It dawned on me tonight that when my nephew and his wife have their first child in a week or two, I’m going to be a great aunt.

Now, I’ve known about the new arrival for a while. I’ve kidded my sister about being a grandma… she’s in her mid-50s, so she’s old enough, I suppose. My mom is going to be a great-grandma… she’s in her late 70s, so she’s the right age for that title.

But it never dawned on me until now that I was going to be a “great aunt”.

I’m 35.

Great aunts are at least 80, and they’re supposed to be dead or something.

I’m too young for that title. Seriously.

Reed Floren posted a free way to personalize your sales letters on Michael Green’s How To Forum:

I hope I’m not stepping on Micheal Green or Adrian Ling toes because that is not the purpose of this post. I am only trying to help and I’m sure your product is much better than this free workaround.

I saw Micheal and Adrian’s tool http://www.salesletterpersonalizer.com/ and thought to myself that doesn’t seem to hard to do.

So here’s an example and a free tutorial on how to make a basic personalized salesletter, I’m sure their product is much, much, more powerful. But from what I can tell this gets the job done.

Here’s an example with my name:

http://www.reedfloren.com/personalized.htm?Reed

If you want to display your name simply change “Reed” to whatever your name is.

Incidentally, Reed posted about her first public domain site made with Conversionary software in this post.

I’ve downloaded a lot of audio applications. Some were free, some were loaded with spyware, and some I paid good money for.

But most of them just sit there, unused. They’re great little doohickeys, but by the time I decide I want to use one, load it up, configure it to save to the right place, with the right file name, and deal with the crashes that seem to be part and parcel of audio recorder software… well, it just doesn’t seem worth the effort.

Then last week I downloaded a trial copy of Skado, and suddenly I have an audio recorder that I use nearly every day.

First impressions weren’t great. The interface is a little weird, and it’s shaped much like the last disposable razor I bought.

But during the first day of the trial period, I began to appreciate how handy this little app is.

I was listening to an online talk radio show when it happened. The speaker rattled off a list of statistics that I wanted to jot down for later reference. Of course, by the time my mind had gotten around to thinking, “I need to write this down” and my body had gotten a blank pad of paper, I’d missed most of it.

So, I clicked the Skado icon in the taskbar, and replayed the previous 30 seconds, which was all it took for me to note the stats I wanted. When the replay was done, Skado had buffered all the stuff I’d missed, and just kept on playing without interruption.

I was hooked.

But lets get back to the basics here. Skado, by default, starts up with Windows. It sits idle in your system tray until you begin listening to something online. Then, all audio gets buffered through Skado and is sent to your speakers slightly delayed from the original.

Because of this feature, you can use Skado to repeat the last 5 or 30 seconds of any audio stream. While it replays the clip for you, if buffers the current audio so you don’t miss even a second of your program, no matter how often you ‘rewind’.

I can see this software being useful for recording online conferences and streamed audio for internet marketers (why wait and pay for the audio of that last guru’s call when you can have it now, for free?), or for bloggers who listen to various live feeds during the day — you can focus most of your attention on your work, knowing that if something interesting gets said, one click can rewind you to the juicy bit, even when you’re not recording.

You can also use Skado to schedule recording times so, as long as your internet connection holds out, you won’t miss your favorite programs even if you’re not at your computer.

And you don’t need to spend time pre-naming your files, like most of my other recording software requires me to do. Skado automatically names them and gets any tag info from the stream, and lets you rename the files with a single click in the file manager to any number of variations on the tag. Very cool.

To test the recording features of Skado, I captured some of the radio plays and audio books on BBC7 to MP3 format. It worked brilliantly, and I now have the complete copy of “Murder on the Orient Express” ready for my next road trip, and a few different episodes of “Whose Line is it Anyway” — not the Drew Carey version, but good for light listening inbetween more serious podcast material.

The settings allow you to split your recorded audio up based on time segments, or by silent intervals. The default is best for music, so if you’re going to be recording talk radio or audiobooks, you will need to adjust the settings to get consistent results.

So far, I have tested Skado with files played and/or streamed with Real player, Windows Media Player, WinAmp as well as with audio embedded in Flash. All worked perfectly.

If you listen to audio online, I highly recommend it.

Click on the graphic below to download your own trial copy now!

It seems that although Sitemaps don’t get a new site spidered any faster,
once a site is already in the index, or after Googlebot has been through once,
the Googledance sucks up the whole site — all 600+ pages of each new site I submitted a sitemap for are in Google today. The site I didn’t use a sitemap on has only 192 pages indexed out of nearly 500 pages on the site.

I just found this in an old magazine. It has all the earmarks of an urban legend, but I thought it was quaint and wanted to post it somewhere:

At the Bottom of a Mine
Years ago some Welsh miners, in exploring an old pit that had been long closed, found the body of a young man dressed in a fashion long out of date. The peculiar action of the air of the mine had been such as to preserve the body so perfectly that it appeared asleep rather than dead.

The miners were puzzled at the circumstance; no one in the district had been missed within their remembrance; and at last it was resolved to bring the oldest inhabitant — an old lady, long past her eightieth year, who had lived single in the village her whole life.

On being brought into the presence of the body, a strange scene occurred: the old lady fell on the corpse, kissed and addressed it by every term of loving endearment, couched in the quaint language of a by-gone generation.

“He was her only love; she had waited for him during her long life; she knew that he had not forsaken her.”

The old woman and the young man had been betrothed sixty years before. The lover had disappeared mysteriously, and she had kept faithful during that long interval. Time had stood still with the dead man, but had left its mark on the living woman.

The miners who were present were a rough set, but very gently, and with tearful eyes, they removed the old lady to her house, and the same night her faithful spirit rejoined that of her long-lost lover.