Letter Never Sent

I’ve been reading this book about marketing techniques since I am in the process of designing an actual, finished website for the business. I’ve been putting it off somewhat because I want to do a good job on it. Before I can start work on the website, I need to determine what I’m trying to communicate and how to go about it. I’ve learned some useful tips and information that I’d like to share with you.

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I was talking with Jody about books we had read as kids, and I thought it might make a good post.

1. The Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. This was a good series, which I remember little about, except for its good description of pioneer living, like living in a sod house, for example.
2. The Great Brain series by John Fitzgerald. I read these in my fifth grade class. When you finished your work you could read from the bookshelf in the classroom. That’s where I discovered this series. The stories revolve around these brothers as they get into mischief and solve mysteries.
3. Flinx Series by Alan Dean Foster. This is a good sci-fi series about an orphan, Pip, and his pet flying snake, Flynx.
4. The Oz books by L. Frank Baum. These were essentially fantasy books, before fantasy was a genre. There’s a lot going on in the Oz books. Magic, witches, and other assorted craziness. I never really understood the whole Ozma / Pip situation.

Glassdog had a spot-on ribbing of Boing Boing this morning (via Waxy.org). It’s essentially a shot at BoingBoing’s relative shamelessness when it comes to their advertising / business strategy. I have written at length about this before on at least three occasions (“More on Wired / Gawker media: Wired Conflicts of Interest”, “What’s with BoingBoing?”, and “The trend toward commercial blogs”). In all honesty, I think BoingBoing’s biggest shortcoming is their eye-bleeding design. It is easier to overlook a lot of things when ads don’t hit you in the face.

1. I’m moving to north Austin near the Arboretum soon. I’m very familiar with the location since it was my route area for 3 years when I worked at Fedex. I took some pictures of the new apartment and I will post them soon enough when I get a chance. It is suprisingly difficult to find one bedroom apartments with washer / dryer connections that are affordable enough, but I think I did really well tracking one down.
2. I generally don’t use locators because they make higher referral fees for promoting less desirable apartments. What I did do this time was sit down with a sheet of paper and the telephone, open up Google maps to my city, and then click “local search”. You need to click “local search” from Google maps rather than using Google Local. Just drag the map around with your cursor until you find the areas you are interested in living in. When you find a desired area, just type in “apartments”, then clear the “where” input field and hit the “Search” button. This will search for “apartments” in the area you have shown on the screen. Then you just use the map flags to get the phone number and address and call the complex to ask about their prices. Here’s a screenshot.
   
3. You can change your address online. I have done this before, but it may be news to you.
4. Something else I learned, Uhaul charges different rates for different types of the same vehicle. For example, if you’re moving in town, be sure to ask for the in-town only vehicle, which amounts to a $10 price difference in most cases. They charge a rate of $19.99 for the 14ft truck in town for a 24 hour period plus mileage. It is helpful to know that the mileage rate is $.59 per mile Sunday - Thursday, and $.89 per mile Friday - Saturday, so if you need the truck to move on a Friday try to make your reservation for Thursday evening so you lock in the $.59 per mile rate instead of the $.89 per mile rate.

When I pulled out of the driveway I spotted a pair of doves collecting twigs for their love nest. The bird song in the mornings has increased as well. I’m glad for it. It has been a long winter.

I played basketball with some guys from work yesterday afternoon over at Anderson High School. See, normally I would decline such an invitation because I’m both anti-social and bad at basketball, but right now I’m trying to do the opposite of what my first inclination is since my normal way of doing things is not working for me. I’m trying to push the Chris envelope and do more things I find difficult.

It was a positive experience: good time with work friends and good cardio-vascular exercise. I had that deep chest ache you get when you’ve been breathing and working your body hard. It’s something I hope to do more of since I would like to improve my game and general fitness.

My brain spent all last night rewiring the basketball-related parts of my brain. I know this because I woke myself up several times during dreams where I would go for a shot or pass and then I would hit the wall with my hand or leg and wake myself up. It happened at least three times that I can remember.

If you’re attuned to what people wear and do you’ll notice fads. Why do people follow the lead of other people? What are you thinking when you wear certain clothes or buy certain products? How do you decide what has value? Here are a few things I’ve noticed:

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Some of the out of state visitors for SXSW might appreciate this shirt. You can get your own here at protoculture for $20. If you’re down on 6th street at Aaron’s Rock N Roll you can buy the antidote to this shirt that says: “F*ck y’all, I’m from Texas.” I don’t imagine they sell a lot of these due to the fact that they would only be funny outside the state or the country.

I was inspired by this post to start using Feedburner to supply the news feeds for letterneversent.com. If you subscribe to the original RSS feeds you do not need to change anything unless you wish to use the feedburner feeds, which will provide some useful features like integration with my del.icio.us links as well as browser-friendly display and nice statistics on how many people subscribe and what they use to view the feed.

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If you have an extra several thousand dollars lying around we can throw a huge birthday bash and book Teddy Pendergrass.

Related:

1. Teddy Pendergrass interview (Real audio)
2. Return to Stage a Personal Triumph for Teddy Pendergrass