gml

yeah you're looking at the actual application there is a corporate site www.targetcontact.com. the reason you didn't get comments unfortunately is because i failed to read the submission instructions hahaha

We just went live, this is the culmination of the last 6 mo of my life, hopefully you approve :) It would be great to get some feedback, below is some marketing blurb from our corporate site to give you an idea of what it is we do:

Newsletters have long been a powerful marketing tool that builds brand awareness and offers improved communication with customers and prospects. But, busy professionals can't afford the time it takes to create a professional looking piece. The solution is TargetContact!

In 2007, TargetContact, Inc. set out to create a simple and affordable marketing platform for professionals looking to increase their visibility. The objective was to create something that required very little time and ongoing maintenance, but provided real results. The founders of TargetContact knew that if they could create this tool and offer an engaging monthly newsletter that professionals could put their own brand on, it would be very valuable.

Today, TargetContact serves Insurance Agents, Attorneys, Accountants, Loan Officers, Realtors, Consultants and many other types of professionals nationwide. With its easy to use campaign manager and engaging newsletter, TargetContact provides its customers with a high value marketing tool at an affordable price.

Vim and Chicken.

excellent. very nice application.

How exactly is this unhelpful? This woman obviously has not created any value for herself and is now confused as to why no one is finding value in her. I fail to see how this doesn't apply to business, especially startups. If this woman had considered herself as a startup she would spend time building value for herself. She would find one of two things, either someone would be interested in a merger or she would be satisfied to stand on her own. I agree that this is probably fake, and is most certainly a repost of a repost, but it certainly has something important to teach us. Why should we hide behind views that we don't believe in? Do you truly believe that his response to this woman is misogynistic? It sounds pretty straight and truthful to me.

my guess, those "plain jane" women, have wealth. and i don't mean puff daddy "i just bought a lexus in cash" rich, i'm talking about "i own a silver mine in colorado" wealthy. this woman is getting exactly what she's putting out, being treated like a cheap hooker. no one is going to marry you if you act like a hooker, unless you're one hell of a successful hooker.

you're not much of a challenge for someone who's interested in insurmountable challenges if you can simply be bought. you might fare well for a couple of years but dont be surprised when the tarnish wears off if you're not simply replaced.

forget it, you'll never be satisfied, just start your own company and set the price as low as you can for other people.

I recently did this, as in about a month ago, I became interested in learning Lisp. I started with a bunch of things. First I tried to get various working environments going like:

Emacs + Slime + SBCL

Emacs + Quack + PLT Scheme

I also tried DrScheme (which is a great learning environment).

Not knowing what i'd really need I also did some searching and discovered a few books:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dorai/t-y-scheme/t-y-scheme.html

http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

i also purchased the little schemer. I learned various interesting things from these different sources.

1. practical common lisp was essentially useless to me since i'd already been kind of feeling sold on using scheme and had very little interest in common lisp. what it DID teach me was how datastructures in lisp are created under the hood (or how one might go about implementing them). from this perspective it was very nice and helpful when understading, car, cdr and mapcar. although i wish i'd had a nice example of implementing a scheme in C.

2. reading The Little Schemer, has been the single most satisfying read of my entire computing life. so much so that i bought The Seasoned Schemer and The Reasoned Schemer without hesitation at price. this book will teach you to "think lisp" if you can just make it through the first book you will honestly know everything you need to about the lisp mindset and be ready to actually write useful code and no be shocked or surprised by anything. i can't stress enough how useful this book is READ IT.

3. Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum days has been a powerful reference for me and I honestly hope that it grows and evolves, it's easy to reference and great for when you start actually hacking on projects. It's just simple and obvious.

4. SICP is a mammoth work and also has a very nice video series. If you're serious about Lisp and even more serious about Scheme and furthermore serious about computing. You must read this. My approach so far has been to read top down (ie. cover to cover) and also use it as a reference. I get sheer joy from reading it, but it's amazing how practical it can be as well.

Personally I've settled on scheme, i dont' really like common lisp i find it irritating and with projects like Chicken: http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org out there I feel really comfortable. I re-wrote my entire blog using nothing but chicken and the web-scheme egg. I recently wrote an irc bot for fun during a huge bot writing session that broke out in a channel i frequent (don't ask we all just started writing bots for some reason).

If you're looking for good platforms the best I can recommend are:

SBCL (hands down nothing really compares so far)

PLT Scheme (aka DrScheme if you like GUI's)

Chicken (the absolute best imho BSD licensed scheme)

Hope this helps everyone. This is such an awesome thread i hope it continues for awhile.