I tried Scribefire with my last post. It seemed to have some difficulty with quoting parts of pages. I guess I need to head back to the manual for that. Still, on seeing the post on my blog, it doesn’t look all that bad.

Anyway, I’ve heard a lot about Livewriter lately, so I thought I’d try posting with it. This is the first attempt.

I’ve used Qumana for a while, and I really like(d) it. Things have been pretty quiet there for some time, so I’m not sure where it’s headed. Better to have an alternative on the back burner, I guess.

Ok, first post with Livewriter…here goes.

While there are lots of great things going on in the
world, most of the news is about stuff that sucks: murders, accidents,
bombings. Tragedy. The old maxim, ‘if it bleeds it leads’, seems to be the
state of the art with news.

What would happen if we changed that. What if we talked about all the great and
interesting things going on in the world: selfless heroes that take on a search
and rescue role, charities that help make the world a better place, businesses
that have interesting ideas they are willing to share and explore.

What if we talked about what drives the people behind great ideas. Could
something like that be contagious?

Seth Godin makes the point. "Celebrate the heroes." I like that.

Seth’s

Blog: Contagious

"The most important thing you can do is choose who you’re
hanging out with. The second high-leverage thing is to put dynamics in place
that reinforce the ideas you’d like to see spread. Celebrate the heroes. Make
it easy for those ideas to spread…"

They say
that you become what you think about. Perhaps we should change our
thoughts to something contagious, but wonderful, instead of focusing on all the
threats in the world.

What do you think?

We’re going to have to use Macromedia/Adobe Contribute to edit our website at work. I thought I’d try using it for a while before the site goes live. This will be my first experiment. Let’s see what happens…

Ya gotta love it.

I’m working with some associates on a dark blog right now. It’s in development and based on WordPress. That means learning how to use that software and so far it’s been a great experience.

Even better, tonight I tried using Qumana to post on the blog’s test server. What do you know. It worked on the first try. I should have expected that though. The Qumana folks seem pretty sharp.

We’ve just got the first few post up on the blog as a test, but we still have to work through who’s going to do what in the future. Once we have a few of the technical details worked out, I hope we can go public.

Now, back to learning. If anyone has a link to the Coles Notes version of how best to use WordPress, please pass it along in the comments.

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Early last month, I was honoured with a Certificate in Business Writing, Public Relations, and Marketing Communications from SFU’s Writing and Publishing Program. I guess I can add CBWPRMC after my name now 🙂 Ok, maybe not.

Seriously, I’ve been writing professional stuff for a long time, but most of my training has come through short courses, picky editors, and plenty of practice. That, and a short stint years ago as an English and History major at UBC, has served me well. But for some reason I thought I’d formalize things a bit. Ergo, the courses at SFU.

Continuing education is always good, and you just never know where it will lead you. Eons ago in another life, I quit a boring janitorial job and started working as a pest control technician for a small company. I found a related correspondence course at Purdue University and signed up. That got me started towards even more formal education, and ended up with me working as an extension biologist, managing a research and development group. Go figure.

So where is this new accolade going to take me? Who knows. Don’t care. I enjoyed the courses, learned a lot, met some new people, made a few friends. Anything else is gravy.

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Sorry, forgot a couple of links in the last post.

TechVibes

Massive

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‘Ducks in a row’ often means that things are planned and ready to go. Is that the best way to make things happen?

When I started out on the path to being a small business owner, it took a long time before I saw the light. I hummed and hawed for what seemed like forever about what wonderful, creative name it should have, and how it would fit with the domain. The business couldn’t start until I’d made that decision.

Finally, I said to h*ll with it and registered a business with a variation of my own name. That was 2.5 years ago, and I haven’t looked back. As a sole proprietor, people relate to me, rather than my company anyway.

But the web site was still waiting. When I get the time to design it; when I have a ton of content for it; when I …er, just wasn’t happening. There were too many excuses.

Anyway, last month I attended the TechVibes Massive technology conference in Vancouver, BC. I collected lots of information from service providers and took it all home to a file. A few days later, I thought…what am I doing. Let’s get on with the domain and web site thing.

In the file at home, I came across a special related to Massive. Heck, it offered 3000 email addresses as part of the all inclusive price. How could a sole proprietor go wrong 😉

So I bit the bullet, registered the domain and generated some content for a basic template home page.

Done: http://www.dws-co.ca or http://www.dws-co.com They point to the same site. (update, the links are now based on donsca, as in ca, com and me)

There is still lots to do. It’s not all that pretty, but at least I’ve made a start. That start will probably keep me motivated now, and the design and content will evolve with time.

So, the moral of this story is: if you wait for everything to be ready and perfect before you start, good luck. It will be a long time coming. Your ducks will never be in a perfect row. There will always be some excuse holding you back. What’s the old maxim: ready, fire, aim. (Who said that anyway?)

Today, in an alumni session with a business group I belong to, three out of four of us made reference to the ‘ready, fire, aim’ concept in our reports to the group. We’ve all had the same discovery in the last month or so. One put it this way: like a bicycle, if you’re not underway, it’s hard to aim it toward the target.  Makes sense to me.

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I was lucky enough to be invited to the unveiling of a plaque commemorating some of the heritage values at Green Timbers Park in Surrey. Our new Mayor Diane Watts (fourth in from left) was there, as was Councillor Judy Higginbotham (opposite plaque from the Mayor), some of the Surrey Heritage Commission, and a few directors of the Green Timbers Heritage Society.

It was a small event, with cookies, coffee, and a few words about the site. Two of the buildings there were part of the original forest seedling nursery, started back in 1930. One of them is now designated part of Surrey’s hertitage.

Afterwards, we went on a tour of the first plantation in BC. The plantation is located in Green Timbers Park, and part of it was planted by local dignataries. The original seedlings were supplied by a provincial nursery on-site.

The heritage society has put up a map so people can see which trees were planted by who, and where each tree is. Time and storms have taken their toll, but there are quite a few of those original trees left.

In about 1989 or 1990, there was another tree planting and the decendents of those dignitaries came out and put in a small plantation beside the original. The new plantation is in an area that was originally left cleared so they could grow ‘bare root’ seedlings for reforestation. Again, the seedlings were grown at the nursery there. Nice.

You can learn more about Green Timbers Park via this link. It’s getting more and more popular as the area develops.

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Yaro Starak at Entrepreneur’s Journey talks about a program in New York where local entrepreneurs are interviewed by a city television program. Unfortunately they only deal with locals.

Too bad. This a great idea. I attend lots of local events and the number of interesting, talented people I meet out there amazes me. They aren’t all necessarily great, newsmaking successes, but they are living their dream, making a difference, and loving it.

Perhaps if we focused more on things like that in the news we’d be better for it. I’ve seen one program, Studio 4, with Fanny Kiefer that does this, but as far as I know she’s just on during the day. Does anyone else know of other local shows like it?

Yes, very, very dark. 

Might be blogger’s block to some extent, but I seem to remember thinking a while ago that I’d just take a break and see if I could think of a ‘niche’ to write in.

Well, that hasn’t worked very well.  I think all that did was lead to a bad case of procrastination.

Anyway, for a change of pace I "claimed my blog" with Technorati today. Scary. I’m ranked 1,107,878 and I’m linked by zero  other blogs. Not surprising in itself, considering the posting rate, but Hey! that makes me one in a million 😉

I’ll try to do better.