I have been running a lot of little side business to keep myself out of the bars and awake late into the night. I closed one of them last year as I always seem to have too many irons in the fire. That was my TEDatum Publishing where I was making restored photo albums from old picture collections. It was very labor intensive editing hundreds of customer low quality photos into presentable coffee table style photo books.
I can still do that work but I discovered it wasn’t worth the effort. The mission is worthy but to be successful as a side business, it needs to be much more automated or priced a lot higher than I thought might be reasonable. So I stopped promoting the service and I closed the website I built for the marketing. I only received two messages about “What happened to TEDATUM website!” so that tells me all I needed to know.
My PN (Peripheral Neuropathy) continues slowing me down bit by bit as my nerve degeneration progresses. I do get around pretty good when I have too but I prefer to sit and use the computer. This is why my shop has a lot of CNC machines. I let my computers do a lot of the work or is it, “I do a lot of the work at my computers.” Ha!
I have always had a great interest in computer training materials and publishing. I call it visual digital communication. This is one of the directions my work at my real job could take me. At “real work” they are not quite as generous with new software as I treat myself to at home. (They still support MS XP pro for our OS and think a WebEx is new technology… 🙂
Through many years I have gathered just about every Adobe Software program that exists. Sporadic upgrades keep my text and graphic publishing system near the cutting edge. So I have decided to do more study and training with the web based presentation materials now available. I am currently upgrading to the latest Adobe CS5 products.
With that I will re-energize the TEDatum Publishing webpage but probably not as a “order here” business. It will be my basic home base for the experiments I am eagerly anticipating doing with visual digital communication. I plan to experiment more with video and make it the core of the web experience.
I know I always play ALL the videos on my favorite web pages. I want to see and hear about things in which I am interested, not just read text about it. I think a lot of other people do the same.
At least this plan will keep me out of the bars and awake late into the night.