There are a few things you run across worth sharing. This little video is one I think is worth passing along.
For those of you who find yourself really enjoying a youtube video and want to download it to your computer, I’d like to suggest a plugin for Mozilla Firefox (or Flock), that will allow you to download and watch your favs whenever you want. The Easy Youtube Video Downloader works well to download and VLC is my player of choice.
So this post is a sort of informal poll, and I’m hoping to get some comments. We’re trying to get http://clips.roeckerfam.com up and running. So far we’ve had a couple of sales after much effort. It’s time to start getting the site tweaked for search engines. With our limited description on most pages, it’s going to be difficult to increase traffic.
Today I had an idea that was a part of a solution. I made up a story about one particular pair of barrettes. So I’d like to know if the story helps to increase the saleability of the item.
Here’s the ’standard’ description:
Product Description
These stylish accessories are made with 1, 3/4″alligator clips. The clips have been lined with durable grosgrain ribbon. All ends have been heat treated to prevent fraying.All clips are sold in pairs unless otherwise listed.
This is the story I came up with for the “Dororthy” barrettes:
These barrettes make an excellent accessory. More fantastic however is the tale of how they were created. The story goes that during the filming of the movie about the magical land called “Oz” a visitor was sent from the Wizard himself.Hogwash you say! There is no such thing!Well, for every fairy tale there is an element of reality behind the story. Behind the fable of Oz is an actual Oz, and the wizard is certainly a Wizard indeed.Well, this Wizard heard about the movie and was so flattered that humans would take the time to honor his country so, that he decided to present Judy Garland with a gift. He sent one of the munchkins who blended in perfectly on the set, to deliver a box. Inside the box for the young actress were chocolates, various exotic fruits from Oz, and two red-ribbon barrettes.Judy was thrilled, and she had initially planned to wear them during the movie’s signature song: “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Everyone approved, until the film was announced to be released in color. The costume department and director insisted that Judy’s dress be blue for the film. The barrettes would clash, and were left in the dressing room.The Wizard was offended at the release of the film. Not only did it assume him to be a bumbling charlatan, but Judy Garland wasn’t wearing the barrettes she had been given. So if you wonder why no one has heard from the land of Oz to this day, Wizards tend to live a long time, and are much better at holding grudges than people.By coincidence the original design for the barrettes has reappeared after all these years. Now available in pairs for only $5 you two can own this piece of Hollywood fabledom.
I think stories can help make the website more fun, increase traffic, and pass along a few more smiles. If you’ve got an idea for a story (like the lady-bugs) let me know and we might make it official. If you’re thinking this is generally a bad idea, let me know too.
Thanks to Jenny for the logo! It’s awesome! We use it on the stationary here in town.
Matt Hargrave is not only a relative (thanks to Haley) he’s also a really great guy to have in the family. He’s been telling me how Haley bought a really really nice new computer.
There’s only two flaws with it:
There’s a partially eaten piece of fruit on the front of it.
There’s no office suite (word processing, spreadsheets, etc)
So Haley’s been leaving the computer “off” and going to the library to the wee hours of the evening to get papers done.
There’s a better way. Sure you can shell out anywhere between $150 and $500 to get Microsoft’s Office suite. It’s popular, looks flashy, and is so confusing sometimes it’s hard to get a job done.
Before you spend the money shop around a bit and see what else is out there. This week OpenOffice 3.0 was released. So many people downloaded it that the servers are overloaded. Still want to try it out? You can download it here. Since it comes in so many flavors, you’ll need to know a bit about your computer. Most of you will probably not use the version for Solaris.
There’s two changes you’ll want to make when switching office suites. The first one is in your head:
Stop thinking in terms of the Microsoft Labels. You’ll have to tell yourself that you don’t want Excel anymore. You want to make spreadsheets. Your formulas, functions, shortcuts, graphs, and charts will all be at your disposal, but they’ll be in a ’spreadsheet application,’ not in Excel.
Pay attention to this one. Open Office by default likes to save things in the OpenOffice format. Microsoft Word saves things as a word document “.doc” OpenOffice has it’s own file format to save things as. Guess what Microsoft’s applications wont read it. (How they do like their monopoly). We can change it to help you avoid any incompatability issues
Open the Word Application.
Tools
Options
Load/Save
General
Under Document type select “Text Document”
Always save as “Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP”
Under Document type select “Spreadsheet”
Always save as “Microsoft Excel 97/2000/XP”
Under Document type select “Presentation”
Always save as “Microsoft PowerPoint 97/2000/XP”
It’s a lot simpler than it looks and the program is fairly solid. If you’re not able to get student discounts and rebates for the Microsoft Version this one is worth considering.
Actually the software is so good between linux and open office I’m considering getting donated computers, repairing them and loading them up with the free software out there and donating them to the school. The final state will be that the school gives them to students who otherwise wouldn’t have a computer. I’ll probably start setting this up towards December.
I understand that the music industry is a difficult one to get into. Why not? It seems very depressing to be a musician. Maybe that’s why they do so many drugs. Then of course there’s also the death of musicians. I mean really it’s like a statistically bad thing to be taking a plane ride once you’re a famous musician. Remember Richie Valens, Aaliyah, Buddy Clark, Buddy Holly, Dean Paul Martin, Jim Croce, Jim Reeves, and John Denver?
That’s why many musicians see the road they’re headed down and decide to avoid the pathway of destruction. Some choose rather productive outlets. Brian Biehle writes music for/with his kids. Other musicians end up being high school music teachers–a fine route but it seems more like a desperate attempt to avoid eating ramen noodles more than 4 nights a week.
Out of all the possible outlets for musicians who don’t make the ‘big time’ who sells out to make elevator music. I mean really. You’ve got to call mom and be like “Hey mom, I recorded my fourth album today.” She’ll ask what’s on it. “I used a soprano sax on the love-theme from Superman.”
Do we really need that? I’ve become an expert on elevator music. I’ve had to deal with Yahoo’s customer service on several occasions this past week for one issue or another regarding websites. I’ve listened to quite a bit of elevator music. I hope I don’t have to listen to very much of it in the future. I think that they use the music as a means to deter you from staying on the phone. Someone at customer service must have sat there and said “let’s play the most obnoxious calming music possible so people will either hang up, or be placated.”
At 30 I’m looking at life as though there are some things I’ll just never get around to accomplishing. Becoming a musician is for sure off the list. Why? I probably wouldn’t make it–I don’t want to teach high school–Drugs aren’t an option–Fiery plane crashes look cooler on movies than they do up close.
So I arranged for these two to go out on a date just before I left Utah. Then my job was to back off and see what would happen. I asked how they were doing a bit later and in response I got this photo.
It says a lot!
I haven’t been getting much sleep these past few weeks. About 10 days ago I was finally going to get some rest (more than 5.5 hours) and went to bed. At 11:30pm I got a phone call. It was from Mike. It was good news. Something he and I had been talking about for a long time finally happened. He was excited. I was sleepy.
As mention in the previous post, I had to be in at work early and had a 3:00am wakeup. Yes there is a 3:00 in the morning for those of you who didn’t know. So I crashed putting the boys to bed last night.
Wouldn’t you know it, around 11:00 there was a phone call from Mike. Chrissy answered, woke me up and it was good news once again.
He wanted to tell me that McKell got a new ring and he bought it for her.
There’s a bit of pride involved in playing match maker. After all this makes two couples I’ve introduced. My efforts are minimal compared to the amount of work it takes to create a family and keep it together. They’re wonderful people. They’re a wonderful couple. Just the sort of wonderful people that causes a loving Heavenly Father to send an invitation to the highest covenant man can make here on earth.
Congrats Mike and McKell! I’m glad to be your friends.
This photo is definitely NOT their baby. If we give them time I’m sure we’ll see one like it in a few years.
There’s two great reasons for celebrating today. You’re going to need a little background for me to tell you why it’s so great first. My mother and father have both gone through several computers. My dad has always loved gadgets. He also loves to read about them. One concern you can’t help but reading about when you read about computers is their security. Dad’s a bit concerned about loosing the hours of work he’s put into the family history files he’s created.
So for all of these years my parents have used the internet very little at home. I’ve been trying politely to change that.
Mom got a new computer. I got my opportunity. Last night, with only a little hesitation, I talked her through downloading skype. I’ve known for a while how simple the program was to install and use. Within 7 minutes we were webcamming each other for the first time.
Then the kids saw grandma online. Rainey climbed up onto the couch. Eliza and Daniel started talking. Pretty soon grandma had to sort through conflicting streams of conversation. I’m sure it was probably wonderfully overwhelming!
It could have been the fact that I had been up since 3 in the morning, but I felt a great weight lifted off my shoulders. I was able to let out a big sigh. Finally we can use all this technology to keep our family a bit closer together. For years we have been talking with Chrissy’s parents via webcam. As parents we’ve watched our kids develop a close (although long distance) relationship with one set of grandparents. Naturally I’ve wanted to balance the scales.
Daniel can show grandma how he’s learning to draw letters. Eliza can show off her homework. Rainey blows kisses at the screen all day long–if you’ll let him.
You can do the research yourself but I’ll tell you quickly why I use skype:
Low footprint: not a whole lot of hard disk space and you can ‘call’ over dialup
Security: each conversation/chat is 256bit encrypted
Cross platform: I’ve got computers running Linux, Windows, and OS X. Skype works on all of them
Add free: Unlike MSN and Yahoo Messenger which are outlets for large corporations to display their advertising, skype doesn’t do that.
Thanks for skyping mom! I’m hoping we can make a habit of having meals together.
Last time the dog got skunked it was my turn to give him a bath. This time the dog got skunked and it was still my turn to give him a bath.
Isn’t there like a thing where you’re supposed to take turns on this one? Or is this like the dishes where it’s just my chore every night and I should be grateful to get any help?
I’m also thinking that if we actually lived in a town–it’s mascot would be a skunk. In the 15 miles I drive to and from work there’s usually a two skunk minimum. (Two dead skunks on the road)
I guess this is just what happens when you live in the country.
Tonight I finished the code for the Book of Mormon Podcast. I can now go to sleep knowing that it’s completed.
Since I started the podcast as a way to keep busy while listening to Spring’s General Conference I’ve had more than 400 people sign up for the podcast. It’s neat to think that they depend on me for something as important as their scripture study. When you search in iTunes for the podcast you’ll notice there’s another gentleman that has podcasted the book of Mormon under the title of “The Official Audio Book of Mormon.” There’s nothing “official” about his version of the podcast–except that is uses the same church audio files.
One of the reason why my version took so long to produce is that each chapter contains the summary information integrated with the files. This makes the podcast appear more professional.
What’s the next step? I’d encourage the fellow bloggers out there to add a link to http://roeckerfam.com/bom.xml on their webpages with the title of “The Book of Mormon Podcast.” Every search engine looks at blogs to find new and popular topics. They increase the ranking of a search’s keywords based upon how many blogs & websites that have the link. Right now “the book of mormon podcast” shows this podcast as 7th. If you can take the time to link to it eventually it’ll win out as the first choice.
Oddly enough this is an online project where I don’t actually get anything out of it. I could have built the podcast for some gain, but didn’t because it didn’t feel right. The other six search results that are ahead of this one–didn’t deliver a free version of the scriptures .
Growing up with my dad was an experience, and for every experience there’s a story to tell. Dad has always been a gadget guy.
When it was time to go Christmas shopping I remember going to Toys R Us. It was a big deal for us to be in a store with that many toys. It was a big deal for dad as well.
Dad used to detour to the calculator section (no computers back then). It was only after some prodding that he’d come join the rest of the family at the register. Dad’s always been a gadget guy.
Now from what mom tells me, dad does the same thing with the Mac store. This video is dedicated to the gadget man that’s never grown up.
Dad gets these blogs emailed to him. So if he wants to see the vid he’ll need to click here.
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