Our 2 youngest (11 months) had been a bit slow to crawl. We were hoping they would get moving however now that they are can we tie them down. Trent LOVES the stereo equipment and rushes over so he can push every button and turn every knob. It took me 30 minutes the other night to get the settings back to the correct place. Speakers were turned off, surround turned off, muting, etc. Amy had to grab something from the back room a few days ago, a 20 second task, and Trent was sitting playing with some toys. As she was walking back down the hall the stereo got cranked up to a level that was WAY TOO LOUD. Trent was sitting in front of the stereo again looking at her like "WHAT?".
My wife has always liked medical things and has made comment on several occasions that she would have loved to have been a nurse. When she saw in the paper that the Bodies Revealed Exhibition was in Sacramento we knew we needed to go (even though we did the standard "do you really want to go?" at least 7-10 times).
This last weekend we packed up the twins with all of the standard diaper bag gear and headed down to Sac. We had called Amy’s sister and Bob (The Brother-in-law) and planned to meet them. We were a bit surprised to see such a small building as I was thinking museum type spaces. However the small accommodations didn’t detract from the displays at all. It was absolutely fascinating, the manner in which they preserve the bodies lets them do all kinds of creative displaying.
The process uses acetone to remove all the water from tissue on a traditionally preserved body. They then use a polymer in conjunction withe a vacuum chamber that somehow replaces all the water with the polymer. Your left with a plasticized mummy. With everything being plasticized you can remove bone, skin and other tissues leaving organs, blood vessels, muscle etc. My favorite one was the blood vessels (see image). You can’t believe how fine of a network runs throughout the human body and I was amazed that one of the largest concentrations was in your heel. On displays of the heart and lungs they even colored the arteries vs the veins so you could see how blood circulated out then back in.
When we bought the tickets they let us in with our strollers, but a few minutes in the head attendant nabbed me and made me check mine, thus having to walk around the entire time holding Trent. He is the lighter of our twin boys but at 22-23 pounds and as squirmy as a worm out of the ground, it was tough holding him for 45 minutes. He also wanted to touch every display we walked within 3 feet of. We got to talking with a sympathetic attendant that told us it wasn’t fair as there are people that come in all the time with wild 2-4 year olds and, in her opinion, that was worse. Interesting fact, you tip one of the displays over and it cost the exhibitor $1,000,000 to replace. Wow!
There is a great deal of controversy over this exhibit though. All the bodes are of Asian origin and word has it they are all obtained through the black market. You can imagine how they came to be on the black market too. Within the Asian cultures it is definitely a no, no to have your body treated in such a way as these have been preserved. I can’t really condone taking peoples remains and doing something against their wishes, but I would have to tell you that it is unbelievable informative and educational, beyond anything I learned in the class room.
If you get the opportunity to go I highly recommend it as you will learn and see more about the human body in 45 minutes than the average person sees in their educational career.
Trevor made the golf team for Reed High a few weeks ago and we picked him up some new clubs. Since we were going to be playing I needed to restock my golf ball reserves. The golf shop was running a special where you got a free sleeve if you bought a box of a dozen. Sweet, except the fact that it excluded only Titleist. Evidently Titleist dictates they can’t do any promotions except the Titleist approved ones, and will revoke their license for any Titleist product if they are found violating their laws. THAT SUCKS.
A few weeks earlier I had received an ad in my email for Callaway’s new TOUR i & TOUR ix balls. I picked these up instead and got the free sleeve. Well I wish I had just paid for the Titleist because the cover on the TOUR ix are so thin they scuff up with regular iron play after 4-6 holes. I go through 3 or 4 a round just because of wear and tear. For a $40 box you would think they would be a little more durable.
I’ll stick with my ProV1x’s where a ball lasts the entire round.
One of the things we tell our clients is that if you don’t have someone to produce content for a blog you shouldn’t go down the blog, and for the most part, social path. You have to create, or repurpose content to keep it going. Well here I am writing a post after 36 days without one.
It’s interesting as I was playing with some new Google Analytics features an noticed that my stats had gone through the floor. No one reading for a long time because I didn’t have anything new. So I updated my blog software, added some GA features and lets see how many people come and look. It will be an interesting experience. I’ll have to make sure and be diligent in my posts over the next few weeks.
So Kenzer (my social tech thermometer) turned me on to Utterz.com. This is a pretty cool service that at first glance is cool but not super functional. Basically you can call into a number (712-432-6666), talk and the audio gets posted to Utterz. Of course there are widgets, flash and links that can be posted/integrated into any site for content distribution (see my right hand sidebar). That alone only makes it slightly cool, but not powerful. However there are a few other options that i found out about after reading a little more.
You can also send an email with text a picture or video attached and it will post just as well. This is powerful not from your computer email but from your mobile phone. You have to be able to send an email from your phone (if you can’t get with the times). Simply shoot the picture or video and email it to go@utterz.com. The Subject line becomes the title and the body of the message is transfered over too. When you hit play an automated voice reads the body of the message. You can use a widget for the sidebars or auto post to your blog through a simple authentication process. Just give it your username, password and the url of your Blooger, LiveJournal, Tumblr, TypePad, Twitter or Wordpress site and your golden. Pretty cool.
Now for the not so cool. The widgets or embeds are all flash driven and thus not searchable/indexable for SEO/SEM purposes. There is no text message version for the people who don’t have email setup on their phones. Also the search to find other utterz users is not as effective as you would want.
Overall though a great service and i can’t wait for some community adoption to solve some of the shortfalls.
So one of the kids picked up some styling gel and it made me think about the message marketers send, without really thinking things through. This bottle has a label that says "80% MORE FREE". I realize they were trying to tell us how great a deal it was but really. The 10% or 20% more that I have seen on other products is palatable but 80%? That means whoever bought this product before was getting 20% of the volume and paying the same price.
Translation - We were REALLY ripping you off before.
So for my job I was working with Josh Kenzer on the plugins we have found and what would bring our clients the most value for their Wordpress install. I have included a list of the ones we came up with along with a short description of why it’s cool and a link to an example or screen shot. Some were listed in a post last week but I think they definitely warranted an update/explanation.
Crossroads - Same thing as the above plugin except for your Flickr photos. Example of 3-4 Sets being pulled in. Also uses the the WP Lightbox plugin below to do some pretty cool transitions.
FCK Editor - I know HTML pretty well but this WYSIWYG makes it super easy. Very much like word and doesn’t take much to train someone how to use.
Google XML Sitemaps - Great plugin that will build XML sitemap for your blog and send it to Google, Yahoo & Ask.com. Tons of specialized configurations for even the pickiest expert.
TubePress - This plugin lets you display videos or playlists on any page or sidebar. Here is an example of a playlist being pulled in. uses WP Lightbox to produce some cool transitions.
TwitterTools - This one is a little cooler than I first thought. it is widget ready so it can be placed just about anywhere within a compatible theme. There are some great configurations that let you create a post or daily digest from your tweets, tie the tweets to a category, place your tweets in the sidebar and configure the number of tweets for display. It also gives you the ability to write a tweet from within Wordpress (character count and all). For an example just check out my right hand sidebar. Configured to show the last 3 posts within this widget.
Wordpress Reports - Lets you tap into your Google Analytics and Feedburner accounts and view a stats dashboard from within Wordpress. it’s super simple to get this up and running. Setup a Google analytics or Feedburner account and just give Wordpress your user and pass for Google and the url of your rss feed for Feedburner. A nifty little feature for Google is that with a few check boxes this app will install the google tracking code, track outbound links and will exclude your traffic as long as your logged in as an admin.
WP lightbox 2 The YouTube and Flickr plugins use another plugin that does the pop-up and transitions
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