OUR BLOG

Featuring marketing tips, tech news, digital wonders, some personal things and everything in between . . .

Month: October 2008

Canon CanoScan LiDE 100


Thursday October 9, 2008

Reading Time: 2 minutes

If have pictures from back in the days before digital camera’s came about, this scanner will be useful.

If you have printed material that needs to be compiled in to a PDF file, this scanner will be useful.

Released around 8/31/08 New Canon CanoScan LiDe 100 Flatbed scanner for $60, great product for a great price. I recently purchased the Canon CanoScan LiDE 100, a scanner with 2400 x 4800dpi, USB 2.0, compatible with Windows XP, Vista, and Macs. Weighing at 3.5 lbs, dimensions 14.6″ x 9.9″ x 1.6″ makes it very easy to take from one place to another without worrying about the weight or size

Instantly scan your photos to use on your website to display personal family and/or friends photos or better yet, put up pictures of your business, from your staff to your facility. Have Webconsuls setup an image gallery for you in FLASH or HTML.

Purchase one today and start marketing your photos on your website.
Frys Electronics, Newegg.com

Reading Time: 5 minutes

On our recent excursion to Las Vegas for Blog World Expo I sat in on an interesting panel discussion on “Mommy Bloggers”. There are blogs of all persuasions but the mommy blogger niche is really a category unto itself. The “Mommy Blogger” phenomenon has been grabbing the attention of marketers for quite some time as Moms are generally the holders of the purse strings in most households.

Listening to the discussion and reflecting on my blog reading habits I started to think about what I like to find in blogs, what keeps me coming back and what we can aspire to as we try to develop our blogs.

Here is one of my favorite “Mommy Bloggers” and why her blog(s) keep me coming back for more.

Lela Davidson

I originally was introduced to Lela’s writing on Hub Pages. Her hubs, individually written articles, ranged from household hints, parenting tips, vacation spots for families, holiday celebrations and harder issues such as drug abuse and creationism in public school cirriculum.

  • Lela’s profile is engaging and natural. When I read “about Lela” I can imagine her in her world. This is how Lela introduces herself to her readers:

I am a Mother. I cook, clean, wipe noses, push Benadryl, check for nits, help with homework, and iron tiny polo shirts. I used to have a real job with a degree framed on my office wall, but I gave it up for this glamour. I also write, hang out with my husband, and drink wine with my friends on the driveway. I believe parenting is the hardest job in the world as well as the most natural thing we do. I screw up. Daily. And I banish guilt relentlessly. I believe it’s your moral responsibility to find the thing that makes you lose track of time, the thing that empties all the racing thoughts from your head and leaves you deaf to the oven timer so you forget about the cookies until the smoke finds you. Writing is my thing. Here’s to hoping you find yours and go do it.

  • Many of her posts are simple “how to’s and lists.”

How to Know if Your Kids Are Huffing
Top Five Midwest Family Vacation Destinations

  • She is always very timely. She has already begun posts in preparation for Halloween.

  • Lela keeps you involved in the process. Recently Lela has been working on a novel. She keeps her readers abreast of her progress and her plan. Novel in Six Months Plan

  • Lela writes regularly.

All these elements keep me coming back, but of course I subscribe to Lela’s RSS Feed so I don’t miss a post.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Some people live an entire lifetime and wonder if they ever made a difference in the world. The Marines don’t have that problem – President Ronald Reagan

Those words can be found in the Photosynth I made of “Park Semper Fi” near my home in San Clemente California. If you want You can zoom thru the images to find the quote. Using a Nikon D60 I took 253 shots from all angles of the small park in the center of our “Little Spanish Village by the Sea”. Zooming in an out of point cloud (hit P on your keyboard) gives you the feel of being there in this 3D space generated with those 2D images. ( scroll mouse to zoom in and out ) The next step turning these point clouds into a wire frame models and then skinning those frames with the photos that generated them. Full photorealistic 3D worlds easily built buy anyone with a decent digital camera. If the above synth does not work for you, (sorry Windows IE and FF only) the rest of you, ( My Mac and Ubuntu friends ) please watch this youtube video demonstrating my favorite shiny new toy.

For those of you that can view the above synth, thank a Marine.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Before there was radio, and television, and computers people used weekly literature to connect with the world at large. From August 4, 1821 to February 8, 1969, The Saturday Evening Post was what people looked to for: current events articles, editorials, human interest pieces, humor, illustrations, a letter column, and poetry; readers were even encouraged to write articles for the Post. People would sit around their homes on Saturday evening to read the Post, they would discuss the articles and what was taking place in the world with friends and neighbors. Norman Rockwell became a main cover illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post; he would illustrate certain events or activities of the American Family in a beautiful way.

As time went on, the post lost its popularity and people started looking other places for their information. Newer magazines and the advent of T.V. made the Post less popular, the Post had to cut costs and started using photographs as opposed to illustrations. Today the Post is still published six times a year by Benjamin Franklin Literary & Medical Society (a non-profit), because The Saturday Evening Post descended from The Pennsylvania Gazette, founded in 1728 by Benjamin Franklin.

I had the privilege of going to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA. On display were many Rockwell paintings that were featured on The Saturday Evening Post’s cover, art of a bygone era where life was painted and encapsulated in time. Norman Rockwell’s art was a staple of the Post up until 1963.

Today, Weblogs have taken the role of the Saturday Evening Post; readers and the writers share the same role for spreading information to the masses. The public follow blogs much the same way they followed The Post, blogs today are the conversation pieces. Blogs may not have the same artistic appeal that the Post had, but blogs travel along the same lines with regard to started discussions. I am not sure that it is a coincidence that when we publish something on a blog it is called a post. Blogs allow the reader to be the writer, and the writer to be the reader in the blogosphere.

Reading Time: 6 minutes

It is Saturday morning and tomorrow I will turn 59. I was hopeful that at this age I wouldn’t still need to be concerned about tags and labels, but hey I still do laundry at least once per week and in this day and age I find myself discussing the pros and cons of labeling or tagging blog posts. Let’s talk about clothes first: What is it about the tag or label in the neckline of a shirt or top that is so annoying? I ask this question, because as a woman I can categorically state I have never removed a tag from a piece of my clothing. But I can also attest that my significant other hates tags in the neckline of his clothing and he has on occasion twisted himself into the shape of a pretzel to attempt removing the tag while he is wearing the garment!

He claims it is scratching his neck and driving him crazy. I maintain that this is learned behavior from childhood when his mother tried to make him comfortable and dutifully removed all tags. You should know that when my children were little I never removed a tag from the neckline of their shirts, pajamas or the like. It was a sociological test I was running in my own little world. The truth is I really don’t care if my spouse removes these tags, unless, of course, the tag includes the laundry instructions.

Can’t tell you how many golf shirts have been ruined because they needed cold water as opposed to warm, or they should be hung to dry! Clothes manufacturers came to our rescue about 2002 and invented the tagless label. Accordingly, Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst at NPD Group, a Port Washington, N.Y., market research firm stated in 2005: ”Tags are a very emotional issue.” Is he kidding me? Illness, death, bankruptcy, divorce, crime, war and the like are emotional issues, not TAGS!

My blog commitment has been to make you laugh and to offer you something useful, so today I am including a PDF that you can print and hang by your laundry machines. It is a Guide to Home Laundering and Dry-cleaning Symbols. The reason you may need this is twofold: 1) You may find that when you launder your clothes, someone has removed not only the neckline tag with laundering instructions, but they may have removed the additional tag sometimes found elsewhere on the clothing. 2) You may discover that the laundry instructions are written in size 2 font and in universal code. Take a look at these instructions; you may be amazed at how often you have misinterpreted a symbol.

Now for a short discussion about Web 2.0 Tags and Labels: I will make this short and sweet. You can read a lot about labels / tags, as they relate to blog posts. I will only offer you my very simple observation. Tags and labels have always been important in our day to day life, even before we had the world wide web. Think of it this way. The tag/label is an identifier, it guides the reader to more information about the subject matter within your historical blog posts and it perhaps provides just a bit of information that will make your life easier in the case of Web 2.0 allowing your blog to be found by more people. If you really want to understand this in greater detail, contact Webconsuls’ Social Marketing guru…Darin McClure, because I have to go do the laundry!

P.S. I know I took 599 words to enlighten you today. Happy Saturday!

Reading Time: 2 minutes

If you missed last nights VP debates between Govenor Palin and Senator Biden, here is a video summary. For myself, keeping in mind my low expectations after the presidential debate, I was pleasantly surprised with the part I saw. Maybe it is because these opponents are a little looser than the presidential candidates were, but to be positive I thought there was less ‘speaking over the allotted time and repeating what had already been said’, over and over again.

Either way, the ‘winner’ of the debate varies depending on who you ask, but if you didn’t catch the debates, feel free to use this video and stay informed.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

T-Mobile has quite a few things up their sleeves right now.
First off, T-Mobile finally unleashes their 3G Network. It was available for testing purposes in New York but now will be available in the major cities in U.S.

Click here to see T-Mobile’s 3G Coverage Map

Let’s get a quick breakdown of the most commonly used networks by your provider:
note: Kbps stands for Kilobytes per second.

Edge: Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution (or Enhanced Data GSM Environment)
Edge Speed: Ideally 200 Kbps, realisticly its closer to 90 Kbps

GPRS: General Packet Radio Service (an upgrade from GSM network). This is 2.5G that gives the speed between 30Kbps – 50Kbps

UMTS: Universal Mobile Telephone Service. This is the 3G Service provided by T-Mobile and ATT. This service is aimed to provide up to 2Mbps but in the real world, you’ll see 300Kpbs – 400Kbps (which is still an amazing speed compared to Edge or GPRS).