• As an engineer, I learned the value of getting “a fresh set of eyes” on anything I was designing. At each stage of the design process (paper napkin, 3D computer model, dimensioned drawings, etc.), it was always a good idea to have someone else look over my work and offer suggestions or catch mistakes, because…

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  • Password Purgatory Webster’s second definition of purgatory is “a place or state of temporary suffering or misery”. It’s where I used to go whenever the password I absolutely knew was correct was heartlessly rejected by the account I absolutely had to access. Not to be denied by some digital gatekeeper, I would resort to some…

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  • Active Inactivity

    A good friend of mine, Eddie Rhoades, once said to me, “Rob, there are too many things in the world that go ‘beep’.” In many of our lives today, amidst the incessant clamor of the modern world, we often forget to leave room for the quiet. I first learned about the idea of “active inactivity”…

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  • The term “disintermediation” seems to be popping up more these days, as if the concept is something new. It’s really just a fancy way of saying “cutting out the middle man” or “going right to the source”. If you remember Webvan from a few years ago, they tried (and quickly failed) to disintermediate the retail…

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  • Love of Countryside

    I was raised in rural Ohio. It wasn’t a farm, but it was a big enough plot to have a large garden with room left over for pickup football games on crisp fall days. The maple trees added an element of suspense, and someone always went home a bloody hero. There was a little creek…

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  • Kent State University Visual Communication Design professor Michael Mahan has created these awesome logos for Rob Mahan Books and the publishing company Marietta Book Works.      Mike is currently working on the cover and interior design for An Irish Miracle. In addition to teaching at KSU, he owns and operates the graphic design firm,…

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  • New Publishing Company

    I am pleased to announce that – Rob Mahan Books – has launched the publishing company – Marietta Book Works – Marietta Book Works will release An Irish Miracle, a novel by Rob Mahan, in the Spring of 2012. Be sure to follow the website for An Irish Miracle and see posts about the novel, excerpts,…

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  • An Irish Miracle spans over a half a century and two countries. With all the strife in the real world today, the stories in it offer a respite, a brief glimpse of simpler times and simpler places. Born in 1945, life for twin boys on an Ohio family farm is filled with hard work. The…

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  • Book Country, the Penguin Group USA‘s online community dedicated to genre fiction, introduced a suite of self-publishing tools today. While there are dozens of entities offering authors self-publishing options, I believe this is the very first time any unit of The Big Six traditional publishing houses (Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, MacMillan Publishers Ltd, Penguin Group,…

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  • I didn’t do a very good job taking feedback from my “alpha” beta reader* on the first draft of my first novel, An Irish Miracle. One could say my initial responses were a bit defensive, as most of them started with “Well, I did that because . . .” It soon became obvious taking that…

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