Virtual Magpie (the equivocal adventures of Megan M.)

This morning I’m sitting in on panels at Interactive Austin, a social commerce conference that so far is pretty nifty. We’re hooked up to Twitter, but Twitter isn’t running so well today (unless it’s our wireless connection — is everyone else dropping off every ten minutes, or is it just me?).

I’m not liveblogging the conference since my last twenty-four hours has been so hardcore, but I am taking notes and clips and pictures and twittering when possible (read: when functional). If you’re here too, say hi. :}

Karen Wennberg’s fantastic Thriving Artist campaign is reaching its peak (well, at least for now!). She’s created a Fundable project to raise money for her website and she’s offering a lot of really awesome stuff in return for donations. There are only five days left and she’s nearly met her goal, so please go take a look at her stuff and support her if you so desire!

[Edit: As of Friday evening, Karen has exceeded her goal, although donations are still being accepted. Thank you for giving her your support!]

Last week I ordered one of these:

As far as I know it doesn’t come with the cute boy. But that could be a great bonus (Data Robotics, take note)!

It’s supposed to be arriving today, along with a nifty 500 gig drive that only cost me about a hundred bucks. I had no idea that terabytes were so inexpensive these days. When did this happen!? I guess I just haven’t had a hardware upgrade in awhile. Quite overdue. What fun!

So I’ve stripped down two of my external drives in preparation for feeding them to my robot, and I will probably strip the third after I see that everything’s working well. I have another external drive around here somewhere that I can use, too, but hell if I know where it ended up. Closet digging time?

In other news, I reorganized the office again. Furniture is delicious. (And now I have room for a data robot!)

[Edit: Oops! My old external drives were ATA drives and aren’t compatible with the Drobo. The new one is fine, so I ordered a second… and it looks like I’ll be keeping those externals around after all. For the first time in my life, I’m going to have a terabyte all in one place. Crazy!!]

Since last summer I’ve been working with an awesome individual by the name of Robert Gardner, who deals in yoga, Thai massage, and food genius (among other things). This week his website went live and I can confidently say it’s one of my favorite designs ever. If you’re looking for someone to help you improve your health and wellness over all, Robert is your dude. And whether or not that’s your cup of tea, I’d love some feedback on the design we settled on!

Link.

Robert is my unequivocal pick for massage and yoga instruction (and how to roast a killer chicken). It’s been hugely helpful having his input on these parts of my life. I sincerely hope the design and marketing we do for him helps him as much as he has helped me!

PS. Why yes, that is Marty illustration fu you’re seeing. Isn’t that grass gorgeous?

I’ve said before that I wanted to help, and now we’re going to do it.

Many months ago Marty and I came up with a cunning plan to help struggling artists into the digital universe. It’s incredibly important for a new artist to have a presence on the web. If it’s done right, the artist’s visibility can skyrocket — and when your work is about visual media, you need it to be seen. Especially with my eye on Youngstown this year, I know that there are brilliant artists out there who just need the right break, who can do amazing things. (Well hell — I’m living with one!)

Our plan was solid, and we took it forward. We’re calling it the Thriving Artist Project and you can consider it officially launched. We’re starting things off with the inimitable Karen Wennberg. If you’d like more information (who wouldn’t?) you can check out the Thriving Artist Project page at Virtual Magpie Design. If you want to help out, you can find her contact information there, or you can feel free to Digg, del.icio.us or otherwise bookmark that page. You can definitely help us by spreading the word, if you are so inclined; and I daresay I’d be grateful if you did!

If you’re not as excited as I am, you obviously haven’t read the project page yet.

Go! Get excited!

Dude, the coolest thing just happened to me.

Last night I tried to order the Classic PhotoReading course from Learning Strategies. I tried to order it three or four times and every time it gave me an AVS error — on two different cards, when I’d been using my cards successfully all over the place this week. The 24-hour sales line couldn’t help me and suggested that I call customer service in the morning, so I left customer service an email (just in case) and planned to call them when they opened at 8.

This morning I called in and they explained that because their security system was so hardcore, even a small inaccuracy in the billing address would cause an AVS problem. I talked to Ryan, who was very helpful and friendly, and ultimately it looked like I needed to call my bank to make sure they didn’t have a slight difference in my billing address — something that might not cause problems with many processing systems, but was probably the issue here. Ryan gave me his direct number, and I set off to call my bank.

I kid you not: For twenty minutes I sat here and pressed buttons and begged the automated system to transfer me to a real person. Most of the options that sounded like what I needed either sent me to a dead-end automation or a very persistent gatekeeper function that wanted a particular telephone-specific number or code from me that I have never had. I looked through all my banking materials and could not discover a way to locate, or obtain, this number that it wanted. I was becoming extremely frustrated and a little bit angry. Why does this have to be so difficult?

I say twenty minutes because about twenty minutes into this horrible process, I got an incoming call. The number looked a bit like the direct line number Ryan had given me, so I took a chance and picked up, ditching the endless, futile phone call with Chase. It was Ryan! He said that they had reset their security system and he thought the card would go through now with no problem. We gave it a shot and it worked brilliantly! I was so relieved that he had called me back, because who knows how long I might have stayed in Chase’s system, cursing the gods of commerce?

You might think that Ryan sounds like an awesome and amiable guy, but you don’t even know the half of it. I was ordering the Classic PhotoReading course for $245, plus 2-day shipping for a total of $266. That was my plan. I had a customer code that entitled me to a little bit of bonus information, but it turned out that the code was long since expired and it wasn’t possible to put it through. But Ryan — I can only assume because of the lengthy back-and-forth, but maybe just because he is a nice guy, or because this is a nice company — offered to give me the “sale price”. He asked if I had considered getting the Deluxe course instead, and I explained that I was buying it in two pieces instead of all at once to be careful with money. He said he had a code, however, that would give me the entire Deluxe course with additional materials, plus overnight shipping, for $253.85 — less than I had been planning to pay, for half as many materials, to arrive tomorrow before noon, instead of Wednesday.

Yeah, whoa, that’s what I said! I thanked him and told him to please have a particularly wonderful day. And now I am telling you, because despite my difficult experience with my bank and what could arguably be called a difficult experience with the Learning Strategies payment processing system, I am walking away from this whole situation filled with gratitude and glee, and wanting to tell people about my awesome morning with this company and the dude who picked up the customer service line.

That’s what good business is, folks.

On Wednesday, I’m going to join… gulp… Toastmasters.

Yes. You heard that purposefully italicized note of anxiety. The girl who started a design company out of high school just because she wanted to make something new and awesome — no, the girl who happily stood on stage in a foreign country and sang for an audience God-knows-how-big, waded through television and radio media, and would do it again in a heartbeat — is nervous about speaking.

I always have been, and that’s one of the reasons this business has been built up around email interaction instead of eye-to-eye meetings. I do lunches, I do coffee, and I do meet people in person (fairly often, considering!) but I will tell you, it is not something that comes easily to me. I will sing whatever you want in front of ten or ten thousand people, but you say you want me to talk to them? Jiminy Christmas.

I visited a meeting last week at National Instruments (because a friend was kind enough to let me tag along) and I found the group incredibly friendly, very engaging and interesting. My long list of worries and irrational concerns (yes, I made a list) was chopped off at the knees (as I mostly expected), and I was confronted with the undeniable next step: Join Toastmasters.

The next few days were a bit of a blur; I filled out my take-home application, set aside my checkbook, and put on my Patient Megan hat to wait out the rest of the week. But then I started seeing references to Toastmasters in my usual newsfeeds. My original interest in Toastmasters, long ago, had been founded on a Boing Boing article — which I can’t find anywhere now, of course, and even Google has failed me. But after filling out that application I noticed that Steve Pavlina has several posts on Toastmastering. He has a fantastic article on progressive training where he discusses his Toastmasters path, another about making mistakes (and taking risks), and another about humorous speechmaking. I hope I find more as I go — Pavlina writes awesome material.

Additionally, even though Google failed me in searching for the original Toastmasters reference I had seen, it did reveal a fantastic speech by Neil Gaiman at the Nebula Awards (via). Suddenly I’m interested in speeches. Brains are so tricksy!

You can sort of see where I’m going with this. The next meeting is Wednesday, and I admit I’m excited to find out what happens next. We all change very quickly into new people; I am a different person today than I was yesterday, or last week, or last year. Who will I be in a month, I wonder?

Many of you know who Kit is; for those who don’t, Kit O’Connell is a writer in College Station, TX who recently moved his public blogging from LiveJournal to a private installation of WordPress entitled “approximately 8,000 words“. (Turns out some Russians bought LiveJournal; prognosis is uncertain.) He came up with a seriously excellent design concept, and even considering that he started his efforts with a pre-existing theme, his results are pretty awesome. He says:

I am designing this website to mimic the standard short story manuscript format which professional writers use to submit their work. I still have some tweaks to make, but so far I am pleased with its appearance.

Link.

I love the idea and it’s very appealing. I think it will work well for him. Though he’s not quite finished yet, this is probably one to keep your eye on — Kit’s always had great writing (and great thoughts on writing) up his sleeve. But I just had to mention the design fu. ;}