Blog Standard Stuff

Earlier this evening I decided to post something to the local Freecycle list - a mattress that we’ve had kicking around, never used, but is just a bit on the lightweight and (for me at least) not very comfortable side. I used the ‘message maker‘ - a web page that has a form you complete which generates an email with all the necessary bits required, including something called the fair use policy. I didn’t read what it involved, but clicked the checkbox anyway, as it seemed like the right thing to do. After sending the mail, I realised that it had added this to my outgoing message:

Fair Offer Policy: I agree to wait 24 hours to see what responses I
get before deciding who to give my item/s to. This gives members on
Daily Digest, or those who don’t have continual access to the
Internet a fair chance to reply.

Wow, that little phrase there really changes the responses you get. No longer is it first-come, first-served. Instead, the responses are all about who’s most deserving of the freebie. Here are just a handful of the responses I got (all typos are theirs, and I can’t be arsed to tidy up for them):

hi if this is still available i would be very greatful for it as our
matrress (passed down from family) has got the springs sticking out and half of the buttons missing,its very uncomfortable to try and
sleep on but cash is tight so cant afford to buy one new for quite a
while.we can collect anytime over the weekend sunday would be better
for us but if saturday would be better then im sure we can do that.if
you want it gone before that i could pop round after school
hours.many thanks lisa

A good one for starters. A mattress that has "passed down from family", like some kind of heirloom? "Here you go, son, this was my father’s and my grandfather’s before him, and now I’m letting you have it". My heart bleeds. Probably because of the those vicious sticky-out springs. It’s uncomfortable but there’s no cash to buy a new one "for quite a while" - evidently they’ve calculated how long they need to save up for a new one (but the broadband and computer obviously gets funded - much more important than sleep, after all). Fail! So, I thought this response was atypical. How wrong I was:

I would be so very grateful of this for my sister, who is having to use a blow up matteress at the moment. Due to a serious incident her mattress was taken away by police and she has not been able to afford to replace it yet. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this.

Now it’s the sister who’s suffering, and on a "blow-up mattress" too. But what’s this? "Due to a serious incident her mattress was taken away by police". ? And again ? WTF? Let’s hope it wasn’t anything serious, like a stabbing incident which caused the police to remove it for DNA testing or something. And if it was, let’s hope it doesn’t hapen again - it’s a blow-up mattress, after all, and wouldn’t take a puncture very well. Anyway, if I am to give away a mattress, the last person I want to invite over to my house to collect is someone who admits in their begging note that their last mattress was in some way involved with a "serious incident" that required the police to take it away from the scene of the crime. Who are these people? Fail! Who’s next?

Hello I hope I am not to late to ask about this. I would like to ask you if I could have it please I am disabled and on a very low income my Husband is a large framed man and he has killed the mattress that is on the bed. It does not have any spring in it and I cant even lay on it these days with out being in pain. even to sit on it the mattress is uncomfortable. This would be so welcomed in my home please.

I think this one might be genuine. But the husband "a large framed man" has, apparantly, "killed the mattress". Perhaps it was the same man who was responsible for the previous lady’s mattress which appears to have met an unfortunate end? Anyway, they didn’t get the mattress on the basis that I know that if I find the mattress squidgy and not up to supporting my 13-stone carcass without giving me backache in the morning, it won’t be any good for said disabled lady and her large-framed husband. So, who’s next in the queue?

Oh, YES PLEASE!!! We desperately need a new mattress as ours has
outlived its lifespan and I’m waking with backache. I prefer a
softer mattress. My husband and I keep meaning to go look for a new
mattress but with a very hyperactive little boy we foster, we just
never seem to find the time to go looking and buying one!! You would
be saving us an ENORMOUS effort if you would allow us to have it! We
just never seem to have any leisure time at all!

Suffering from back pains? Check. No time to get a new one? Check? Tugging at heart strings by letting me know that they are good people who take on foster children? Check. Again, might be genuine, but who knows for sure. Finally:

hello, i would really love this as mine has just about had it with
the springs sticking through, and i dont seem to be able to get one on
here always gone before i can ask , or as i dont drive and have to
arrange it with family, i think they give it to first to collect. but
never mind if its gone i will keep trying, but i would be very grateful
of it.

Another person suffering from deadly sticky-out springs. Seriously, does this happen anywhere other than Tom & Jerry cartoons? Apparently it does. Swindon seems to be plagued with inferior-springed mattresses, by the look of it.

Oh. Wow. This is just perfect. I had said ‘finally’ a moment ago, but just as I finished the last paragraph, another response came in. Perfect timing! And this one has it all:

do you still have this available please? as a single mum i cannot afford to replace the one i have (which has springs poking out all over lol)..we have just moved to your area,we are in newhall street….my eldest and i could walk it round the corner at your convienience …
please please please…. i am so desperate to get a good nights sleep but what with christmas and my 3 children needed new ones when we moved alas mummy gets overlooked lol

In the end, I decided to offer the mattress to none of the above. The winner simply wrote:

yes pls can i collect it patricia

To which I replied:

As you replied with the most straightforward and non-creepy ‘woe is me’ tale, I’m giving you first dibs on this.

So, FreeCyclers, the lesson if you want something from lloydi is to cut the crap and keep it simple. Oh, and a bit of punctuation, spell-checking wouldn’t go amiss, either. Tsk tsk.

Now I don’t claim to be – and nor will I ever claim to be – a good logo designer. In fact, you could omit the word ‘good’ from that last sentence and it would still be truthful. But I recently ended up doing some logo work as a favour for family.

Some of Manda’s relatives have gone into a business venture together (a Chinese Buffet in Swindon, Wiltshire), and I offered to help by building a web site for them. I knew that they had enough financial outlays, and didn’t want them to get someone else to do it and either be charged too much or get a shoddy product, or both! I knew, also, that it didn’t need to be too involved – just a web site to give people an idea of prices, what’s on the menu, a booking form (Christmas bookings much welcomed!), all fairly simple stuff.

But the original logo designs I saw were not great. The ideas were created in PowerPoint by one of her family and I couldn’t help but think "That really shouldn’t go up out the front of the building", plus there were other considerations like letter headings, menus, flyers etc. Admittedly, these are things that I’d not thought of before, as I’d never had to.

Knowing that that Photoshop is not the best tool for logo design, and acknowledging that it would take me an age to get something half decent together in Illustrator, I ended up using the simple drawing tools in Skitch, a program that’s really only designed as a screen grab tool, with some basic tools for annotation/highlighting etc. But I have found them to be a real joy to use. And so I ended up creating the main logo and other related images entirely in Skitch. The image can output as SVG - it’s all vector-based.

Last week the restaurant opened for business, and I couldn’t believe how good the logo looked in place on the front of the building. The simple black background contrasting with the backlit red and orange was so effective – from a distance, it was clear to see that there was something new at the site, and I really hope that it draws attention to random passers-by, just as it did to me. Naturally, I hope that they are able to make a success of the business and if they do, I can feel happy that I may have contributed in some way towards that goal.

‘cos I paid a man to iconize me … and I’ve either aged a few years (e.g. 10) or I really have a false self-perception!

There’s an exellent post over on Joe Clark’s site today entitled Advice for presentations: It happens! In this lengthy piece (well, this is Joe!), Joe imparts some of his knowledge on what makes for a good presentation and how to deal with things when they go a little (or quite badly) wrong.

I’m pleased to report that I can tick most of the boxes where preparation is concerned, but I wanted to elaborate on one point that Joe makes regarding setting up browsers in advance for anything that you want to demonstrate. My advice - don’t.

In my experience, most of the conferences that offer wireless connectivity suffer almost from the word go, such that good connections - or any connection at all - cannot be guaranteed. Thankfully, it’s never happened while I’ve been presenting, but I cannot say how many times I’ve seen people presenting visibly flapping because their idea of showing off a feature of site A or site B has to be cancelled becaue they can’t connect. And even when there is a connection, the mere fact that you may have 800 eyeballs staring at you means that when you are trying to do something like fill out a form, you will make stupid mistakes, you will fumble, you will find it uncomfortable as there is silence while you wait for the browser to do something.

So, I’d like to add to Joe’s already excellent list of tips with one of my own: pre-record anything that you want to demonstrate.

In many presentations that I’ve given of late, I’ve used screencasts embedded in my slides. I can do however many takes I have the time and patience for at home, keep that video file for the presentation and re-use later. In that screencast, I make sure to allow for live explanation of what’s happening - usually accompanied with a circular motion of the mouse around the section I might want to refer to - and when presenting it, the cursor is in itself a prompt for me to describe that feature. Another advantage of this approach is that you *know* how long the demo portions will take, which makes timing as a wholemuch easier.

There’s no problem with lack of internet connection, although you have to be aware that if you rely heavily on the visuals, a hard drive failure or other similar disaster means that you will not be able to wing it using notes alone (but, again, you can prepare by having backups of slides on a key drive, and even a backup ‘pooter).

So, that’s my way of doing things, and it really makes presenting so much more stress-free :-)

Well, the crux of this post is right there in the heading, but that’s not all I wanted to write about.

Yesterday was the day that we said our final goodbyes to dad. If you read my previous post on this blog, you’ll know that my relationship with my dad was, like the rest of my family’s relationship with him, not a typical one. Nonetheless, I wanted to be there for his funeral (or rather cremation); it was the right thing to do even if I hadn’t had much to do with him in recent years.

I allowed almost 3 hours to make the journey from Swindon to South London – plenty of time, or so I thought. I had imagined I’d be there an hour early, having a cup of coffee with my brother somewhere near the venue. But as I reached the first Reading  junction on the M4, the traffic slowed down to a crawl, with all three lands almost at a standstill and remained like that for the next 30 minutes. My ‘buffer’ was disappearing fast. When I reached the next motorway exit, I decided to come off, loop around the roundabout at the top and use that as an opportunity to get a look further ahead up the M4 to see if it cleared ahead. It didn’t (and now I know what the cause of the delay was) so I diverted to Basingstoke, took the M3 up to London, back on the M25 and then on to the M4 again taking me into central and then south London, all the while watching my estimated time of arrival (according to Satnav) slip further and further back. It went to 1:05pm (the service was at 1pm) but with my foot down I managed to squeeze it down to 1:00pm exactly. I never saw It creep back to 12:59 and once I hit central London it only started to slip back again.

I knew, in my heart of hearts, that being a bit late would not change his ‘present condition’, but I really wanted to be there to hear what my brother had to say at the service. We got there at 1:15, and walked in to the venue to the sounds of Andreas Bocelli’s "Time to Say Goodbye". I’d caught the closing credits, you could say.

Afterwards, we made our way a short way across south London to a café (it was a low-key affair), where Manda and I, my brother and partner, Sandy (one of my dad’s previous partners and someone who went through so much of the mad moments with dad) and a handful of dad’s recent friends and neighbours joined us. It wasn’t the traditional wake – there was no heavy boozing (somehow, that didn’t seem appropriate), instead we had baguettes and coffees and just talked about some of the funny moments in dad’s life, his unending wit and the crazy/dark moments he had.

Andy (my brother) has said to me in the past that we should try to write some of this stuff down for prosperity, combining it with some of the other characters he’s known in his life. And I suppose in some way I can do that here – there were some things that I hadn’t heard before that made me laugh and some that really shocked me. I heard the story about a bar he was sat at once, a bar that had underneath it some hooks to hang handbags on. He fell off his bar stool – probably not for the first or last time – but on his way down managed to catch himself on one of the hooks. By his nose! For what probably seemed like a slowed-down comedy moment to others (but a slowed-down moment of sheer agony for him), he hung there for a moment before the nostril gave way to the inevitable. Ouch. Then there was the time that Sandy answered the door to dad who had been sleeping rough for some weeks: "Can I use your toilet?" he asked, to which Sandy said yes. Some time later, Sandy went up to investigate why he was taking so long to discover him taking the side panel off the bath – he must have had a flash of inspiration weeks after last leaving the house, remembering that he’d hidden something in there: a stash of vodka. I imagine the scene as he stood there at the door asking to use the toilet, screwdriver in hand (that wasn’t how it was, I was just thinking of the absurdity of it all)! Sandy probably has so many other stories of his crazy times, due to the alcoholism. One New Year’s Eve he told her that he would be back by midnight (yeah, right) but ended up back at 2am, handcuffed to two policemen who wanted to search the house. They uncovered a gun and Sandy was not entirely sure whether they believed that she wasn’t complicit in some way! Turns out he’d tried to pull (or had pulled) off a bank robbery, for which he’d later do time. Another time after an argument, he’d threatened to shoot them both! Sandy wisely decided to go for a walk and let him cool down. When she returned she discovered holes in the wall and thought to herself "that’s a funny place to make holes for the radiator pipes", as he was in the process of fitting a radiator. Later when moving the sofa about, a couple of bullets fell to the floor. Crazy times indeed.

The weird thing is that despite the tragic aspects of his life, we were all able to sit there ourselves and have a laugh about it, even Sandy who’d witnessed some of his most bizarre behaviour. I was glad that I’d gone up to the service and the aftermath. I was also pleased to discover that regardless of his darker moments, he did have a group of people who he called his friends and who thought John was a real character, a funny guy who would, to use one of their word-for-word quotes, "be sorely missed". The truth is that it’s much easier to forgive friends and drinking acquaintances for their various foibles than it is close family. Friends can make new friends, they can decide who they wish to associate with and they can more easily overlook parts of their friends’ lives that don’t fit with their moral code. With family it’s different, it doesn’t work like that. The irony is that had dad been the funny guy who lived next door to me and who I occasionally chatted to while nipping out for a pint of milk, the old guy with the colourful past and the raft of amusing anecdotes, rather than my dad, I probably would have got on better in recent years.

So, now the deed is done. All that’s left is for us is to work out how we collectively pay for the service (not surprisingly, there is pretty much nothing in the ‘estate’ that he leaves behind, aside from letters, photos and other memorabilia) and for his ashes to be scattered. He’ll finally settle somewhere over a cliff-edge in Cornwall, a place that he loved as a young adult, when he would take us on camping trips as a family, before the various demons took hold. 

There’s the saying "You come into the world with nothing, you leave with nothing -  you can’t take anything with you" (or words to that effect). I get the sentiment, but most people do leave something behind, even if it is a bit of material wealth that is passed on . But in dad’s case, there really is nothing left behind – other than us, his children. He apparently wrote in a letter to one of his sisters in the past something along the lines of "It’s not what you achieve in life, it’s what you leave behind", a bit of a twist on the earlier saying. It’s almost as if he had admitted and accepted his failures in life but acknowledged that he had indirectly left a mark, be that by his children or by the impact he may have made on friends.

And now I’m wondering quite how to finish up this entry and drawing a blank, so I’ll just leave it at that. Oh I know what else I wanted to say: do you know if there’s any way I can find out if I’ve fallen foul of any speed cameras? In my mad journey up to the crematorium, I think I may have been over the speed limit in a couple of spots as I desperately tried to make it to the crematorium. I may have to write a pleading letter or two, but for now I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

I wish I could say that I will miss you. I wish I could pontificate about what a great man you were, how you were an inspiration to us all and how anyone would strive to be half the man you were, but we both know that’s not the case. Sadly – for all of us.

When I heard the news that you had shuffled off this mortal coil, my initial reaction was "Oh, so it finally happened then – took yer time, didn’t you?" On one hand I felt guilty for responding like this, yet on the other hand I know that because of your actions, I couldn’t really feel any other way.

Later that day, I withdrew into myself a little, feeling sad. Not sad at losing a father as others would, but sad at what might have otherwise been, sad that I wasn’t able to really feel sad (if you catch my drift) and sad that you spent the last years of your life in what I would consider to be very sad circumstances. Yes, that was a lot of use of the word ’sad’ there, but that’s how it all ended up.

I was mentally recalling picture’s from mum’s photo album – you remember mum? She was the one you used to slap about when you first started drinking – where you were building the extension on the house in which I was born. I can see you in that photo looking all proud – you had a wife, 3 children, a good sized house and a good job. Things were only on the up, and how might things have been if that good upward curve had continued in that fashion?

My early memories of you are blocked. I cannot remember the screaming rants and the violence – either I was asleep, too young or my own mind decided to file that away in a corner somewhere never to be found again – but I know they happened. My memories of you as a child are of that person who visited when he wasn’t working out of the country somewhere exotic ( Saudi Arabia – was that for the work and money alone or did you choose to work in a ‘dry’ country on purpose?) and who always came with gifts. My first brand new bike (a Raleigh Boxer) that was from you, as was the first tape recorder, and I have to give credit for my early interest in music – I was the only person in my class at the age of 8 years who could claim to ‘be into Kraftwerk’, thanks to the pirate tapes that you used to get out there and bring back.

In later years, as I grew older and was more able to understand your illness, so did your inability to be able to deal with it despite numerous occasions where people who loved you tried their darndest to help you through. There was the accident that nearly killed you (Mr Indestructible), your cry for help dive into the River Thames, your bank robbery shenanigans and the ensuing prison terms and of course the ongoing AA meetings. We tried to help but along the way and over successive years you managed to alienate everyone until all you had left was a flat in Peckham that you didn’t own and some drinking buddies who, while perhaps not angels themselves, were well aware that you could be a problem once you had a drink inside you.

You had something about you – I’ve described it to people in recent days as ‘a spark’, perhaps a cheeky glint in your eye. You were funny and always a practical person, good with your hands (even while in Prison … learning how to use the computers to make Fake IDs that later got you in to trouble, ah such fun and games!). You were intelligent too, but obviously that was not enough to tell yourself that what you were doing was affecting you and everyone else around you, such that when you died you had little contact with any of your family. When I think of what happened on the night you died – waking from sleep with breathing difficulties, effectively drowning in your own lungs before having a heart attack – and realising that the person you called from your little one-bedroom flat was a support worker, not one of your sons, your daughter, one of your sisters or a wife/partner, it makes it seem even more sad. As we ready ourselves for a Christening this weekend for baby Freddie, I cannot help but reflect on how badly things can go wrong, that one day you were like this too, cradling a child and wishing the best for him/her (and I think we all turned out pretty well, despite anything else that might have happened). I would hate to think that anything in our lives – as in your children’s lives – could ever cause us to be in the situation that you ended up in. Actually, now I think of it you have been inspiration of sorts – you’ve showed us exactly what we should not do.

So, farewell dad. I may never understand the demons in your head that caused you to go so massively off the rails and I hope that if there is an afterlife that you get a better crack at it next time around, for you and everyone who knows you.

As spotted in a feed somewhere in my masses of news feeds this morning, the new AOL page - looks quite a bit like Yahoo!, doesn’t it?

Click on the thumbnail to see a comparison (it’s a 2.8mb animated gif).

[Note - I was accessing AOL’s site from work and it appears to be missing some content blocked by the firewall, but you can still see the similarity]

Well, that’s what I always use to say to people: "You have got to check out the Boost bars in Aus - they are to die for." I’ve oft lamented the fact that back here in the UK we don’t seem to have anything that quite matches up. Sure, there are fruit juice and shakes bars, but somehow they never really seem to have that extra special something that I remember from when we used to have them in Aus.

But this weekend something wonderful happened - while taking a walk through a shopping centre in Oxford Manda spotted a familiar looking logo: "It’s a Boost bar!" I had to do a double take, but yep, there it was, no copycat affair, this was the real thing!

It turns out that the outlet had opened just over a week ago and is only the second to open in the UK (the first being in Manchester). The guy on the counter gave us all the sales spiel (including one particularly cheesy line about some people considering it the ‘eighth wonder of the world’) but I cut him a bit short by explaining that he didn’t need to sell to us - we were already well and truly sold on the concept! He added that ultimately they want it to be as big as Starbucks. Sounds a bit pie in the sky at first, but when you consider that the brand started in 2000 in Aus and has had phenomenal growth since then - "the fastest-growing juice business in the Southern Hemisphere" - that may not be all that unlikely. The guy who’s brought it to the UK is Richard O’Sullivan (no, not the actor), and he can thank his daughter for the tip-off:

It was his daughter who came across Boost Juice on her gap year in Australia. She phoned home to tell O’Sullivan, “Dad: you could do this.” He got straight on a plane to judge Boost for himself. “It stopped me in my tracks. It was an explosion of flavour, tasted great, and you just knew it was good for you.” O’Sullivan, 44, now believes the UK juice bar market is ripe for an Aussie invasion.

And the thing is, I can remember thinking exactly the same thing: "This is such a great business opportunity, why aren’t there any in the UK?". It’s just a shame I wasn’t able to phone up a fabulously wealthy entrepreneurial father to come out to see what I was on about, as it looks like I’ll have to shell out the full price for a Strawberry Squeeze from here on in. But I’m happy to do that :-)

So, I can remove that ‘you must do this if you’re in Aus’ from my list, or at least I will be able to once they’ve established more of a foothold in the UK. Perhaps I should be sending people to Manchester or Oxford instead?

Read more about Boost in this article in the Independant

To mark the imminent release of Web Standards Creativity - a book that covers a wide range of inventive web techniques, using tricks from the world of DOM scripting, CSS and more, and all with web standards front and centre - the whole posse of authors (well, apart from one notable exception) are going to be having a little competition at this year’s SXSW Interactive. Coincidence or otherwise, all of the individual chapter authors are not only going to be at SXSW, but we’re all speaking at one or more sessions - your task is to track each and every one of us down to get a chance to win a copy of the book.

There are ten copies to give away and all you need to do is:

1. Print out the PDF below
   
2. Track each of us down (the flyer has a picture of each of us and where we’ll be speaking)
3. Ask us nicely to stamp the relevant section on the flyer.
4. Buy us a beer (optional)
5. Offer up some mindless chit chat (optional) before finding your next victim, I mean author
6. When you’ve got the whole set, be sure to ask your final stamper to mark the time/date and sign it for you (the final stamper will need to retain the flyer or just tear off that bottom section as proof)

The first ten people to complete the flyers will each get a copy of the book, once it’s available to ship. Good luck!

Technorati Tags: SXSW, SXSW2007, WSC, Web Standards Creativity, Competition

Every now and then, you read something or hear a story that, for whatever reason, makes you think "Wow, isn’t t’Internet a fab thing?" Today was my day.

Backtrack to 1998, when Manda and I went to Prague for our first trip away together (this was before Prague transformed into the stag do capital of Europe!). One of my favourite photos from the trip was one taken in a Metro (underground) station. Not a setting that you’d immediately think of as offering a great photo opportunity, but Prague’s Metro stations are quite something to look at:

Last year (2006) we went back to Prague and on the final day there we went back underground for the sole purpose of taking photos of the stations on one of the lines. Literally, it was a case of stop, hop out, take photos, then back on to the next line then repeat all over again.  I was really pleased with the end results.

Today, I received a really touching letter from someone about these photos. I’ll not paraphrase, but simply quote the relevant section of the mail:

I ran in to your shots of the Prague Metro on Monday and wonder if there is any way I could purchase some or all at the original resolution so that I can make some high quality prints.

First, an explanation.

My wife is Vitezslava Otrubova, who is a graphics designer and photographer. She left Prague in 1968, just a few days after the Russian tanks rolled in, at age 21.  She ended up years later in Seattle with me.

Her father is Jaroslav Otruba, the architect of the set of stations that you photographed. He has taken me on exhausting walking tours of Prague, and has a few of those anodized aluminum panels in his apartment.

Dr. Otruba suffered a stroke about five years ago at the age of 85 and has been on the decline ever since.
My wife has gone back to Prague every year and had to see a talented architect and artist, who was always working, trapped in a body that couldn’t speak, couldn’t write, and couldn’t draw.

We got a call three weeks ago from my mother in law, saying that Dr. Otruba had taken a turn for the worse and was hospitalized.
Even though my wife had last visited Prague in October, I encouraged her to immediately fly back.

This Monday, Dr. Otruba died of pneumonia in the hospital.  This is an bittersweet event, in that the mind and spirit have finally been released from a body that trapped them for five years.

I want to mark his passing in some small way, by celebrating his most recognized works.
I would like to, with your permission, make two sets of high quality prints  of your Prague Metro photographs and present them my wife and her mother.

My wife will be returning to Seattle on February 27th.  We will be taking some of Dr. Otruba’s ashes to Orcas Island, a place he loved when he was alive.  If you are agreeable to this project, I will present the photographs to her when we have that small family ceremony.

How nice is that? Naturally, I said yes (and of course at no charge). All I asked was that I could see a picture of what they did with the photos, and if possible  - and if it were deemed appropriate – to get a picture of Dr Otruba’s daughter being presented with the photos that I took because they were so striking in design.

I love that Flickr allows me to share photos like this and the fact that I’ve been able to connect the Czech designer behind this set photos with his daughter in Seattle from beyond the grave. The sender of the original email (Dr Otruba’s son-in-law) has since sent me a picture of the designer, presumably before the stroke took its toll, and it was really special to put a face to the name, a name that I had not known just a day before, but whose work I’d raved about to many people since coming back from Prague.

Can you recall a time when you’ve felt like you’ve really made something special happen because of something you’ve done on the Internet? If so, I’d love to hear your story.