An excellent read on the on-going Net Neutrality debate

This article from Lifehacker is an excellent read on the Net Neutrality debate. This is a subject that is very important to anyone who uses the internet for more than just checking their email or reading a few highly syndicated news articles. I urge all of you to seriously follow this issue if you don't want to end up getting priced out of what could easily become the "premium" internet, and forced to use only the basic due to corporate greed, misdirection and aggressive lobbying. Reading the comments may be of interest to some of you as well, and some of the explanations put forth by some of the commenters shed a little more light on not only the implications of this issue, but the stark contrast between the points of view of people on each side of it.

Another really good primer on what Net Neutrality really means is available here: The Open Internet: A Case For Net Neutrality.

If you're curious about the exact details, you can read the full text of the recent FCC rulings here: FCC Daily Releases - Adopted December 21, 2010.

For anyone interested in reading further on the issue, there are several books already out on the subject, and I'm sure there will be plenty more to follow. Check out these listings from Amazon.com.

     

How to link your blog to your Facebook account

I've been trying since yesterday to find a way to link this blog to my Facebook account. I figure getting the word out to friends who might already be somewhat interested in what I have to say is the best place to start. :-)

I tried one Facebook app called Blog RSS Feed Reader. I'm not even going to link to it because it failed so miserably. The setup was straight forward enough, and it previewed the posts just fine so I know it was reading my blog, but when it came to having it actually write my blog posts to my wall, it did absolutely nothing.

So I did some more searching, and this evening I found another similar tool called RSS Graffiti. So far, it is just as easy to setup, has more options to fine tune how your posts appear on your wall/page, and best of all it actually works!

If anyone out there is curious about how I've managed to link my blog to my Facebook, this is how it was done. So now I don't have to worry about manually linking to posts, or double posting anything. Yay me! :-)

The boy says momma

I worked my old day job again today. When I got home my wife said that she had been fighting SAD since yesterday. Seasonal Affective Disorder is a type of seasonal depression that can vary in it's strength. Around here (the Pacific Northwest) it seems like practically everybody feels it at least occasionally. She needed some cheering up and our son had been fairly cranky today, which obviously didn't help. So I took baby duty for a while and let her focus a little more on what she'd actually been trying to accomplish for the day.

At one point, while I was holding him and trying to show him some videos that he likes on my computer, he turned around to my wife and finally started saying "momma" in a manner which actually seems to indicate that he knows what he's saying. :-) He's been saying "da da" for months now, but he hadn't really said it convincingly until recently. Even then it was only partially convincing. This evening, the "momma" was definitely real.

I'm glad that even though I worked outside of the home today I didn't miss this. These are the moments that I wanted so desperately to be here for. I would have hated to come home and find out that he'd done it while I was at work. Thankfully, even though he was saying "momma", he waited for "da da". :-)

Back to printing wedding stationery

Well, Christmas is now done, and we've managed to drag ourselves out of bed and back to our computers to pick up where we left off. But first, I have to talk a little bit about one of our gifts this year.

We've been using an old Kodak EasyShare 3.1 megapixel camera to take all of our product photos. It does a decent job, but we know that the quality is nothing compared to what is available now. So we decided that it was finally time to upgrade.

I did a fair bit of research trying to find a camera that was as easy to use as our current one, but had all the new fangled fun to go along with it. After reading a ton of reviews, we settled on a newer EasyShare model. We are now the proud new owners of a Kodak EasyShare M580. We love it! We've been so impressed with the EasyShare line that we figured there was no good reason to stray at this point. We ordered it as a kit from Ace Photo Digital via Amazon. While I typically don't expect to have much contact with an online seller when I'm buying something from eBay or Amazon, I do expect that they will be responsive when necessary. Ace Photo Digital was awesome! I kept checking our UPS tracking number to see when our camera should be arriving. Every time I checked it showed that UPS had received shipping information for our camera, but not the package itself yet. When I contacted Ace Photo Digital about this, they immediately emailed me an affidavit to fill out stating that I hadn't received the package. It was supposed to be 3-5 day shipping and had been 10 days at this point. I printed the form, filled it out, scanned it, and emailed it back. It was that simple. They would ship the new one as soon as they processed the form. However, later that afternoon, UPS arrived with my camera. So I emailed back to Ace, and let them know I had received it. They thanked me for letting them know, and we were all set.

Fast forward to Christmas day when we opened the camera... Here is a great shot of our little dog Jazzy enjoying one of his new toys. Look at the fangs! :-)

This is a great little camera with a ton of features that I didn't expect from such an affordable point-and-shoot. It even shoots 720p HD video and has HDMI out! I think it's safe to say that we won't be missing the old camera. Anyone need a 3.1 megapixel relic to play with?



Now that we've played around with all of our new toys a little bit, it's time to get back to work. So today we've already printed one order for 100 Save The Dates, and another for 40 Invitation sets. It amazes me that we can do this so quickly now. I'm still not used to having our own laser printer here to do our production runs on. I started printing these orders this morning, and before I knew it they we done and ready for cutting. I didn't even have time to finish my coffee while I waited. :-(

We used to print on a couple of different inkjet printers, but they were sooo slooow.... So we had tried outsourcing our printing for a while. It was great quality. The staff was wonderful. But we live about 30 minutes from the print shop, and with a baby, and having to run in multiple times a week for printing it just wasn't feasible. So we spent a couple of weeks researching to find the best affordable home laser printer we could get our hands on.


Thanks to the wonderful group at the Let's Talk Stationery forum, we finally settled on the HP CP3525n. For the type of printing we do, this thing is practically a miracle. It has it's little quirks occasionally, but that's just par for the course when dealing with computers and printing in general. We print on some pretty heavy cardstock which is usually linen textured. Many printers simply can't handle this. Even if they can draw it through their paper path, you tend to end up with severely curled pages, or the printer simply can't produce enough heat to properly fuse the toner to the textured sheet. This HP doesn't have those problems. On really heavy stock it can curl slightly, but not nearly as bad as many others. It'll also handle the envelope sizes that we typically use from A7 for invitations, all the way down to 4Bar for RSVP cards. It truly is an amazing piece of machinery.


Well, I guess that's about it for now. Today will likely be spent doing some more marketing research and continuing to do what I can to drive more traffic to our shop. So if you're interested, or even just a little curious, stop by and take a look at our custom wedding stationery at DearEmma.Etsy.com.

How to attract more people to our product

The key point of being able to work at home and support our family, is keeping our product where people can see it. We need to make sure that as many people as possible see our products every day, because we know that only a small percentage of them will actually buy.



Today we have begun looking even deeper into how to go about marketing our Etsy shop, and optimizing it for search engines so that more people will actually find us. Even coming from the tech world, this is no simple task. There are lots of little tricks that aren't really obvious to anyone who hasn't looked into it or done it before. But many of them that I've discovered so far really are no-brainers when you really think about what you're trying to achieve and the tools that you have available to do it. I haven't purchased any guides like this yet, but it will probably be my next step. We have begun looking for people who have done this, and are living proof that their methods work for shops like ours on Etsy. There are several guides like this available, so you might want to look for one that relates specifically to what you're selling. This one seems to be more general in nature.

I know. It's Christmas Eve and I should be enjoying it rather than working. But if there's one thing that working for yourself teaches you, it's that work never truly stops. We work when we get an email. My wife and I both have iPhones and we both get our shop emails delivered to us constantly. There is no real time off. Sure we're not actually working 24/7, but we work when it presents itself. The best analogy is like being on-call 24/7. This does have some distinct advantages to the straight 9-5 that most people have to deal with though. Just like any on-call job, you tend to have more freedom of movement, and often times you go for long stretches of time without absolutely needing to do anything. We often get to decide when and even where we are actually going to work. Other than the graphic design and production parts of our job, we can do our work from pretty much anywhere that we can get decent internet access. Because of this, we have a fairly flexible schedule in a lot of ways. At the same time though, we are also tied to our work 24/7 whether we're actually working or not. I actually have three email accounts set up on my phone, and when it vibrates to let me know that I have an email, it's hard not to wonder if it's work or personal. I'm checking it constantly. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but it's the way it is. So while my wife is baking holiday goodies, I'm working on fine-tuning our marketing strategies.

I've spent a portion of my day trying to figure out how to draw more people in. I've been tweaking little things like our Etsy shop title, and page names on our own domain. I've added a feed of our most recent items to the side bar on this blog so that more people will see them (assuming anyone other than myself will actually read this). But that's where all of this optimization should eventually lead. The whole idea behind it is to start a following here that will draw people in. Sure I don't want this to be entirely a marketing tool, but that is part of the reason for starting this blog. I still have a laundry list of things to do to tie all of these spaces together. Linking from the shop to the domain and this blog. Listing this blog on our Facebook page. All of these things will supposedly work in our favor and draw more people to our shop, which in turn will make it easier for my wife and I to spend more time with our son, and less time worrying about money. That really is the bottom line. If we know that we have a process set in motion that will bring us a steady stream of customers, then we know we will have a dependable income. So far we've been doing pretty well, but it takes a lot of work to manually advertise on Etsy, and this is the majority of the advertising that we currently do. If we can replace that system with one that is more automated, and less time intensive for us, then we can turn that extra time into family time.

While it may seem like I'm wasting valuable family time right now, by working on Christmas Eve, what I'm really trying to do is give my family a lasting gift. With any luck the little bit of time that I have put in today will pay off down the road. The best part is that I am actually writing this post with my son on my lap, and (for the most part) he's perfectly happy about it. :-)

Hello world...

Such a simple title with such far reaching implications.

It simply amazes me that I am sitting here writing a message that can literally be read around the world, from my living room.

It used to be that "Hello world" was simply the first thing that a programmer would make appear on his monitor. Now it's actually possible for someone to make it appear, and be seen by the world. OK, so being a tech guy this really isn't that amazing to me, but it's still pretty cool.

As you've probably gathered from reading the About Me section on the sidebar, or the description of this blog at the top of the page, I used to be deeply involved in the tech world on a daily basis. I still am. Don't get me wrong. The only two things that have changed here are my focus in life, and my job.

I used to have a round-trip commute of roughly 50 miles a day to work as a System Admin / all-around tech guru. I loved the work and the pay was enough to live on. Then in January I had a son, and my entire world changed.

I never really was a morning person, so it's not like I ever really enjoyed getting up for work. After my son was born, I truly began to dread it. I didn't want to leave him. I tried to take the first two weeks of his life off from work entirely. This didn't really go as planned because due to the size of the company I worked for, they simply couldn't cover all of my responsibilities for me. I worked with a great bunch of highly capable guys, but they needed my help. So needless to say, my plan to only work half-time for the next two weeks, turned into about 70 hours instead.

Once I went back to work full-time, I began trying desperately to find a way out. My wife didn't want me working any more than I did, so she was trying to figure out an escape too. Lucky for me, my mother-in-law had already built it, and was looking for a way out too. See, my mother-in-law has an extraordinary talent for business development. Now we're not talking multi-billion dollar corporations here. We're just talking about developing what many people would see as a hobby into a sustainable, profitable business. She has been doing this for over a decade, and as far as I know has literally given away almost every single business she has developed. Luckily, I happen to be the recipient of her best one to date. In a somewhat surprising and often surreal twist on life, I am now the official owner of an Etsy shop by the name of Dear Emma Stationery.

Now, instead of getting up at 6:30-7:00 in the morning and driving 25 miles to work for someone else, I get up whenever my son wakes me up, and walk out into my living room to work for myself. There are many benefits to this beyond just sleeping in (although I tend to really enjoy that one). I get to be here to witness every new little development in my son's life. I don't have to work all day, and come home to ask my wife "So what'd he do today? Anything new?". I absolutely hated the thought of missing something like his first smile, first step or first word.

So now, my wife and I work together full-time. Not only in business, but more importantly in raising our son. I can't imagine ever going back.