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I don’t buy as many gifts as a lot of people, but I have actively started my Christmas shopping much earlier this year. Normally I’m waiting until the very last moment, trying to get a couple final items and make them presentable for Christmas morning. This year I started in March. If I found a good deal on something that I thought was useful for someone, I would buy it. If it was a solid, universal value, I bought a couple of them.
I try to avoid buying things that lose their value quickly. If buying for myself or a friend, I want that item to be around and useful for years. If possible, I’d like it to gain value or add value to something else. You can ask my family about the types of things I give as gifts, such as blankets, tools, knives, instruments, containers, pictures and picture frames. If these things are of quality, they can last forever. So I search them out, and if I see a good value, I get one…or five.
There has been talk recently of the missing bees from farmed colonies. By some reports, up to 30% of commercial hives have failed in the last couple years. It’s not that the bees are dying in the hive, they are disappearing. No one is sure where they are disappearing to.
I’m reminded of the story now after a couple strange bee encounters. They both occurred at night in the last two weeks. I believe we grilled both nights as well, and we had the house opened up. After grilling, 5 or 6 bees made their way inside our house and buzzed directly toward and around the lights that were on. Both times they hovered to complete exhaustion, and then fell straight down to the floor. Once on the floor, they were easy prey for anything that wanted to remove their existence, including me.
I have very rarely seen bees at night, and never have I seen this behavior. Seeing it twice makes me wonder what is causing it, or is there a chance that strange behavior like this could reflect what has happened with the larger population? Who knows?
I consistently find myself sending out the same or similar emails every couple weeks or so. Maybe it’s informing a new employee how to interact with our internal management system, or providing some tutorials for clients, but each time it’s needed, I would look up an old email with that info, rearrange it to fit the current situation, and then send it off to the new recipient.
Admittedly, I need to structure some of my tasks better, so these emails are handled automatically by a work-flow program or email trigger system, but I’m still working on that. Until then, I found that you can enable the “Canned Responses” Google Lab in your Gmail to make this process much easier.
Here are the steps needed to enable the Templates/Canned Responses Lab
1. Login to your Gmail account.
2. Click on the settings link in the upper right-hand corner.
3. Click the Labs tab. (See screenshot of Gmail settings tabs.)
4. Look for the feature called Canned Responses.
5. Select Enable next to the Canned Responses feature.
6. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page.
7. You will now see a “canned responses” feature whenever you’re composing an email. You can also use your email templates as an automated reply in filters. See these screenshots of canned responses in email composition form, canned responses in filters.
 Google Canned Responses Screenshot
I was standing outside the office yesterday, in the middle of a relatively serious conversation, when I saw a pigeon swoop down from a strange direction towards the building. I gave it the benefit of the doubt, thinking it knew more about where it was flying than I did, and didn’t pay much attention.
Then I heard it slam into the window above the entrance. As I look up I see this bird carcass sailing down, directly towards me! I tried to get out of the way, but it bounced off my chest and hit the ground. It fell 15-20 feet and landed on concrete.
I thought I had just been hit by a dead bird. Strange. However, it wasn’t dead. It turned upright and set there, stunned and injured. It hit the glass hard, hit the concrete hard, and lost several feathers in the ordeal.
 This pigeon slammed into the window above us. It was still sitting there when we left the office for the evening, so I don’t know if it ever recovered. It might have flown away later, or been a cat’s meal. The scene made me consider how quickly your situation can change. He was flying high one second, then injured and falling to the concrete the next. Don’t take those moments when you’re flying high for granted. And if you see something worth going for, make sure it’s not a reflection in the window of something that’s behind you.
We all heard the news. Michael Jackson died today from a cardiac arrest, after a lifetime of R&B, pop, stardom and controversy. Within minutes the news was blanketing www.twitter.com, facebook, and the other social media outlets. It took a while for Google News to confirm the story, but you can could find Michael Jackson trending on OneRiot (formerly Me.dium.com) immediately. Just minutes after, already had more pages of video results than YouTube.com.
OneRiot.com is a social search engine that “Finds the Pulse of the Web.” It acts in realtime, tracking trends and indexing search results according to their current relevance and popularity. It shares data pools with twitter and digg, so currently buzzing themes show up as they happen.
Google launched a new Gmail Tips section today, with tips to save you time, energy, and reduce mistakes. If you are a power Gmail user, I recommend walking through their suggestions and browsing the labs sections for ways you can benefit.
There are Google Labs available to help you avoid forgetting attachments and to provide canned responses in Gmail for recurring themes. There are tips on using keyboard shortcuts and quick links to increase your productivity. You’ll find something to help your productivity.
I custom designed and mailed a single postcard today for free, and I had to share this experience.
I had heard of AmazingMail offering one off custom postcards, but today was my first attempt to make and send one. After signing up at AmazingMail.com, you are automatically credited 10 postcards and postage absolutely free! The thing that makes AmazingMail unique is the fact that you can custom design a postcard for a single unit. There are no expensive setup fees or minimum quantities. Once laid out, you can send a one postcard or 10,000.
My task today was to design a postcard to send my family, incorporating pictures from a hiking trip I went on recently. Mission accomplished. The card I sent was full color with custom images and personalized text on front and back! They walk you through the process, step by step, and when completed you can save the design for future mailings. My card was a personal card, but this service seems most effective when used by businesses to contact and engage customers on a consistent basis. As a matter of fact, you pre-schedule your mailings up to a year in advance!
In the past, producing and mailing anything “custom” was cost prohibitive. However, thanks to new technology custom printing is now affordable to the masses. With AmazingMail’s free trial (no credit card needed), anyone can see how this service might benefit them moving forward.
Many small businesses do not have a good understanding of how online marketing works, especially with their own website. Having been swindled for so long by the Yellow Pages, or spending thousands of dollars on newspaper ads, they do not realize that online marketing can be performance based. You can track and see if your marketing dollars are giving you a return on your investment.
Beyond that, however, they have not opened their eyes to the fact that you aren’t “paying per word” when you post information online. Bandwidth and digital storage space are cheap. In a Yellow Page or newspaper ad, you have to be very selective about what wording and imagery you use. Every word, or each square inch, is costing you. Online, though, that is not the case! More information is usually better.
Online you can imagine that you have unlimited space. You have expertise in your business, and you need to make visitors to your site understand that you are an expert. This will involve educating them on the different aspects of your business, explaining past experiences, providing tips and tricks to avoid pitfalls, showing testimonials of satisfied clients, and any other factual information you can provide to let them know you are a professional and can handle their situation.
Like any targeted ad, you do want to provide a compact summary of your services on the main page, as well as the most effective ways to contact you (phone number in big letters, email, contact form, etc.). But with a website, you have the freedom to add sections devoted to any topics you feel are important, and to which you can add valuable content. Don’t feel limited to pack everything into a 2″ x 4″ advertisement then wait a year to see if it does any good.
Adding this content helps in two areas. It reassures visitors that you know what you’re talking about, and gives them a reason to trust in your establishment. But it ALSO is extremely important in allowing search engines to find and rank your site. Search engines organize their rankings based primarily on the text of the website and the links that are pointing at the website. By adding quality content to your site, you’re adding targeted pages with related content that wouldn’t normally exist on your site. Each new pages adds new keywords related to your profession, that if were not included on your site, the search engines would not rank you for them. If you were a dentist, for example, and added a page on “root canals”, search engines would realize that you also did root canals and might recognize any methods or machines you included in the article that you use for that service. If someone had searched for one of these methods before, there is no way for you to come up, since that text wouldn’t have been included on your site. But by adding this information, you now open up the opportunity for people find your site based on these new terms.
You want to know the best thing about adding this content? Once you devote the bits of time to add pages to your website, the content can stay there indefinitely! That’s right, if you spend 30 minutes writing up a detailed article on how your business handles a certain situation, that article can remain on your site for an indefinite amount of time (barring a catastrophic failure of your hosting system). This means that article can continue to help you with customers and search engines forever if you commit to writing it just once.
The conclusion to make from this is to not limit yourself on content when designing and updating your website. More content is better. If helps educate clients, gives them reasons to trust your site, and it dramatically increases your site’s relevancy in search engines. Consistently add quality content to your website, and you will beat the competition.
Search engines can’t find this content on your site if it doesn’t exist.
I am all about the electric car revolution. I think we can increase our efficiency across the board by converting a bulk of our transportation from fossil fuels to direct electric drive, even if most of our electricity is still being derived from fossil fuels.
Regenerative braking alone can reduce wear and tear on brakes and increase stop and go efficiency dramatically. Electric cars don’t need to idle at stop lights like gasoline powered autos, so there’s less waste there. Benefits are gained by tapping into the mass production and distribution systems we already have in place for electricity, allowing cars to charge at night when other usage is at its lowest.
However, one thing that doesn’t get much mention is how we’ll replace the benefits we reap from all the wasted energy from gas engines. When a gas engine is running, it generates large amounts of heat. We have radiators in cars to remove this eat from the engine and disperse it into the surrounding air. However, in cold seasons and climates, we use this excess heat to heat that car and defrost the windshield. These become critical in adverse weather conditions.
In an electric car, resources are managed very carefully, and there is no excess heat to use for the cabin of the vehicle. It will have to be heated with electricity which will draw hundreds or thousands of additional watts from the already taxed electrical system of the car.
Heated seats and steering wheels are a good start, and these can probably be easily adopted from current systems. Electric defrost and defog methods also exist for vehicles. But dealing with this problem long term is something we need to keep in mind as we work away from the fossil fuel excesses we’ve grown accustomed to over the years.
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