[We may have a taker. Sat 11/5 8:41pm]

We have a Mission Style entertainment center / computer desk. It’s yours for free. You just need to pick it up. First come first served.

We have a wonderful piece of furniture that needs a new home. It’s three separate pieces stacked on top of each other. The bottom is used for storage. The middle part is the computer desk / desk / entertainment center. The top is a display cabinet with a glass front, glass shelves, and display lighting. It’s made by Bassett in the Mission style.

You need to be able to carry the parts down an inside and and outside set of stairs. We live in a townhouse near the DMV off Gallows Rd in Tysons Corners, VA.

Here are links to photos so you can see it for yourself:

Dimensions: roughly 28″ deep x 44″ wide x 70″ tall

Contact me on Twitter @pfischer if you want it. I will update this post when I have a taker.

-Paul

The ringtone is a .m4r file. It will go straight into iTune and onto your iPhone. If you don’t have an iPhone you’ll want the .mp3 version. It’s in mono, 64 Kbps, so it should work on just about any phone that will let you use your own .mp3 files as ringtones.

If there’s interest and time, I’ll try throwing some bed music underneath it and post it again.

PS. The best part of the impression was Cory doing his daughter’s British accent.

The most notable etiquette item that stuck in my mind was Thank You notes. The outpouring of kindness and generosity at the baby shower really blew me away. I am still in awe regarding the overwhelming turn out and things people sent to help little Eliza’s get a good start on life. I spent weeks writing Thank You notes, signing them, and sending them out. Natalie Morris did a big batch for us, which really blew me away. She’s been such a great help.

But after the Thank You notes went out, I got a letter from my Aunt Lenny. You need to know some things about my relationship with her. Where my mom was ADD, my aunt is OCD and as a child I could mess things up or break them the second my aunt’s back was turned. Lenny and I have never really communicated directly, most of our conversation goes through third parties. So I was a little surprised and delighted to get a letter from her. Among the other things in the letter there was a simple note written on a post-it sized piece of paper. It said, “When you send out Birth Announcements make sure you include the people on this list…”

Up until this point I hadn’t really considered the need to send out birth announcements. I sent out invites to the baby shower, posted the birth on Twitter, and emailed 1/2 the known universe. As you might expect, I’m now consumed with the idea of getting the baby announcements sent out. And so, having learned to avoid anything requiring extensive amounts of time to assemble I set about looking for printable birth announcements on the web.

Most of my original findings were in two classes, neither of which interested me. The first was online printing services which would pre-print your custom announcements. The second was large kits which included ribbons, bows, multiple pieces, colors, and types of papers, and therefore required a minute or two per announcement to assemble. Both of these choices were terribly expensive, ranging from $1.25 all the way up to $4 or $5 each. Since I have about 50 names on my list, and Martha probably has about the same, we were looking at a minimum of $125 for 100 invites which we still had to address. Then we had to add shipping to get them to us and postage to send them out. That would round the total to about $175 minimum.

After much searching and modifying my google search terms, I finally found a site that offers blank cards and envelopes in bulk. My Expression offers a small but nice selection of cards which can be ordered blank in bulk for less. We purchased 100 cards and envelopes for less than $60. That includes shipping. I’ll try to post more when they arrive, but they look very nice. Hopefully the picture on the web will meet my expectations.

Once we have the cards we’ll be able to print our own announcement text and then print the envelopes. I plan to include a photo of Eliza Rose in the announcement. Once Martha and I select a photo, I plan on using some of the “50 free photos” trial offers that you see from certain shutterbug websites. If I can find 2 such offers I can get 100 5×7 prints to put in with my 5.5 x 7.75 announcements.

I’d rather not pay someone $0.25 per envelope and $0.50 per card to have them print on blank stock, when I have printers at home which can do the same job. I’d rather take that money and put it in an IRA or 529 Education Savings Plan.

Even thought I’m going to be doing some of the work at home, I’ve limited myself to printing the cards, addressing the envelopes, stuffing the envelopes, and affixing stamps. As much as that sounds like a ton of work, most of it will be done by the old Epson printer I just picked up off FreeCycle. The end result will be a nice birth announcement at less than half the cost with very little assembly work. That’s a win-win situation to me.

A free book? There’s no such thing as a free book! What’s the catch?

No catch. It’s free, click here to download it. But, Mur asks that if you like it you purchase it from Amazon.com on August 25. She’s making a run on Amazon and really needs us all to pitch in and help her get noticed. She, like so many others, has a book contract now. But podcasting novels are still a new medium for delivery and we need to show the publishing industry that this makes a difference.

Martha and I have read the PDF version multiple time. We help Mur by making the PDFs and doing layout and formatting. We also did a little editing. All of this was to help Mur make the best product possible. We bought the first version of Playing for Keeps when it was self-published on Lulu.com. And now we’re joining her for her run on Amazon and we’ll be buying multiple copies of Playing for Keeps as published by Swarm Press.

Mur has delivered countless hours of enjoyment and encouragement to the pod-o-sphere. She has also inspired and rallied people including me. It is not an exaggeration to say that if Mur wasn’t here I wouldn’t be either. I wonder how many other people to whom you listen, read, and watch are here because they were inspired by Mur Lafferty. I’m guessing the number is larger than you think.

So be ready to place your order from Amazon.com for Playing for Keeps on Monday August 25. Be there! Aloha.

Scott Sigler’s new print version of Infected gets released on April 1st, 2008. Over the next few days, his publisher has allowed him to give away copies of the PDF version of the book for free.

We are helping him do just that.

For more information on Scott and Infected, visit www.scottsigler.com

If you want share the file with friends, get them to download it from this page or from:

www.randomhouse.com/crown/infected/downloads/infected_novel.pdf

By getting the file from that link, it’s proving to the big publishers that we podcasters have a clue about what we are doing.

This file will only be active for a few days, at which time the link will become inactive and you’ll have to go to the bookstore to read the story. Which you should do anyway.

Jean Marais (Moshang Zhao in SL) has released a new CD of remixes called Asian Variations for free via Creative Commons. We ask that you’d help by linking to Asian Variations on blogs, playing music from this on your podcasts and vlogs, interviewing Jean on your podcasts and just helping to promote in any creative way that you can think of. Thanks so much and enjoy this fine chill out selection. Jean’s email: moshangmusic@yahoo.com

I’m listening to it right now. I’m into track three and this is just awesome!

-Paul