I spent the night on the farm last night. I had a day onsite with a client a few counties away and I just went there instead of coming all the way back here last night. Call me crazy, but it was calling to me. The cabin is still many (wo)man-hours from being completed. This was a fact that had been depressing me to the point I was avoiding the cabin altogether.

After all, we made the decision to stay here at the lake until my son graduated high school — because despite my substantial complaints about the Russell County School system… it still runs circles around the Casey County version. It will be a cold day in Hades before my children attend that sorry excuse for a school again.

Which means… I can only visit the farm. I can’t live there right now.

It’s kind of crazy, with gas prices being what they are, that Wayne drives over 70 miles to work every day, when the farm is less than 10 miles from his place of employment. He stays at the farm occasionally. I think, working nights, it’s probably easier to sleep there than to battle all the hubbub around here during the day.

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Ok, this is a rant. I can’t stand it anymore. If there are any more “polished” marketing pieces that float across my desk (either my physical “inbox” or the one on my computer) with basic grammar errors, I’m going to whoop out an amazingly loud screech! (Please notice that I said “if there are any more” not “if there IS any more.”)

My rant topic today? Subject Verb Agreement.

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I had a client with an interesting problem this week. Their T1 connection had gone down for a few hours and suddenly their emails were bouncing, being delivered to their webmail instead of siphoning through their onsite router, and life was just generally difficult for them. They were also no longer receiving their web-based forms email.

It took a bit of research (and calling in favors from some of my most talented fellow techies) to resolve the issue. These things are never as simple as they should be, are they?

In case it’s of any assistance to anyone else, I wanted to deconstruct the problem here… and share the solution.

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I found a cool quote about George Bush referencing spinach today. Given the whole spinach scare right now… it makes the quote even more valuable than when it was first spoken, IMHO.

“I don’t think either one of them is really telling the whole story. What Bush is saying is that if you eat your spinach, you’ll be able to have some ice cream for dessert. Al Gore, on the other hand, just wants to pretend that the spinach doesn’t exist.” — Michael Tanner

Things that make me go… Hmmmm.

When school started this year, I (once again) refused to fill out the application for “free lunches” for the kids. And once again, when yet another “reminder” was sent home that they needed this information, I once again refused to fill our OR return the application.

So today, I received an officially signed sheet of paper informing me that my application for free lunch had been denied.

I saw red.(Thankfully, there was a number I could call to have my application reconsidered by the “Hearing Official” in Jamestown, Kentucky…. GRRRRR)

You know… it makes me crazy. Way back, when I was trying to make my way alone — with three kids depending on just me for their food and a roof over their heads — while I was launching a business and we nearly starved… EVEN then I refused governmental assistance to feed my kids.

Now, I bought in bulk, we didn’t eat fancy, but we ate. And to be sent an official notification that my “application” had been denied makes me want to punch someone. Hard. Really hard.

According to the kids, they are the oddballs in this school system because they actually DO pay for their lunches. My youngest has told me that it makes her feel bad to be different.

Now, how’s THAT for leaving no child behind??!?

*Grrrrr*

My life has taken a seriously hairpin turn for the better in the last couple of days. It was a bit less than wonderful before the changes started. It was getting to be a bit of a drag, honestly. And then a slew of related and unrelated developments and changes started… like a well-placed pattern of dominoes awaiting that first domino to fall…

Although I can’t go into all of it right now, I can say that I’ve reconnected with an old friend, I’ve put one seriously PIA part of my history to rest (may it RIP forever), my son and my husband have had some GREAT news, many “pending” items — the stuff that has left me in limbo for months and even years — has started to resolve itself. (Have I mentioned how limbo is my least favorite place to be in life??)

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Let’s say you have decided that blogging really IS a good idea. And, you are ready to have a blog on your own website. The only problem you face is an innate abhorrence of writing.

So you are looking for an easy way out. You ponder the options… and determine that you should hire someone to do your blog. After all, this will get you blogging (that really “in” thing to do for your online marketing) and will make the whole process as painless as possible, right?

WRONG.

Since I am a blog advocate (and a freelance writer), I’ve had quite a few inquiries lately about blogging services. Writing about blogging has resulted in a page one ranking on Google for blog writing services. But, Google is a fickle friend, so I don’t expect to retain that ranking for long.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying quite a bit of web traffic on this topic and I get quite a few questions on ghost blogging. I want to address some of those questions here. (more…)

In Kentucky, I wring my hands about the quality of the education. I blog about it, I become a thorn.

In China, the new eSchoolbook program is being launched, and even from the tiny bit of information I can find, it sounds pretty awesome. Now, if only I could get this type of high-tech education approved for home schooling my own — or permitting them to have quality distance learning.

This weekend, I talked with a client over lunch about the educational systems in Kentucky and Georgia. And his idea, married with this high-tech concept, makes perfect sense to me. Why not have the BEST teachers in the country teaching the classes and doing the presentations and have the local teachers on hand to answer questions that arise from those presentations?

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While doing my daily thing today, I found the following information for those lucky enough to be in the Silicon Valley Area in early October.

Microsoft is hosting a Vista Fair — where they will download a free copy of MS Vista onto your machine and will provide you a free current copy of the Vista operating system and will send you another copy when the full version is released!

It’s enough to make me want to hop a plane! Learn more here:

Visit here to sign up!

Hurry, the available slots are going quick!

I just finally — and begrudgingly — upgraded to the next iTunes version. Why? Because without it, I can’t access some of the cool new features like the games (notably Bejeweled and Mah Jong) that are currently available for my iPod from iTunes.

I purchased and downloaded the Sims 2 game to my little flip phone a few weeks ago, and have thoroughly enjoyed the “dumbed down” version of this classic simulation game.

iTunes also is offering feature length movies by the download. I, however, will continue to use my own program to rip my rather extensive DVD library to portable format. With the collection well over 2500 strong these days, I don’t feel the urge to download rather than
make my own (already purchased) library available on the road.

I may, however, consider this more cost effective way ($9.99) to capture some of the future new releases that I want — but don’t want to get up and take a road trip to own.

Life is pretty sweet for the movie-music-game junkie geek in the modern age, isn’t it?

*reclines in overstuffed desk chair and sighs*

This week my eldest son left for the Army. And, it’s one of those things that makes you realize how quickly the time really does go.

I preach about quality of life, about slowing down, about smelling the roses. But,  apparently, I seldom do it.

After all, that young man that’s taller than I am now, was, just a few short months ago, the little baby that liked to sleep on my belly — for every nap. He’s the little guy that I’d nurse while I typed on my undergraduate thesis. He’s the one I taught to read at four, to ride a bike, to stand up straight and tall, even when life dealt some serious blows.

This is my baby… my first child.

As I think about it, I bawl. There seems to be so much more that I should have taught him. There’s so much he still doesn’t know. How could I have failed him like this?

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Following a lawsuit by Adobe, Microsoft agreed to remove the “save as PDF” feature from the upcoming Office 2007 (also called Office 12) as delivered.

But, Microsoft is providing this option as an “add-in” which can be downloaded for free by users from the Microsoft download site. Recently, that “add-in” was made available.

If you want yours (and the ability to also save as XPS format) …
Download your copy of the “Save as PDF” and “Save as XPS” add-in for eight MS Office program formats here.

Enjoy!

Real estate agents, coaches, speakers, authors, artists, small businesses and other entrepreneurs are using outsourcing more and more every day. What troubles some is how to go about selecting the best in the business.

It’s not always easy to pan for gold online.

With that in mind, I’ve compiled this checklist list of things you should consider when you are seeking a specialist to help move your own business ahead.

When Seeking Individual Offsite Providers:

• Always require and check references. Check every single one.
• Don’t hire a generalist. Outsourcing specialists are a benefit to your company only if they bring the specific skills you need. You can hire generalists for onsite work or use temp agencies as needed for general or clerical work.
• Does your potential specialist do outsourced work full-time? Part timers only dedicate a few hours a day or a week to your needs and you will split that with any other clients they may have.
• Get information. Ask about background and real-life experience in the areas you need and a history of delivering those services via digital means. Consider and weigh formal education, professional experience, longevity in business and client references.
• Investigate. Check into the certification requirements if you seek certified individuals. If everyone passes the “tests” — do the tests indicate skill?
• Rates will vary, but your end cost is what matters. Recognize that specialists may accomplish in 15 minutes what it could take two hours or more for a beginner to accomplish – and the pros will deliver a better end product.
• You get what you pay for. If a VA is charging less than $25 per hour, they probably aren’t seasoned. If they do not yet know the costs associated with running their own business, do you want them helping you run yours?
• Do they seem too eager? If so, you may not want them. Hungry often = new or less than experienced. Sometimes you strike gold with a wonderfully experienced newcomer, but often your projects are merely their training ground.
• Do they interview YOU? Most professional providers will. If they aren’t asking questions to help you define how you see their role in your business, you should be concerned. Excellent outsourcing providers ask excellent questions.
• Do they educate you about this way of working? If you are new to outsourcing, most professionals will take a few minutes to ascertain your level of comfort and will help to explain to you how it works, and how they (or someone they recommend) may help you.
• Are they busy? Most professional providers of a certain caliber have a full client load. You know the old saying, “If you want something done, ask the person who is busy” — not the one just standing there. They accept only the “cream-of-the-crop” new clients — and only those they believe they can help.
• Don’t be offended if you are referred on. Most professionals will send you to another provider if they don’t have the time in their schedule or if they don’t have the specialized services they feel you need.
• Professional referrals will help you find a good match. Someone in this business is careful about referring work to others. It puts their own reputation on the line. Not every referral is a perfect match, but your chances are improved when a professional outsourcing specialists makes a recommendation.

Here begins today’s rant. It follows yet another call from yet another real estate agent (and genuinely nice guy) that has been taken for a ride, financially. This has been bugging me for awhile, even before the most recent call (I get several of these a month, BTW). I’ve talked with my own clients about it, and I’ve probably run off a few potential clients with my blatantly bold and brash “brutal” honest opinion on this particular topic.

The fact is, real estate agents are an easy mark. They believe in and look for a silver bullet to fix all their online and offline marketing woes and they are willing to buy false “Holy Grails” over and over again.

They don’t get what they want from one company (even though what was advertised was exactly what they did want)… so they go on to the next company and buy yet another “service” — another “software program” — another online lead generator — another “one size fits all” website, etc, etc, ad nauseum…

And they wonder why they never quite make it to the big leagues. They wonder why their overhead is so high, their profits so low and why the concept of personal “free time” is a misnomer.

I’ve HAD IT!!!

(Not with these agents… but FOR them!)

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I think I’ve found my new mantra… in the form of an E.B. White quote. I tripped over this quote while blog hopping this morning. It fits my view on how life should be and explains why some days (like today) seem to be so dang difficult!

I get up every morning determined both to change the world and have
one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning the day
difficult.

- E.B. White

After the recent grocery division announcement, I didn’t expect anything new out of Amazon for awhile. But, I was (happily) wrong. My favorite book source has just announced their new movie and TV episode download area!

Personally, I’m thrilled with the idea of iTunes getting a little bit of competition here — I’d prefer to have one place to go, but iTunes doesn’t have all of what I want. For instance… where the heck is the current season of Weeds???

As a person who doesn’t “do” cable, I’d like to pick and choose (and am more than willing to pay) for the content I want sans the commercials. There’s alot of hubbub right now about other options, including free content that is advertising sponsored for some of my favorite episodes. Now, maybe I’m alone in this, but for now, I want to be able to go on and download what I want and get it over to my iPod without any headaches. I’ve looked at other movie download options – paid options – but the ones I’ve viewed have formats that don’t “play nice” with my iPod. Amazon may have the same problems… I don’t know yet.

I’m going to have to go over and check out the Amazon movies — they even offer a free first episode of any of their TV shows — and see if it will be able to be downloaded to the iPod, or if I can only view it on the tablet. As much as I carry around the tablet these days, it may not be a big deal to have a tablet only format — I’ll have to give that some thought.

What WOULD be a big deal is being required to maintain two types of software on my little slate. I’m trying really hard to consider what’s most important and to have fewer, but more robust, programs on my slate. I want one icon to tap to get what I want. I don’t want to have to think… was that Amazon movie format, DVD format, iTunes format, or some
other format — before selecting the player or the movie.

In addition to the recent announcement of downloadable TV and movie content, Amazon also announced the launch of an online grocery delivery service a couple weeks ago, and I took a few moments to go in and poke around a bit., I must say I’m pretty impressed with the varieties of non-perishable organic foods that are featured.

When I get a few moments, I’ll have to go back in and look around a bit more carefully. I wish I’d done it when they were offering a $10 off coupon for new grocery customers… but time slipped away from me (the coupon was good for less than 24 hours, and I simply didn’t have the time).

Enjoying the concept of having groceries come to me, instead of me going to them has never been more appealing. Yes, I like “small” and “compact” — but I also tend to buy my staples and my essentials in bulk and the prices for the bulk organic items are quite reasonable and are, for the most part, a bit lower than what I have to pay at Wild Oats in Lexington (a two hour trip away).

So, I’m looking forward to placing my first order and evaluating the delivery time, the condition of the products ordered and … of course… my monthly “bottom line” on the family food budget. Granted, I’m the only one sticking with the “all — or dang close to all — organic” approach to food consumption, but I’ll take any savings I can get — savings in money, savings in time, savings in overall life hassle.

I’m loving some parts of the new (beta 2) Outlook 2007 – a part of the 2007 Microsoft Office System . As I mentioned before, I’m not liking the fact that I STILL can’t get my Business Contact Manager to work (so I can do my billing from my accounting program without copying files and doing the “desktop to Tablet to desktop” dance.

The other thing that was making me nuts was to be teased with the possibility of having an RSS feed directly imported into my Outlook program. Right after I add an RSS feed, it downloads and “wheeee!” I have my favorite RSS feeds being delivered into their own little folders under my personal files in Outlook.

I was thrilled… and then the errors began. Now, I’ve found the solution, and I thought I’d share…

Thanks to a post over at the Office forums by Patrick Schmid, I now have it back up and working… now I just wonder if it will be a temporary fix, or a permanent one. For others experiencing this issues, here’s Patrick’s solution:

Already restarted Outlook and your computer?

In Documents and Settings/username/Local/Settings/ –>Application/Data/Microsoft/Outlook and delete the file ending in sharing.xml.obi. If that doesn’t help, export all your feeds as OPML (File, Import and Export), delete them all and reimport the OPML.

Patrick Schmid


————–


http://pschmid.net

Thanks for the help, Patrick!

AFTERWARD… This worked for approximately… uh… 2 seconds. After some additional online research, I’ve discovered that the reason for this problem is … it’s a beta. DUH.

Hopefully the folks at MS will get this fixed before the final product comes out. For now, I’m going to have to investigate another format for reading my favorite feeds.

Today was an interesting day. I woke up late (my little alarm clock is still MIA from the trip to Amy’s for the birth event). And, I stayed up too late last night working. So, the kids were 10 minutes too late to catch the bus. (They catch the bus at 5:35 a.m.)

I called Wayne to tell him that I’d need the car a.s.a.p. to take them to the school, which is 45+ minutes away from where we live. Since Wayne works nights, and gets off work at 7:00 a.m. and it takes him 45 minutes to drive home, it takes awhile to deliver the kids to school. At 9:00 a.m. I managed to get Alexzandria to the elementary school. I asked about the attendance policy since it had changed this year and since the student handbook section on attendance was not in agreement with the “handout” received on attendance at the beginning of the year (both were sent home the same day).

Apparently, unlike most parents, I actually read that thing every year before signing the sheet saying I’ve read it and agree to it. Granted, this year, due to typos, misspellings and mutually exclusive clauses, I made some notes on WHAT I was agreeing to before turning it back in… but I read it.

So, I was a bit surprised when I was told that Alexzandria, having arrived at 9:00 a.m., would be counted absent for the entire day…

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If you own an ecommerce website, you may be interested in some of the latest statistics on which search engines and websites are most effective traffic drivers for closing sales online.

According to a recent report released by Hitwise.com, Google retains the top position in online sales. Compared to rival search engines, the big “G” is leading the pack, as most small business owners would expect. According the press release dated August 31:

“Hitwise today announced that Google was the top U.S. search engine responsible for 14.93 percent of U.S. upstream visits to the Shopping and Classifieds category for the week ending August 26, 2006. Yahoo! Search was the second most popular search engine sending visits to Shopping & Classifieds websites, accounting for 4.69 percent of upstream visits for that week. MSN Search rounded out the top search engines accounting for 2.33 percent of visits to the category.”

(Note: Upstream sites are those sites visited immediately prior to visiting the subject site.)

In addition to the expected Google dominance, a newcomer to the commerce scene is the social networking site MySpace.com. Commonly considered a gathering place for teens and young adults, this online community now accounts for a serious market share of online purchases via upstream clicks. WebProNews reported last week that upstream visits from MySpace.com accounted for more upstream traffic to shopping and classifieds than old-timer MSN search.

Marketing and online communication with your target audience is becoming a more diverse equation. Today, you should consider multiple approaches to establishing your brand and vary your platforms. Consider new, less traveled roads when marketing online and always try to keep a pulse on where the people who comprise your target market congregate online.

It’s not a static problem, but keeping abreast of the changes and shifts of dynamic online populations will pay big dividends for your business, no matter what the size.