March 2006

Apropos of life:

From Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address:
With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

From Loving Each Day:

Remember that your state of mind, the way you feel about yourself, powerfully contributes or not to your well being depending on whether your attitude is uplifting or not.

The First:
It is… axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.—W. H. Auden

The Second:
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.—W. H. Auden

Who, Joe? Him.

Sunday morning Tyler and I, and then Leah, and Tony, were drawn into a discussion of farts, and whether they were the product of Satan, or God. It was a pretty good discussion which turned out to have general agreement that farts are not generally good or evil—they are of us and our bodies, created by God, so they’re neutral.

The question in the world is “How we use that gas?” Are we passing gas to the greater glory of God?

Silly, I know, but it gave us all a chance to talk about the inherent nature of the world, and how we can act in concert with or out of concert with, our Higher Power.

In my experience, discussing farts with teen and tween boys was a valuable “teachable moment”—in part because it was a valuable teachable moment for me.

And I’m not really kidding at all.

Not a bad article. Requires free registration on the VenturaCountyStar website.

Ventura County Star: Business: Business blogging is blooming

That happened to Leah Peterson of Simi Valley, who posts interviews with other bloggers as a feature on her personal site.

One of the bloggers, who has a lot of traffic on his site, linked to her site and overwhelmed it with more traffic than it could handle. Peterson remedied the situation, but it was a reminder that an interesting post can change blog traffic levels.

Peterson has a background in photography, art and writing. She runs Crawberts.com, a Web development company, with her husband, Joe Crawford.

“Very rarely do I write about anything business-ey on my blog,” she said.

Even so, she said she found before long that her blog was leading to business connections that wouldn’t have formed otherwise.

“We don’t have to advertise as much,” she said. “We don’t have to go out looking for work as much. The word of mouth spreads instantly.”

The blog became a good place to contact people and network.

She recently posted a job ad on her blog looking for programmers — then took the opportunity to talk about those things they were looking for beyond what was mentioned in the ad, such as integrity, a strong work ethic and “know your stuff as well as you say you do.”

Peterson said there is a balance between being honest and creative while still being careful about what she posts. She makes sure to ask clients if they are OK with her mentioning contract work in the blog.

When she goes looking for people, Peterson said, one of the first things she does is look for a blog or personal Web site. She expects that others do the same.

“I think people want to know what the people are really like behind the business,” she said.

Take10Now.com just launched. Rory Cohen will be on the TV show The View tomorrow (March 2nd, 2006) with her transgendered son, Tye, of http://asktye.com/

Hope you all check out the sites and check out the show! These are all Crawberts.com productions, and we’re pretty proud of them.