Sat 28 Jul 2007

I LOVE Me Some WeeWar!

Posted by mark under General
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I’ve been playing an online game for a while now called WeeWar. It is so awesome. It’s kind of like the board game Risk. Aside from the fun strategy, and scheming, and destroying, one of the things that makes the game great is that it is turn-based. I’m currently embroiled in furious battle with my brother and my two cousins. What happens is I take my turn, and then the game sends an email to the next person in line that it is their turn. That means that every player can play when it is convenient to them, and the game doesn’t have to steal your soul and ruin your life! If you want to play more, you just start more games. If you don’t have much time for games, you can just be involved in one game with a bunch of players so that it takes a while to get back around to your turn again. This has been great for us since the four of us have very different lives: one who is frequently on the road (me), one with kids, one a newly-wed, and one who lives in the gutter and sleeps in filth.

The game with my brother and cousins has turned into our major form of communication too since there is a little box on the screen where you can have an ongoing chat with the other players. It’s great.

Ok, now here’s the real deal though: after I have recruited 10 players to the game, I achieve Pro status which means that in any game I start, all the players have access to a bunch of additional units (planes, boats) and cooler game maps. So if you want to play WeeWar, you can help me achieve Pro status by using this link to sign up. That way you will be counted as a player I have recruited! Then once I get Pro staus I would be glad to invite you to a game with all the additional units. Just remind me ;)

I should point out though, that you will need some patience. It turns out that WeeWar is so popular that they have had trouble keeping up with the huge demand, so there are times that the site goes down, and they are still fine-tuning the recent upgrades. I think they will get it all worked out soon.

You’d think that since I have six games going right now it would be my turn in one of them… but no.  I guess I just have to get invited to more games.

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Sat 28 Jul 2007

Moving in Three Days

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Yes, it’s true.  Just three days until Lenore and I move to Pittsburgh.  There is a lot of work yet to be done and I am tired.  Part of the tiredness might have to do with the fact that I drove almost 300 miles today, and it is currently 1:27 am.

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Sun 22 Jul 2007

Driving Model Trains With Uncle Bill

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Today was the last day of the International Jugglers Association Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It was awesome. If you juggle you HAVE to go to an IJA festival. It’s just amazing. The Saturday night public show may have been the best show I’ve ever seen. Check out Get The Shoe, they totally stole the show. After saying my goodbyes to my friends I headed up to Elkin to visit my Uncle Bill. He lives way out of town in a nice log home that he built when he retired, and in the basement he has a giant train set that he is building. It’s awesome.

It has two gauges of track so he can run the two different size trains that met up in a town in Colorado back at the end of the steam locomotive era. Uncle Bill showed me a bunch of the things he’s working on, and I even got to drive a train. The last time I was here none of the trains were running yet, so it was great to see them in action. He even has digital trains that you can run with a wireless remote control, and they have sound! I was worried that the sound might be dumb, but was actually really high quality and added a lot. I can’t wait until the next time I get to come here.

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Sun 15 Jul 2007

Better Ranking Through Good Design- How to Pick a Website Designer, and Why You Need One

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I wrote this article for a now-defunct Search Engine Optimization (SEO) site, and I think it’s a good article, so I thought I’d share it here.

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In a previous post I talked about the importance of Covering the Basics First when dealing with search engine optimization. My first point was that you need to be sure your website doesn’t suck. Does your site suck? Are you sure that it doesn’t? When I first put up my site it was hard for me to tell. Now I have the experience and perspective to know… and I had some help.

In my opinion, the best thing you can do to ensure that you have a good website is to hire a designer. If you are a large corporation I’m sure that you already have a great site and a whole team of designers to keep it that way. But for me, and for a huge number of small business owners out there, there is only one person in my web-design team: me… and I’m bad at it.

As a small operation, the temptation is to make your website yourself. I made mine, and if you’ve done the same thing I’m sure you’ve done a decent job and you have a serviceable site. You have good reason to be proud of your efforts, because you got things rolling. But now you need to take the next step, set your pride aside and let the professionals do their work. Most people don’t realize the important difference between something that looks ok, and something that looks great. If you want to take advantage of every edge you can, then you need to have a GREAT site so you can have good ranking, improved traffic, and more business.

To those of us outside the industry, graphic design seems simple enough. Anyone can organize pictures and paragraphs and make a site look good right? Oh, no… that is SO not the case. Even with an extensive background in art, I do not have what it takes to do good graphic design. I have several friends who are graphic designers, and I only had to watch them work for a few minutes to see that their years of training and experience allow them to do work that is way beyond anything I ever did.

How do you pick out a designer?

It’s tempting to look to a friend who is a designer and think that not only will it be easier to work with a friend, but it will also be cheaper. Speaking from experience, it is only a good idea to hire a friend if you have 100% unflinching, absolute confidence that their abilities match your needs. A lower price doesn’t benefit you if your life is made miserable as a result. Lets say you hire your friends wife to do your website, and… oh I don’t know… what if they get a divorce before your site is finished? Seems unlikely? That’s what I thought before it happened to me. As difficult as it may be, you really need to try to not worry about the money. You will come out better in the long run.

Here are a few steps that you can follow when looking for a designer for your website: (more…)

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Sat 14 Jul 2007

Working on a Mark Hayward DVD with Takeshi

Posted by mark under General
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I have been gathering footage, and mulling over ideas for this project for years.  Many of my performer friends have DVDs that they sell after their shows.  I have wanted to make one for years, but having the high standards that I do, I wanted to make a really high-quality DVD so it took a while to gather enough footage and get my ideas together.  I’m really excited about what we’ve been working on so far.  The whole thing will be bonus footage.  There are plenty of opportunities to see my show, and lots of people have seen it, but if you buy the DVD, you will get nothin’ but EXTRAS!  There will be footage of me performing bits that I don’t do very often, or in some cases have only done once;  Takeshi is working on a mini-documentary that will incorporate news footage, and interviews with friends and family; and there will be tutorial videos on how to do both yo-yo and spin-top tricks.  There will even be a section with really old-school footage, including a short documentary that my brother made back in the early 90s called “The Gemini’s Big Gig” from when Matt Henry and I used to perform together as The Gemini Jugglers.

Takeshi and I shot a bunch of footage on Thursday, and we will shoot some more in a just over a week after I get back from the IJA juggling festival in Winson-Salem NC.  The whole thing might be finished in a month, but we’ll see.

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Wed 11 Jul 2007

Warning: Possible Certified Check Scam on Performers

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I recently got referred for a gig by a friend of mine. It was a wedding/anniversary celebration in Jackson Tennessee. I actually thought it was a legit gig until we started to talk about money. The guy said that he wanted to get my address right away so that he could have his accountant send me a certified check. That was a big red flag for me. A while back I tried to sell some stuff on craigslist, and they have a great security notice about fake cashier’s checks. You should read it right now if you haven’t already.

Once I was suspicious, I started looking more closely at the whole situation, and there were a bunch of things that didn’t make sense:

  • The guy seemed too willing to spend a bunch of money. We all know that people spend ridiculous amounts of money on weddings these days, but he seemed to be offering a blank check to bring out yo-yo performers who he knew nothing about. It would be different if he was working through a trusted agent, or if he had heard of me or my friend who referred me, but he knew nothing about either of us. That’s just weird. People don’t usually throw money at unfamiliar things. He was even willing to fly my friend out from Texas sight-unseen.
  • His email domain was mixmail.com which is a Spanish language site. By itself, this was no big deal, lots of people speak Spanish, and I’m perfectly happy to work for them, but the majority of scams seem to come from out of the country from free email addresses. This detail was just one more straw on the camel’s back. (more…)

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Sun 8 Jul 2007

Watch for me on Nickelodeon’s Slime Across America

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Yesterday, as I was setting up to do my first street show at Summerfest in Milwaukee, there was a big camera crew standing in front of me. I went over to ask what they were doing, and to see if they were going to be staying right there for long since I wanted to do a show. I didn’t go over to talk to them to try to get on TV, but they offered, so of course I said yes.

I did a little interview with Mark and another guy (whose name I forgot, sorry) for the Nickelodeon show Slime Across America. I did some yo-yo tricks while they asked me questions, and at some point Mark asked me if I wanted to have a dance-off with him. I didn’t want to at all, since I can’t dance, but I said, “Do I EVER!” So the other guy did a little beat-boxing and we each got 5 seconds to dance. I won. Of course I had the upper hand since the producers said I could do some yo-yo tricks as part of my dance.

The show is what they called an “interstitial” which means that it is a short show that is shown between other shows. If they use the footage of me, it will be aired on July 26th. The problem is that it’s not a show that will be listed in TV Guide, so I’m going to have to record the entire day of programming on Nickelodeon. I’m pretty excited about being on the show, so I really hope they use the footage of me.

My buddy Marcus Monroe walked by as they were interviewing me, and got interviewed too when I was finished.

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Fri 6 Jul 2007

A New Career High: My Face on a Birthday Cake

Posted by mark under General
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One of the reasons that people become performers is that they like the attention. Most of the time that attention comes in specific, expected forms. But I was recently offered an awesome new format: my photo on a kid’s birthday cake.

EiljahBDayCake

Elijah’s mom took this photo of us after a show at the Burlington WI ChocolateFest. Then I got an email from her a few weeks later asking if she could use the image on Elijah’s birthday cake. I couldn’t say yes fast enough! What an AWESOME idea!

I’m not sure who was more excited about the cake, Elijah or me.

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Thu 28 Jun 2007

Having An Old Car Makes People Want to Help You

Posted by mark under Model A Ford, Regular Ol' Stories
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Last week I took the radiator off my Model A Ford because the fan broke and cut a hole in the back of it. Yeah, I was pretty happy about that. I had known for a while that I needed a new ratchet nut for the crankshaft pulley on the front of the engine, so I ordered a new one a while back. I was just waiting until the next time I had the radiator off to install it. Now I had my chance.

There is a special tool that you can buy to remove the ratchet nut, but I figured that I could get it without the tool once the radiator was off. It turns out that I was wrong. The ratchet nut is nestled into the concave center of the pulley, and you can’t reach it with a normal crescent wrench. Besides that, the old nut on my car is actually a different size, so the special tool wouldn’t have worked anyway. My two options as I saw them were to go out and buy an expensive tool that I would probably never use again, or go over to the garage across the street and see if one of their guys might come over and pop the nut off for me.

I went over, talked to Ernie, and told him I was having trouble trying to get a part off of my old car. Initially he wasn’t all that friendly, he told me that they don’t do any mobile service, and it seemed that I might be out of luck. The ratchet nut is a really odd-looking little item, it’s kind of like a regular bolt, but it has four shark-fin shaped teeth in a circle sticking out of the top. I had brought it along on purpose just in case I needed it to help me out in my task. I pulled it out of my pocket and showed Ernie when he asked me what I was trying to take off the car. He looked at it, very puzzled, and said, “What the hell are you working on?”

“A 1930 Model A Ford.”

There was a long pause. “Well… let’s see what I’ve got in here.”

(more…)

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Sat 23 Jun 2007

My First Car Show With the Model A Ford

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From right to left: My family’s Model A, Devin’s A, a hot rod A, a badly done hot rod firetruck.

Today Devin came up from Bedford and we had our own little 2-car Model A parade over to the rockabilly car show on the west side of town. It was awesome. There were an incredible number of amazing cars. It was almost all hot rods and custom cars, but I did manage to achieve my goal of talking Model A’s with some old car guys. It was really great, and I even learned a little about my unusual water pump… which is now leaking. But that’s ok, sort of, since one of the old car guys told me what kind it was, so I may be able to order parts for it now.

This was the farthest I have ever driven the Model A and that felt really good.

The reflection of my car in the hub caps of the car next to mine.

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