John L. Dilbeck's Ramblings
JohnDilbeck.com
Last update: 5/14/02; 02:57:21.
Whatever strange and wonderful ideas tickle this big brain of mine.
Archives: 2000 2001 2002
Tuesday, May 14, 2002
I thought I was going to be gone for a few days, but I was gone for just over a month.
2:53:32 AM
Mom was diagnosed with colon cancer back in November, and went through chemo and radiation therapy early this year. She was scheduled for surgery to remove the tumor on April 11th and we expected to be gone out of town for about a week.
However, even though the surgery to remove the tumor went well, Mom developed a pinched nerve and wasn't able to walk.
After a week of recovering from the surgery, she was transferred to Thoms Rehab center in Asheville and was there for only a few days when she was transferred back to Mission/St. Josephs Hospital for additional surgery. For various reasons, her surgeons and other doctors decided not to do the surgery, and after a week, she was transferred back to Thoms.
Now, she's in the process of getting the pain under control and getting strong enough to walk again. Even though she's 81 years old, she's healthy and should be able to walk and come home, again in a couple more weeks.
I've decided that it makes more sense to come back home and start catching up on everything rather than staying full-time in Asheville. She's off the narcotics and is able to think for herself, again, so she doesn't need me there running interference for her.
I'd like to thank her doctors and their staff for the excellent care they've taken in helping her deal with, and hopefully conquer, her cancer. The staff at Mission/St. Joseph's Hospital and Thoms Rehab Center have taken excellent care of her. I'd like to thank the security and maintenance folks at both hospitals as they provided transportation for me between the hospital and the Lewis Rathbun Wellness Center, where I lived for the last month.
Thanks to everyone who has offered support and good wishes to Mom and me. I'm looking forward to her returning home soon.
It's been quite a month, and I'm ready to get back to making Steel Roses That Never Wilt and to start introducing a new line of handcrafted etched glass products.
It's good to be back home.
Tuesday, April 9, 2002
I'll be unavailable for the next few days, maybe a week or more. If you try to contact me, I'll get back with you as soon as possible. 1:33:31 AM
Friday, March 29, 2002
It's been a while since I've posted to this weblog. I've been a busy boy, and I've been trying to decide what I'm going to do with the next phase of my life.
12:14:11 PM
For several months, I was busy taking Mom to her daily chemo- and radiation therapy appointments. That's all successfully completed and she's feeling great. I want to express my thanks to everyone who has sent messages of support and good wishes for her. Now, she has her surgery scheduled for the middle of April, and then it's time for recovery and getting back to normal.
April 1 is just around the corner, and I'm ready to start taking orders for my Steel Roses That Never Wilt, again. There will be a substantial price increase in the Medium and Large roses on May 1, 2002. I'll be happy to take orders between now and then at the current prices.
The small roses will remain at $100 each, or $1,000 per dozen. Medium roses will rise from $160 to $200 each, or $2,000 per dozen. Large roses will rise from $300 to $500 and I don't take orders for dozens, since they take nearly a week to make each one.
I'll be unavailable from April 10 - April 20, so if you try to contact me during that period, please be assured that I'll get back to you as soon as possible following April 20. I will not be shipping any roses in April, but I'll be back smithing full-time in May and I'll make as many as I'm able.
I've spent half-a-year trying to decide if I'm going to quit metalsmithing -- which I love -- and go back to consulting -- which I have learned to loathe -- in order to make a living. I decided that I'd rather earn less and enjoy my life more. So, I've made a final decision to stick with my metalsmithing, glass engraving and etching, leather carving, and related interests.
I'm happy with this decision, and I'm looking forward to finally setting the other interests aside so I can concentrate full-time on getting as good as I can in my new interests.
I'll still be doing a certain amount of webmastering as I continue to maintain JohnDilbeck.com, GeorgiaDragRacing.com, AHCcrafts.com, ArchAvary.com, and several others. I'm going to stop designing t-shirts -- which don't sell, and I'm going to narrow my interests and efforts a good bit.
I'm going to be more active in Arts and Crafts marketing, and much less active in affiliate marketing.
So, now that the decision is made, I'm happy to tell you and move on to this new phase of my life. I don't think I'll ever get back to where I'm spending all my time smithing and creating new products and not even knowing what day of the week it is, but I'm going to try.
You'll find that I may be a bit slower responding to email, I'll be unsubscribing from quite a few mailing lists I've been following, and I'll be making more items and selling them on this site, eBay, and Amazon.com.
If you want to talk to me about arts and crafts, I'm all ears. Feel free to write me at jd@johndilbeck.com.
Saturday, February 2, 2002
It's been a busy week around here! I had the pleasure of visiting Arch Avary for a couple of days this week. We spend a lot of time discussing some changes that will show up on his Arch Avary Originals website in the next few weeks. We also spent quite a bit of time working with Photoshop and I programmed several macros that will help him automate processing photos he's been taking with his cool digital camera. Many of those photos will be showing up on his site.
2:55:26 PM
Appalachian Heritage Crafters, as regular readers may know, is a non-profit crafts cooperative in Murphy, NC. We had some problems with the website a couple of months ago, but it's back up and it will be growing this year. I doubt that the site will match the spectacular growth of the organization, which was a decided success in 2001. The crafts store (located on the highway a couple of miles west of Murphy) will reopen in a few weeks and we look forward to a great year, in addition to the other educational and outreach programs.
My brother has been a drag racing fanatic for 35 years. I remember taking him to various dragstrips around Georgia and Florida in the late 60s and early 70s. Lately, he's working on a project that I'm not at liberty to discuss, but a part of that project is his brand new Georgia Drag Racing website. It didn't exist a week ago, and now there is a nice framework that will accomodate future growth. If you're interested in Georgia drag racing in particular, and drag racing in general, you're invited to drop into the site for a visit. I have a feeling that the site and the mailing list will be quite active this year.
If you have any photos and/or stories related to the history of drag racing in Georgia, I know David would be happy to talk to you. You can contact him at David@GeorgiaDragRacing.com.
I spent quite a few hours working on the search engines and directories, updating old information and submitting new. 2001 was quite successful in terms of establishing JohnDilbeck.com in the search engines and directories, and I'm looking for further growth in 2002.
The rest of the week was spent driving Mom around for her continuing medical treatments. She's doing great and I appreciate your continued support.
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. I even got a couple of hours of sleep this week, too.
I've added more links in the bookstore and directory, too. Click on the menu to the left or the one at the top of the page to see for yourself. Thanks for continuing to visit my sponsors and purchasing their goods and services.
Thursday, January 24, 2002
Wayback Machine
12:07:24 PM
I remember, back in the days of the original Star Trek series, thinking how cool it would be to be able to access all the knowledge and information in the world from a convenient computer.
While that's still impossible, this dream became a giant step closer last October when the Internet Archive announced the Wayback Machine, which is now apparently the world's largest database and their goal is to archive all the world's knowledge. They've made an interesting start and have several years of websites online with more on the way.
To see for myself, I just looked to see if they had any references to my very first domain, need-sleep.com, and they did, indeed. I found several pages that were about five years old, and it really was like taking a trip in a Wayback Machine. Most of the graphics were missing and I didn't try clicking on the links, but it was an interesting experiment.
If you're interested in how all of this works, Richard Koman wrote an article on How the Wayback Machine Works that is worth a read.
I've been researching client/server databases using open source software and this is an excellent demonstration of those tools. They've built a parallel processor from about 400 computers running Linux and BSD unix, tied together with a custom parallel operating system they call P2.
The Wayback Machine was built by Alexa, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.com.
Vulnerability Assessment Triggers Alarms
Data collected on cyberattacks during the past six months by a security firm that monitors corporate networks all over the world shows that companies in the energy industry suffer attacks at twice the rate of other industries, and many of those attacks appear to be sponsored by governments or organizations in the Middle East.
Sunday, January 20, 2002
It's been nearly a month since my last posting here.
8:28:55 PM
It has been a really busy month! My mother was diagnosed with some medical problems that require daily treatments for a few weeks, and I've been driving her to her appointments and have been trying to leave the phone line open during the day for all her friends who have been calling her. That means that I've been working the night shift whenever possible.
I also converted JohnDilbeck.com so that it now uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for much of the formatting. It was a large job and I didn't know I had so many pages on this site! I completed that job this morning around 3:30 or so and I've uploaded all the files to the server this evening.
If you look around the site, you'll see that the bookstore has expanded (with more on the way). I've also made some changes to the directory, with some reorganization and general cleaning up. I've decided how I'm going to work with my classifieds and I'm in the process of reorganizing that section. This will take some time. I'm going to be expanding it quite a bit over the coming months.
So, now that the big conversion is over, I can get back to concentrating on finding and passing along good information about arts and crafts, computers, marketing, and other things that interest me.
Tuesday, December 25, 2001
Merry Christmas!
I hope each of you has the opportunity to spend time with friends and family during this holiday season.
I'll be leaving in a few minutes to spend the morning with my daughter, my son-in-law, and my three grand-kids, as well as all their aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, and more.
My wish for you is that your holiday season will be happy and that 2002 will bring you a healthy, prosperous, and happy new year. 6:05:36 AM
Thursday, December 6, 2001
Surefire Commerce and Sitesell announce new service
1:07:39 PM
For months, I've been raving about how much I've learned from Ken Evoy and the products he sells at Sitesell.com. I've taken several of his free email courses and I've purchased several of his books. Just recently, he updated his bestselling Make Your Site Sell! book for the year 2002 and it has lots of new, valuable information. I highly recommend all of his products, and this book, especially.
If you've been selling anything, you know it is a lot of work to market your products. The Internet doesn't make it much easier, but it does open your access to a larger market. At some point, preferably early, you learn that you want to accept major credit cards on your web site, and in your physical location, as well. There are lots of ways for small businesses to do this, and I have heard good things about PayPal.com, Propay.com, and Costco.com for very small businesses or for people selling at auctions such as eBay. I've used PayPal for some time now, and I'm very satisfied with their service.
When your business grows, you need to move to a faster and more secure service and there are many to choose from.
Once you start to really grow, where you are processing $50,000 or more per month, you want a premium transaction processing service that provides top-level security, backups, secure data centers, fraud detection and prevention, and professional customer service. If your business is processing over a million dollars per year through credit cards, you need a service you can rely upon.
Several months ago, Surefire Commerce acquired Sitesell and they've teamed to offer premium online transaction processing to larger businesses. If you are a fast growing company, or you're already processing over a million dollars per year (in US dollars), you should contact Surefire's representatives and see if they can provide services that suit you and your company. Perhaps you'd like to learn more about them and fill out a form to have one of their representatives contact you. If you're experienced in online commerce, or you're considering stepping into this ever-expanding market, you want to have your merchant account processed by someone who can protect you against fraud and unreasonable chargebacks, as well as process your transactions quickly and accurately. Do yourself a favor and contact Surefire Commerce.
Online Shopping Looks Merry and Bright
Jupiter Media Metrix weighs in with its numbers for post-Thanksgiving online shopping by finding 43 percent more visitors to shopping sites during Thanksgiving week in 2001 than in the previous year.
Online Sales Down in October
U.S. online sales decreased from $4.0 billion in September to $3.6 billion in October, according to the NRF/Forrester Online Retail Index. This raises the question: Are good offline deals taking shoppers off the Internet?
Friday, November 30, 2001
George Harrison Has Died
9:32:10 AM
Former Beatle George Harrison, singer, songwriter and guitarist for one of the world's most famous pop groups, has died after losing his battle against cancer. Harrison died on Thursday at a friend's Los Angeles home, at 1330 local time, according to his longtime friend Gavin De Becker.
"He died with one thought in mind - love one another," De Becker said.
Wednesday, November 28, 2001
TECSoft, an Apple Solution Experts and FileMaker Solutions Alliance member, is offering a CD and seminar to help participants learn AppleScript and how to create software automation solutions.
9:21:22 AM
The company's new Workflow Automation with AppleScript Training CD is an interactive training CD that costs US$99.
Considering an alternative to Microsoft's Office?
ConsultingTimes downloaded and installed the StarOffice 6 beta and found -- much to their surprise -- a rather full feature office suite, based on open standards, with the best Microsoft Office compatibility to date. In their opinion, on a purely subjective level, StarOffice 6 looks great, and appears to be a serious contender for both the home and enterprise desktops. The Star Office 6 beta also includes some of the best document filters for converting between Star Office's native XML storage and Microsoft's formats. They present an exclusive interview with Iyer Venkatesan, the StarOffice product manager. He gives an inside look at how Sun is positioning StarOffice, the target audience, key development goals, and other issues that are sure to be of interest.
Unfortunately, at this time, Sun is not working on a port for Macintosh OS X, but they did forward their development work to OpenOffice.org and developments in porting a native Mac OS X version of Star Office will be announced there.
Are network security firms helping the FBI to put a 'Magic Lantern' backdoor on computers?
From a Wired news article by Declan McCullagh: The flap started last week, when news reports began to appear about an FBI project code-named "Magic Lantern." Details are sketchy, but Magic Lantern reportedly works by masquerading as an innocent e-mail attachment that will insert FBI spyware inside your computer.
If you're skeptical about governments searching for increasingly sophisticated ways to spy on us, you may find this related article interesting.
Google has been testing a web page voting system that will let users rank sites.
AbiWord 0.9.5 has been released with XDarwin binary. Progress has been made towards a native Mac OS X version. Several new features are included in this pre-release beta.
The Linux Journal has announced their 2001 Editors' Choice Awards. Several of these programs are being ported for Mac OS X.
Super Get Info 1.0.5 is a powerful, elegant alternative to the Mac OS X Finder's Show Info command and offers several improvements. You can download it for a 14 day trial. The purchase price is around $20, and registered customers of a previous version can download the updater at no cost.
© Copyright 2002 John L. Dilbeck, jd@johndilbeck.com.
