Chipmunk Videos

This week I finished 5 short chipmunk videos which I am planning to put on the poetlady website. It's fun to watch those little critters getting ready for winter. My girlfriend likes give everything a name so we call them Sassy and Spike. Oh, and the squirrel is named Buster. We don't have any video of Buster because he doesn't come around too often. Sassy will jump right on our lap to eat peanuts out of our hand. It is worth seeing if you like cute furry animals. Well, that's all for this week. Don't forget to visit the Poetlady Flower Shop.

Video Bombs

I was browsing one of the popular video clip sites the other day and found several videos of the famous Diet Coke + Mentos combination. For those of you that haven't heard about this, if you put Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke, there is a reaction that causes the liquid to rapidly expand. Some people, mostly kids, have video taped their experiments. Many of the videos show a two liter bottle sitting on the ground and the liquid shooting out like a geyser when the Mentos are added. But some of the videos show people throwing the bottles onto a hard surface, turning them into rockets that go several hundred feet into the air. Then I came across several videos that show what happens when you combine clorine and rubbing alchol. I was amazed that such dangerous activity is available for kids to watch. One video even showed a bottle exploding in a boy's hand. It seems like they need to put some controls in place to prevent kids from watching this stuff.

Budget Video Clips

My GF Poetlady is heading back to Texas for a few weeks. That should give me time to work on the videos I mentioned in my last posting. It is surprising how popular video clip web sites have gotten lately. People are posting all kinds of funny and unusual videos. The standard length seems to be 2 or 3 minutes, about the length of a music video. That seems to be the limit of anyone's attention span these days. It will be interesting to see what I can come up with since I edit video for my job as a media technician. The clips I am looking forward to putting on the web show a chipmunk eating out of my hand. There should be some other interesting clips once I start looking at the video that my GF took on her last trip to Texas. Who knows, maybe I'll even post a few on youtube.

End of Summer

Not much to report on the Budget business front this week. I did get some bumper stickers made up at a place on the Internet called Makestickers.com. They have an excellent order process that lets you customize and preview your design online. They provide fast service and can keep track of your designs for reordering. They have reasonable prices and do a great job, I recommend them highly. Now that we are into September the days are getting shorter and the temperature is getting cooler. I hope we have a mild winter. I am looking forward to a productive September and October as I have a number of personal video projects from this summer that are now waiting to be completed.

Budget Brochures

This week I made a business brochure for a client. Brochures are a lot like web pages. They contain information and have nice graphics and are made to help get customers interested in your business. Once you have a brochure it can be handed out at trade shows or mailed directly to a customer. A good way to get started is to try to make the brochure yourself, and then send it to a professional to see how much they can improvement on it. The text or content in the brochure is the part you need to concentrate on and let the graphic designer worry about fonts, colors, and layout. Have a few people look at the finished product, and once everyone is happy with the design, have copies printed at a local print shop using high quality paper. You can do the printing yourself if you have good equipment and don't need more than 50 copies.