Basecamp, Mr. Flanagan informs me, is cool. It certainly looks neat. Added as an adjunct to the previous post.
Big Plans
My old drummer Sean has asked me to help him get a shipping center set up for his Amazon-hosted store. There are a raft of items to deal with. This is a link dump for research.
Shipping and inventory software
I posted to AskMe on a busy day and only got one reply, from me old chum Mr. Lope. He noted that the software offered by HarveySoft fit the bill for a former company of his.
Despite the horrible, price-hiding design of the website (Now with useless java-enabled navigation buttons!!) I was able to observe that the pricing page appears to provide initial confirmation of Mr. Lope’s judgement.
More options need to be identified.
- HarveySoft
- AirFrame – web-based CRM suite. Interesting idea. Subscription-based pricing, $65/user. No hardware requirement. Definitely work looking into.
Amazon support and integration
Amazon store builder – a bit off topic, but worth remembering. Automates access to Amazon-listed products to be wrapped in a non-Amazon website.
Guidelines for Managing Large Inventories for Marketplace sellers.
Amazon discussion board for zShops users.
Amazon tips for Pro Merchants.
Telephone management
Another poster recommended an open-source telephone tree package, Asterisk, which does look interesting from a features perspective. But I suspect that phone systems will be close to the bottom of my priority list; I haven’t really started working through my feature needs there yet. I like the idea of a no-hardware solution, though; Having the phone company offer the features, perform the maintenance, etc., for a messaging tree system is attractive to me from a desire to provide simplicity and to minimize the physical infrastructure needed.
I have a strong suspicion that the physical location we are moving into will prove unsuitable within a year and until I know that idea is wrong will likely want to avoid hefty setup.
Workspace setup; office supplies
Sean is getting shelving; we’ll need chairs and office supplies and so forth. A trip to Ducky’s and to other local used furniture suppliers is a necessity.
- Ducky’s
- Boeing Surplus – Big sale starts May 26, this Wednesday.
- Dixon’s Used Furniture (no website) – residentially focused, rarely has good office furniture.
- Seattle University Surplus (no resources, looking into it.)
- University of Washington Surplus (very limited hours, only open 2 days a month. Next scheduled opening, June 1. Looking into a possiblity of looking at the materiel earlier.)
- EntreStart used to have a warehouse of old furniture and computers in SoDo but it’s gone now, I think.
I need to make a list of smaller materials needed, and another one about services needed such as recycling, etc.
Computers etc.
Sean has two workstations we’ll begin with. I am sure we’ll need more (they are from an inexpensive supplier that is identified with manufacturing problems). I’ll need to identify and wrangle licensing for a standard suite, as well.
I know I’ll want to add wireless to the LAN as soon as we’re set up, and suspect that notebooks will be desired within a month of getting rolling. I was able to find a hub for my cousin Eric in LA at Fry’s for $30.00 with a $30.00 rebate, so this should not be a problem.
We’ll need a laser printer for invoicing and so forth.
(posted in an incomplete state, will be revised.)
Whoop ASS, you mean
Opening 13 Cans of Whoop [blogerated NYT link]
Pounding Punch tastes like a nonalcoholic version of the Pagan Pink Ripple, a budget wine with tropical flavors that was a landmark beverage for me. Its distinctive hangover, a sneak preview of a cheap and tawdry death, made me realize while still in college why it is very important to drink in moderation. Sinful Citrus combines an insipid, vaguely lemon flavor with a shocking blue-green color. It looks like a product intended to be poured in the toilet. That’s where it went in my house, at any rate.
William Grimes writes amusingly of taste-testing a batch of energy drinks. With the exception of the unfortunately bowdlerized headline – obviously intended to read “Opening 13 Cans of Whoop-Ass,” and the exclusion of the Jones Soda Co. energy drink of the same name, the article is a funny bit.
MT Blog Census.
Six Log: How are you using the tool?, Mena wants to know. So here’s my census.
Active blogs and authors: four and fourteen (with up to twelve more in the wings), respectively. Inactive blogs and authors: eight blogs and four additional authors. Planned blog-based sites: five. Possible additional authors: fourteen.
That means I need to plan for a total of up to seventeen blog sites and forty-four authors with some non-sustaining revenue potential.
ACTIVE BLOGS:
One blog to debug a problem with another author’s MT plugin. Three authors, including me. Headed for inactivity.
One blog to stash notes on an event that I am covering. Not directly revenue producing but directly related to professional, revnue-producig activity.
A group blog under the rubric of one of the publications I write for, provided as a favor. Nine authors, I think. No revenue, but clearly professional development.
A documentary blog providing discography and ephemera information on a long-defunct band. Intended as a collaborative blog. Two active authors, up to fifteen potential authors, some small possibility of supporting music sales through the site but with revenues projected in the tens of dollars per year. Not what I would consider commercial, but probably revenue producing.
INACTIVE BLOGS:
One for each close family member, totaling three in addition to mine. All are totally inactive.
One blog to support Viv’s jewelry business. A placeholder. Non-revenue producing, but clearly commercial use.
One blog providing a backup for another blogger. Never used. One author.
One stillborn comics review and journalism blog. Eventually, I will migrate all my comics-related writing to this site. Non-revenue producing professional development but specifically intended to qualify for AdWords.
A placeholder for my portfolio, intended to be integrated with my Gallery install. Non-revenue producing professional development.
A placeholder for the blog-ization of my resume. about 70% done, but stalled. Non-revenue producing professional development.
PLANNED BLOGS:
A migration of another defunct band site. Up to five authors.
A migration of a special-interest website. One author.
A migration of a defunct post-nuke based special interest website. Up to seven authors.
A memorial website. Up to four authors.
A migration of an archive website for a defunct punk zine.
Image Filters
Visual Filters and Transitions Reference provides the tools needed to do inline image filtering for IE. I’m wondering if there’s a better way to do this, or if it’s worth the effort.
I think in this incarnation of the blog, it would be pretty cool to make any embedded image display in the browser in a manner similar to the rotating headshots up in the masthead, in a high-contrast maroon-and-manila version. I am not very interested in creating a duplicate image base that has that style enforced, although I can see that a one-time duping process might be the best route for the legacy material. I don’t much want to have to do image processing when I post, and that tack would set a need for dual images, one in true color, for when I move to a new design, and one for the pseudo-printed look.
I suppose in theory I could rig up something that would enforce a reprocessed image at display time using Apache and something like ImageMagick on the back end. However, I’d prefer to have the browser do the work; and I’d also like to have it happen on a case-by-case basis (so I can turn it off if I want).
My instinct says that I’m only gonna find this feature in IE, because it’s a fairly obscure need. Anyone out there have a grasp of this?
History
I very recently read 
A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, and I heartily recommend it. This general-interest survey of the current state of scientific knowledge concerning, well, nearly everything, is lucid and highly entertaining.
Bryson’s interested-observer role is well played; as I read the book, I have to admit I wondered how long it would be until he hosts the inevitable TV series based upon it, on the model of The Shock of the New and Cosmos (which appears to have been a primary inspiration for the book).
(An aside: What is up with the weak sites for Sagan and Shock of the New? I mean, sure, they’re old media material, but geez.)
The most-commonly used technique that Bryson employs to add human interest to what amounts to very informed speculation on events that happened before there were humans is dishing. He dwells with amusing panache on the personal foibles and peculiarities of the individual scholars involved in the development and discovery of this leap of knowledge and that fossil bed.
A clear pattern emerges in these sections too: it seems, in general, that the individuals we recognize as a discoverer or primary source of an idea are generally not the actual source, but instead the individual who most successfully promoted themselves as the source. Monkeys steal food from one another, too, so this should not be terribly surprising.
I saw a headline zap by the other day noting that Bryson’s book had been nominated for some prize or other, but alas, the title of the book creates a very noisy result set chez Google, and thus I was unable to dig up a link.
Sensibility
Speaking of dedsign synchronicities, The Modern Compendium of Miniature Automata pleases me greatly today.
Gothicke
Ragnarok Press makes demo fonts with full letter-sets, but no punctuation or extended characters. Two are made available every month, and they archive them here. Many, many nicely done versions of seventeeth-century calligraphic fonts.
Wood Type
Wood type – someone’s wood type resource list.
I’m looking for a hand-lettery version of Walbaum medium italic, which I think I have, but can’t find as I don’t recall the name.
Skeleton Island
Click the closeup to see the whole map. Scanning this, I noticed some killer engraved illustrations in the book. But I really must move on today.
UPDATE: Hmm, I had noticed this as I was working on the prior entry, but there’s an odd chiming between this new look of mine and the recent redesig over at Josh’s Communications from Elsewhere. I know I was not thinking of his design as I assembled this skin, but the similarity of the name of News from Nowhere and the even more unsettling visual echo that occurs with the addition of a map element in this entry is downright weird.
Jason says to draw him a map, send him a postcard. I like the idea of relabeling the Treasure Island map with refferences to his songs. Hm. that suggests an interactive project, does it not?