could use the engine and cars, we could save them. Railroad man, I'd like to save Cheyenne. Indian lives are just as important as any other's. Pete! Oh, Pete! Why do you want? I haven't got time to pull out. You won't have to worry. The wind's changing. The wind's changing. It is changing. I want to use that engine and those cars. What? The wind's switching to the southeast. The Indian camp is at the base of the mountain. They'll all be burned. Well, who cares? I do. We'll take the steam cars and bring the Cheyennes back here. Well, that's crazy.  We'll take that chance. Look, wind already starts changing. Pete, Pete. Give orders about the train. Now look here. I don't know where to show it. Then we'll take them steady, big fella. Here it's all over. You'll eat silver. Now wait a minute. Give the orders or I'll give them myself at the point of the gun. I'm going to let the water out of the engine border, Pete. We can use it to smother the spark. Wait, are you the engineer? Yeah. Then leave the water in the engine. Put on more wood.  Hey, you're Max. I don't know who you are, but I'm letting the water out. We needed to smother the fire. Better do as he says, Bill. I reckon he knows what he's doing. That's better. Now Pete, tell the rest of them. All right. Man, that's enough. Fire! The help of the wind, it looks like we've whipped the fire. As you all can see, the thing that saved us is going to be bad for the Indian camp over by the mountains. And this man here is the lone ranger. He's going to take the engine and the cars and try to get through to save the Indians. What's the matter? Why did you stop the fire still burning? The wind has changed, Sam. Now we're going to try and save the Indians. What? I'm taking instructions from this mass man. He's the lone ranger. Save the Indians. He's crazy. Don't listen to him. You're in no danger. The fire can't jump this railroad right away. The Indians will be trapped. Teams up. Pete, she's ready to go. Good. I want a few men to ride with us and help the Indians. Who volunteers? Don't do it. Don't go with him. Take the throttle. Come on, Tunnel. Now, what do we still for the scout? We'll take them with us. All right, Silver. Up you go. Up the scout. Gradually picking up speed, the engine and three flat cars plunged into the inferno of blazing prairie grass. Tongues of greedy flame licked the iron rails and tried to climb under the train itself. The air was thick with smoke and wind-borne embers at the lone ranger protected Silver from flying sparks. Teddy Silver's teddy boy. We'll be through it soon. Finally, they reached the base of the mountain, the south edge of the Indian camp. There they found the stoical Cheyans working in little groups trying to fight off the fire. You find Cheyton back on Tunnel. Not him to get his people on the cars as quick as he can. Ah, Tunnel, do it. All right, Silver. We won't have to go far. Stop, boy. Where are you going? I'll be right back. Hey, big fella. Come on, Silver. That's it. This way, boy. We'll be burned alive. I thought I'd find you somewhere around here.   We can't breathe. You should have told that before you started this fire. We didn't start it. I know you did.  All will take care of you. Start marching over to that train. Back through the raging fire, the engine labored with its heavy load. The Indians were silent but grateful for their deliverance. While under the watchful eye of the Lone Ranger, the three members of the iron spur were certainly in sullen. As a rescue train backed up to the front of the bunkhouse, a large crowd awaited them. Everybody gland Lone Ranger helps Cheyenne. That's Colonel Clark. That's Colonel Parkman and Ms. Barkley, tunnel. It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen. How did you do it? Most of the credit is due to the engine of the man who ran it.  You'd better turn over to the sheriff. Who are they? I don't know, but the sheriff will find out. Down silver down, boy. Here's Count. Colonel Parkman, you will find that these three men are working for the iron spur. And there's three less of that gang to fight our job. Now the Indians will be on our side. Oh, Colonel Parkman, if only the Lone Ranger could always be with us to help. Hold on there. Don't leave us now. We need you. We'll not be far away. Come on, Colonel. There's a copyrighted feature of the Lone Ranger Incorporated.