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The Brabec Bulletin Sampler
A Nifty Digital Voice Recorder  A Nifty Digital Voice RecorderI took my first cruise in August 2010—a trip to Alaska with my two sisters from California. Anticipating the many interesting conversations the "sisters three" were likely to have on this trip, I purchased a sweet little digital recorder that you might find interesting. What sold me on the Olympus Digital Voice Recorder ($43 on Amazon) was one reviewer’s comments that indicated it might actually be easy to figure out. It did take me fifteen minutes to figure out how to set the time and date and do a test message and then erase it, but any electronic gadget I can learn how to use in fifteen minutes is a winner in my book. The really nice thing about this recorder is that it is tiny, almost weightless, and perfect to stick in a pocket or purse to capture reminder notes to yourself, sounds of a family get-together, something you're hearing on radio or TV that you want to hear again, or any other sound that strikes your fancy and is worth keeping. This particular model (there are several) picks up sound beautifully from 12 feet away, will hold 444 hours of recording, and has a PC link for transferring files to/from your computer. The Olympus reads .wma files, and you can move files back and forth between the Olympus and your hard drive using Explore so long as you remember that it won't read the contents of folders; only individual .wma files. It comes with five folders, each of which can hold hours of recordings. You can't identify them by name (only by number), but this is fine when you consider that this isn't meant to be a long-term storage of sounds, but something you can capture, transfer, and then erase to free up for more recordings. For me, the best part of this new toy was that, on returning home, I could upload all our interesting sister conversations to my computer and then give each of my sisters a nostalgic CD remembrance of the trip. Can you imagine, 10 or 15 years from now, how wonderful it will be for us to relive this once-in-a-lifetime-week together? Sometimes I hate technology and the stress it can cause when it's difficult to learn or when it just goes wrong, but other times I thank God for all the blessings in my life that technology has made possible, such as being able to easily publish my own books again. A Perfect Formula for Getting Anything DoneBusiness consultant Patricia Katz, who is also a painter, publishes a wonderful ezine called PAUSE—The Voice of Sanity In A Speed Crazed World. I always find her perspective on life and business uplifting and thought-provoking. In one issue, Pat wrote about a vacation she had taken to Paris that included daily painting lessons where members of the group she was traveling with had only an hour or two to find a subject, then sketch and paint it. If one dithered too long about what to paint in the first place, there wasn't time to create anything of value, she said, adding that she began to think of the process of doing this as "Scan, focus, commit, begin."
I read that and thought, wow, what a perfect formula for business success or any individual project we might be considering! In fact, this was just the motivational push I needed to hear at that time because I had been dithering for months while trying to figure out how to use my lifetime of resource material for new books. I finally concluded that, although I had enough material for half a dozen new business books, I was no longer interested in writing about business. After forty years of this kind of writing, I needed to change directions as a writer to retain my enthusiasm for my work. After scanning all the life writing I’d done that had never been published, I decided I wanted to write and self-publish two memoirs for starters. The muse suddenly struck in November of 2009 when I committed myself to the most compelling option I had—the story about my life with a drummer named Harry that I had been thinking about for four years. During that time, I had been telling myself that I just didn’t have time to write another book for so long that it had become habit, but something happened one day that woke my muse. By then, I had scanned the possibilities for what to write about and had focused on a particular idea, but I was still having a hard time getting started. We all need a bit of encouragement at times to pursue a new idea or goal, and thankfully, I got this push from a fellow author who had just published his own memoir. My phone conversations with him, and the email exchanges that followed, literally lit my fire! As soon as I committed myself to writing and publishing my first non-business book, there was no stopping me, and the book was in print five months later. In an article on The Author's Den, "Four Months on a Tank of Gas--The Secret Life of a New Memoirist," I tell the story of how this book grew from the gleam of an idea to a book in hand. If you’ve ever achieved a special goal, you know how good I felt when I held my first self-published memoir in hand. If you’re still making excuses for why you still haven’t done something your heart has been leading you to do, I hope this story will spur you forward. If you’ve simply been dithering too long about something, NOW is the perfect time to put Patricia’s simple formula to work for you: "Scan, focus, commit, begin." It worked for me, and I bet it will work for you, too. Telling the Good Guys from the BadAn email from one of my long-time readers reminded me once again that there are a lot of newbies surfing the Web without any real understanding of how the Internet works. Like my father, who died long before the Internet was a part of our lives, many people believe everything they read, whether in a book, in an email, or on a website. They don't understand how much of that information is incorrect, out-of-date, misleading, or dangerous. The Internet is rampant with con artists and businesses that have questionable reputations, and even pros sometimes find it hard to tell the good guys from those who wear black hats. All one has to do is click the wrong link in an email or on the wrong website to find themselves in a world of computer grief or financial loss. For example, one might think that anyone who advertises with Google ads are "the good guys" on the Web, but discernment is also needed here, and you must never think that a Google ad on anyone's site is an endorsement of that advertiser's products or services by the site owner. "I'm thinking about working with Writers Literary Agency for a children's book I want to have published," one of my long-time readers wrote. She had found the link on my site and had assumed I was recommending the company. But the link she clicked was simply a Google ad, not one of the helpful resources I had personally checked out. When I wrote back to explain that there were numerous complaints about this particular company, she said, "I spend very little time on the Internet and your newsletter and site are the only locations that I completely trust. I didn't realize I had clicked an advertisement on your site, and not one of your personal recommendations." Google randomly generates the ads that site owners place on their website by adding a few lines of HTML code. The site owner has no control over these ads, other than to log into Google and indicate ads they don't want included for one reason or another. Frankly, I don't have time to constantly monitor the many Google ads that populate my website pages and blacklist undesirable ads in my Google account. Like most everyone else, I am trusting that my site visitors will use discernment when dealing with ANY advertiser on the Web. The writer of the above email is way ahead of most folks her age, but she readily admits that she has a "high Internet handicap." So many website owners just assume that everyone knows how the Web works, but they don't. I have a legal disclaimer on my site that clearly states that, unless stated otherwise, I do not "guarantee, approve or endorse" the products or services linked to on my site, but I'm sure very few (if any) website visitors ever take the time to read a site's legal disclaimer. All this is simply to say that those of us who are savvy about the Web cannot automatically assume that everyone else is. Protecting Your Children from Identity TheftAs if we all don't have enough to worry about just trying to protect our own identity on the Web, now parents must regularly check their child’s credit report to make sure identity thieves haven't stolen their Social Security number. All children have to get a Social Security number upon birth, but for many of these children, that number won't be used for years. Now the hackers have learned how to find these inactive Social Security numbers and are using them to open new credit card accounts where they can run up thousands of dollars' worth of charges that will ultimately end up on the child's credit report as unpaid bills. If you're not already monitoring your child's credit report, you need to start doing this at once, and you can do it without charge by using the free Annual Credit Report service. There are many articles about this topic on the Web, but for starters, read "Identity Theft: Your Child at Risk" on CBS’s Money Watch site. (Four more articles on page 2 . . . Click here ===> |
Scan the possibilities.