“The RoseBouquet”

My skills in vector drawing are not coming on as fast as I might wish. This will take time. Yesterday I hesitated, not sure whether to give more time to practice, or to go back to polishing the new site template. I made some progress on that last Friday, and like anyone else… I like to be where you can see results forming faster.

I’ve also been wrapping up several projects for the mission, WTM, and have just tackled some new ones.

Remember my hint about the virtual writers’ retreat idea last week? Well, I’m having fun planning those sessions, and have even thought up some prizes to offer. If I can rouse some friends to take part I think that’s going to be lots of fun! What’s more I’ll get a better grip on my novel and how to improve and market it better.

That’s another flower in my Bouquet of Enterprises.

Oops, did you realize I have two bouquets? One is my RoseBouquet of friends, and the other is my Bouquet of Enterprises or ventures that I’m into.

Today we have my last Friendship Bible study out of the Old Testament. Three more in the New Testament and then this series is done. So far I’ve had as good as no feedback on these articles, so maybe I’ve done all this for my own benefit. I hope you’ll enjoy the eight Writers’ Workshop sessions. And participate!

I did finally get my first video lesson last Wednesday afternoon. However, my young geek-teacher has no training in teaching, so after we had downloaded and installed two programs, he took the mouse and swirled it around on my screen and told me that this is for that, and that is for this…. and I was soon lost. I decided that I would have to take some my education into my own hands here.

So I gave up my Thursday and Friday mornings to go look online for tutorials and to learn to understand at least the one program better. I did try to follow the steps given, but ran into questions, so tomorrow when my guru friend shows up, I will be able to steer the lesson with some intelligent questions. Hopefully we’ll make some progress forward.

Computer art done in a vector program is really terrific, now that I see the potential. You can draw most anything starting with a few basic shapes, then with shading and 3-D effects you can make even a snowman come to life. But that’s not all, You can grab an elbow, say, lift it, and all the rest of the body changes appropriately to create a new pose image for your animation. Clever, eh?

I think this is goin’a be great fun!

I spent the weekend (Friday night and all day Saturday) at a Heritage event by the Mennonite Historical Society of Saskatchewan (MHSS). I had to give a report on the website which I am responsible for, and I also took a small part in the honouring of Rev. John D. Friesen, who was my cousin-uncle. (Mom’s first cousin). A number of new jobs for things to put on the site were given to me, so I’ll be busy on that for a few months.

Besides that, one women lent me her Friesen book to study for a while, and another man gave me a photo and asked for help to identify the Friesen woman in there. One of his Walde-Wiebe great-grandfathers had married a widow Friesen and he had no way of identifying her.

Four more friendship articles after today’s and then we’ll start something new. A virtual writer’s workshop. I’m using these weeks to prepare and if I get the participation I’m hoping for it should be loads of inter-active fun.

My video-making lessons still have not started. Jondalar has been too busy or sick each week, but maybe it will come to pass this week.

Meantime, I’ve been busy going through the Action Guide videos with my new SBI site, and whoa, have I been astonished at the new things I’ve learned. Either they have added a lot of new stuff, or I missed it the first time I went through it for my aloe-vera-and-handy-herbs.com site. It looks like I’ve got a winner here that should turn into a very handsome stream of income.

The training videos are truly excellent, and although it is true that after about Day 4 you need access to the features that are explained there, you could pick up a lot of information for free by watching them thoughtfully and making notes. Apply the principles to the site you have right now and see if you don’t improve by several notches. Wanna go see? ActionGuide.sitesell.com

Yesterday I finished Day 6, (a phase or stage) so now I’m going to buckle down to finalize my template and start producing pages according to the blueprint I have drafted. I’m guessing this next stage will take about 10 weeks. Then I might be able to cut back the hours on that one, and apply some of these neat principles to my other sites.

Also, I’m planning a virtual writers’ retreat to which I want to invite you, dear reader! Yep. You.

There are five more articles on friendships in the Bible. Those are ready, so that gives me just five weeks to prepare this virtual writers’ retreat and make sure that will be both fun and beneficial for us all.

This week’s article is about Job and his friends in calamity. I’ve tried to super-condense their conversation and put it into more current vernacular, so we can easier learn how to treat our friends in trouble. However, it’s still rather longish so you’ll have to finish reading it on the website.

My video-making lesson did not materialize last Thursday, but we another another appointment for tomorrow morning to start. Here’s hoping it comes off. Meantime, I’ve been going through the ActionGuide videos at SiteSell, following the research and brainstorming sessions as guided. Whoa, did I have a fine surprise on Friday when I got a glimpse of the monetizing opportunities ahead! I’ve been smiling to myself ever since. The future looks fairly rosy. Naturally, I’ll have to put in time to make it happen.

Last night I got a year’s worth of post-dated checks from a missionary support group, so I know I can allow myself enough groceries this year. God is so faithful to meet my needs.

I’ve been making some progress in short spells on my friend Betty’s site, which I am re-building after she lost her original domain name.

We don’t all cope the same way, but if you want to try my principle, it is simply to assign a specific block of time to do certain things, and then stick to that schedule. Little by little you can get many projects done.

Guess what, sometimes I don’t even notice when I’ve completed a big project because I have my eye trained on the next step. I tell you, things don’t look nearly as scary that way.

Have you noticed how many websites now show little boxes with videos? What do you think of them?

It looks like a trend that is here to stay, although many of us still have to learn how to get along with it. Sometimes if we have older computers or a lowly dial-up even the smallest and shortest video is a challenge to watch.

You need a lot of extra RAM memory so that the video can load before it starts, or it will be jerky while it stops to buffer or load the next little segment. You also need the right kind of codecs and software on your computer to see and hear them well.

I’ve asked Jondalar to start teaching me how to create videos this week, so I can add some to my sites, but just to make sure I didn’t have to start at ground zero, I took time yesterday to research a bit and see what it takes.

It seems a good camera, and then good software for editing the film, and more software to compress the files so they aren’t so huge - these are the main ingredients. It turns out that some of the software is free and ready to install.

I’m not sure I want to start with movies of people. I was thinking more in the line of animated how-to lessons, but it will be interesting to see how this develops. I may have more to tell you next week.

There is an end in sight for my series of articles on friendships in the Bible and what we can learn from them. Today’s is about a young king who sought the advice of his rebel friends. There will be only 6 or 7 more and then that will be finished.

I’m planning to start a Bible study on Giving next, but that will generate articles for another site. So I got to thinking yesterday about the Ruthe’s Roses section in the RoseBouquet.

Well, I’ve daydreamed sometimes about having a special weekend retreat to which I would invite my dearest friends and I would ask them to help me analyze and critique my novel and how I can improve it, or the website to market it better. I cannot yet afford to fly in my friends or to reserve a resort for such a retreat, so I’m thinking I’m going to use that spot for a virtual retreat. I’ll try to make it fun, and do it in short bites, and even offer prizes to those who participate. Tangible prizes that I put in the mail to you, not just downloads.

That will allow me to get back to the main purpose of this RoseBouquet, and my site, Ruthes-SecretRoses.com and maybe I’ll really start selling copies of my novel!

You haven’t a clue what my book is about? - Well, the first 14 chapters are available on the site, Ready to Read You have a few weeks to get a head start.

Remember how I asked for online shopping tips last week? I haven’t received any from subscribers, but I did some research and found some on my own, and am moving forward with that web business plan. I used the SBI Brainstormer yesterday and was tickled to see that there is considerable potential for a profitable site, - if I use the best keywords.

I’m hoping Jondalar will start giving me lessons in creating videos this week. That should be interesting!

One problem I have is getting my emails answered so that there is some time left in an afternoon to check the STATs on all my sites and the ones I maintain for others. It seems that block of time is often interrupted, and sometimes snatched from me. One afternoon of doing something else, and not getting to my emails, means it will take an extra push and concentration for the next several days to catch up. It’s been like this since December, so when I do get to checking the STATs, it will not just be for the previous month, but the previous three in most cases.

Evenings? They are all spoken for, and I’m trying to squeeze in time to finish polishing up Betty’s Children-of-the-Heart.com site while she is not able to do anything about it.

A couple of weeks ago, I did manage to get another profile of a worthy mission up on the Generosity-Alive.org site, but have not had time to promote or link to that page from other sites yet. Pastor Duncan in Malawi runs the Searchlight Orphan Care and desperately needs $600 a month to keep feeding them. He’s run out of food and is afraid he’ll have to turn the kids out on the street. He’s hoping that my profile of their ministry will bring in funds. I wish I could guarantee that, but …I can’t twist people’s arms. Searchlight Orphan Care

Pastor Duncan strikes me as a sensible man who would really like to start some enterprise whereby the orphans could raise enough funds to run the place. I always am ready to help those who are not afraid of work.

Anybody have a small assembly or manufacturing business that could be done off-shore there? I wish I could send them a multi-interest entrepreneur with some managerial skills, and some knowledge of selling online. I’m sure they could be doing a number of profitable things.

Today’s article is about Solomon again, (The Queen of Sheba’s visit). You might even wonder if I deliberately planned it to come before Valentine’s day. No, it just happened.

Yesterday a number of things came to a head at the office.

1. The data recovery I’d started for our Director here at WTM on Friday, finally finished. We had to put the hard drive from his bad laptop into my laptop (which often crashes), and then using a Knoppix CD, I was able to upload the files he wanted saved to one of my websites. From there I downloaded it to my main desktop computer. Tomorrow we will format and load his new laptop and add his old files that I recovered. Jondalar had already worked on this for two weeks, so this is quite a victory.

2. I got this next issue of Reflections ready to print, including some last minute corrections. This is the quarterly newsletter of which I am the layout editor and key writer.

3. In the morning I discovered that Ginny Dye has stopped - ended - MyPowerMall. I saw a video last week in which she hinted at this, so I wasn’t totally wiped off my feet, but I had been working on a new site that would drive a lot of traffic to MPM and that is now stopped in its tracks too. I should be able to shift gears, but I’m glad I haven’t lost more than a couple of months work on that. It was foundational though, to a huge dream I had of helping non-profits. I guess lots of people signed up but only a handful were really shopping online through the mall.

This means I’ll have to go through a lot of my sites to remove those MPM links. Hopefully I can find something else to replace them so I don’t have to go through those motions twice.

4. Last week I’d received a letter from Betty, a client, whose prolife website I was hosting. They had moved as a family to follow her husband to a new job. They are in a place in Mississippi where she can’t get phone or internet access. Her domain had gone down for lack of registration renewal. Since I couldn’t reach her any other way, I wrote to her, and yesterday she got to a phone and called me. We worked out a plan whereby I would register a similar domain name, and set up what I have as a backup to her site. I managed to get that done yesterday yet. The site still needs fine-tuning as some of the links don’t work, but if you had been looking for or linking to http://children-of-the-heart.net you need to change that now to http://Children-of-the-Heart.com (one that had not been available to her a few years ago when she first started her site).

The main things happening in my business sphere is this matter of installing new operating systems on computers. Then fine-tuning them the way I like them. Big beautiful roses for backgrounds, windows in my shades of pink and green, and larger fonts, is just the start.

I did the one at the office a couple of weeks ago, and seem to have things working smoothly here. The one at home on Saturday seemed to go by so much faster, because I was using a fully loaded DVD rather than the netinstall which had not worked the previous weekend at home.

However, I found there was much more fine-tuning to do and some things have gone really buggy. Firefox and OpenOffice.org, two programs I depend on all day long were acting sluggish and unresponsive after a few hours. I love to multi-task and have several things open and happening at once, but I couldn’t click or do anything until one error message had shown up, and everything was taking long minutes to show up rather than the split seconds I was used to.

I went searching online with other browsers (and also phoned Jondalar) and tried several “fixes.” All the programs became more cooperative, but one of the fixes may have messed up Firefox because by evening it would only open my home page, for BBN, my favourite online radio. So I started using Konqueror and Opera. The creative resourcefulness I have inherited from my Dad really got a workout as I kept looking for answers.

KMail wouldn’t let some of my email accounts SEND until I discovered that I had to tick TLS instead of SSL for the security method. Things like that.

In the evening I wanted to finish up this next issue of Reflections so it can go to press this week. (Sigh)! What a merry-go-round of problems to work at. I couldn’t access the already proof-read pages, and had to re-do some work from last week. I’ll have to really dig in this afternoon to catch up and do all that I had hoped to do last night!

Throughout all that though, I was aware that I was blessed with good health, I was in a safe, warm place, and God cares for me. These troubles will help me to help someone else eventually.

No doubt you have heard about the earthquake and devastation in Haiti, which is just part of an island in the Caribbean, but oh the awfulness of the event, and the suffering and hardships going on there since then.

I don’t have a TV, so I’ve been following mostly by radio, but I’ve also taken a bit of time to go online and see some pictures and videos, so I am aware of happenings there.
/

So far I have not had the time, or taken the time to sit down and think things through. What should our response be?

Yes, nations are almost competing with each other to send plane and ship loads of aid, and millions, even billions of dollars, and we should be generous too, but how much of that is going to be wasted while organizations find a footing and a way to be effective? Is generosity good if it is given foolishly?

Some people give a little bit to everyone who comes begging, or who puts on a fund-raiser, but after a while they feel overwhelmed and start complaining that the world is full of hands held out, and they start avoiding all charities - unless they are truly moved by the news media’s pictures.

Personally, I feel an obligation to check things out, look for missions and missionaries that have a good, working plan in operation, and who manage the gifts they receive very well. Furthermore, I like to take time to pray and listen for the prompting of God’s Spirit in my heart to know when and how much I should give. I do not like to be pressured or shamed into it by outside forces.

There will be a need in Haiti for a long time to come. For now, I’d like to pray that the aid that is rushing in there will be wisely distributed, and that cooler heads, with skills to manage situations will organize the searches, the medical work, and the restoration of that torn and broken place. But I’ll watch for the right moment to step in to help with cash.

Just in the last few months I have become aware of other needy spots in the world, like Pakistan and a number of African countries. Without seeking God’s guidance I really don’t know whom to send the small gifts I can spare.

Beyond that, I do pray and plan for a way to have much more to give. And, I want to have a spiritual filtering system in place, so I can determine my giving more promptly. If you have such an evaluation or filtering grid for making such decisions, I’d love to hear from you.

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Feedback from last week’s RoseBouquet:
David S. wrote;
Thanks for this very focused, refreshing and lively RB.
So good to see the weaving of suggestions, ideas and new thoughts or re-igniting old ones. Like the imagery of the weather….. Be encouraged….
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How are you doing with your goals and plans and new agenda since New Year’s Day? I thought I was doing quite well, but last Wednesday I decided to install the latest version of my office computer’s operating system, (openSUSE 11.2), and ended up doing it a second time after I’d talked to Jondalar and realized I had made a mistake in the partitioning.

That meant that I spent all of Thursday fine-tuning my settings, getting my favourite programs installed, changing my colours and theme to suit my own taste (I’m partial to roses, but you know that). It took all afternoon to set up each of my email addresses again, and it appears that the last day or two’s emails didn’t survive the transition.

I’ve just about caught up on personal emails again, so if you haven’t heard from me, you may want to write again and jog my memory.

At this point, I think about the only thing still to work out is to get my favourite internet radio station, BBN to play again. The sound works otherwise, but not for that. I could not get it to play on the other computer either on Thursday, so that was a long, dull day. I’ve come to understand that having that lovely Christian music playing in the background all day is like a lovely oral fragrance, a sweet company, and mood sanitizer. If I’m addicted to it - so be it!

There a number of blessings related to this new operating system. It is similar to what I had with version 11.1 but with some improvements. And yes, I installed it myself!

People with Windows systems seem to think you have to take your computer to a Geek shop to have it done, but we Linux-users do this often enough that it doesn’t scare us. I am watching for a suitable weekend to do the same on my home computer.

(In fact, I’m toying in my mind with an idea to offer a Saturday seminar in how to do this. What do you think? Does it have merit?)

Oh yes, I’m back to my series of articles on Friendships in the Bible, and what we can learn from them. Today we’ll look at Samson and his False Friends. Come to think of it, maybe he was the false friend.