Archive for April 2009

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

Sun. April 12th: 50% off on Governor of Poker

Mon. April 13th: 50% off on Youda Farmer

Tue. April 14th: 50% off on Lethal judgment 4 – deluxe

Wed. April 15th: 50% off on My little Flufties

Thu. April 16th: 50% off on Purebreaker 3 -Deluxe

Fri. April 17th: 60% off on Happier than you

Sat. April 18th: 45% off on Petri Heil 3 -Gold Online

• To call or not to call? Should you follow up with an editor after sending PR? Mixed bag.
• Why you want a Dwight Schrute in your office
• 115 Marketing Strategies for Small Business
• Make a Monitoring Dashboard to Track Online Conversations.

And for fun because we’re allowed…

• 10 Plagues Wine Glass Markers: Wish I had found these before Passover started.
• The Ultimate Matzoh-Ball Game
• Kosher Coke is not just for Jews: Excuse me? No, the regular Coke tastes better than the one without corn syrup. Or maybe the fact we can’t get this in cans or smaller bottles is the problem because they go flat the minute you open them.
• LED: Easter Eggs: Happy Easter to those who celebrate.
• Easter-themed Rube Goldberg Machine. From the too much time department.

I memorized these for the first time last night:

1. Golden goose egg, 2. Firefly, 3. Paint roller, 4. Diamond ring, 5. Stop sign, 6. Kitchen table, 7. Ticket stub, 8. Leather jacket, 9. Ice cream cone, 10. ATM machine, 11. Scalpel, 12. Champagne bottle, 13. Stroller, 14. Couch, 15. Rose bush, 16. Swimsuit, 17. Apple core, 18. Candy cane, 19. Cowboy boots, 20. Train.

And I just remembered them all again. The only one I miss is #17. It’s “Rotting apple.” I didn’t cheat. Let’s see if I can do one more list and then I’ll share whose fault it is for remembering all of this.

1. Rusty razor blade, 2. Goalie mask, 3. Red VW bug, 4. Blender, 5. Coffee cup, 6. Brown paper bag, 7. Chess set with broken white king piece, 8. Marble statue, 9. Megaphone, 10. Shower curtain, 11. Canopy bed, 12. Plaid wool blanket, 13. Pencil, 14. Salt shaker, 15. Wooden baseball bat, 16. Private jet, 17. White apron, 18. Button, 19. Superman costume, 20. Fluorescent light bulb.

W00t! Mike “The Toilet Paper Enterepreneur” Michalowicz does a beautiful job of explaining how to have a photographic memory in 30 minutes. I didn’t sleep well last night and yet, I managed to memorize 40 items. The key is to have a base list of 10 items. I stole his (hey, he offered!).

1. Gun
2. Shoe
3. Tree
4. Floor
5. Bee hive
6. Sticks
7. Heaven
8. Skate
9. Slime
10. Hen

Notice these words rhyme with the numbers and they’re things you can visualize. “Alive” is not as a good a visualizer as “bee hive.” Sticks and slime give me all kinds of fodder involving my young sons. I visualized #6 as “kitchen table” by thinking how the boys brought in the sticks and put them all over the kitchen table as they always make a mess of the table. Then #16 is “swimsuit” because the kitchen table is right by our back door to the pool. They’d track in dirt and other things sticking to their swim suits right into the kitchen.

Since “brown paper bag” is the other #6, I visualized the boys collecting sticks and putting them in a brown paper bag because they always love to bring stuff in from outside and make a mess in the house. We can’t take much on an airplane, so I figure my boys can bring their brown paper bag full of sticks on a “private jet” as we can do whatever we want if we had one

Think I have a great memory already? Think again. I have a weird memory — remembering things I don’t want or need to remember and yet forgetting things I need to remember. I’m working on making this a habit.

Read Mike’s entry on how to improve your memory. Another good memory process is the Roman Room Technique. It also uses visualization. Ron White who can memorize impressive stuff like a long list of numbers explains his process.

Can I use this to remember all the US presidents again? Yikes! Too tired to try.

Do you remember things well? What process do you use?

While working for a company, I moved to another position within the same company for a promotion. It was exciting to switch from process management to marketing. It didn’t take long to regret the change. The person I thought I would report to went on a special project and never returned. She had such an energy that I knew I’d love working for her and learning from her. I ended up reporting to someone who would make a great coworker instead of a manager. I also discovered morale was in the basement with this department. A total shift from my previous one.

Then came the waves of nausea to take the situation to a new low. I discovered I was pregnant with number two. Instead of being excited, I was miserable. I liked the company, yet I couldn’t transfer because I hadn’t been in the new job long enough. The excitement of another baby couldn’t bring me out of the darkness of my job situation. After all, I had the nausea thing happening causing me to feel green whenever I drove to the office.

My only choice for getting out of the situation was to leave the company. I landed an interview with another company and the job sounded like it was written with me in mind. But I had a new dilemma that I had never faced before and no one else to ask. Should I tell the hiring manager I was pregnant? I researched this and asked around including a friend who worked in human resources. No one had definitive answers. I knew I couldn’t be the first dealing with this, but I couldn’t find anyone who had.

If I didn’t tell her, I felt like I was cheating her and not being truthful. If I told her, I could lose the opportunity to move to a better position and a happier situation.

I went to the company’s building and met with the manager and a colleague. They explained the position, expectations and hopes for the team. We all clicked.

Then I met with the manager in a one-on-one situation. We had a friendly conversation and she confirmed I was one of the finalists for the job. I paused. Let out deep breath. I explained to her I was in a situation and I felt the right thing to do was to tell her. So there, I told her I was three months pregnant. She responded like coworkers do when they heard of such exciting news.

That company was the last one I worked for before becoming a full-time freelancer. I landed the job and stayed with them for seven years. Interesting twist. The manager took a new job while I was on maternity leave. I returned from leave with no manager and only one colleague left behind (we had four of us when I started). That was another adventure, but one that set me on the path toward my freelance writing career.

So while I regretted accepting the promotion, it sent me on my way to eventually landing my first paid writing gig and becoming a full-time freelancer. Had I stayed with the original company, that might have never happened.

This post is an entry in the What I Learned from Adversity group writing project.

By the way, I had a third child. That was a breeze to announce to the boss as I was still with the company and it had been over three years since #2 arrived.

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

Sun. April 5th: 50% off on BABLS Game

Mon. April 6th: 40% off on Rescue at Rajini Island

Tue. April 7th: 50% off on Antarez Mssions

Wed. April 8th: 50% off on Antarez Prefect

Thu. April 9th: 50% off on B-Intruders 2 : Circle of extinction

Fri. April 10th: 45% off on Electro Master

Sat. April 11th: 50% off on Blue Balloonz

Sky Kingdoms is another game in the Luxor and Zuma family — moving marbles that you need to break by making matches of at least three of the same color. I guess you could call these “rolling marble match threes.”

The opening with the story moves very slow. The game doesn’t allow you to control the moving of the story so you can back up or move forward. Instead of taking place in the ruins of Egypt, this one takes on a fantasy twist with the action happening in the air.

Plenty of power ups keep things popping. The first power up you want sends coins flying down. Collect these coins so you can buy more power ups including more lives. The shopping happens between levels. Once you complete all pieces of a puzzle, you’ll get a new wallpaper for your desktop.

As you buy power ups, it’s not clear when you have access to them during the game. They just appear in the bottom ready for use. Boy, I need them all during level 5-2. I do manage to get one, but it’s not enough to help me survive the level and I’ve gotten faster.

During the bonus level, a snake comes out and you pop the marbles as you always do and collect more coins. However, you don’t get to keep the coins if the snake bites you. The game’s directions don’t clearly explain how this happens and it’s not obvious after playing this level plenty of times.

Sky Kingdoms includes 90 levels, multiple bonus upgrades (each bonus starts cheap and you can upgrade again, but it costs more with every upgrade) and 36 animated backgrounds.

Don’t play this game if you don’t like panicky games and can’t stand things happening fast. It’s also not ideal for those who have never played Luxor or Zuma. The Easy level is very hard. I’m forever stuck on level 5-2 — best I’ve done is almost clear two groups of marbles, but then I fail by the third group. Even if I manage to beat it, I’m betting the next levels will only be harder. Remember this is “Easy” mode. If you think the others don’t challenge you enough, try this one. You can’t complain that it’s too easy. Believe me.

Download Sky Kingdoms

Can we expect showers to follow? To be continued…

• 27 Twitter Applications Your Small Business Can Use Today
• The Top Five Innovation Killers: Go on. I dare you.
• 10 Free Things for Writers: Contains stuff I hadn’t seen before reading this list.
• Angry Editor Rant: Want to know why things aren’t going so well for some freelance writers? This could explain why. [Link: Anne]
• How to Land a Writing Job: Another winner from Anne. She’s on a roll!
• Experience Design: Why pages are the last thing you need to worry about. Lovely presentation by Tim Richards.
• 175 strategies and places for link building. Step 1: Find time. A 17-year-old has more time than a parent of three with a full-time paid job and part-time job as volunteer.

And for fun because we’re allowed…

• Drawings by Craig Frazier. Words by You. Submit your captions.
• Super Mario Brothers Rubik’s Cube: And I can’t even solve the original — just one side.
• Passover Does Facebook: Hilarious.

Photo credit Mike Wade

The popularity of Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out (affectionately known as HARO) proves many of you, your company or clients want to get in the spotlight. Occasionally, Peter kicks folks off the list because they can’t follow one simple rule:

By joining this list, just promise me and yourself that you’ll ask yourself before you send a response: Is this response really on target? Is this response really going to help the journalist, or is this just a BS way for me to get my client in front of the reporter? If you have to think for more than three seconds, chances are, you shouldn’t send the response.

I use the mailing list from both sides: as a journalist and as an expert. Thank goodness I am a journalist because it helps me do better on the other side of things. I often put in my requests to use “HARO Subject” in Subject. You’d be surprised how many fail to do that. Based on this, it’s no wonder people disobey Peter’s numero uno rule. Furthermore, people embarrass themselves by sending a press release (PR) to media that have nothing to do with that industry, topic or anything. OK, I admit — sometimes we reporters don’t make ourselves clear (me, too).

So what are these simple, common sense rules that too many fail to follow? My top 8:

1. Read the publication: Businesses and PR pros send me PR regarding video and audio apps. It doesn’t take much to figure out I don’t do video or audio unless it has captions.
2. Contact the right reporter: You’re not going to send a company’s new computer product story to the sports reporter unless it’s about sports statistics.
3. Copy the column style: Many publications have regular columns and features based on businesses and people. When submitting for these regulars, copy the style to improve your chances of getting in.
4. Provide story ideas: Rather than tooting your company’s latest award (whoopee dee do), help the reporter by offering story ideas. Awards are best left on the company’s site and distributed in online PR sites rather than sent to reporters. I’m sure there are a few exceptions.
5. Share trends: Noticing a trend in your industry or business that few know about yet? Help the reporter jump on it (remember to contact the right publication and the right reporter so it doesn’t go to waste).
6. Select a few publications: Rather than trying to befriend everyone — pick a handful of publications and build those relationships. Simply contact the reporter to introduce yourself and ask if he/she is working on anything and needs resources.
7. Follow the reporter’s request to a tee: I often provide what I need from folks, yet some people respond with the “John Doe is an author of such-n-such and speaks on this topics. Call me to set up an interview.” Hello? The questions are right there — answer ‘em or kiss the opportunity good-bye.
8. Respect the reporter’s preferred communication method: I always put “No phone calls” in my requests. However, I know that some think it applies to the initial contact and that I’ll call ‘em. When it’s in my control, I skip the calls. If your expert doesn’t have time to email, I know others who do.

Bonus points: Research the reporter before making contact. Here’s a challenge. What can you find out about me? Both personal and professional?

My favorite story: I received a book about adopting cats to review. The only time I’ve ever mentioned cats was a few years ago when there was a internet cat joke floating around. I’m a dog person and I don’t review books about animals unless the title just happens to have an animal in the name such as Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? (it’s NOT about cats!).

If you have a product or book, you can send it to the publication, blogger or web site. But contacting them first ensures a better chance of seeing the item get reviewed. Besides, why waste a copy of Taking Care of Your Adopted Cat on me? I just donate it and hope someone can use it.

FYI: I don’t make a big deal out of those who can’t follow the simple “Subject” instructions — just giving you an example of something that’s easy to follow.

What other ways do you build your relationship with the media and get publicity?