In December 2006 I attended the first ever Elite Retreat Conference in San Antonio, TX. In my opinion, this was the best conference of this type I have ever attended. The attendees numbered about 20 and there were abundant opportunities to talk one-on-one with the presenters. Coupled with the fact that it was a “no sales pitch” event, this made the conference all the more interesting.

The upcoming Elite Retreat conference in March 2007, being held in San Francisco will prove to be no less informative. With the addition of Darren Rowse, Kris Jones and Neil Patel the organizers have expanded the amount of information that will be presented.

Darren Rowse of Problogger.net is a full time blogger and internet personality. Darren presumably replaces Dave Taylor who was a presenter at the last event.

Kris Jones of Pepperjam Search, a new addition to the presenter list, will prove to be an invaluable resource for internet marketing and internet business in general.

Neil Patel, an internet marketing consultant and creator of CrazyEgg.com, will prove to be a very interesting addition. Neil is a very smart guy and his abilities cover a broad spectrum of internet related businesses.

Rounding out this list and present at the San Antonio conference will be Jeremy Schoemaker, better known as Shoemoney, SEO, affiliate marketer, PPC arbitrage expert, SEM & branding extraordinaire and an all-round fun guy to hang-out with.

Aaron Wall, an extremely smart guy and well known for his work on Search Engine Optimization (seobook.com) will have a wide variety of SEO techniques to impart. Aaron is a highly paid SEO consultant who large companies consult with in order to improve their search engine rankings.

Last but not least, Lee Dodd, the organizer of the Elite Retreat Conferences. Lee is a forum and online community expert. Lee’s knowledge in this and other areas proved to be very informative and interesting at the conference in San Antonio.

In my opinion, despite the pricey admission fee, Elite Retreat San Francisco is an event not to be missed.

So, welcome to my personal blog. Here you will find various miscellany including, software projects, ideas that happen to enter my head, etc. I recently attended a different kind of conference called Elite Retreat which happened in San Antonio, TX in December 2006.

There I met a bunch of really neat, cool, interesting and smart people. Needless to say, I was VERY inspired to create a presence on the internet. For many years, since I started using the internet in about 1993, I have consciously tried to not have a presence on the internet.

The reason for this, I think, is that I value my privacy greatly and this seemed like to way to protect it. After attending this conference, I have realized that there is much to be gained (leveraged?) from having a presence on the internet.

So, this is the beginning of it.