Tag Archives: daycare

Captcha Captcha Captcha

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So I kind of took a way too long extended break from my blog. I’ve been working hard on our product sites, in particular oClubhouse.com which provides high quality CMS websites for Associations, Membership Clubs, and Organizations. It’s really a fun product and I know that our new customers are gonna love it. It really puts alot of emphasis on making websites work for membership clubs with just enough bells and whistles to grab them new members, and leverage the social web to keep their current members hooked, while not providing so much to get overwhealming for people. It’s a delicate balance.

We’re making a few other products as well, in particular oFitnessclub.com for Fitness clubs, Athletic clubs and gyms which is pretty cool, as well as oDaycare.com which I’m even more excited about. The ROI with oDaycare.com is pretty crazy. Any Daycare that has open spots and isn’t using oDaycare.com is missing out on money. For less than the cost of one student a month (alot less) they can really provide an extra level of service for their parents, as well as bring in tons of business.

Anyway that’s another blog.

This one is Captcha Captcha Captcha.

So as I said, I was being a bad social marketer and ignoring my blog. Well I come back after a couple of weeks and I have 179 comments. SPAM. Porn spam, handbag spam, bad english me like post and bookmark very informative i read again SPAM.

delete, delete, delete, delete, delete….

I can’t believe I didn’t install a captcha in this WordPress install. Talk about forgetting something major.

Captchas are those images or math problems or things you have to listen to in order to post in certain places. For instance if you try to post a comment on my blog here after your name and message it’ll have this picture of numbers and letters and you have to put them in a box. I’m sure you’ve seen them all over the internet.

The reason for them is that they, for the most part, prevent non-humans from posting spam. Computers have a hard time reading the images and figuring out what they’re saying, where the human eye does not. Of course they’re getting better, or some people hire cheap Chinese day labor, but still you’ll prevent a ton of spam posts from even going through.

I didn’t have one on. Big mistake. Everyone needs to use captcha. Sure it can sometimes be a little bit annoying for the user, but it’s worth it in the long run. Most Captchas are very inconspicuous and take a second or two to complete, and they clean up the internet for you and for me.

I can’t believe I forgot to put one on in the first place.

Ah well I hope this one works. I’m using the SI Captcha Ant-Spam plugin for wordpress which for some reason is hosted on a Long Beach weather website. That troubles me somewhat, but what can you do.

Every site that takes submissions or registers users should use captcha. It’ll save you the headache of deleting 179 spam emails when you go away for a couple weeks.

New OrcaPack Website

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I’m gonna copy a post from OrcaPack.com

http://orcapack.com/new-website-focus-products

We’ve launched our new website for OrcaPack at orcapack.com to focus on our new targeted website products. We’re starting with oClubhouse, oDaycare, and oFitnessclub.

Since our inception in 2002 our company has undergone a number of radical changes. We started out as a product company making a specific product, then as a website design and service company, then catering to specific industries, then back to general. We’ve been all over the map, whatever needed to be done on the web, we did.

This is a new chapter though. One where we’re moving into working on our specific products.

All these products focus on specific industries. The idea is that instead of having web design be a service, we have it be a product that someone buys a subscription to. It’s like leasing a car versus buying.

When you buy a car you spend tens of thousands of dollars on a new car. Let’s say you get a semi-decent new car for $30,000. You get certain warranties with a car, that it’ll keep working and the like, but the car itself doesn’t improve. A few years later the newer models make yours look kind of grungy. You don’t have the latest GPS system, or DVD Video in the back for your kids. The doors don’t slide open automatically, the seats don’t store in the floor, whatever. Plus it’s just looking a little dingy and dirty. The car manufacturer will be happy to help and build you a new car for $30,000 or more given inflation to get those new features.

Not to mention that all along you had to pay for gas by yourself, clean it yourself, drive it yourself.

It’s the same thing when you buy high quality websites. You’re spending 10,000, 20,000 or more, sometimes significantly more, to build a website with a high quality design, specifically architected for you and your industry, but as soon as it’s handed to you, the responsibility of the designer is done. If a month after it’s finished you see some cool new thing, well… It won’t be on your website, unless you pay extra. If after a year you don’t like how the site looks it’s going to cost you thousands more to redesign the site.

That’s why what we’re offering is more like leaseing the car. You pay a low rate per month and you get the same site as if you had paid tens of thousands of dollars. We maintain the site for you. We keep it clean. We update it, make sure it’s patched and secure. If a new feature comes up that is applicable to your industry we add it. Every month the ‘car’ is new, fresh off the lot. You get a current, technologically up to date, well maintained site, that looks good, and is architected specifically for your industry for a low price.

The three industries we’re focusing on initially are membership clubs, organizations, and the like with oClubhouse; fitness clubs, althletic clubs and gyms with oFitnessclub; and daycares, preschools, and early learning centers with oDaycare.

oClubhouse focuses on membership clubs and organizations. One of our flagship subscribers is the Publicity Club of New England. Whether it’s a local professional club, or a college alumni club, etc. Groups that need to have an active membership with many social ties. Groups that need to get new members to find them and join and sign up (and pay dues!). Clubs that have events and need to sell tickets to their members. oClubhouse focuses on providing a basis for these groups to bring in new members, get those members to participate in your club, both at your real life events, as well as online, and to generally be a sucessful club.

oDaycare focuses on daycares, preschools, and learning centers. One of our flagship subscribers for oDaycare is First Step Childcare Center. Whether you’re a daycare, preschool, or some type of early learning center we can help you. oDaycare focuses on these businesses, to better help you get new students, to keep your own parent/clients happy, and make it easy for people to find you. In addition we’re partnering with a number of services so that not only can you have a basic website, but easy setup to provide secure areas for your parents to view video within your center, post secure pictures online, etc. For far less than the cost of one student a month you can help fill your center to capacity by using oDaycare.

oFitnessclub focuses on fitness clubs, athletic clubs, and gyms. One of our flagship subscribers for oFitnessclub is Cambridge Athletic Club. Fitness and athletic clubs have some specific challenges that our product is aimed towards solving. Not just getting new membership, but also keeping your membership involved in your club. It’s important for gyms to get new members on a regular basis, and we can help with that, but every member that doesn’t quit is another one that you dont’ have to worry about refilling. oFitnessclub can help with incorporating various forms of social networking into the site, as well as some other features to make the life of a gym manager more bearable.

We have a number of future products in the pipeline. oLawoffice is live, and we’ll be focusing on bringing that up soon. As well as oScientist, creating websites for science and technology research companies. We’re looking to do numerous other future products as well.

For now though OrcaPack and our new website have changed to our new product focus, so we can bring the experience we’ve learned working with these industries for the past 8 years directly to our new customers, for a low monthly cost, instead of a high initial investment.

For more information please contact Tim Hinkel by calling OrcaPack toll free at 866 830-8165 or contact us using our email contact form.

Colds, Flus, Pig Flus, Parent Teacher Conferences

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It’s a good thing that I have job flexibility.

My daughter last night started to fall apart, and she felt warm to the touch. 101 degree fever. So we shoved some Motrin into her, and she made it to bedtime. She had a hard night, some more medicine, and this morning she was still sick. So we had to keep her home from school.

Now what do people do who have you know….jobs. They take a personal day to stay home with their sick kids. Except, how many personal days do YOU have. It seems like most people I know these days have 2-3 weeks of vacation a year. If they’re LUCKY they get 5 personal days on top of that.

Well, we also have parent teacher conferences coming up for her. School is closed that day, and it’s all PTC all day. Well that’s all well and good for the teachers, but there goes another personal day for many people. Have to stay home with the kids, and then take them into the conference.

Doesn’t seem right to me. I dunno. Setting aside specified vacation days and personal days seems….well it seems juvenile to me now.

One of my first jobs was at Toys R Us. I had the fun job of going up and down each aisle and ‘straightening’. I wanted to be put on cashier, but they for some reason had it in their mind that I was a straightener. They were really mean there. Never pointing out what I did right, only everything I did wrong, and in a mean “you’re a total incompetent, you did it wrong idiot, do it this way.” type way, even if they never told me how to do it right in the first place. Real jerks. Anyway, I got a 15 minute break, so I would go down to the break room and drink a soda and read a magazine. I went down one time, and one of the managers came down with one of the assistant managers. They came down a minute after I did, and after a few minutes turned to me and said “Shouldn’t you be ending your break now?” to which I replied ‘no I have another 10 minutes.” Five more minutes passed and they turned back “OK your break is over.” and I said “No I started at 4, I get 15 minutes, I’ll go back up at 4:15.”

Crap like that.

Anyway saying “You get 3 weeks of vacation” is something similar. If I’m not making someone punch a clock from 9am to 5pm, why am I punching it for X number of work days a year. If I hire someone, and I give them work to do, then shouldn’t it be judged on how much work they get done, and how good the quality of that work is, not the time spent?

If you’re making widgits, and the assembly line moves at a constant rate no matter your skill it might make sense to pay you by the hour. You’re essentially paying by the widgit.

So why are we still paying as if the assembly line is rolling past. Sure you’re gonna keep track “hey Joe we’ve noticed that you’ve taken 8 weeks vacation so far this year, and missed a few project deadlines, we’d like you to scale it back and no more for the rest of the year ok?” rather than something formal. If Joe however works 10 times as fast as anyone else and his quality is beyond compare….why limit him to X days vacation or Y personal days.

It depends on the job and the industry, but really….the whole 3 weeks vacation days thing is so last year.

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Wrapping back around to my sick daughter, we had to dig to find a number to call to call her in sick. It’s the first time. Nothing straightforward about it. We also both got conflicting messages about the Parent Teacher Conferences, and no real way to figure out what’s up with that.

That’s the great thing about using a product like oDaycare for your daycare or preschool. You can control that information, and make it very easy for not only getting new customers and students, but getting that information out to your current ones. Calendar plug ins so people can see what food is being served on their iPhones from linking their calendar to yours…The days you’ll be closed, information about it. oDaycare doesn’t just put it on your website and easy for them to find, but it can even put it on their mobile devices so they can reference it anywhere.

It’s the little things like that, which make a parent really happy to be a part of your school, and oDaycare can keep that communication flowing.

Peace out. I have to go watch Thing 2, as it sounds like Thing 1′s fever is up to 103 and her mom is going to take her into the doctors office. Don’t get me started on that….

The Drawbacks of my Office

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So, it’s no secret that I primarily work from home. Brick and mortar is fun and all, and maybe if we ever get enough people working on our products all in one place we’ll spring for some ultra cool hip office space with a foosball table and free soft drinks, but it ain’t gonna be today.

I do love my office though. I used to have it on the main floor at the back of the house. The room was basically open to the rest of the main area of the house, and it was also a travel path from the living and dining room through to the backyard, or the laundry area, or the first floor bathroom. Essentially my office doubled as a hallway for a third of the rest of the floor, and with a two year old and a four year old, as well as a stay at home wife…things got…a bit busy.

It wasn’t a problem before we had kids to work from home, nor even after we had one, and she was an infant or in child care, but when my wife got pregnant with her third, I knew it was time to refinish the basement and get my office down there or I’d never get a scrap of work done. Maybe another day I’ll post some pictures of the work my father in law and I did on fixing up the basement. Basically it was a post-apocalyptic 1970′s Pizza Hut with mouse nests and skeletons everywhere. I had to gut it completely, tear down the old spackled cheap plywood walls, rotting in some places, the horrific and falling to dust drop ceiling, the red flattened shag rug, the plastic fake textured brick superglued to the plywood which I spent a month’s spare time tearing off, before eventually just ripping the whole wall down….

Anyway it’s all finished now, new drywall, painted recessed ceilings and track lights, new electric for the computers (I have EIGHT OUTLETS for my work station… no more triple chained surge protectors). I moved down immediately when it was complete this spring, before the baby came, and my productivity increased tremendously. I really love it.

There’s one problem though. The cat.

See this is not my cat. This is a cat my wife was given as a gift back when she was in grad school. She didn’t even want a cat then, but her roommate gave it to her, and how can you turn down a cat. I’m highly allergic, and when we moved in together and got married we tried to get rid of the cat. Noone wanted her, so we kept her. Of course both her brother and her parents said at the time they didn’t want a cat, and both within a couple years had bought new cats of their own. Anyway, so now I live with this cat, spend ungodly amounts of money on asthma medication because of her, and so on. Well her catbox is also in the basement, down in the basement bathroom. It’s not literally next to my office, but that doesn’t matter.

New cat food and old cats do not mix. My wife bought her some new dietary cat food to help her because she’s old or something, and dear god almighty…Seriously, when the cat goes now the whole house stinks. You can smell it on the second floor of the house. It’s like a rotten meat stewy smell mixed with vomit. It’s so strong you can taste it. I have an air purifier, and a glad plugin in my office now, but it still doesn’t even come close to helping. It’s like the Maginot Line of odor protection, and the poop smell is already in Paris. I tried immediately jumping up and running back there to spray the entire area….nay… hose the entire area down with Lysol, and it helps, but now it smells like lysol, and faint cat poop still there lingering.

So, I’ve decided to make it an outdoor day. Weather is nice enough, cool fall breeze, sunny sky. Why not. I love my new office the 95% of the time when the cat isn’t ripping one loose back in her catbox, but really if 5% of the time I get to work outside things could be alot worse.

I can’t do coding as well on my laptop. I like to use a full keyboard and multiple screens and a real mouse when i do it, but it’s ok. Same thing with design. It’s a bit harder without my work station. So I’m gonna do some Information Architecture on the new OrcaPack site to bring it up to speed with where the company is now. OrcaPack has morphed so many times at this point, what’s one more iteration.

Originally we started as a product company, making a product similar to what we had been making at the previous company I was at, which went tits up thanks to 9/11 (nearly all the companies being targeted for initial sales were in the Towers). So we tried to mirror that, before we moved on to doing web maintenance and monkey work for various companies. We dabbled for a while as something more akin to retained web services, transitioned a bit to be a little higher end while still doing maintenance, etc. That’s where the website is at currently, not showing that we’ve gone BACK to a product focus.

So we need to rebrand and rearchitect Orcapack to show off the new products and our basic services, and get those off the ground. We already have customers for all the products, we just need more, and we really kinda need the websites to help out in that regard. I mean we are a web company after all.

As I have mentioned our first focuses for products are odaycare.com, oclubhouse.com and ofitnessclub.com, with olawoffice.com in there as well, but that’s on a back burner.

odcaycare.com is going to be a product focused on providing a high quality website to daycares and preschools. We’ve architected and designed these sites to go up fast, and be very high quality. If a new day care were to come to us for a custom site it’d be at least $10,000 for just something basic, and probably more. Why pay that though, if you don’t need to. We’ve created an architecture and features specifically targeted towards these businesses and provide them as  a product they can purchase on a monthly basis. And really, if it gets the daycare just ONE student it pays for itself, and then some. If you’ve ever tried to find a local daycare online you know it can be a real pain, and even if you do find a site, it’s probably not any good. Yet we have a new customer who had filled up BEFORE she even opened her doors thanks to her website. People found it, liked what they saw, and signed up. Her new daycare was profitable ON DAY ONE. That’s a testimony right there.

I’ll talk about oclubhouse.com and ofitnessclub.com on some other day. Right now though I need to get my power cord, and headphones, and settle in for some work on orcapack.com while enjoying a clean cool breeze and a beautiful day.

Thanks cat. This should turn out nice.