The Crafty Puzzles Company: 12/06/12

Thursday 6 December 2012

Daily Sudoku: Fri 7-Dec-2012

by via The Daily Sudoku

Daily Monster Sudoku: Fri 7-Dec-2012

by via The Daily Sudoku

Daily Squiggly Sudoku: Fri 7-Dec-2012

by via The Daily Sudoku

Apple’s Children Illusion by Dean

via Mighty Optical Illusions http://www.moillusions.com/2012/12/apples-children-illusion-by-dean.html

Inspired by our last month’s Appetising Love Optical Illusion Dean Pellerezi took a shot of an apple sitting on a table, and then mixed it so that it includes a profile of his beloved ones. I’m sure you’ll notice the illusion immediately, which btw doesn’t degrade the quality nor aesthetics of Dean’s submission. What I love most about it is how subtle it turned out to be. What’s your take on the below photo? Hope you enjoy it!

I recently saw your post of an apple illusion and it inspired me to photograph my children. Thanks for your cool site and the inspiration! – Dean

Crafty Puzzles

My Journey As A Scroll Saw Pattern Designer #897: Newsletter Issues

via LumberJocks.com RSS Feed - All Posts http://lumberjocks.com/scrollgirl/blog/33313

I spent the day yesterday trying to catch up on things here around the house. I did weave a bit of work into that mix, as we had just sent out a newsletter and there were several orders to attend to. Once again we are having trouble with our mailing list however. There is a problem with all of our MSN customers because the IP address from the site generated information is looked upon by MSN accounts (hotmail, live, etc) as SPAM and won’t allow the emails through. This means that not only are those customers who subscribed to our newsletters not getting them, but also when they do order, the receipts that are automatically generated by the site are also bounced back and they don’t get them either. In fact, that is what initially made me aware of the problem.

Fortunately, I don’t have the site set up to automatically send orders out. I have mentioned before that while it does take a bit of time, I still like to manually send each order, adding in a short greeting and note of thanks to my customers. Since the orders are sent from my Gmail account, there is not problem on that end and at least the customers do get what they ordered as they always did.

However, it is not good that the MSN customers (and I am finding random other customers also) do not receive their newsletters. There are times when I give special discounts and coupon codes to my mailing list recipients and it doesn’t seem fair to those who subscribe not to be able to enjoy them.

So we spent part of the day manually isolating those customers and sending them the newsletter from my gmail account. Keith spent a great deal of time picking the emails from the many on our list and I spent some time sorting through emails that got bounced back due to either error or closed account, etc. We realize that we need to look into another way of doing our bulk mailing that will be a bit more efficient and reliable. (If you signed up for the newsletter using a MSN account, you may wish to do so again with another email address if you haven’t been receive it.)

I also began the task of redecorating my little tree for Christmas. That was also another time-consuming task, as the lights that I had on last year weren’t working and I wound up having to go out to get more. I did other errands in the process and before I knew it, it was nearly dinner time before I returned. The day was nearly done.

I am going to take one more day to get on top of things. I did think of a new idea though yesterday, so stepping back a bit was worth it. I am going to see how the day progresses, but I am going to do some drawing on the new idea and get moving on it. Things will once again progress.

Sometimes taking the pressure off just a little bit does wonders. Telling myself that I didn’t ‘have’ to do some things today seemed to make a difference in how I felt. As it turned out, I spent probably a healthy portion of the day ‘working’ and I didn’t even realize it. It is funny how these mind games can play a part in our success. Just by calling something a different name helps to accept it a little easier sometimes.

I wish you all a good day today.