I am not sure of the source that my parents attained a copy but over the last few years I have created a digital copy and made some updates in some of it’s original lingo.

It is my hope and prayer that this may be of use to you and your loved ones as we never anticipate our heavenly birthday but in that event I hope we can each so our best to provide our loved ones some answers to make the process smoother for them.

Drop me a line if you have further questions or comments about the answer book.

download answer_book.pdf

Answer Book by Robert Mitchell is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Well you will not find the answer in this one post. I hope you don’t stop reading right now, because there will be some tips. Lately, I have just been hearing too much of how my wife and I are lucky to have such great sleepers. People not understanding how our kids can take such great naps and then sleep 12-14 hours at a night, etc…

The only way I consider us lucky is that a friend of a friend gave a book to our friend when she was pregnant and our friend in turn recommended it to us. My wife first borrowed the book and then loved it so much we bought our own copy of “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child” by Marc Weissbluth, M.D. around the time our daughter was born in 2006.

I will say upfront the book is not a storybook read. It is more of a textbook read and I personally would not just sit down a read cover to cover. The book is broken up into sections and I recomend that you just read the section that your child is in and preread the section that your child will be into next. The joy and curse of babies is that they are constantly changing, growing and developing. With all of these changes they will constantly be changing their sleep habits on you. Personally I felt it would be right when I got our daughter figured out, she would be doing something else. It was and still is a great joy to watch her grow into a little girl that loves her sleep.

It is my desire to post something every now and then of our journey as parents as we try to teach our kids healthy sleep habits in hopes that you may find support and possibly glean tips in teaching your kid(s) healthy sleep habits.

Some tips from my experience to help in organizing digital photos and scanned photos so that you don’t have multiple DSC0120, IMG5612, etc…

{STEPS}

1. Create a NEW folder called YEAR. (i.e. “2009″)
2. Create a NEW folder called TEMP within YEAR (i.e. “2009″ > “TEMP”
3. Whenever you bring pictures off your camera, load them into your TEMP folder!
4. Go through and delete bad, close to duplicates, etc…
5. Using a program like Adobe Bridge, Google’s Picassa. Do a batch rename of all you files to the date created as YEARMONTHDATE (i.e. 20090609_001.jpg, 20090609_002.jpg or 20090609_robert heather in backyard.jpg, 20090609_grace abraham in the pool.jpg
6. Tag each of your photos with keywords (i.e. name, place, etc…) Keywords can be whatever you want. The key is to use words that will help you in being able to do a search for photos later using the keywords assigned to each of the photos.
7. Edit the photos as needed (i.e. crop, lighten, darken, etc…)
8. Now you can move these photos to the “YEAR” folder or subfolder (i.e. “2009 > “01-03_Jan_Mar”, “2009 > “04-06_Apr_Jun”, or however you want to name you subfolders.)

The overall key is to first place the photos in a general TEMP folder so that you know these photos have not been looked through. They need to be renamed, tagged with keywords, edited, etc… Once they are in the overarching YEAR folder, you know that these are the photos you wanted to keep and importantly to find quickly and view the photos you were looking for.

Please comment if you have questions or other digital photo organization tips to share.

One huge marketing and tool found on the web now is video. For the average non-profit or small business, it would be wise to partner with branded video players like, Vimeo than to spend time and resources on developing or purchasing a video player to play video content. A major reason to partner with them is because they have already worked out many of the plug and play bugs and functions. Even with purchased video media players the setup of, storage of, and rendering of the movie files would have to be managed and that often gets missed. Even when it comes to my anablepomedia flash site. Looking back on the amount of time that went into creating a flash video player, it took a lot of time. Personally I plowed through trying to learn how to create custom video players through flash so that I could evaluate it and for a school project.

A major buzzword of the web is social networks! There are companies that provide a closed “social network” to ensure privacy and create a “close network”. Why go through the trouble of creating a individual social network when there are tools like facebook that already have a large network of people. The great thing about facebook is that you can promote networking of people inside & outside of your own organization/company. You can create a group (private or public) to represent your organization and network within that group. Events for that group can be created, the group page can be used as bulletin board postings, etc…

Just about every organization large or small has a calendar. There are many services that provide online calendars for a monthly or yearly fee. Google has a calendar that is free and can be applied to many various web applications. It also allows multiple users to administrate the calendar’s events. Calendar’s can be public to everyone or be private for a select group/organization.

The key with any white-label technology is to find out what it offer’s, any limitation’s, etc… As with anything there are pluses and minuses. Then it’s a matter of creating and utilizing the tools for the best interests and marketability of your organization/company. For the majority of non-profits and small businesses to create their own brand of video players or social networks will not result in the best bang for the buck. There are however circumstances when it would be best to branch from facebook into a low cost alternative social networking like Ning. One must consider the trade off of losing the existing community found through YouTube, Vimeo, facebook to creating one’s own brand.