After years of neglect, Feydakin.Com finally got a face lift.. Gone is the old scary me, here is the kinder, happier me.. Lots of projects coming in the 2010 year.. I will get back to cataloging all my obsolete gear, from my Sony Watchman to the ’49 Indian Scout that I’m going to restore with my dad.. Plus I’ll be updating people on our quest to disconnect a bit and buy a farm in Kentucky plus I may even ‘finally’ get that always dreamed and planned for, Private Pilot’s License..

Might be a fun year..

I’ve never rally been accused of being a part of the crowd. But for Mother’s Day I usually cheap out and give my mom a piece of jewelry that I made (its cool – I’m really a jeweler, but you knew that), or a plant that she will manage to kill in short order. So I’ve been sitting here trying to come up with something new and different..

Then I looked at the soup I just spilled on my shirt and it hit me. Ever since I quit the day job to live the glamorous life of an entrepreneur, my wardrobe has been modeled after Charlie Harper on Two and a Half Men. Shorts and a bowling or Hawaiian shirt, even in 10 degree weather. I just don’t go outside.

Hawaiian shirt for Mother's Day

The quest had started. Find my mom a Hawaiian shirt for Mother’s Day that she will love.

She is a green freak. Really, you should see it.. Anyway, I found this awesome lime green women’s Hawaiian shirt at Wave Shoppe. I like their shirts and they even have them in size “Fluffy” for guys like me (I might have ordered one for me while I was there, I’m just sayin’). Anyway, I think that this Mother’s Day will be awesome. Not that every day isn’t awesome, but this should surprise her. Now I need to figure out how to hide it under a pastic plant or in a jewelry box for when I give it to her.

If this doesn’t make me her favorite son I don’t know what will.

Misfit Domains

I admit it, I collect things.. Comic books, swords, cars, domain names, whatever I feel like at the moment.. I always intend to do something grand with whatever I collect, but in most cases they just end up collecting dust and making my wife mad..  With me restarting everything  around here fresh I was going through my domains, wow, it’s amazing what you end up with  when you set things to auto-renew and forget about them..

My old company, that hasn’t been in operation for 6 years or so, NeoTek had a website. I saw that and thought, huh, been paying $12/year for 6 years so my wife can keep her email address that she used when she was publishing engineering papers. I thought I would just let it go. Then I realized, hey, that things has been mine for 11 years, why not “do something” with it.

But what to do?

Cheesy link directory? Nah, already have a few of those.

Porn site? That would be cool, but I like my stuff and I have a sneaky feeling the wife would take all my stuff and send me out in to the cold naked if I did that.

I could start another silly blog like this one.

Then I thought, hey! I haven’t been an affiliate, uh, specialist yet. I could do that. I could sell things like Slankets on it and then when the next big thing came along I could move on to that and eventually build up an As See On TV empire of useless crap! Everyone loves useless crap, that’s why it sells so well.

Yeah, that’s the ticket! I’ll be an affiliate Guru and just watch the money come pouring in. Or maybe not. Anyone have a great idea for an old, unused, domain?

Seems like just a couple months ago I was talking about re-opening my internet marketing company, Metal Monster Marketing, and here I am again with another change.

It’s time to leave the jewelry business entirely. Effective Christmas Eve I’ll be leaving Images Jewelers as a full time contractor. I’ve loved the last 6 years there and learned a lot about something I knew nothing about when I started. I’ll miss the ladies, the designing, and just about everything else about the store. I’ll still be returning from time to time to give guidance on their web presence and help them continue to develop that side of the business, but it’s time to move on.

So where am I moving on to? Creadively, llc. I’ve taken over the position of director of Search Marketing at Creadively, LLC. Creadively can be classified as a startup company and for now we are working on internal projects only, but the opportunity to get in on a startup, and all that entails, again is just too good of an opportunity to pass up. Juggling several projects at once, training a new staff as we grow, and until Christmas, working two jobs will be a real challenge to adjust to again from the one customer one project life I’ve been leading.

I can’t wait.

I try not to rant too hard on the jewelry trade.. It does feed my family after all.. But I was reading this interesting Time Magazine poll about retail jewelers.. It seems that the number one complaint of 2000 polled consumers is that their jeweler, or jewelry salesperson doesn’t always know as much as they could, or should, about the product that they are selling..

Poll shows need of retailer knowledge

Did you notice the publication date on that page?? 1947.. Yup, 60 years ago people were complaining about the lack of knowledge in the retail jewelry trade.. Take a tour around any of the online jewelry forums.. A common complaint that runs through all of them is the overall lack of knowledge and skill of the people behind the counter.. The stories are nearly endless..

So why is this?? Why are we 60 years down the pipe from this first poll being published and still seeing the same complaints?? I have some guesses..

I think that a lot of it has to do with the traditional nature of the industry.. Information was passed from father to son without a lot of outside influence.. This causes bad information to become fact in a very short time.. I don’t know about you, but I still have trouble telling my dad he is wrong about something..

But, I think the larger problem is simply one of laziness.. There is so much good information out there, easily found, yet so many people in the trade would rather make up an answer and try to bullshit a customer than admit that they don’t know something and ask for help.. A piece of advice for those of you that do this.. our customer probably knows as much, or more, than you do.. And making up an answer on the spot will cost you the sale.. And even worse, that customer will most likely jump online and post their story about the idiot jeweler.. How is that for advertising??

The jewelry trade isn’t the only one that has this problem.. But it really isn’t that hard to learn the basics quickly, and gain more in depth knowledge with just a little effort on your part.. It’s been 60 years.. Get off your ass and learn something..

After running coppermine here for a while I’m moving the gallery to flickr.. It’s mostly for drive space and bandwidth considerations..

I’m reasonably happy with flickrRSS but I may experiment with a few other tools I’ve seen out there.. this was just easiest to set up..

It’s been a while since I posted anything relevant to anything else.. I blame real life.. And these 70 hour work weeks..

I got the Bangles and Brides pligg front end installed and working finally.. Launched it Friday I think.. It’s all a blur.. BaB has been growing slowly and steadily and I really think that allowing our community to submit news stories is a great idea.. Technically they could before, but it wasn’t as easy to do.. Plus I was the only one that could see the submissions.. The new pligg interface is very digg like and it looks to be a good thing for the site..

Also launched the generic store over at Images Jewelers (osCommerce) to compliment the custom jewelry site over at ImagesOnTheWeb.Net. The site is already selling and starting to rank well for a few easy to grab design lines.. I’ll be working on that for the rest of the year at least.. Thankfully we finally got some help doing all the data entry to get the product listed..

I’ve also been registering random domains with cool names lately.. Not sure when I’ll have time to work on these.. But I need to get the new deep link directory up and running soon.. We’ll probably do the first 100 links for free or something.. At least until we get some decent weight to toss around.. By then we will probably be near Christmas and the jewelry thing will be eating up all my time again.. Maybe I’ll get than new portal launched next year.. gem-carvers.com is a great name for a gemology / gem carver site

Or should it be a light sampling of Westmont?

I don’t know, but it definitely wasn’t as good as last year.. Especially when it comes to the food.. I started going to the taste last year with CrankyDave and MrsCranky and loved it.. This year, eh, I think we would have been better off going fishing or something..

The biggest issue was the food.. Or lack of food.. There were far fewer food vendors this year and it really hurt the eating.. Bub’s was great, love the BBQ, and the Lion’s always have great corn, but I really really really missed the ribeye steak sandwich from Don’s..

The music was great though.. We caught most of Flat Cat, great jazz music.. And Brian Howe from Bad company was the headliner.. But the star, or stars, of the night was Mister Sister.. Wow.. They were great.. Three female lead singers an a band that can really play.. Everything they did was spot on and a ton of fun to listen to.. And Chuck, wow, I need to find out if he give guitar lessons..

Check them out on their myspace page http://www.myspace.com/mistersistertheband or better yet, catch them live sometime.. You will not be disappointed..