Monika's Blog

My inbox is constantly filling up with requests from people asking ‘for just 15 minutes of your day’ for a phone call, or a brief introduction to their services that they are trying to sell me. Most of these emails are immediately archived or trashed, never to receive a response from me. I have honestly stopped reading most of them as people spell my name wrong, email me from a gmail account instead of a company URL, or are clearly cutting and pasting from previous emails to other people (it shows up in blue people! Come on!).

Recently though, I have had a few people actually take the time to get to know me as a person and send me emails that I not only responded to, but felt a desire to respond to.

Yes, I realize he was asking me for something, but he was also sharing an event with me, which made me want to respond. I emailed him back with some suggestions of events and told him I would let him know if I heard of any others. I also enjoyed the frankness of his comment “I’d carve out some time for you, but I assume that if you had any interest in —-, we would have spoken by now.” Which was very true, I had researched his company and services in the past and determined they were not right for me at the time.

I just love that they are showing me a side of themselves that make them more human as opposed to sending me some copy and pasted text that they have emailed to hundreds of other people (we can tell).

Now just because these people took the time to get to know me more personally, it does not mean that I will be using their services. I will, however, remember them and be more likely to continue a conversation with them later (which may lead to me doing business with them in the future).

It is just nice for an email to show up in my inbox with something different from the ‘normal’ emails that start out with ‘Hello Monica’ or better yet, ‘To whom it may concern’.

Zaarly got it’s start at Startup Week a few months ago and has been growing quickly ever since.

Never heard of Zaarly or not exactly sure what it is? Zaarly a platform that allows you to post something you want/need, attach an amount you are willing to pay as well as the time frame you need it by, and anyone in the area can decide if they want to provide that service/item to you.

This morning their iPhone app (iTunes link) launched and (being who I am) I just had to download it and try it out immediately.
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I use my Twitter favorites more often then not as a ‘read later’ or ‘don’t forget to share this with so and so later’ more than a ‘I love this tweet!’

Then I usually forget to go back and read the article or share the photos with anyone. I favorite tweets for different reasons, think it will be useful at work, it is about a band I like, I want to share it with someone etc. There are different reasons that I try to keep straight in my head, but I sometimes forget why I marked a tweet or article.

Earlier today I read an article on Keepstream and how they are trying to help you organize your tweets. At first I was not so sure I would use it, but I tried it anyways (I mean, I am a sucker for new technology).

I have to say that I am VERY impressed with it so far! Keepstream allows you to take your tweets (in my case, I used the tweets that I have favorited) and put them into different lists, or collections.

Most recently I have been trying to find all of the cool, fun, free, popular, etc SXSW parties to attend so that I can share them with my brother. Since most of them are mentioned on Twitter, I have been favoriting the tweets (and forgetting to send them to my brother). With Keepstream I can now go through my list and find all of the SXSW party tweets and organize them into one list that is both easy to share AND easy to embed elsewhere:

Now who knows how long I will actually use this service (just being honest), but at the moment I am in LOVE.

So I might be kind of a hoarder (especially when it comes to technology), but I do not like losing my information, whether it is photos, emails, websites, text messages etc. So when I offered my old 3GS to a friend who needed it more than my purse, my biggest concern was “how was I going to preserve my text messages that I had saved from 2008?”

Now I am sure you are asking “what is the big deal? They are just old text messages. Are you really ever going to read through them again?” Honestly I am not 100% sure why I want them all, I just know that I would be really sad to lose them.  The only ones that I really cared about were the ones from my friend Jason Schippers who passed away last year, the rest are just bonus, I suppose.

So why did I care about these messages from Jason? Well he helped me get through two really tough times in my life. We had bonded over Twitter when he reached out to me because of our mutual love and respect for Tickle Me Pink and shortly after that, we became good friends.

He was a very influential person when it came time for me to decide to move from Fort Collins to Boulder and break up with my ex-boyfriend. I was one of the first people he told when him and his wife decided to call it quits and get divorced. He was there for me when I found love again in Boulder, and again when my heart was broken. I was one of the people who talked him into moving back to Denver for a job. He always insisted I texted him before I left on a trip and he was the first one I texted when I landed (a tradition that I miss dearly). He always wanted to made sure I was safe.

For all the above reasons and more, I was just not willing to give up the past 3 years of text messages. I even went so far as to take screen shots of all our messages and was ready to save them to flickr to ensure I still had access to the messages. After asking Twitter how to save the messages, which turned out to be no help, I finally received a viable option to preserve text messages from a friend at PodCamp Boulder this past weekend. Michael Sitarzewski told me about Missing Sync which is a program that extracts and stores your text messages in an easy to read format. Yes, it did cost me $30 to download it, but the peace of mind was worth it to me. Losing that information would have eaten away at me (at least for a few months).

After reading through my conversation with Jason at least 3 times in the past few days, I am so grateful that I will always have access to our messages. I can look back at our texts and will forever be reminded about his biggest message to me: “smile.” Jason always told me he loved my smile. He was the person who could always text me and make me smile.

Now he will always continue to make me smile.

Yesterday I was having such a hard time using Larimer.org’s website and trying to figure out where to go to vote, but luckily I stumbled on this map from Google. All you have to do is enter in the address where you are registered and it will return a map showing you exactly where to go on November 2nd. Hopefully this will help others and encourage you all to go out and vote this year!

And yes, I am registered with a permanent mail in ballot but unfortunately for me, I am still registered at my ex’s house in Fort Collins and figured I would rather go vote than deal with contacting him to get my ballot.

While my dad and I were at the Flobots.org Bowling Ball on Saturday night, my mom stayed home to watch my brother’s puppy, Drake. She stumbled across Bakerella, who recently wrote a book about her famous cake pops.

My mom decided that we would attempt to make our own on Sunday, they looked so yummy and easy to make! The directions seemed simple enough; first you have to bake a cake. Then crumble it up and mix it with frosting (the get your hands dirty part):

After that you have to make them into small balls, which is a lot harder than it sounds. We also made ours WAY too big at first. Under the size of a golf ball seemed best:

While the cake balls were in the freezer (the longer the better, but not to the point of freezing) we microwaved the Wilton melting candy:

The first batch of candy melt seemed too thick, so we experimented with adding butter and other ingredients to the mix. Clearly it did not go too well:

Luckily the second experiment went much better. Vegetable oil (about 4 tablespoons) seemed to do the trick and gave the candy a good consistency. The first cake ball turned out great!

But there were many others that we were forced to eat as they were not up to our standards:

The finished result:

The cake pops look and taste great, but both my mom and I decided that we were not sure we would ever make them again. It was a little hard and frustrating when the pops did not turn out, and the instructions we were going off of were not very complete. We were happy we made them, but who knows when the next time we attempt making Cake Pops again.

Recently I have taken over the task of helping out my brother’s band, Tickle Me Pink, with the huge task of opening their own online marketplace to sell their merchandise to fans all over the US. Despite the fact that I work for an e-commerce website (DrillSpot.com), starting a new store from scratch is a ton of work!

While I have been researching different platforms over the past few weeks that offer easy back-end systems that allow you to sell products online, it was not until this weekend that I decided on which one we were going to use, BigCartel.com.

Originally I wanted to use Bandzoogle.com, but after signing up for their free trial and testing it out I decided that they offered many more features than what we required (website design, hosting, email campaigns, sms, fan club etc). Their backend was a bit clunky, not very user friendly and the themes they feature on their examples section are not available for all to use (the available ones were a lot more like old-school, bad Myspace themes). I decided to stick with using Tumblr for TickleMePink’s blog/main website and combine it with BigCartel’s store as opposed to throwing it all into Bandzoogle. (Note: these are my personal opinions and not reflective of the band).

When we started uploading products we were using the the free version of BigCartel but as we were sorting through all of Tickle Me Pink’s merchandise it became clear that we would need to upgrade to the $10 a month plan in order to display the 10 t-shirts, 1 hoodie and 1 cd that TMP currently sells:

As I said, the backend of BigCartel is simple, clean and makes it very easy to upload many products and images to your store:

Honestly the most time consuming parts of creating the store were:

1) setting up a BigCartel account (requires a PayPal business account – had to upgrade our original PayPal)

2) creating a sub-domain for TickleMePinkRock.com (this was probably just due to my own ignorance in the matter, but figuring out how to make GoDaddy, Tumblr and BigCartel work nicely took me a little while)

3) counting and organizing all of the merchandise (12 different shirts over 4 different sizes, mixed between 5 containers, oh my!)

4) photographing every item for their website:

It took me all weekend, but it was worth it! The official Tickle Me Pink store is up and running at store.TickleMePinkRock.com/products and we have even had our first sale! While creating this store was a bit of work, I highly encourage any band, or artist, who wants to sell their products online to take a look at BigCartel.com.