Entries from June 2008 ↓

Kinder Surprise - a set on Flickr: “”

So we’re coming back across the border from British Columbia to the US. My wife has never been in a duty free shop before, so we figured we’d stop. Talk about making the trip to Canada extra special. We found out the sell Kinder Eggs.

The picture is the still closed Kinder Egg Surprise. I won’t tell you here what’s inside, but I’d love you to see inside the Kinder egg.

These are apparently unable to be purchased inside the US, so I consider this an extremely lucky find. Do enjoy the photos, and be sure to share your Kinder stories.

Around the Valley in 60 Days: Hello to St.Peters, Missouri: “”

My brother-in-law gives us a shout out from his blog. He shares a picture of our twin granddaughters from our visit out there. Jerry also wrote us a nice note.

Thanks Jerry!

Pathwords is a Facebook word game by zynga.  If you’ve not played it, but love word games, check out Pathwords.  This article is to give you some tips once you’ve wet your whistle.

First off, it’s important to understand the scoring.  Let’s look at the word chart.

What immediately jumps out to you?  It’s how the points don’t scale up right?  The biggest bang for your buck in making longer words is from 3 letter to 4 letter words.  You’ll do the most to improve your game just getting out of scoring 3 letter words.

Another thing to notice is the significant jump at 7 and 8 letter words. To get there, you’ll have to do something besides look for longer words, you’ll need to create them.

Beyond scoring, there’s another trick to the words.  Have you ever thought you were out of words, even 3 letters long?  Not true.  The game never leaves you without a word.  So another key to mastery isn’t just longer words, by accident, or intent, but learn those three and four letter words cold.

A good example are GET GUT GIT.  Those words occur fairly frequently. Learn the more unusual ones with Z, V and J.  Those will be your most difficult letters to rid yourself of.

The dictionary used is the TWL Scrabble Dictionary. Check out the Official Tournament Word List entry on Wikipedia.

The zynga team provided their own tips in the help section of the Pathwords game.

• Instead of clicking the Submit button, you can click the last letter of your word again.
• You can also drag the mouse to form your word. When you release the mouse button, your word will be submitted.
• Be careful of how you use shuffles. The first one costs a mere 20 points, but they can get very expensive very quickly. If you don’t have enough points to pay for the next shuffle, you can’t use this feature.
• Expert players will manage their letters carefully to help them form big words for huge points.
• Check out your current word right underneath the board. If your current letters form a legal words, the word will be green. If not, the word will be red.

These aren’t word tips, but trust me, playing with mouse drag is the fastest way to go.  I actually find this true even with the touchpad on my Mac Book Pro.

So let’s sum up.

• Make longer words when possible
• Create longer words on your own, be selective when you have choices
• Learn the three and four letter words by heart
• Focus on learning words for V, J, and Z.
• There is always a word.

Let’s get playing.  Be sure to friend me on Facebook and challenge me to a game of Pathwords.

Readers of this blog will already know how I spent part of my Canada visit engaged in social networking. But it didn’t stop there.

My wife and I had the chance to meet Glenda Watson-Hyatt in person as well. Glenda and her husband Darrell hosted us for lunch in Surrey, BC. We met at the City Center Brewery.

Glenda is both an author and professional blogger. I came to know her first though through Twitter. Yep, Twitter. She’s a social media maven like me.

Glenda welcomed us with open arms and a smile. I immediately felt like a real friend. As she led my wife and I into the restaurant though, I had to race to keep up. She’s no slow poke.

This lunch proved to be one that Sharon and I were loath to end. The time was one of good food, good stories, and good friends. But it also brought home some lessons for life and social networking about meeting in person.

People are so much more than a few characters in a Twitter message. Sure, people tell you their favorite color or drink, or where they like to eat, or mention their struggles. But until you sit across the table from them at their favorite restaurant, you don’t know the why’s and real what’s of those things. And you begin to understand why sometimes you didn’t get the jokes before.

Hugs and handshakes cement a relationship like few things in life. Yes, you can share your profile, and pictures of your kids and dogs, but that’s all superficial stuff. Stuff your neighbors know and maybe your kids’ friends even. But how many times have you hugged those folks? Hugs, even among gents, are considered a hallmark sign of friendship. Hugs welcome someone closer than any stranger has a right to be.

Appreciation happens. Yes, we say we appreciate each other. But when was the last time you didn’t gripe about picking up your kids, and they’re only ten minutes away. How good does it feel then to have someone travel hundreds of miles to meet in person. Or how much more do you appreciate someone and time with them when you’ve traveled far to share a few minutes with them.

Glenda has cerebral palsy. You’d never know it from her online presence if you didn’t read her blog. She’s feisty and full of more energy than most of us. Her blog is constantly updated, she’s authoring another book, and she’s extremely active on Twitter, other folks’ blogs and more.

She’s the same in person, but wheelchair bound and each syllable a struggle to get out. Meeting her made me feel really humble. I thought I understood the effort she was putting into having such an active life online and off, and now I’m struggling to express myself without feeling to shameful. She wouldn’t want that for me I know.

Glenda hugged me like she meant it. Wow. We’d only ever chatted online with no video sessions and no audio. She’d only heard I was a nice guy, and hopefully thought so from my online presence. But she made me feel welcomed with that hug. Like we were long separated friends. And she had so much energy, it’s hard to tell you that.

Each word was a struggle, yet she shared how happy she was to meet in person. I realized how much our relationship meant to her as well. Not only did she put up with me catching on to her lingo, but Darrell and her had to trek across town in their wheelchairs just to dine with us. Talk about feeling appreciated. To top it off, she gave us a personal copy of her book, I’ll Do It Myself.

Sharing lunch with Glenda was a highlight of my week and vacation. Yeah, we’d exchanged dozens of messages, and postcards even, but wow did I so not know her. Nor did I realize how enjoyable her company would be. Darrell was an added bonus. He not only played translator but was a great lunch companion. Not afraid to make recommendations, nor to put back a cold one with us. You know what I say, the best way to share with friends is over a good meal.

So yeah, chat yourself up, have a thousand friends on Facebook or whatever, but don’t count yourself lucky until you’ve taken that relationship offline as well. This year has been a fantastic series of meeting online contacts in the flesh. There was the MidWest Media Conference, the St. Louis Blogger meet ups, and the Social Media Club St. Louis meet. Then how about the trip to Austin with tweetups, lunches, and breakfast tacos. Oh yeah, and how about the Lo-Fi St. Louis Restart party at the Mad Art Gallery!

To think, the year is just now about half over. I can’t wait to take social networking to the pub, diner, or dance floor next. Where are you meeting your contacts?

My vacation plans started off ordinarily enough, time away from work and visiting with family. In this case, the family is my daughter-in-law and granddaughters up in Washington State. The plan was one week up there, visiting and perhaps drifting up to Seattle for a day or two. Well, things changed!

In my searching around for things to do, I came across some folks that sent me to a link on Jeff Pulver’s next breakfasts. Guess where? Seattle and Vancouver on back to back days! Yeah. We’d thought already about heading into Seattle, Vancouver, or both, so I was excited about this.

As it turned out, Seattle was too hard to make, so we changed plans to make a week day trip to British Columbia and have breakfast the next day. That travel adventure is fodder for another post.

The breakfast was held in down town Vancouver at the Subeez Cafe. Sharon and I arrived about 8:30, and the meet-up portion was already in full swing. There was Jeff, live and in person, elbow deep in schmoozing with the locals. It seems folks from all over the area were interested in this get together.

Minutes after getting there, we were handed our personal social networking tool kits. If you’ve never seen one, then please check out this Facebook video. Jeff explains it all.

Kit in hand, we quickly put on our name tags and gave ourselves tag lines. I labeled myself as a social media gadabout. Sharon chose the oh so true social media widow. This made a great intro for discussions folks had with her. Moments later, someone handed us each some other tags to label ourselves with. Tagging is a big part of these breakfasts.

We spent some moments looking around this rather unique restaurant, but most of the time after our tagging was spent in deep conversations, and there was plenty to talk about. Conversations obviously included social media and networking as topics, but also strayed into all kinds of areas. Sharon ended up talking about our travels, where we’re from and learned plenty about Canada from Ian Hood and Roland Tangloa. These gents made us feel the more like friends than strangers. Of course my wife is like that with folks anyway. Ha.

Everyone was talking and there was a wealth of interesting folks to engage there. Jeff Pulver was going to be my primary target but once I got settled, I found there were others just as interesting. And just so much I couldn’t take it all in. If you get a chance to go, do talk with Jeff, but don’t ignore all the wonderful people like yourself that showed up as well.

Conversation didn’t come to an end even when breakfast arrived. The breakfast was a treat and a nice surprise. Originally this was going to be a continental breakfast. In most places that means bagels, fruit, cereal etc. Not so here.

The Subeez Cafe apparently doesn’t serve breakfast regularly. So for us they whipped special up. Check out this picture.

The first thing to catch my eye was the fresh fruit. Strawberries and apples fresh cut and colorful sat nicely on each plate. This was the first time though I’d had fresh fruit and toast though. Turkey sausage and baked beans nestled nicely with fluffy scrambled eggs between the fruit and toast. To top off the toast, there was a side of peanut butter on each plate. Needless to say, the breakfast drew much of the immediate conversation.

Interesting things besides breakfast included that I’ve been a much busier Twitter user than most in attendance. Most folks there used other social networking tools, though no one had heard of Plurk yet. Facebook seemed popular though, and several folks had full blown websites and blogs. Photography seemed popular as well, with several folks having cameras and video going.

What did I take away from this? What value added did it have in my life? The biggest thing for me was getting face time with folks I’d normally only meet online. In a world where many of us will communicate but never shake hands, this is even more important. Being there in person also allows for more intimate communication, including other forms of personal communication, such as body language and expressions. There’s nothing quite like a real life wink to cement meaning in a message.

Documenting this with words isn’t doing this event justice, so I took some pictures as well. Please check out my pictures of the Vancouver Jeff Pulver breakfast. If you’re on Facebook, be sure to check out the event page. Please feel free to tag the pictures, and leave comments if you know anyone in them.

Now what? Now I start planning on joining Jeff Pulver for breakfast in St. Louis. How about you?

Look what I received for Father’s Day!

Spore Creature Creator is the prelude game to the upcoming Spore game from Will Wright and EA.

The creature creator allows you to design and play with your creatures before the full game comes out in September. Players can design just about any creature they can imagine, controlling the number of eyes, ears, arms, legs, and more. Why limit yourself to a regular bipedal beast when you can give it six arms and eight legs?

Adding things to the design doesn’t just make for looks. More legs equals more speed. More armor means more health, and more eyes can make your creature a charmer. Along with speed and charm, each creation will have various attacks and benefits based on what’s added.

The Spore website has a free version of the creature creator with about 20% of the full range of parts in the full price version.

Spore Creature Creator and Spore is being released in both PC and Mac versions at the same time. Yahoo!

Come visit my Spore page if you will and share yours back, here in the comments.

     Have you used plurk to do more than chit, chat, brag and bemoan? Well Sunday night I gave plurk a try as a group fun platform.

     Lots of folks make jokes or puns, but I think we’ve missed out on a use.  Plurk posts and comments act the same as a thread in forums.  So I figured why not play with that.

     My first few trials were with numbers. Here’s my first number sequence, and here’s my second.  Those both got a response, so I decided to give something else a try.  How about Bible  books.

     Bible books should be fairly easy but it took a while to take off. Here’s the Bible thread. At the time of this writing, it left off at 2nd Chronicles. Thanks Phil Crissman for jumping in.

     The final fun game is still ongoing and just about halfway there. Name 200 cities with no repeats. Feel free to bzzt folks that mess up.

     Are you getting a good sense of what I’m going for?  I see plurk as a chance to do a lot of free form games.  I’m thinking beyond simple name and number games.  There’s potential to do games requiring links to make it work.

     What about you? Any plurk game ideas?  Have you heard of fizzbuzz? I’m thinking that one is on the list for sure.

This work is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 License.

d3bruts1d says Plurk is the World of Warcraft of micro-blogging.