I am writing this on my blackberry at 3am from a dark hospital room where our poor daughter has been since Friday, sick with severe abdominal pain. Between taking care of her, a big catalog project, and a various other websites, blogs, flash pieces and identity projects, there has been little time for any diversions lately.

Fortunately, this hospital (like nearly all nowadays) offers its patients and guests free wifi so we can get some work done and stay in touch with the living.

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Today I found this free downloadable ebook by Geekpreneur which outlines in simple language why they think Twitter is a great promotional tool for your business. This whole "microblogging" idea is sounding more and more convincing to me the more I read about it. Here’s a synposis:

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I discovered Chris Brogan from my recent Twitter experiment. His blog is an excellent resource of ideas, and this is one post that I particularly liked, as I have been trying to figure out how social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook can be beneficial to businesses– both my own, and my clients’.

Check out Chris Brogan’s 50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing. Some ideas I particularly like:

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Ever wonder what it would be like to see Jack Handy in a Leave-it-to-Beaver episode directed by David Lynch?

A month ago when I started this blog, I encouraged my dad, who is retired and has too much time on his hands, to start writing one too. Dad loves to read and write (he has a Ph.D. in English literature) but most of all, he loves to tell funny stories, and to force other people to parrot back things he finds funny, ad nauseam. I have often retold my Dad’s humorisms to other people, and thought it would be a really cool idea to get him to write everything down in his own words. So I set him up a free wordpress.com account, showed him how to use Windows Live Writer, and let him go. Bigdaddytype2 is the remarkable result. 

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I’ve read so much about Twitter lately that I decided it’s time to give it another shot. Today I logged onto Twitter, had it search for people in my Outlook address book who are members, and fellow HOWie Von Glitschka (illustrator extraordinaire) turned out to be a Twitterer. So I clicked "follow" and he wrote me back and became a follower of mine– kind of exciting!

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David read this article in the Dallas Morning News yesterday about another novel use for Twitter: as a play-by-play of what’s happening in Congress with the Republican uprising against Democratic leaders:

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I ran across this post by Rick Butts about why he thinks Twitter is better than Google for finding information. The gist of it is that:

• It’s easier to write a plain-English question in Twitter than it is to formulate the perfect search query in Google. (True)
• Twitter is composed of humans answering queries to the best of their abilities, whereas Google is nothing more than an inhuman giant database spitting back search results. (True)
• Twitter can’t be spammed or manipulated through fancy technological tricks (True)

“Just join Twitter and attract a group of followers and you’ll soon you’ll have created your own collection of living brain cells, capable of solving problems, reasoning, understanding fuzzy logic, and developing solutions, and pointing you directly to the answers you seek!”

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Today marks the end of our first month blogging! I have been so busy with work lately, including putting together 2 new corporate blogs for other clients, that I haven’t been able to post as much as I’d like, but it’s been a very interesting month of intense learning. During this month, I have installed 5 blogs from scratch, moved a blog 3 times to a different host, upgraded the blogs to the latest Wordpress 2.6, downloaded and experimented with dozens of themes, read thousands of articles and tips on blogging, and learned to customize themes by editing PHP. I’ve discovered the hard way that installing Wordpress on the root directory of your site breaks access to your WebDAV folders, required for comment-sharing on Acrobat. (Sorry, Music in Motion’s catalog department!) I have figured out where all the various components reside on Wordpress and how the structure works so it’s not quite as mysterious. Here are just some of the things I’ve learned about blogging and Wordpress so far:

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You gotta love those Japanese. Check out these aprons, designed by a prison official and cut, sewn and assembled by inmates at Hakodate Juvenile Prison on the northern island of Hokkaido.

Featuring the Japanese character for "jail" inside the circle, with "PRISON" printed in English below, they’ve been a huge hit among the non-incarcerated fashion conscious, and are totally sold out on their website. It’s been so popular, in fact, that the prison is planning to register the logo with the patent office.

The prison is not allowed to hire more staff to meet the demand, and the inmates are forbidden to work overtime.

But like every other hot selling design out there, it’s only a matter of time until somebody rips off this design. Toss those bootleggers in jail, and there you go! Instant labor pool!

Last week, my parents treated me to an amazing birthday dinner at Suze restaurant. For those of you (like me) who didn’t know about this gem of a restaurant, it’s a tiny New American bistro tucked in a shopping center off Northwest Highway and Midway in Dallas. It’s owned by chef Gilbert Garza and Lisa Garza, (Lisa, friends told me yesterday, is now in the final 3 on The Next Food Network Star). Also, we found out their excellent meats are supplied by one of our clients, Winn Meat Company.

Everything we ordered (lamb chops, parpadelle with veal, tenderloin and venison) was over-the-top outstanding: simply prepared dishes that were perfectly cooked and let the excellent ingredients take center stage. Check out this Guidelive review.

But the thing that really took our breath away was the lightly seared Hudson Valley Foie Gras with a cassis glaze (I think it had cherries in it too), caramelized and slightly crispy on the outside, and melt-in-your-mouth on the inside. I’m not going to say anything else for fear of this turning into a piece about food porn. But all I can say is, it’s by far the best foie gras any of us ever had, and we’ve been talking about it ever since.