Latest Wood Project

I just finished my latest wood working project. I made two book shelves previous to this which turned out pretty good. This one is a shelf for my audio equipment and is my first attempt at using a router. The router was easy to work with and adds a nice professional touch. All of the fasteners are hidden from view, which makes it look more like a real piece of furniture. I designed this myself, so I had to put a lot of thought into how I was going to connect each piece. I have my stereo speakers fitting into the end cabinets. Previously, I had a piece of plywood setting on top of the speakers for a shelf, so this is a vast improvement. Most of the boards are laminated pine, which is a good choice if you need a long, 16 or 18 inch wide board for your project. For the finish, I used Minwax Polyshades Gloss Honey Pine #410. I put three coats on the top to give it an extra glossy finish. It's nice to have a project that you can take your time with. Working with wood can be a good diversion from computers and web design.

Tweet, Tweet, buy my sh...

It's getting hard to keep up with the latest social networking site. The list is getting long: AngelFire, then Netscape, then Yahoo, then MSN, then Google, then My Space, then FaceBook, and now Twitter. I've been posting on Blogger (which is now part of Google) for several years. Unfortunately, I still don't have a single registered follower on here. So, it looks like if you want people to read your posts, you have to either be famous, or join the latest fad social networking site.

The thing that's really crazy, is when companies try to chase the crowd, thinking they are missing out on a marketing opportunity. They have to try and figure out how to "sell" themselves on the latest site. It just seems to me that a lot of hours are being wasted on this type of marketing and the only people who are getting publicity are the people who started the site to begin with. The rest of us "techies" are quietly jealous of their success, knowing that Google, Amazon, or Ebay are going to buy them out for million's someday.

I could write the best book or design the best time saving application, but no one would know about it without marketing. But the companies who think they can go on a social networking site and market for free, are going to have to keep moving when the crowd packs up and moves to the next best thing. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be 3 or 4 steps behind the times wondering what fantastic things we are missing.