Ford, social media and the new Fiesta

Last year I wrote about my trip to Los Angeles in the Ford Mercury Mariner that Ford lent me for a test drive. This week I found out Ford is using social media ONLY to market their newest release, the Fiesta. It's a sleek little compact that should get 40mpg. Ford's big idea? They're having competitions between city groups of social media enthusiasts.Here is Lemon, Denver's chosen team leader. He was given a Ford Fiesta (European model because the American one isn't even out yet), a gas card, and a budget to host some events for the team.

He runs a kick-buttowski company called Your Name in Graffiti. He and his partner Kanz painted an outdoor mural at Colfax and Oceola in Denver in the rain and snow and wind, just for this event. Ford Fiesta Movement.
Here you see Lemon with Derek, who will be the videographer of the Ford Fiesta events. They're leaning close because we had to whisper. A random poetry reading group took over the entire cafe where we were meeting. Suddenly our rousing discussion of the difference between graffiti art and graffiti vandalism got put on hold. All I know is that some lady somewhere in Denver would be perfectly happy if all the buildings in the city were white.
So who gathered at this cafe to talk about Ford's new movement? Well, I was invited to meet the artist and I learned that he's hosting a party tomorrow, that's right, Friday April 9 2010. Click his link to find out more. Then Aimee and Jeremy arrived, and I found out that Jeremy had also been given a Ford to test drive last year. The small gathering was overseen by Paul from the PR company. Paul revealed what a gigantic leap of faith Ford took in putting advertising into the hands (fingers to be exact) of social media mavens. And it paid off. I learned that there are something like 12,000 reservations already placed for this car that no one has seen. Well, now you've seen it. Here's a photo. I'm in the light brown sweater. That's Denver's Union Station behind us. Just as we wanted to pose for this photo, the meter man came driving by to try to ticket us, as the meter had just run out. There's Derek, feeding the meter so we could take a photo together.
I joined Foursquare just because Lemon told me he gets more points for his Denver team when people check in to his party Friday night using it on their phone.


Again, here is the link for the Denver team Ford Fiesta Movement. RSVP to some events (there will be 4 total). I want to see Lemon win even though I have no idea what he'll win.
I found an even better link to learn about and RSVP for tomorrow's party.

Electronic Day in the Life

Here is my version of an electronic day in the life of The Pixellator: Up Close. Gadgets and software play a prominent part in my life. If I lost it all in an instant, I could still get along very well, thank you, but I'm in love with how much today's gadgetry enhances and eases my life.

I start the day with an electronic rooster crow alarm from my Android smart phone. I snooze it about three times. I often check Google Maps in the morning if my husband has to send a team of workers to a certain address that day; I'll preview the house they'll install gutters on using Street View and then print a map for him so he can check on his team later.

My Gmail account can be checked from my Android phone or from any browser. This morning I checked email from the phone, then got ready to head in to my publishing job. I only go to the office once every several months to prepare publications for reprint. As soon as my office helper is at the guttering office, I use the settings panel on the Android phone to forward all my calls to the office where she is. Now I can only be reached by email or SMS text, but since I have two jobs, she handles the calls that come to my business cell phone when she's at the office.

At my publishing job, I tried to open up trusty Adobe InDesign this morning, only to be greeted with an abnormal window demanding I enter the serial number and "personalize my software." This was a problem I needed to troubleshoot and solve quickly. I only had a babysitter for half a day! I found the original software box for CS2 and entered the serial number. Didn't work. I entered every number possible; none were accepted. I asked my boss if anything strange happened on that iMac this week.

"I clicked a button to update something a couple of days ago."

Since I knew that getting on the phone for support was not an option (Adobe support is notoriously either expensive or not helpful) I turned to my very favorite web site for InDesign support: indesignsecrets.com. I used their search field to type the keywords "serial number" and the first result was what I needed. Yes! This was a known bug that did have a fix.

Can you imagine how little of the population is running a Mac with OSX AND InDesignCS2 AND they clicked an update button from Adobe Acrobat? I'm in a small niche, here. This problem only affects people with my exact parameters, and the patch was linked from indesignsecrets.com to adobe.com support web pages. So, after 1 hour and 2 tries of applying the patch, I was successful and had control over InDesign again.

In case you haven't heard of it, InDesign is a powerful desktop publishing software that has granular control over every aspect of layout. Today I used it and Adobe Photoshop to update the images that would appear in a brochure style catalog. Once the layout looked right, I needed to convert the document to a "press ready" PDF. Something seemed corrupted in my document because after five tries and five failures to convert to PDF, I simply ran out of time and decided to submit the document in a packaged and zipped InDesign format. Again, I used the internet to upload my prepared file to the printshop in another state. They gave me an assigned folder number to upload to, then I left the office.

I had been called to do 2 guttering estimates by my office helper. I'm training her to take over doing the estimates, so I stopped at our guttering office and picked her up. (Luckily, another family member took over babysitting my 4 year old) She had already used Google Maps to plot out maps for our two destinations, but my navigator was missing (maybe my husband took it and never returned it). So, instead of using the Garmin navigator, I used my Android phone as a navigator, with the Google Maps Navigation app. Actually, it works better than the Garmin. It says street names and gives me more advanced notice before I have to make a turn.

Those 2 estimates in heavy rush hour traffic took us from 3 pm all the way until 6 pm. Back at the office, I used my HP all-in-one printer in conjunction with my laptop computer to print the photos I took at one of the estimates. I had used a Kodak digital camera with a removable memory card. I simply inserted the memory card into the slot provided right on the printer, and a wizard came up on the computer screen. I copied the photos from the card to the "my photos" folder, and set up a print job that combined 4 photos on one sheet of paper, thus saving both ink and paper. I stapled the estimate, map, and photos together, and left them for my helper to enter into Quickbooks tomorrow.

Back at home, I wanted to check on my Facebook, Twitter, Ning, and Gmail accounts, and then write this blog using Google's Blogger. Now it's 10 pm. My Android phone with always-on internet tells me I have new gmail, updates to apps, and snow on the way tomorrow.

Perhaps tomorrow I can get around to maintaining some of my other web sites using Dreamweaver. And with all this new-fangled gadgetry I use, I still have a combo TV so I can play my beloved VHS movies from decades ago, as well as DVD's and CD's.

Google's Superbowl Ad Spot

During the Superbowl, I happened to scan headlines in Google News just ten minutes before I saw the Google ad. I spotted a headline about Google's exec not Tweeting often so I clicked. Then the ad came on tv so I could Tweet about it right away.

In the tweet, I remarked about how my 12 year old son was just asking me this week why he never sees Google ads on tv, but he sees ads for Yahoo and Bing. I simply figured they have market saturation and don't need to advertise. Well, looks like they spent $3 million for the 30 second spot.

Here is the ad, my comments to follow.

This is Google's chance to show off everything its search engine can do. It showed search term suggestions, accurate text suggestions for misspelled words, it showed the ability to look up flights by entering the flight number, local results, the "translate" command, Google maps, and street view.

Now that I listed it out, they did pack quite a lot into a cute storyline. The only thing I think this ad should have shown off is math capabilities of Google. I'd like to see, after the search on truffles, another search on currency conversion. After all, he's obviously an American in France for a study abroad, meets a girl who likes him, and he needs to buy her a gift, right? Just type this into Google: 11 euro. The first result is a conversion into US Dollar!

That's my 2 cents on the Superbowl ad.

Great collection of tutorials

I saw this amazing collection of tutorials for Illustrator, Photoshop, Wordpress, and more, and just had to pass it along here. Tutorials for web and graphic design. Thanks to BeMooved on Twitter for alerting me to this great resource.

At the same time, if you just want to look at some interesting typography portraits, BeMooved also passed this link along. Typography Portraits. Have you ever tried creating a digital portrait using only letters or words? Check it out.

Dreamweaver templates and CSS

I like to use templates in Dreamweaver when I'm designing a site from scratch or doing an entire site redesign. I am currently working on a redesign and my master plan for long term maintenance was to base all files on a template and use a library item for the footer. Whenever the main navigation changes, it's also easy to update because it's an externally located set of javascript files.

As far as the style sheet goes, I like to use external css files, but was having trouble rendering pages using a certain method to link to the file.

I was using the import method < style type="text/css" media="all" >
@import "css/styles.css" ;

But with this method I could only see the page in design view when I look at the template file, not when I viewed pages based on that template within Dreamweaver. I went back and forth with different variations of link paths, accounting for the extra folder where the template resides, with no luck. If I used the "put" function to ftp the file based on a template to the server and look at it in a browser, it looked fine, with all style sheet elements in place. But the team who will maintain the site will need to be able to see what they are doing in design view.

Finally I searched through my CSS book CSS: The Missing Manual and found the answer. First I tried hand typing "url" after the word import, but that didn't work. Chapter two spelled it out so clearly. I followed directions, but it told me to type:
@ import url( css/styles.css);

with no quotes. Again, I could see design view just fine when looking at the template file, but when I looked at a page based on that template, it was plain white with only text, no colors or images. So, I found the answer on page 437, a special chapter for Dreamweaver. It told me to use the "attach style sheet button" on the CSS Styles panel.

I think what was different when I used Dreamweaver's attach command from the CSS Styles panel was the comment marks, indicated by the exclamation point and dashes, as well as the quote marks inside the parentheses.

< style type="text/css" media="all" >
< ! - -
@ import url("css/styles.css");
- - >
< /style>

Now I had a web site that the entire team could edit using design view in Dreamweaver.