My family and I just went and watched August Rush. I LOVED it! Maybe I am just feeling a little tender lately, but this movie was fantastic. It isn’t often that I recommend a movie, but every so often one comes along that hits my strings. I love music and I recommend the movie to anyone who loves music.
I just got an automatic email from skype. It says:
It appears that you haven’t used any of your Skype Credit for a while now. Skype expires inactive credit balances and you have 30 days left to take action to keep your credit.
This is lame. I paid up front for minutes and then they are going to make them expire. Sounds like a Calling card. I have had skype for a while now and this is the first time they have sent me something like this. I wonder if it has anything to do with being owned by Ebay?
I guess to get 180 more days use on my money, I just need to use the account, a call, a text, whatever.
I hate shopping. I often tell my friends that it is less exhausting to work a 13 hour manual labor day (e.g. laying concrete, landscaping, construction, working the potato harvest in Idaho–all of which I have done) than it is to spend four hours shopping for clothes, or groceries. I hate the lines. I hate the choosing between unlimited options. I driving to and from stores and then walking all the way through them. I don’t understand those who like shopping. How is it fun to go and spend huge amounts of time just to spend huge amounts of money. Even worse is when you spend huge amounts of time and then you return with nothing. I know girls who just shop to look, they don’t ever buy anything. It is all odd to me.
With regards to the lines. These lines are why I rarely shop at WalMart and why I shop at Kmart and the Family Dollar. Walmart is always a zoo. The other day, at Walmart, it took me about an hour just to buy a stick of deodorant. The drive is ten minutes. I had to park way out in the far end of the parking lot and then walk all over the huge store just to find someone that wasn’t busy to ask were the deodorant was (The number of overweight people in Walmart is surprising, you would think walking all over that store would put them in shape). I ended up talking to a frequent Wallyworld shopper who knew more about Walmart than their employees do, she led me to an overwhelming shelf of deodorants of all shapes, colors, scents, costs, brands, and sizes. After picking my new deodorant I walked up and down 100 yards of checkout counters just to find that I wasn’t going to avoid any lines. Who would have thought that all those people parked in closer car stalls than me, who had all used up all the customer assistance before I even got in the door, would now be in front of me at the checkout line? It was a miserable hour of my life.
On the contrary, the other day I stopped at a Family Dollar, and I had a wonderful experience. I was able to park within 40 feet of the store door. When I got inside I was just steps away from one side of the store to the other. Picking was easy because they only give you two or three choices. Prices are often better than Walmart. Checkout was a breeze, because they don’t have lines. Other than the size of the store, Kmart is the same way. I love short lines.
Perhaps Kmart/Sears, who is hurting terribly right now, should advertise the one good reason to shop at Kmart instead of Walmart. Shorter lines and closer parking spots. It would work for me.
There are a couple of new Mac TV ads. It was during one of these ads that I thought to myself, “I will get a Mac.” These are the ads that pushed me over the edge.
Every week I receive 5 to 10 emails from my Religion class members saying. “Hey everyone, I missed class today, can you send me your notes?†It is important that I respond to these emails because I know that I am going to need others notes just as much as they need mine, but I thought there must be a better way. I decided that I would post all my notes on writely, an online word processer (there are several of these online word processors out there, from my experience, writely and zoho writer are the best of the bunch—I would use zoho but the backspace has issues), and then I sent out this email to everyone:
Hey yall’
There is a group of us using writely (just like Microsoft Word but by Google) so that anyone who wants to can be involved in collaborating notes for each lecture. Here is how it will work.
I post my notes each day on writely after class. Everyone else in the class can get on the same notes to read them, edit them, add to them, or share them with even more class members or others you think would like to see them. You can also view them if you miss class. We have collaborated like this in some other classes and it works great.
Just let me know if you want to be a part of our group and I will send you an email with a link to each days notes.
Thanks
Jeff Harmon
Within 30 seconds of sending this email out, I received 2 responses. In the next 16 hours I had more than 50 peers asking for links to collaborate(writely only allows 50)! Everyone LOVED the idea. I was blown away. By the time I got done inviting them all, I wished writely would connect straight into my Gmail groups so that I could just send invites to a group. It was a pain to copy all those emails in. Google should pay me for this. I not only just invited 50 users to writely, but I also just converted about three-quarters of those to get Gmail accounts (you have to have a Gmail account to use writely).
Talk about viral marketing.
Here are some other ways I have used writely:
Collaboration is King
The power of writely and zoho writer is completely derived from cleanly executed collaboration. There are also spreadsheet collaboration systems from Zoho and Google (these are not near effective enough to replace Excel in most situations yet). Here at FamilyLearn we followed these principles and have created a powerful online collaboration system for families to create and print: wedding books, anniversary books, retirement books, teacher books, family histories, and all kinds of other books. It is called iMemoryBook (the internet memory book). Snapfish recently released sharing/collaboration online as well for creating their photo books. There are countless other collaborative project springing up each year. I think it was Paul Allen who told me that the original guys who started the internet had collaboration in mind as the internet’s primary purpose.
So… how long will it be before we can invite anyone we would like to collaborate with us in, an email document, or even a common blog entry, online photo sharing, family home video editing, and pretty much any thing else? In five years I could see a “collaborate†button as common as spell check on any rich text editing system. Just watch, it is too helpful to not happen.