How the Harry Potter Ride Works

The best theme park ride in the world is Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey at Universal's Island of Adventure theme park in Orlando, Florida. It's also the most technologically advanced ride ever built. If you want to know exactly how the Harry Potter ride works then you've got to check out this extremely detailed guide. It's called Secrets of the Forbidden Journey: The unofficial guide to the ultimate theme park attraction.This book explains how the ride uses a G2 RoboCoaster system with a KUKA made robotic arm on a transport, how the effects are done, how the attraction came to be, and more interesting stuff. If you're into theme parks and behind the scenes type stuff then this book is for you!

The 50 Most Terrifying Roller Coasters Ever Built

Despite this being the busiest I've ever been in my life with the least amount of free time I've still been able to finish and publish two books (with two more in the works). Earlier I finished Once I was Adopted, a children's picture book about adopting our dog Conan told through fun rhymes. Now I've published The 50 Most Terrifying Roller Coasters Ever Built. From initial idea to publication was about four weeks. I used an Excel spreadsheet, macro, and outsourced work to a virtual assistant in order to complete it so quickly.

So what's it about? Mega roller coasters of today reach heights of over 400 feet and speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour. Roller coasters towering taller than a certain height are terrifying for many individuals but it would be boring to simply make a list of the world’s tallest coasters. As a result, most of the bone-chilling machines in this list do not use sheer height to terrify, but instead prey on our fears and emotions in other, more creative ways. One element alone may not make a ride terrifying but the sum of all of its parts does. What factors make a roller coaster terrifying? Height, speed, inversions, backwards segments, unique track elements, darkness, and unexpected surprises all contribute to making your head spin and your knees tremble.

What are my next book ideas? One is about Excel spreadsheets and the other focuses on a specific theme park attraction.

Once I was Adopted

Once I was Adopted is the adoption story of our dog Conan. It’s a children’s picture book on Kindle. Teach your children to read and the joys of adopting a dog and caring for a pet at the same time. Here are a few pictures of Conan along with a few quotes from the book:

Before I was adopted

I had no room to run

there was no one to love me

and I never had any fun.

Once I was adopted

I moved to a new town

I loved my family so much

I was the happiest dog around.

All My Friends Are Dead

All Mr Friends Are Dead is one of the most bizarre children's books you'll ever read. It goes something like this: If you're a dinosaur, all of your friends are dead. If you're a pirate, all of your friends have scurvy. If you're a tree, all of your friends are end tables.

And don't forget to check out the sequel, All My Friends Are Still Dead.

Observation Wheels Now Published

To go along with my new website about observation wheels I have published a new book called Observation Wheels: Guide to the World's Largest Ferris Wheels. Check out the description and a preview on Amazon.com:

Give Yourself a Raise

If you follow this blog or know me personally then you’re probably aware I’ve been trying to make money off the internet in my spare time the past few years. I’ve enjoyed a lot of success recently, making over $3,000 the past two months. I want to help others have the same success I have had so I created a how to report I am giving away for FREE! The free ebook report is called “Give Yourself a Raise: How to create a residual income from the internet in your spare time.” The main topic of the book is how to create a website, blog, or ebook to earn extra income. It’s a lot easier to do then most people think. The hardest part is thinking of a good idea (and I give out a free idea in the book). I can honestly say one of the best decisions I've ever made is starting my own website. 

Making money online is easier than you think. Believe me - if I can do it, anyone can! But if it’s so easy why aren’t more people doing it? Because humans are inherently lazy. Not all of us, but generally speaking we like to find the easy way out. Those who don’t know much about the concept of making money online can open up their minds and take initiative to learn and understand it. The problem is that most people won’t even do that. It takes effort and most folks are lazy, except you of course because you are spending time reading this report when you could be eating potato chips slouched on your couch watching Honey Boo Boo reruns.


The FREE eBook Includes:
-why make money off the internet
-misconceptions about making money online
-writing blog posts for people and search engines
-monetizing your blog or website
-much more!

Download the Free report here or visit my new website http://www.need-a-raise.com

Coasters 101: Second Edition Launched

I recently launched the second edition of my book, Coasters 101: An Engineer's Guide to Roller Coaster Design. Changes to the book include interesting new content like:

• Evolution of the roller coaster
• Detailed description on launch systems
• A people powered coaster
• How a 4th dimension coaster works
• the modern vertical loop
• and much more!

I'm also working on getting the book published in more formats in order to make it available to as many people as possible. Here's the list where you can find it:

ebook pdf (through clickbank)................$7.99
Kindle Edition.........................................$9.99 
Nook.....................................................$9.99 (coming December 8th) 
Paperback...........................................$11.99

$1000 per Month

Learn how to make a residual income from the internet in your free time.If you’re not making any money off the internet – why not? You very well could be. It’s extremely easy to make some extra cash. Through my own experiences, I’m going to show you how to make a residual (and hopefully somewhat passive) income from the internet including:

• The secret to making money online
• 7 easy steps to building and monetizing your own website
• Optimize your site for search engines
• Internet marketing lingo
• Tools and resources

Do you want to learn how to earn 1000 a month? Do you want to know what is passive income? Download my free report and I’ll tell you ways to earn passive income and give you some of the best passive income ideas I’ve used to earn over a $1000 per month all in my free time!

Content Creation

I've been a content creation machine this week. I created a ton of content for my blogs and websites since coming back from a week of vacation in California. In the past week I have updated multiple websites, wrote numerous blog posts, conducted an interview, published over 100 vacation pictures to Facebook, and am editing three video segments from the trip. I thought I would use a post here to summarize all my recent content creation with links to all. Ok, here it goes. 


Blogs

I recently interviewed a zoo interpreter and photographer. I wrote up a review of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and uploaded a video of it to YouTube. I added an 2012 NFL helmet schedule to my Excel Spreadsheets Help blog downloads page. I explained part of the process of writing my roller coaster design book on Amusement Authority.


Mini-sites

I recently started a new online money making experiment which I’ve decided to share with you today. I’ve built four mini-sites to test out my idea to see how it works. People are always going for release dates for movies, book, and video games. If you can get traffic you can make money online. Thus, I have created a few sites based on possible future sequels for some of my favorite movies and video games. Looking for the Uncharted 4 release date? How about the Avengers 2 release date? Modern Warfare 4 release date. RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 release date.


Web Properties

I updated my recreational therapy exam site with a few new pages of great content.
My Apartment Search Spreadsheet website is up and running. My CATIA Macros tutorial site is humming along quite nicely.

Emails

I got some interesting email this week, from looking for quotes for a magazine to a casting call for a Food Network show, it's been quite the interesting week.

Don’t Put Me In Coach Book Review

I just finished “Don’t Put Me In, Coach: My Incredible NCAA Journey from the end of the bench to the end of the bench” by Ohio State walk on Mark Titus. Mark was a bench warmer on the Ohio State basketball team from 2006 to 2010. His Club Trillion blog launched him into the media spotlight and his career took off from there. The book is a funny journey into the locker room of the Buckeye basketball team. You will learn things you never knew about some of the most famous Ohio State basketball players of all time. I’ll never look at college basketball coach Thad Matta the same way ever again (the part where Mark describes the first time he met Thad is unforgettable). Get the inside scoop on the personality of players like Greg Oden and Evan “the Villain” Turner. Find out what really goes on in practice and overnight away game trips. 


The book, while a fun and easy read, is far from perfect. The beginning was laugh out loud funny and quite refreshing. However, the same style of humor and very similar jokes throughout make it increasingly not as funny the further you read into it. Also, a majority of the jokes are bathroom style humor, so if that’s not your thing then I recommend not reading. It’s very hard to tell what is true and what was fabricated for entertainment purposes. You find out how to earn a trillion in basketball stats but I found that segment of the book rather uninspiring (but maybe you other walk ons and benchwarmers will find it inspirational).


Regardless, if you’re a fan of OSU basketball I highly recommend you read  “Don’t Put me in, Coach.” The insight into how past Buckeye team’s chemistry was is something all hardcore fans crave and on that front Mark delivers in delicious doses.


Embedded below is a video Mark “The shark” (yes, that is the nickname he gave himself) Titus created and uploaded to YouTube. As he likes to say, he is “making it rain.” If you do decide to read you should watch Mark’s YouTube videos because he does refer to them in the book.

Best Apartment Hunting Guide

Are you looking for an apartment hunting organizer?

I’ve self published my fourth book, called the ULTIMATE Apartment Search Guide, in junction with the new niche profit website I launched, www.apartmenthunterhq.com. The purpose of the web site is to push sales of my Apartment Search Spreadsheet. The Excel spreadsheet is a rating comparison tool to help users choose which apartment is the perfect fit for their individual needs. Using scroll bars to weigh different factors, a bubble chart updates automatically displaying the project cost of living in each apartment versus their given score based on the users input data. The pdf file included with the spreadsheet download contains some very useful tips for apartment hunting. Download the Apartment SearchSpreadsheet.

I lot of thought and work went into creating this spreadsheet which is why I decided to charge a small fee of $4.99 to download it (I do through in my ebook for free plus a few other spreadsheets). Embedded below is a video I put together using Microsoft Movie Maker and Snagit to explain how to use the rental apartment comparison spreadsheet.

I also posted an article about how I created this spreadsheet on my Excel help blog. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. Heck, if you want let me know and I’ll email you a pdf copy of my apartment search guide absolutely free, no strings attached! It includes numerous tips for your apartment search, such as when it’s ok to break your less, landlord expectations, how to find a roommate, questions to ask your future landlord, and more.

June Updates

A couple of quick updates from my blogosphere this past weekend.

I created a 2012 NBA Mock Draft spreadsheet and uploaded it to my Excel Spreadsheets Help blog. Check it out and download the mock draft creator for free from my Google docs site.

I posted an in-depth article about the Snow White's Scary Adventure ride which was recently retired from Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom. I found a good video of the ride and an over rendering of the layout.

We went to the Columbus Zoo this morning to check out the new exhibit. Embedded below is my video of Stingray Bay.

How to create more income streams for yourself

 Residual Income

If you’re not making any money off the internet – why not? You very well could be. It’s extremely easy to make something. It’s a lot harder to entirely make a living off of the internet. But having a residual income stream is always a great idea, especially if it's also a mostly passive income stream.

Recently, a friend emailed me, “I have done very limited amounts of html coding so yeah, building a website, buying a domain and web hosting all seems so daunting.  It's hard to make that initial plunge.”

Yes, it is hard but unless you’re planning on doing something completely custom, starting a web site isn’t that hard. I register my domains with NameCheap. I use Wordpress for my CMS – content managementsystem- automatically installed through Host Gator, my hosting service. Then I bought the Socrates theme so there’s no html involved other than copying and pasting my Google Adsense code. The most confusing part for me was pointing the domain name to my hosting service. Luckily, there are plenty of YouTube videos to walk you through all that.I build all my websites myself but I do use oDesk to outsource some of the content creation and writing. I do my own marketing too but most of it is automated – RSS feed automatically posts toFacebook which automatically sends to Twitter. There’s an app for everything!

Currently, I have a couple blogs where the main source of income is ads and one niche web site selling an ebook. Last month I made about $1,150. Not a millionaire yet but it will pay my rent and a few bills. I’m currently working on creating two other niche sites. The best way to mm online is by selling a product – whether it’s physical or digital makes no difference (though you can probably make more with digital due to no manufacturing costs.

Coming up with a good idea, especially one with little or no competition is probably the hardest part of the whole process so if you have one then you’re well on your way to success!

So What Are They Eating

I recently wrote a guest post over at But What Are they Eating - a really cool blog idea about ebooks where authors, instead of simply recapping or giving a description about their book, actually details some of the food that is eaten by the characters. This was a great fit for my short story because of all the unique morsels which are consumed throughout the adventure in China. Check out the post here.

My First Video Tutorial

I created my first step-by-step video tutorial today. I basically used workshop 1 from my new CATIA macro book which I am promoting on my brand new website, www.scripting4v5.com! Check out my video embedded below and let me know what you think - did I do a good job and what can I improve on?

Blog Status Monthly Report: January 2012

My online income blog, My Make Money Mission, is failing horribly so I thought I would post my monthly blog update here for a change, until I figure out what to do with that site (keep it or blow it up). Right now I am currently using five primary methods to monetize my blogs. Here is the list of my five income sources and how much they made for the month of January, 2012:

Adsense: $57.97
Kontera: $44.03
Amazon: $2.72
Inbox Dollars: $1.38
Share Cash: $81.05

Total: $187.15

Not a fortune but it will help pay some bills. Click on the links to start monetizing your blog today.

Share Cash is doing awesome based on all the downloads of my Super Bowl square spreadsheet. In fact, my Excel spreadsheets help blog got almost 27,000 unique visitors last month! (Anyone want to pay for advertising on it?) I've been trying to get better at time management and profit maximization by deleting low traffic / low income blogs and focusing more time and energy on my successful blogs to make them even better.

I'll write a separate post later about my foray into self-publishing. Interesting enough, I think my paperback books sales are surpassing my ebook sales. More on that later.

Published my third book

I published my third book. This one is all about writing macros for the CAD system. It's called VB Scripting for CATIA V5: How to write macros. Available in paperback and Kindle eBook additions.

Here is a brief excerpt from Chapter 2 of the book:

Get Workbench

The Document object also has methods such as the “GetWorkbench” method. The GetWorkbench command takes a string as an argument and returns a Workbench object. To load the structural workbench:

Dim doc1 as Document

Set doc1 = CATIA.ActiveDocument

Dim workbench1 as Workbench

Set workbench1 =doc1.GetWorkbench(“Structural”)

Work with Collections: Count and Item

Collections are special kinds of objects that hold a list of objects of a certain class. The property “Count” and the method “Item()” are frequently used on collections in CATIA. For example:

Sub CATMain()

'Count the number of open documents

Dim docs1 as Documents

Set docs1 = CATIA.Documents

MsgBox “The number of open documents is “ & docs1.Count

'Accessing the first Document object in the collection

Dim doc1 as Document

Set doc1 = docs1.Item(1)

MsgBox “The FullName of the first document is “ & doc1.FullName

End Sub

I'm published - again!

I've recently published my second book and my first fictional story, entitled Nike's Chinese New Year.

Are you looking for information about the Chinese New Year festival? Do you want to know more about Chinese culture and traditions? Well, there is a new book out that might be exactly what you’re looking for! This is a special treat for those with a curiosity in China who enjoy erupting in laughter. Some educational topics about China woven into the story include: traffic in China, communism vs. capitalism, food and cuisine, customs, holiday celebrations, fireworks, prostitution, tigers, and more. Learn about exotic locations such as Suzhou, Harbin, and Beijing. Other themes found in the book are coming of age, how to make a life altering decision, relationships, and much more! 

Here are a few excerpts from Nike's Chinese New Year:

               While most citizens of the United States were exchanging flowers, candy, and cards for Valentine’s Day, the Chinese were busy celebrating their most important traditional holiday. The Spring Festival began on the first day of the first lunar month and was otherwise known as the Chinese New Year...In fact, I’m told the Chinese New Year is the world’s largest human migration as millions of Chinese workers travel home to their families. Eric even claimed that trains are so overcrowded people wear diapers for their multi-hour long journeys home. 

Traffic in China, the way I see it, is a free-for-all. There appear to be no road rules at all, and if you survive the day, you’ll do it all again the next day. The stoplights that they do have must only be for decoration. Taxi drivers drive in the middle of two lanes so they can swing into either one of them as needed. They don’t have roundabouts in China. Roundabouts only function if people follow the rules, hence they don't work here. A roundabout would only add to the chaos. According to my made-up insurance statistics, the most dangerous cars are green and driven by the Chinese.

            Every time I climb into a taxi in China the very first thing I do is fasten my seat belt, pull it as tight as I possibly can, and grab onto anything that feels or looks sturdy. Well, to my wonderful surprise, this particular cab didn’t have a working seat belt. I about had a mild heart attack. I was left with clutching onto the seat in front of me until my knuckles turned white, not daring to open my eyes until we were safely discarded at our destination. 

 

         I managed to swallow the first bite with difficulty.  As I felt it burning its way down my throat, my heart began to do flip flops in my ribcage.  The food hit my stomach like a glob of lava in a lava lamp. Eric watched me worriedly, perhaps concerned I might keel over from the trauma.  When I enthusiastically dug into a second bite, his mouth fell open in amazement.  “I am impressed,” he said.  “That is by far the most dog penis I have ever seen an American succeed in consuming.  Are you well?” 

I'm looking for someone to review my book on Amazon and to give me some feedback. I can possibly send you a free copy if you're interested.


Buy the paperback at the CreateSpace eStore here. 

Buy the ebook Kindle version here.

I'm Published!

I self-published my first paperback book today through CreateSpace as well as an eBook version through Kindle Direct Publishing. Have you ever wondered how to design a roller coaster? Coasters 101: An Engineering Guide to Roller Coaster Design examines the numerous diverse aspects of roller coaster engineering, including some of the mathematical formulas and engineering concepts used. This technical guide is the most detailed roller coaster design book to date and will take you through the entire process, from concept to creation. A must read for every enthusiast and aspiring roller coaster engineer!


Shout out to John Stevenson for designing the nifty cover.

Order the paperback version here.

Purchase the eBook version here.

View a free preview of the book here.

2011 Year in Review

So here's my obligatory blog post looking back at the year that was. A few of the highlights from the past year that come to mind first are:

• ASTM F24 committee meeting in New Orleans
• Winning Cedar Point's K'nex Build Off Competition
• Spending four weeks in Utah for work
• Visiting Dollywood for the first time (and staying in the amazing Dollywood Vacations Cabins)
• Quitting by job as CAD engineer I held for 2+ years and moving to a new city and starting a new job as an automotive supplier engineer
• Staying onsite at Universal Orlando for a few days in July
• Celebrating our one year wed-iversary by doing the Wildside Tour at The Wilds
• Publishing my first book (e-book that is, paperback coming soon).
  

Here's a list of some of the Cyclone Edition's Most Popular Posts from 2011:

• Vintage Lego Airport Shuttle Monorail #6399

• CATIA > PRO-ENGINEER

• More OSU Tweets

• Best "Osama is Dead!" Tweets

• Excel "Contains" Formula

• 2011 College Football Bowl Spreadsheet

• Best LeBron Tweets