Lookin’ for a freebie?

A product that I made showed up in the Agenda of the October 2009 issue of Digital Artist Magazine [available here]. (That should probably read available “intermittently” here because the server crashes gets overloaded quickly whenever a new issue is released – so when I went to get the link, the store was actually down. It’s there though, under those “Page Not Found” errors.)

Anyway, it’s a project I was really happy about because my good, dear, fabulous friend Christine (a.k.a. listgirl of Adventures of Listgirl) has been making freebie templates for Project 365ers this year, and recently set her mind to creating a cozy storefront for herself so that she can create and sell more templates. Christine comes up with designs I’d never come up with – partly because I’m what they call a “whitespacer” – but mostly because my brain just isn’t wired that way. When I see a square, it’s a square. When Christine sees a square, she’ll cut it up into a bunch of triangles, stitch it all together, flip it around a few times and leave you wondering why you’re so dense.

So when she decided she wanted to open her store on November 1st, I wanted to find some sort of way to lend my support to her new endeavor. Then she left me alone for a few days while she visited family in Ohio, and I found myself having this insane idea to make some free papers! So I did that, and sprung the idea on her when she returned home all like “SUHPRIZE!!! I made theez 4 ur grand opening!” like some sort of demented freak. Then over the next couple of days I wanted to throw some other odds and ends in there to make it into a mini kit – and when I was done messin’ with it I sent it off to her because she has considerably more bandwidth than I do.

I wanted to find some way to show my support for a great friend in her new endeavor (which may propel her into a mental breakdown .. haha), and because I’m so optimistic about her prospects as a shop owner, I called it “Optimist” … because that’s how I roll.

On November 1st it will be available as a free download in her store – and I’ll pop back in here and post a link once I have one.

Loyal Customer

Tom and I are both collectors of digital “stuff”. People sometimes pick on us for not being packrats, because we don’t keep a lot of tsotchkes and memorabilia around the house. We tell them they should sit down and browse our hard drives, though. For every one thing we throw/give away in real life we probably acquire fifty digital “somethings”.

We have, over the past two years, acquired several external hard drives to store our nonsense. Instead of deleting things we just add more hard drives to the line. In Tom’s office downstairs we have two Western Digital MyBook drives, which I can’t say enough great things about. Those total 1.5TB of space. Then for my laptop, I keep a portable 250GB Western Digital Passport (USB powered) which goes wherever my laptop goes, and then I purchased a 500GB Seagate FreeAgent Desk Drive at one point and its sole purpose has always been to back-up my laptop and the little Passport drive. Mine is older and less fancy than this one, but it’s the same gist:

[via Seagate.com]

It’s our only Seagate, you’ll see. It was on sale at Office Depot one time, I couldn’t pass up the deal so I adopted it.

Fast forward about a year, and I adopted this – Sisko, the cord chewing cat:

This is cute, isn’t it? I do love this. But this? THIS eats cords. This LOVES cords. THIS is a cord eating machine. If eating power cords were an Olympic event, this animal would be the Michael Phelps of cord eating. There have been many times when we’ve expected to arrive home and find a cat-shaped burn mark in the carpet surrounded by white fur from where THIS was electrocuted.

And before anyone sends me emails, we do spray all our cords with a product called YUCK! – which lives up to its name. YUCK! tastes like crap. You can’t YUCK! a bunch of cords without ingesting a bunch of YUCK! vapors yourself. And the YUCK! works like a charm right up until the YUCK! wears off. Then we have to reYUCK! everything.

Do you know how we figure out that the YUCK! has worn off? I’m sure you see where I’m going with this.

About two weeks ago the YUCK! on the power cord for my Seagate drive must have lost all of its YUCK! factor, because we were down in Tom’s office working (in our respective areas) and we noticed Sisko looked a little too pleased with himself. A short investigation turned up a severed power cord and my poor little Seagate Drive – ’twas dead. The cat? Perfectly fine.

Tom poked around the Internet a bit trying to find a replacement one and wound up tracking one down somewhere – a computer parts store … Amazon.com .. I’m not entirely sure. The damage was going to be about $23 if I remember correctly. Just another $23 to add to Sisko’s tab. If you could invest money in a cat the way you invest money in fixing up a home, then I’d have quite a bit of equity in Sisko. If they ever come up with a Cat Equity Line of Credit then that sound you’ll hear will be me laughing all the way to Cabo.

A few days later Tom emailed Seagate directly to inquire about a replacement cord – and he was brutally honest about it. No smoke and mirrors here! The email laid it all out on the table – our crazy freaking cat eats power cords for sport. Just ‘cuz. Because he has teeth, and cords are there, and they’re ever-so-tantalizing with their plastic coatings and their delicious wires.

A short while later he received an email back asking for his mailing address – which I think he assumed was for a shipping quote – and after he sent the address he received another email saying that his information was being forwarded to the correct department. At this point he said to me “I think they’re just … sending a cord?” And I was all “Nooooo … would they do that?” Nobody replaces your stuff for free. The knob on our dryer broke months ago and there’s no shortage of hoops we have to jump through to get one of those suckers. And the charging unit for our weed eater died over a year ago – but the replacement charger/battery costs more than a whole new weed eater. So there was no way we were getting a replacement power cord THAT THE CORD EATING CAT got ahold of.

Then on Monday the UPS man dropped a package on my doorstep and inside – a replacement cord for one Seagate External Hard Drive. No questions, no hassles, no web forms or hoops – and NO CHARGE.

My 500GB drive is just a hair shy of being completely full – occupational hazard really – so my plan was to pick up a 1TB drive around the holidays when there are a lot of deals on EHDs to be had. And I was going to pick up another Western Digital since all of our other drives are WDs. But I’m easily bought – and I think Seagate owns me now.

Free Stuff :)

From Paislee Press!

Liz just created a Blurb.com book to document the first three months with their new baby girl, and a reader requested that she turn the photo mosaic from her opening page into a Press Plate template – which she’s offering to her blog readers for free.

So you can use it to create your own photo mosaic, or to clip papers to as a background for your pages, or a mixture of both – the world is your oyster!

Reading {10.8.09}

50 Awesome Billboards: Doesn’t this one seem like a cruel, cruel trick? I’ve long suspected that the folks at Nike have an evil streak, but this confirms it.

[via one cool pick by {one cool chick}]

On my Sony Reader: I’m about to start this one by Kathryn Stockett. It’s pretty popular over at GoodReads but I’m always a bit behind the curve. Have you read it?

[via Amazon.com]

My Parents Were Awesome: A Tumblr site where readers can submit photographic proof that their parents were, at one point in their lives, as cool as they say they were. I need to dig out some vintage photos of my mom.

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