Archive for July 2008

A previous blog entry discusses Freelance vs. Full Time Writing. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been discovering a big benefit of working as a freelancer. My mom role collided with my freelancer role when my son’s medical challenges erupted.

Not to worry — he’s fine. I don’t mind talking about it, but it doesn’t belong in a public forum living in cyberspace for all eternity. Feel free to contact me privately if you’d like to know details.

My spouse and I had been struggling since spring trying to figure out how to help him and what would be best for him this summer. We thought we had it figured out only to find the program had no room for him. We put him in two programs and they worked OK. But I had to take time out of the day to deal with some incidences.

Two more opportunities came up and I had to investigate them … during the day. Yesterday, he started a three week program that made oil companies happy as we drove through lots of traffic to get there. The program could make a big difference for him and it requires parents to attend meetings every morning and afternoon — so count the commute and meetings and you have a formula for eating up lots of working time.

My spouse works for a corporation, so I’ve felt bad about him having to attend these meetings and miss a lot of work. Imagine if I had still worked for a corporation and having to make up all the missed time or take vacation days for something that is no vacation.

So I go to most of the meetings and my spouse goes to a couple of them. We appreciate having my flexibility, but it doesn’t ease our feeling guilty for our jobs. I emailed my regular clients to let them know what’s going on and that I would prioritize work as needed.

Needless to say, I’m running around with my virtual head cut off and doing only what I need to do for the next couple of weeks. That means sacrificing my social networking including blogs, Twitter, and elsewhere. I won’t blog as often. I’m all about getting the kids where they need to be and keeping the work going.

How do you handle unexpected job interruptions?

I went to a conference in Austin this past weekend for leaders of an education organization. I lucked out that the first speaker made an important point for all of us to remember.

A teacher goes to a conference and picks up great ideas to take back to her classroom. She gets home and puts all her notes into the filing cabinet. When do you think those notes see light of day? When she retires…

It doesn’t take much to pick up lots of new ideas and learn many new things in an effective conference. But c’mon? Who can remember all of this? Practice it? Put it to use? The president and I discuss the various ideas we picked up and realize we’re thinking too big and it feels like we face a giant to do list.

I can hear all the David Allen fans shouting. Instead, we agree that we need to pick three or four doable things and start with those. The notes won’t go away as we’ll use them to help us with those three or four things while reminding us of others. If we get those first items done, then back to the notes for more ideas and get the next round done.

In one of the sessions, the speaker kept walking past the front rows and I couldn’t lip read through her head. It wasn’t her fault as I never had a chance to give her a heads up. So I watched the presentation, which had just the right amount of notes for me and started working on an article.

I’ve submitted the article to the president. So that’s one idea done. Next idea is to submit an article in the local newspaper’s neighborhood Web site. Already, I’ve sent an email to the person I want to feature and it won’t take much to pull it together once I hear back.

I work as a historian for one of the boards I’m on. Ideally, it’d be lovely to pull together a page for the scrapbook covering the conference today. We haven’t decided on what approach or supplies we’re going to use yet as the committee is still forming.

At least, I’ve got a picture from the event. Just need to grab an accordion folder, print the picture, write a short caption on a sticky note and put it in the accordion folder sorted by month. When we decide, then all we need to do is pull out the photos and captions for the event and that’s one page.

The conference included evaluation forms for every session. I repeatedly wrote, “Please post materials on organization Web site.” We can’t all be in every session that interests us. I also requested a wiki or some forum where we could post our notes. Interestingly, the conference was at Austin Convention Center — the home of SXSW.

You can count on the attendees of SXSW Interactive to share their notes. They probably do the best job of it, making it challenging for all of us to figure out what to read and do. I captured all of my session notes on my laptop (easier to type notes than write notes since I don’t have to look down to type) and I want to share them.

Well, I’ve been home for about five hours and already I have an article, a blog entry, an email, and short to do list. A busy week awaits me, but I hope I will sneak in another thing or two to take what I learned further. What do you do after returning from a great conference full of fun and energy?

The following games will be discounted next week on Game du Jour, the ‘one-deal-a-day’ web site dedicated to indie and casual games:

Mon. July 28th: 40% off on Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet Awesome! Meryl’s review.

Tue. July 29th: 60% off on Azgard Defence

Wed. July 30th: 50% off on B-Intruders 2: Circle of Extinction

Thu. July 31st: 50% off on Gemstars

Fri. Aug. 1st: 50% off on Brain Freeze – The Meltdown

Sat. Aug. 2nd: 50% off on Gubble HD

Sun. Aug. 3rd: 60% off on Forest Mob

• 9 Ideas for a More Creative and Effective Brainstorming Process
• Driving Traffic Using Smaller Shots of Power
• Personality Page: Character Traits for Writers
• The ‘Get It Done’ Challenge for Freelance Writers
• Which Comes First, Your Book or Your Business?
• 5 Essential Ingredients In My Ideal Writing Weekend

And for fun because we’re allowed…

• Want to know what it’s like to travel to Japan? Jamie points to The Stupid American Tourist.
• In memory of my dad, the baseball fan — one thing we shared. Switch pitcher meets switch hitter.
• NYC Panorama and Coney Island: Breathtaking photos.

Of to Austin for a PTA thingy. Yes, I’m one of them… a PTA mom and board member (three times over on both counts).

I love Gmail. I don’t know what it is about Gmail that compels me to keep Gmail active at all times in my browser. Though I’ve used other services, none had me checking emails on a regular basis like Gmail. As a Thunderbird user, moving emails into Gmail was a breeze.

The following steps using Thunderbird as the example should work similarly for other email clients — the biggest difference would be in setting up the IMAP part. I know Outlook can do it.

Step 1. Turn on IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol — techie stuff, we won’t dive into that) in Gmail. Google explains how to get started with IMAP in Gmail. To turn on IMAP from within Gmail:

1. Click Settings.
2. Select Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
3. Select Enable IMAP button.

Step 2. Set up IMAP in your email client. In Thunderbird, I created a new IMAP account in for Gmail (don’t use the Gmail option in Thunderbird’s Account Wizard).

Step 3. Select emails and move them into the Gmail folder just like you move any files into another folder. If a folder contains hundreds of emails, do a few at a time as it takes time for the email client to process and move them. Beware that this process MOVES the files not COPIES them, so they won’t be in Thunderbird once you move them.

Coupon: 20% off of any Playfirst game

Code: AUGUSTAFFILIATES

Expiration date: September 1, 2008

In all these years, I don’t think I’ve ever posted anything about starting a blog. Someone emailed me asking how to get a blog and start blogging. So here you go.

There’s an easy way and there’s a hard way.

The Easy Way

Here you just fill out a form, make a few choices, and you’re in business. This solution uses a developer-hosted solution. That means the company or developer of the blog application hosts the software and blogs. These require no installation and minimal set up (after all, your blog needs a name or something). My first blog took the easy way approach using blogger.com.

Advantages

• Easy.
• Fast.
• Painless.
• No tech knowledge needed.
• Free or cheap.

Disadvantages

• At the mercy of the host’s server, which hosts thousands of other blogs.
• No personal domain name. Sure, you can pick a name. But instead of www.meryl.net, you get meryl.bloggingservice.com.
• Risk business reputation. Businesses without their own domain name communicate they’re cheap and not serious about building the business.

Easy Way Blogs (known as developer-hosted)

• Blogger.com: URL is in the form of yourname.blogspot.com. My first blog used Blogger.com.
• WordPress.com: URL appears as yourname.wordpress.com. This blog runs on WordPress. Offers paid upgrades.
• TypePad: From SixApart, the folks behind MovableType. URL is yourname.typepad.com.
• Other developer-hosted blogs.

The Hard Way

This takes more work and may require hiring a pro to help you through the whole process of…

1. Registering a domain.
2. Creating a design (or creating a template from your site’s design to work with the blogging application). Sure, you could use the free templates for starters, but many spam-like blogs use these templates and they may turn away visitors at first glance. Plus, you lose out on branding opportunities when using a template.
3. Installing the blogging application.
4. Adding plug-ins to make it easier for you to manage.
5. Helping you get started, if needed.

I run this blog on WordPress and Bionic Ear Blog on MovableType.  They both have strengths and weaknesses.

Advantages

• Branding.
• Easy to remember domain name.
• Builds credibility.
• Less blog downtime than a hosted blog solution — depends on your web site’s host.

Disadvantages

• Not free. Factor in the costs of buying a domain name, signing up with a host provider, and creating a design (if you don’t use templates).
• Not easy.
• Not fast UNLESS you already have a domain and a Web site. Then you just need to install the app with your current design.
• More work in maintaining: Software upgrades, plug-in updates, etc.

Hard Way Blog Apps (known as user-hosted)

• Movable Type
• WordPress.org
• Drupal
• Other user-hosted blog software.

Of course, businesses need a valid reasons for starting a blog and determine its purpose before running with it. Is a Blog Right for Your Business? Part I and Part II.

The following games will be discounted next week on Game du Jour, the ‘one-deal-a-day’ web site dedicated to indie and casual games:

Mon. July 21st: 65% off on Fire Flower

Tue. July 22nd: 50% off on Eschalon: Book I

Wed. July 23rd: 50% off on Blue BalloonZ

Thu. July 24th: 40% off on Virtual Villagers – The Secret City

Fri. July 25th: 50% off on My Craps Game

Sat. July 26th: 75% off on Mahjong Forests

Sun. July 27th: 60% off on The Pyramid

Stumped me. What do these words have in common other than double letters (my answer)?

1. Banana
2. Dresser
3. Grammar
4. Potato
5. Revive
6. Uneven
7. Assess

To see the answer, click and drag your mouse over the below to read the invisible ink.

In all of the words listed, if you take the first letter, place it at the end of the word, and then spell the word backwards, it will be the same word.

Protesters stand outside of Dubois Cosmetic Labs protesting product testing with animals. Jade leads the charge and has an eventful meeting with snooty Madame DuBois. There, Jade meets the owner of a five-star spa and asks if she could work there. Jade begins her spiritual journey in learning therapy and treatment secrets from faraway places in hopes of opening an Earth-friendly spa.

I don’t get off to a good start with Spa Mania. The game feels like torture because it runs slowly and sometimes froze on a computer that more than meets the minimum requirements. The first few levels dragged, but I couldn’t do a review without giving it a chance. As upgrades came in and mini-games appeared, the game turned around. I contacted tech support and made changes to my video settings, which improved the performance but not 100%.

Players start with a couple of stations and a valet. The valet cleans up the dressing room and fills the hot tub. We do the rest of the work — mostly. That includes increasing customers’ happiness while lowering their stress levels, guiding them from one station to the next, making and serving green tea, and checking them out. The green tea adds another heart to a customer’s happiness meter.

Spa Mania looks like an ordinary time management game with no new formulas. Then I complete five levels of play in the first locale and met the first mini-game there. Jade learns spa treatment secrets during these mini-games and they tie in with the action. In the first one, she mixes formulas using her (yours) knowledge of color theory. The number of formulas players complete will provide her with special treatment to use on customers in the game.

The next time you play this color mini-game, it changes slightly adding another color to the mix to create a new treatment. But first, you need to play two other mini-games before playing one a second time. In the dream mini-game, players do a “Whac-a-mole” on red and mean-looking faces while leaving the sunny happy faces alone. Jade, sitting in a Zen pose, floats higher as players smash nightmares and let the happy dreams fly around. This mini-game assigns a dollar value to massages.

In the third game, you create incense to use for boosting the customers’ happy meters. Here, Jade runs left and right with a bowl in hand catching incense ingredients. The mix uses flowers, leaves, and fruits. That’s right! No find a pair mini-game or any of those common ones you see in every other time management game. After finishing a mini-game, you travel to a new country and enter a new spa with design reflecting the country.

Spa Mania lets players change Jade’s outfit and unlock new colors and designs. Her outfits don’t change drastically — mostly in color and with a pattern. You can skip this part of the game. Players can also replay mini-games between levels to produce more incense and treatments as needed.

The customers don’t have much personality and their main difference is their happiness level upon their arrival. You’ll help emos, business people, hippies, pregnant women, and seniors. Two employees become available as upgrades — when you have enough cash to afford them.

Spa Mania takes place in 10 locations with 50 levels of game play. The last level takes much patience and experimenting to beat. The intriguing story complete with a spy comes together nicely and with the right amount of dialogue between locales.

The great graphics, bright scenes, and creative and integrated mini-games should attract some fans. The patrons don’t annoy as much as they do in other time management games. They’re just there, but you have enough to do without worrying about their attitudes. While the places Jade manages are five-star spas, Spa Mania falls right in the middle of its genre.