Today’s thing-a-day is related to process improvement! I spent some time reviewing PayPal options for shipping products. The trigger to finally look into it was a friend who needed a simple solution to sell her books. The last time I used PayPal for fullfillment was for the first run of ETP pads in 2009, and I found the experience so tedious that I vowed to outsource everything as much as possible. It’s been five years, though, so I figured it was time to see if anything’s changed, and rethink my shipping strategies. (more…)

[POSTING ON 11/22]

On Friday I was in the midst of restoring all my programs and data to the PC Workstation, and also was going to a photographic exhibition in the early afternoon that would kill the rest of the day. Too dang busy. So I made this card to get out of doing a Thing-a-Day for Friday. Booyah!

What’s notable, though, is that I’d been looking at all kinds of clipart this week to make a certificate with cool guilloche patterns and nice ornamentation. I wasn’t sure how I was going to DRAW them, but I just made patterns and it turned out that it’s a lot easier to just PLAY with them and figure it out. Gotta learn to get over these notions of perfection before play; as my friend Gary says, it’s all about being persistent. They’re not AMAZING patterns, but I can see how they can evolve quickly with just a bit of repetition and refinement. Lesson learned, again!

[POSTING ON 11/22]

On Thursday I started reinstalling the operating system on my PC workstation, where I do most of my photo processing. As I was digging up the install media (on a thumb drive), I found a Mac OS X “Mavericks” mini flash drive that I was supposed to loan to a friend. However, the drive is SO SMALL that I was worried it would get lost. So I spent more time than I perhaps should have learning to attach it to some kind of card.

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2015 Updates!

It’s that time of year…Updated Compact Calendar! I had thought this would be a quicker task when I started it, but it actually took several hours to remember how to assemble the complete package of PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, and now the Numbers spreadsheet. Formatting the PDFs is what takes the longest amount of time, since I have to prep 3 different base spreadsheets stripped of holiday information, then lay each type in both US Letter and A4 size and save to PDF. I do a little extra sizing other than printing them out straight to PDF; I spent a bit of time rejiggering the export workflow to be easier to update next year.

Anyway, you can Download the 2015 Calendar from the usual place!

A Backwards Step

I had ordered this box of 4-1/4 inch currency bands (used to hold together stacks of paper money) last week, thinking that they were self-adhesive. The idea was that I could use them to wrap a small stack of 3-1/2×2 inch business cards together, and stamp them with my rubber stamp as a kind of cheap-but-cool packaging. I didn’t want to use a rubber band for this purpose because it seems inelegant.

Alas, these particular currency bands are NOT self-adhesive. They are pre-glued, so it’s $9 down the drain. Such is the cost of entrepreneurialism. Rather than mail them back, I can probably find some organization that runs bake sales or maybe accepts donations in bills (churches, perhaps?) and donate to them. Worst case, Goodwill probably could find a home for them.

I’m using this setback as today’s THING-A-DAY, because it’s process related and took up my time, and not every day will be a hit. Today, I struck out. The next likely candidate for a cheap packaging solution are napkin bands, which apparently are used by the catering industry, and are self-adhesive. I’m having trouble finding a source of the larger 6-1/4 inch bands online that isn’t expensive, so I may visit a restaurant supply store up in Manchester. I like visiting that store anyway…so much cool stuff to look at!