“The RoseBouquet”

Yesterday I got quite fed up with all the fresh dumps of spam coming through my ISP (Sasktel) address. It was a nice short and easy one to give out to people when I met them, but after ten years, I decided it was time to give it up and ask them for a new address. The problem is, I’m not sure who all was using it to reach me. I hope I’m not leaving some friends high and dry with this drastic move.

Another incident on Friday evening brings me to a decision to explain how to reach me if you suddenly find you can’t get through the usual channels. A resourceful person might be able to figure these out on her own, but sometimes, when you run into a problem reaching someone you panic, and can’t think resourcefully.

Oh Friday evening I dashed out for some grocery shopping. When I came back there was a message on my answering machine. A woman was saying how much she appreciated my Ruthes-SecretRoses.com site, and she wanted to order copies of my book for gifts, and she particularly wanted to share a personal prayer request with me. Unfortunately, she did not leave her phone number. She gave an email address, but I was not able to make out all the letters. When I tried what I thought I could make out my email bounced back to me.

Now I’m up a tree. She didn’t mention any other means of reaching her, but said she hadn’t been able to get me through my form. I went immediately to test it and I did get my test email from the form instantly.

So Dallas (or Dalyce?), please try to reach me again! I did try to get back to you, and would have phoned if you’d left a number.

Now, I don’t spell out my email addresses on any web page, (and I have many because of all the sites I look after) because of the way spa-amm*ers send robots all over the world wide web looking for addresses to collect for their dirty deeds. Smart web designers now-a-days never do that! I do provide forms on all my sites, and when you enter something there, an email is sent to me instantly with your message.

Most of my sites are updated with the newest form which has a random math question for you to solve. Feel free to use a calculator if you can’t do mental math. This weeds out the robots as they can’t memorize the answer ahead of time.

Now, I do run into problems sometimes in responding to someone who gives a webmail like hotmail, or an aol, or hasn’t checked to make sure they typed it correctly. That is frustrating for me too. I got the message, but I can’t respond!

So if you don’t hear back from me within a day or two (I slack off on emails on the weekend; I don’t quite work 24/7), then here’s what to do; Go back to one of my websites, and if the form on one doesn’t seem to go anywhere, look for the links to my other websites in the footer at the very bottom of each page, click to go to any of those sites, and hunt for the contact or reach Me pages. Try the form there, and wait a day or two to see if I’ll respond.

If you still don’t hear from me, try the form on another site, but go into your email program and put down my domain name (the part after the http://) in your “white list.” That means that if I write you back with an email related to that site, it will be allowed through by your automated webmail filters.

If that still doesn’t get you a response from me, look for my phone number in the footers of my web pages. But if you call and get my answering machine, be sure to give your name clearly, spelling it helps, and your phone number and email. If you’ve already tried those, throw in your physical home address!

Okay, is that thorough enough?

Here’s a fresh list of my websites;
Ruthes-SecretRoses.com
BouquetofEnterprises.biz
AGodlyInheritance.com
Aloe-Vera-and-Handy-Herbs.com
There is another one, but it needs stuff updated. I don’t want the robots to discover it before I do that.

May each of you have a good day today, whether you are celebrating Remembrance Day today, (Canadians) or Veterans Day (USA). Yes, I’m home because it’s a holiday, but I’m not idle by a long shot!

Last year I wrote an article about the (soldiers in my Mennonite family). Today, on Remembrance Day in Canada, I find myself thinking about Conscientious Objectors.

I have known about it since my early teens, but more through reading than practical teaching in my Mennonite church and community.

In doing a bit of research I see that there is a non-religious conscientious objector status too now. I wasn’t fully aware of that.

First, a quick historical review. The Anabaptists since the days of their leader Menno Simons, have taught that the Bible says Christians should not kill or go to war. Besides baptism only as adults who are able to understand the step of faith they are choosing, this pacifist doctrine has been a main distinctive for Anabaptists in all of its flavours, from Mennonites to Hutterites, and others. Quakers also took this pacifist stand. Generally, however, people who took this stand were seen as cowards and had to face all kinds of persecution, imprisonment and torture.

The Mennonites who had immigrated to the Ukraine at the invitation of Catherine the Great had been promised exemption from military service. (Canada gave them such privileges too, when they started immigrating in the late 1800s). Later, when other rulers came into place, they ignored that. However, the Mennonites had talented men who went to the government and offered to do alternative service, such as working on the hospital trains that took care of the wounded soldiers or forestry work which would benefit the nation, but not involve killing anyone.

In the Colonial era of the United States, George Washington and other founders of the country expressed a strong belief that people should be able to worship and live freely according to their conscience. But during the American Civil War, anyone who claimed to be a conscientious objector to war was punished and some were killed by starvation and by hanging by their thumbs.

[This is a longer article, to finish it, please go to; A Bit About Conscientious Objectors ]

Last week David wrote about the fall banquets, that he just enjoys them. I do too, when I can make time to attend them.

I skipped the one I was invited to last Saturday because I had been busy winterizing my windows, washing and ironing curtains, tacking down screening outside the one window, oh, and cleaning a bucket full of jumbo carrots, and just generally a domestic whirlwind. When I finally got to sit down mid-evening to catch up on my bookkeeping, I realized that the banquet was nearly over. Good thing I didn’t promise to go, or invite anyone!

What was your Halloween like?

I had bought a bag of small chocolate bars and smarties, and took home a bundle of tracts from the office, and was expecting a busy evening running to the door to hand out treats. However, the client whose computer I had gone to troubleshoot on Thursday afternoon, called and was in a panic as things seemed worse than before. I quickly scrambled some eggs for a quick supper, handed out treats to two tiny tots at the door, and was off to go do more troubleshooting. He complained of hardly any turnout of kids at the door too. We snacked on his candy bars.

This all got me thinking about Halloween in a new light. I already know its origins are in the occult, and I don’t want to encourage it. I just use it as an opportunity to share Christ by adding tracts to the treats I hand out. But I’ve often wondered why adults don’t work harder at disabling it as a holiday. If parents didn’t take their kids begging for treats it might become a non-event. Then I realized that is is the adults (some admitted this to me last week) who sneak-n-eat a lot of the candy they buy for those kids, and if they have some left over, they eagerly eat it up themselves.

I have to confess I did some sneak-eating myself, and have had to hide the leftovers in the freezer to help my self-control Obviously, we adults are not motivated to get rid of Halloween, are – we?

On the other hand, I did hear that our community and a number of others, were throwing special Halloween, or Harvest parties for the kids that night in an effort to keep them off the streets. I wasn’t aware of any real danger, but the next morning Priscilla at the office told me that the paper had reported the most busy night of the year for the police. There had been fires, deliberate stabbings, and what-not! Yikkes! Suddenly handing out treats at special parties for kids sounds like a great idea.

By the way, best wishes to all my American friends who are voting today. I don’t all pretend to have the answers for you, but I am watching what is happening, as I think is the whole world. I want God’s best for you in political leadership. We know from His Word that He does raise up and put down leaders, sometimes through natural means, and sometimes with a surprise move. Sometimes He works through a good leader, and sometimes He works in spite of a bad one. (Remember King Cyrus who went insane?) Just do your part and trust Him!

Want more of my SiteBuildIt! (SBI) saga? Last week I entered the Value Exchange area, and clicked that yes, I’d be willing to exchange links with other sites that have the same theme or keywords.

In no time I had four or five responses from people who had received an automated email from me, and who were responding with, “yes, I’d like to exchange links with you. On what page on my site would you like your link?” Wow! One woman named Jennifer suggested that we exchange articles for each other and thus get a more valuable link. I visited her site which is about baths and bubbles, and thought, sure, I could do this. So the next morning I wrote a quick article about using comfrey in my bath to help ward of varicose veins. She loved it.

Her article arrived late yesterday afternoon. I haven’t had time to put it up yet, but this is a fun way to get quality in-bound links!

Did you know that you can get in on the SBI Value Exchange even if you haven’t bought into SBI? Yes, I did – I just never grasped the full value of it, or didn’t keep working at it as I should have. Here’s where you go to sign up and start; at Value Exchange You’ll get the kind of in and out-bound links the search engines love.

I don’t like to be always apologizing any more than you do, but I feel today that I should explain again, why I sometimes seem to ignore your emails to me for days, even weeks on end. When I get tutoring clients as I did last Thursday afternoon, and will again this afternoon and Thursday, or – when I’m working on a project that HAS to be completed by a deadline, guess what, it’s my afternoon of dealing with emails and the issues that arise of out them that gets pre-empted. Because my schedule is already so full, it is hard to play catchup. However, as soon as I have an afternoon to myself again, I work hard at wading through my inbox and I struggle to get each email answered or filed, so that I can see white space in there again. Normally, I handle business emails first, and chatty ones from friends last. I do skim them as they come in, so I can usually tell which ones need immediate attention, or that can be answered with a quick line or two.

This bothers me to some degree, because when I began my online business ventures in 1999, I vowed that I would always put people first. I would always make time to chat with those who wanted to chat. Well, things seem to have shifted, and now I feel my business promises, especially to clients come first. Things for myself get dropped or shoved to the edges.

I do know that when I start training students full-time to learn my ways, I want to stress that they NOT take on so many ventures at once. Focus on one web business at a time, and get it up and running well before you start another one.

The plan this afternoon is to take on two students at once, who both want to learn how to build web pages for their sites. My challenge will be to see if I can help both of them to learn some valuable things, even if their sites are not alike. Nor to let the personality of the one hold back the other.

How has the financial crisis in the world affected MyPowerMall?

It has not gone under, but many people are reining in their spending big time, so things have slowed down quite a bit. Naturally, I do NOT urge people who are in debt to keep on shopping, online or off. You do need to rein in your spending and get the debts paid off. Frugal Aunt Ruth could well be my main nickname. I have refused to live in debt for so long I have no credit rating and fail any application for a credit card. (Debit cards work like checks for me and do just fine).

But for those who have their budget under tight control and do need to buy your usual basics, you would find that shopping online is a frugal and wise move. Many of the online shops waive the charging of taxes, and sometimes shipping costs too. The big box stores often offer special deals that can ONLY be obtained their their website.

For instance, I buy my vitamins and supplements now through Puritan’s Pride, where I can pay a low price for two bottles and get three more thrown in for free! Then, because I go to their site through the link at MyPowerMall, I get another discount which comes back to me some weeks later as a commission deposit. I really don’t need a chartered accountant to tell me that this is frugal and wise!

Ginny’s always coming up with new ideas to improve MyPowerMall. Recently she devised another level where you pay to join up and a small fee each month. This guarantees an income even when folks don’t shop much. However, Ginny realizes there are folks like me, who don’t always know that that extra fee will be available, so we can still sign up for free and get all those shopping advantages.

Oh, another idea she described just last week is that you can purchase gift cards from American Express through the Mall, and then use them to purchase other things you need, like groceries and gasoline, and then get a rebate on those even though they are not in the PowerMall. Now I don’t think I’d be able to get an American Express card, but hey, it might help someone else!

If you’ve been putting it off, have another look at MyPowerMall

Modern digital cameras make this so easy now! What a blessing. Before I used to have to fill a roll of film with pictures, before I could take it in to a photo department to be developed. To save money  I would often wait a week and then come back to get them. Before I was able to get the pictures on a CD I would have to find a friend to scan the shots I wanted on the web to turn them into digital graphics, which I could then insert into a web page. Once Dad bought a digital camera for me to use, I was laughing.

Now my Steps go like this;

1. After I’ve taken photos, I pull out the memory card from the camera and slip it into the printer’s slot. (Modern computers have such a slot too).

2. Turn to my computer and copy/save the photos into a folder I call Hold2fix (where I have sub-folders for many topics) in my Graphics section.

3. Open my GIMP program to work on the photos (available free online for both Windows systems and Linux at gimp.org)

4. Find and open the first new picture in that folder.

5. Now I lighten up the colours using Tools -> Colors -> Brightness-contrast steps. (My camera tends to save them rather dark, but I’ve read that many digital cameras do that).

6. Then I crop out just the part of the photo I want to use. The less peripheral in the photo the closer up the person, etc. and the less kilobytes of weight the photo will be on the web, thus a faster loading page.

7. Next I used Edit -> Copy -> to lift that section out of the photo.and then Edit – > Paste as New …picture.

8. Now I use Image -> Scale Image – to re-size the photo, usually I choose 25% to re-size the photo for a photo story on a webpage. Rarely would I load a full-sized photo online.

Note: A photo can be saved at the time you load it on your computer in several different formats. If you scale down and de-weight it first for the web, you’ll find you can’t get the high resolution back for print quality. So if you expect to print that photo on paper and want it to look its best, save it first at the high resolution. Usually .tiff or .bmp is best for that. Then, while you have that photo open, save it again, perhaps with a slight change in name to help you remember which is which, but in the .jpg or for real simplicity or if you want to make some of it transparent, in .gif. This way you will be able to use the same photo in several mediums.

The .tiff or .bmp formats have terrific resolution, but are too heavy for a web page. their weight is usually measured in Megabytes instead of kilobytes. You may have noticed that if someone sends you one as an attachment in an email, it will take a long time in arriving at your inbox.

On a website, a .jpg or .jpeg will do much better, and a .gif graphic will do even better, especially if you should choose to take steps to make the background transparent. Then you will need to save it as .gif file.

When you save, there is also a slider that adjusts for the percentage of quality you want. I usually leave mine set at about 89%. For perfect of course, slide it all the way to 100%.

When naming your graphics for the web, remember to allow NO spaces between characters. Those in a Windows environment are used to the fact that you can name a file with a short phrase, and leave blank spaces. That does not work on the web. Any file name has to have a letter or number, or if you wish a hyphen, or an underline to represent breaks, and it must end in a true graphic extension, such as .jpg, or .jpeg or .gif.

What happens if you don’t? Well, the photo or graphic just won’t show up for everyone. It might for you, because you also have it on your computer, but others with different browsers on their computer will not.

The GIMP program has many affectionados who put up tutorial sites and the many things you can do with it. When I need to learn a new technique, I just go do a search and soon have the step-by-step directions. Once I’ve done it a few times it becomes mine and I use it as naturally as signing my name.

If you have PhotoShop on your computer, much the same thing exists. Learn to search for the more detailed function you want to know, and you can teach yourself all you need.