Tuesday, February 5, 2008

My virgin voyage into Blogland!

Well, being as this is my first post as an official blogger, maybe I should give some history of myself and talk about what has led me to this new business of blogging.
Let me start out by saying that I sent my first email in 1995. My daughter was at IU in her Sophomore year, and all through her first year I heard everything about what was going on with her second hand through my relatives who already had email. I thought, if I am going to have any communication at all with her, I better figure out this email thing!
We signed on to a dial up internet service, and printed out emails on a dot matrix printer that was slower than molasses in January!! But, my goal was accomplished, I finally started hearing from my daughter directly instead of through all the relatives! It was wonderful! I had instant (well, at least pretty fast!) communication with her. We talked about all kinds of things that we probably never would have discussed in person. I learned so much about her and what made her tick that year.
My brother Stu is a certified geek. I have always said that his brain works in bits and bites. In the early 80’s he designed a program for me that would print out a weaving pattern (again, on the dot matrix printer, a line at a time, it took FOREVER!!!) I still remember watching that printer spit out a little coverlet pattern that took about an hour and a half to print. We thought it was absolutely wonderful. I might add here that this was also done on a TRS-80 Radio Shack (aka Trash-80) computer that was about 8 megabytes of memory. Woooooooow!
Stu has never been one to let the new toys cool before he owned them, so I have had the pleasure of being in on a lot of new technology, through him and his business, as it unfolded. Because of his interests I really feel like I have learned more than most of my contemporaries about computers, how to use them, and what their potential can be. My business was one of the first in the wedding consulting industry to have an official website (oh, it was a dandy! no graphics, no pictures, simple blue lined pages of text, BORING!!) It was primitive compared to today’s standards, but it was there.
Over the years I have worked hard to stay on the front edge of technology and have tried to incorporate it into our business as soon as it was feasible. We have had live webcams in our ballroom and garden for over four years. We recently installed live webcams in our new chapel that have pan, zoom, sound, focus etc. They are AWESOME!! We have never been shy about adopting new technology—embracing it, and using it however we could to improve our business.
So here I am today, and I am BLOGGING!! I am still kind of shaking my head and wondering if I am biting off more than I can keep up with, given the number of hours I already put into our business, both at work and at home. But I have always wanted to do an e-newsletter of sorts, and I think this may be the way to go about it. I am excited about the possibilities of this new technology. I am overwhelmed at the number of topics, photos, links, videos and the like that are possible to include in this blog. I welcome feedback from anyone who wants to read this, and promise that I will answer any questions I receive in as timely a manner as possible.
If you have any suggestions of topics that you would like to see discussed, photos you would like to see, or just general ideas of things you would like for me to write about, I am open!
This is an amazing medium. I hope that together we can use it to its full advantage!
Join me! Let’s blog! :)

1 comment:

Amy said...

Lookin' good so far! :)

Love,
Amy