Register Now! Top 20 Travel Tools for Nerds on the Go!

$30 registration includes a signed copy of the presenter’s book!

Wednesday, April 11, 2012
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM (Pacific Time)

If you travel, there’s no need to juggle printed itineraries, collect business receipts or feel disconnected from the office.

Beth Ziesenis, Your Nerdy Best Friend, will share the Top 20 Tech Travel Tools for Nerds on the Go! This special session will include free and bargain tech tools that help you stay organized, productive and in touch on the road.

BONUS!
Every attendee receives a copy of the presenter’s book, Upgrade to Free: The Best Free and Low-Cost Tools and Apps (rated 5 stars on Amazon.com — a $15 value), plus one lucky attendee will win a one-hour consultation with Beth to discover tech tools specific to his or her organization or lifestyle.

NOTE: Profits from this webinar will be donated to The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society in memory of the presenter’s running buddy, Rebecca Reza, who lost her life to cancer this winter. Read her story here.

This weekend I sent off the final file for the final project for the final client of Avenue Z Writing Solutions. Yep. That’s it. I retired from the copywriting biz to write more books and make a living speaking around the country. Or something. I haven’t really convinced myself that being a full-time author and speaker will pay the bills, but I’m jumping off the cliff to give it a try.

Strangely enough, the move comes almost four years to the day since I quit my sales job in a tearful phone call to my boss. “I can’t do this anymore!” I wailed. And when I got off the phone, I said, “Uh oh. Now what?” I was daunted by the idea of looking for a real job (even before the economy tanked), so I decided the easiest thing to do would be to start my own writing business.

It was very, very tough to make the phone calls to those clients, many of whom I’ve had almost since the beginning. It took me several months to finish all the work in progress, and when I pushed the send button on Sunday, there were a couple of tears.

So, here I am again starting completely from scratch on a new career I know very little about. That’s not exactly true because I’ve been booking speaking gigs for about three years, plus the first book is in the bag (and on the shelf — check it out!). But I have to create new marketing techniques, new online strategies, new connections — really a whole new identity.

So before I begin a new chapter, I thought I’d share a pictorial look back at the last four years of Avenue Z:

Now… on to the future as Your Nerdy Best Friend!

Now that I’ve held an actual advance copy of the book in my actual hands, it’s time to start sharing!

We’re giving away 10 copies of the book on Goodreads, complete with a cupcake magnet and other goodies!

Enter to win the chance to be one of the first reviewers: bit.ly/U2Fgoodreadsgive

It’s just a little bit of metal, right? This gray/black whirring, whining, groaning box that holds every one of my clients’ files, my book, all my original writing, photos of my nephews… It’s not really evil, is it? Not intrinsically so, I suppose. Yet, the power it holds over me (over all of us, really) to make our days suck is pretty substantial.

Yeah, the day sucked. In a nutshell, Contact Us emails from this site and Cheapskate Freelancer were vanishing into cyberspace when they downloaded into Outlook (I saw it happen!). They’d be there on the iPhone, and then when I hit Send/Receive…. POOF. No more email. No more wonderful new tools sent to me from readers. I’ve lost several in the past few days — all that’s left is the small memory I have of seeing on the tiny iPhone screen as I drank coffee in the morning.

But the bigger mystery here is not the emails… it’s the dependence we have on these little black boxes. How did this become the center of my world?

And another important question… when has it NOT been the center of my world?

For most of my adult life I’ve held jobs that revolved around these little things. I really can’t imagine what I would sit at a desk and stare at if I didn’t have these monitors. What a different world it must have been where you sat at a desk and could look unencumbered across the room to other people at desks. And perhaps those people attended meetings where everyone looked at the speaker, not down at a hand cupped over a BlackBerry.

At any rate, I spent the morning cussing at the computer and the afternoon listening to the IT consultant, who blamed my fondness for free and low-cost tech tools on the slow demise of my lovely HP Pavilion. Looks like she’ll be put out to pasture soon (remember the story of how she got here?). The fact that she’s acting up during crunch time for the book is akin to being dumped during finals week in college. But I’ll be making the switch to a new machine soon, and again the black anchor will be at my feet to keep me at the desk.

Your turn… what was the last job you had that didn’t involve a computer?