Archive for the ‘Other’ Category:
Give them Wings
Today we helped our daughter move to college for her freshman year. I have a feeling that signifies a shift in the family scrapbooking projects. (Although I need to get caught up, so I won’t feel the empty nest syndrome in regard to my scrapbooking too soon).
Wow! Moving in day certainly has changed since I went 20 yrs ago. The radio station had a local radio station complete with DJ’s and they were giving away iPods. Massages were being given for free & Domino’s was cooking pizza there & that was also free (& MUCH appreciated!). And we thought it was college students helping move boxes, but no! the group of young men that helped us were from a local computer store. The poor guy led the way carrying a not so small fridge & we got to the 4th floor (up the stairs) & he realized we were in the wrong wing. So he handed it off to his co-worker & we went down & up again. What an AWESOME community effort to volunteer their time to incoming freshman.
Speaking of community, the RA’s (resident assistants) were wearing t-shirts that read ‘Communities Under Construction’. I loved it! It was so descriptive of residential life. I was an RA for a few years & enjoyed that job.
Then we made our list & headed over to Walmart to buy a printer, cables, etc. Walmart’s parking lot was packed & network cables & printers were in short supply. (My daughter has a 50 foot ethernet cable & can take her laptop for quite a walk with it’s long umbilical cord! :) ).
And I must fairwarn all of you parents of young children - start setting aside money early on. My saying at the moment is that paying for college is like buying a new car every year. My other advice is to raise your children with the expectation of going to college. Lifelong learning is such a gift & will allow your child to be flexible in life & choose their path. Aren’t I just really philosophical tonite?! and adusting to the empty nest syndrome…
Subscribe to the comments for this postPositive feedback & collaboration
I need to say that I really appreciate everyone’s positive feedback. I have rec’d some Facebook invites with some nice personal notes. Thanks Wendy for making my day with this one:
“Hi Connie :) I seen your post at DST. I love your blog and follow it religiously :) Would love to have you as a Facebook friend :) Wendy.”
That is so heartwarming! Thank you Wendy & everyone that reads our blog & visits our site. I know that Heidi is appreciative too! That’s why we do this! People have asked us to help with their advertising or do blog & forum consulting, but to be honest, I don’t have time & it’s easier to share with the masses here. Click on ‘marketing blogs’ or ‘marketing websites’ over on the right in the tag cloud to find all of the information we’ve provided. Signing up for our newsletters will also bring our blog posts to your inbox if you don’t use a blog reader regularly.
- The information on our blog can be easily browsed here (info up to mid July)
- We have freebies on our site - maybe some of our newest readers didn’t know that?
Our goal is to provide people with information of value. It’s gratifying to share our tools & timesavers with everyone.
And collaboration is key. That makes a community stronger & the digital scrapbooking community is built on it. We are having a great time going to various sites for chats. I applaud all of the sites that allow us to link to our resources. Open communities are so wonderful to work with. I understand the reasoning behind having a closed one (where linking isn’t allowed),… kind of, but I think that people still shop at other places & participate in other forums, so why not let everyone interconnect?
What do you think about that?
Sale on ACDSee Photo Manager 9
If you’ve thought about trying ACDSee to get organized, now is the time! The kids will be going back to school soon & you’ll have time to spend with your digi-stash.
Get ACDSee 9 for 40% off! $24.99 USD This offer expires August 30, 2007
If you have questions about using the shopping cart - I posted help with screenshots here on it.
We have videos and tutorials for getting started.
Click on image below to purchase at sale price:
We interrupt this blog for… life
In the past month or so we’ve been blogging every day & it’s a wonderful thing! Heidi & I enjoy sharing information with you & helping with all of your ACDSee questions. We thrive on it really.
But today we’re taking a break because today is my daughter’s 18th birthday! My scrapbooks chronicling her life have been full of all of our family events because she’s an only child. It’s so heartwarming to watch her share her albums with her friends. She values them & appreciates the memories they hold. That’s truly what scrapbooking is about! So today we’re going to celebrate her.
This layout arrived yesterday in the mailbox in the July issue of Scrapbooking Dimensions magazine (more to come on that).
Another DigiScrapping Blog Carnival is happening
Krista Mettler is hosting the blog carnival for the first half of August. This is a great way to be introduced to new blogs. I’m going to put a plug in for Krista too! She’s an awesome designer & you can find her designs at DigiScrapZ and ScrapbookGraphics. Check them out! She has some fabulous artistic type sets.
And we’ve been nominated twice (by Hummie & Tara)- so I need to keep the meme up:
Since we were nominated twice - that means there’s one for each of us. I’ll let Heidi add her 6 people that she’s nominating. Here’s who I’m tagging:
Traci Sims, Ronee Parsons, Christine Smith, Jeanine Beachtold, Petra, Toni Berman
Computer Time Management
Do you just keep saving files & pretty soon things are out of hand? On the weekend I took some time to sort thru a bunch of folders & organized the files by topic. (Now I probably won’t be able to find anything!) Hopefully it will save time.
Then I decided to catch up on my blog reading & came across this post:
Yeah, uh huh … how to do email once a day & boost productivity! So that sucked me in & I thought I would share it with you. RSS (blog reading) doesn’t affect my time management because I catch up on blogs about once a week. After reading that though, I pared down my blogs in my reader down to a manageable amount based on:
- how often I read the blog
- the content of the blog - do most posts hold my attention?
Then I attacked my email:
- I started scrolling & instead of deleting, I would unsubscribe if it was a newsletter. Then I searched & deleted all old ones from that source.
- As I moved down thru my email, I was able to wipe out a lot of ‘junk’ that way. And hopefully turned much of it off. I kept the ones that I read.
- I have folders set up in Thunderbird which I love & would die without. (If you want to use Thunderbird to read your Google mail in it, I have some news coming for you on that)
Now, I’m a fairly organized person & LOVE how Evernote keeps my lists & life in order, so I consider myself fairly ok in that respect. But I’m not sure I could survive by reading email only once a day! ack!! But they do have some good ideas there.
Web Worker Daily is a nifty blog & I thought many of you may like it since that describes you! Did you notice that they don’t mention IM, can we say Hello!? *grin* I love being interrupted by my friends on Hello & even ACDSee questions.
So does anyone do email only once a day? Would you find that challenging? or could you go cold turkey… I mean adjust? I’m curious to hear your thoughts! How do you keep your desktop & email organized? Is it a struggle or do you have a great system?
Questions & Comments in our email
One of the joys of blogging is that we hear from you, our readers! So, what comes in our email?
1. Questions & suggestions:
- Are you wondering about something? Feel free to email us or leave a comment in regard to topics that you’d like us to blog about.
- And if you’re looking for software or an application to make life easier, make that request too! (that’s how I found Live Writer)
- If you have a topic that you’d like to write a guest blog post for us - DO let us know!
2. Requests to do chats - here are some answers to questions in that regard
- Yes! we are available to do chats & we’d like to have two weeks advance notice
3. Questions about ACDSee products & their use
- Ask away! One of us will answer as soon as possible
- We also create tutorials on demand.
4. Notes of thanks - we received this one this week & we are glad that our information is helpful. It’s wonderful to hear how you’re using the web tools that we blog about! It’s our readers that make the digiscrapping community great! Dalynn gave me permission to share her note of thanks about the information in our post about wiki’s.
I’ve been heading up a big ‘Yearbook Project’ for my homeschool group (about 60 families) and had recruited several new digital scrapbookers from that group to do the pages. We scrambled to collect photos from all the families of our events over the past year. We divvied up all the pages we each were going to do. But it was such a pain trying to keep organized just using the Yahoo group we had created for the group.
Then came along your article about WIKIs. WOW! I watched that video and couldn’t wait to sign up for one for our group. It is much more efficient. I’m sure it saves me literally hours a week!
Several other articles have been very enlightening and wonderful too. Anyway, I just wanted to let you both know how much I appreciate all you are doing with your website!
This Yearbook project is almost finished and I will be able to get back to regular scrapbooking soon, I hope… 
Dalynn
(Daly at DST)
ACDSee Chat at Scrap Outside the Box!
Mark your calendars & join the fun at Scrap Outside the Box!
Win ACDSee software! Get your ACDSee questions answered!
DSLR’s, Sizzix, & ACDSee Chats
That’s quite a combination, huh?!! And this will be a bit more of a personal post. Someone asked me why I don’t talk more about myself, but in deference to our goal for this blog, I limit it (to chocolate fountains *grin*).
Let’s talk about ACDSee Chats first, ok? We have 2 upcoming chats. The first will be at SOTB at 10 pm est on Thursday, July 19th. And the 2nd will be at 3Scrapateers at 9pm est on Sunday, July 22nd. Mark those dates on your calendar & we’ll bring the software for prizes. If you haven’t been to one, they move fast as Heidi & I answer lots of questions.
Sizzix is next. Do you need some serious enabling? I almost weakened tonite! Someone mentioned that Creativexpress was having a clearance sale, so I checked it out … and almost ordered another alphabet set! Now, my husband has mentioned ebay so many times in regard to my paper scrapping supplies, but it was still very, very tempting… So if you do hybrid, check it out! Creativexpress.com was my favorite paper scrapping supply source with THE BEST customer service!
DSLR cameras have been intriguing to me. My first camera was a 110, but I used my mom’s 35 mm Olympus OM-10 for many years & I used to know some things about f-stops & aperature settings. But that was long ago. We have a nice Canon 35 mm (which sits in the closet), but I always used the auto settings. Last fall I bought a new camera & decided on a Canon PowerShot S31S. Heidi just bought one too! I love the 12x optical zoom & the macro capability. But no RAW capability. So, in the end of July I’m going try out a Sony Alpha and try out some RAW images and play with ACDSee’s new Pro 2 beta software.
And guess what? more information will be coming on ACDSee Pro 2 beta tomorrow, so stay tuned!
Another Chat & Free ACDSee Software at Scrapbook-bytes.com
Yesterday I redid our blogroll. Check it out on the right! I hope that it helps you connect to what you’re looking for more easily. Please let me know if you have others that I should include?
Last Friday we had a blast at Maggie’s Dragon Flaire Studios! Everyone had great questions & we tried to answer as many as possible.
We invite you to join us for our next one at Scrapbookbytes.com.
The Chocolate Story continued
About a month ago I blogged about the chocolate fountain that I had at my daughter’s graduation reception. It was quite lovely!
Most every day I check blog stat’s & today I saw an interesting search that found our blog
Check out the last one! So I mentioned it to Heidi & she had seen it too. Then she asked if I had seen the chocolate fountain on the Food Network? (which of course I had!) I’m a big fan of this show too (click on the image to link you over for more info):
So what about the chocolate fountain on the food network? Well Heidi said to herself “I know how to fix it!”. That’s what I said to myself TOO!! The fountain wasn’t flowing right. We knew from our experience with mine that it needs to be turned off so the air bubbles can escape, then turned back on. Maybe the people at the Food Network were in a hurry?
Think we should let the Food Network know how to avoid it in the future?