On The 45 SEO and Design

Crawford Landscape Services in McCall, Idaho just launched a new website. (We might have had something to do with it.) Check it out.

If you need a wedding consultant or a wedding photographer, check out Tara Reeder’s business, McCall Weddings.

Like many folks out there, I have been pretty interested to see what new product Apple was going actually unveil at today’s announcement. Well, they finally have come out with a tablet “computer,” and it’s called the iPad. I’ll let you decide for yourself, but it looks pretty darn cool. And with a starting price point of $499, this device may in fact be a Kindle killer — and seems to have the potential to take a big bite out of the netbook market. As I sit here perusing the specifications on this device, the only thing that appears to be a bummer is that it doesn’t have a built in iSight camera. This is too bad — because I constantly use my MacBook for video chatting and it seems that would be a perfect task for this device. I’m sure I’m not alone. I can only imagine that Apple has not included the iSight for strategic reasons — and specifically to curb product cannibalization. Would an iPad with 3g cannibalize the iphone market? Not sure. But I can see how AT&T might be a bit nervous about it. Especially in a world where the user can purchase a $30 a month, all-you-can eat plan with no contract. But let’s face it, you can’t carry an iPad like you would a cell phone. Does reserving iSight functionality for MacBooks and iMacs help provide a clearer upgrade path for those products? Maybe. Lastly, I suppose it’s possible that this is a feature that could be coming out in the future. We’ll see.

Check out the redesign for McCall’s Lakeside Vacation Rentals that was recently launched. And by all means, if you need a cabin or house rental for an upcoming vacation/weekend/holiday in the McCall, Idaho area, give them a try.

Wow, I was just sitting here at the table, working on a specification document for a client’s new website when I saw a long muzzle out of the corner of my eye peek around the bbq.  A funny thing is that I wasn’t even sure what kind of animal it was before I could see his head.  Crazy.  ”Is that a wolf snout?”, I thought?  HA! Nope.  Just your average, seemingly friendly black bear.  I feel bad because these guys are getting into a lot of trouble around McCall due to people leaving their garbage out overnight — and/or not sealing up their garbage cans tightly.  In this instance, I neglected to thoroughly clean up the bbq after using it two nights ago.  Clearly he smelled it.

An Experienced Property Preservationist position just opened up in the “McCall, Donnelly, and Surrounding Areas” as I see in Craigslist. No, I’m not looking for a new job, but I do have all new positions in the area via Craigslist going into my Google Reader. It’s been interesting to say the least. Pretty. Slow ’round these parts. Anyway, this one (like they all don’t) caught my eye because I wasn’t sure what it was. Call me naive. I’ve never been in the banking or real estate world and didn’t know what a “property preservationist” was! So I read the job description carefully and thought — hmm… this sounds like a landscape/yard maintenance position. And I wondered if I discovered a newly renamed position, much like the “Sanitary Engineer”. So, I went-a-googling and found out that the job description on Craigslist was a bit misleading, but more importantly, I am just dumb sometimes. Sometimes? Hope so.

Interestingly, there’s not a wiki page for “property preservationist”, so you wiki-types — have at it!

So what is it exactly? Near as I can tell, it’s officially the person that banks send into (often trashed) homes that are in foreclosure and gets them cleaned and sealed up, so the asset doesn’t deteriorate further. Hence the term “property preservationist.”

I’ll always reserve the right to get smarter.

I have no official sources, but word on the street this morning from a Donnelly, ID resident is that the Tamarack Resort near McCall, Idaho has been purchased. I did some web searches to try and confirm and have found nothing, but I suppose it’s possible that if it happened late yesterday that it might not have been picked up yet. Or, it’s entirely possible that the “word on the street” is well, totally wrong.

Keep your eyes peeled for news from real sources. I trust that the On The 45 Blog is NOT your primary source for news. Lord help you if it is. If the sale is in fact real, I would suspect that that it will be in the Idaho Statesman by the end of the day and of course the Star News on Thursday.

Anyone out there hearing any chatter?

I’m just back from the Farmers Market that’s located in downtown McCall, Idaho. It’s a great little market and it’s open on Wednesday and Saturday during the “Summer” months, which I find is very convenient for picking up fresh food. Even on a Wednesday morning the market is hopping with locals and tourists checking out the booths and purchasing great local items. Some of my favorites are:

Campell Trinity C Grass-Finished Beef from New Meadows, ID. Steve and Debra Campbell are the owners of the ranch and have always been at the booth to tell folks about how they are sustainably ranching and what’s special about their beef. But don’t take anyone’s word for it, give some a try and see for yourself. Delicious.

Ron & Anita from Council, Idaho. They have what seems to be an all organic farm and feature amazing vegetables at very reasonable prices. From different varietals of potatoes, summer squash, beets, carrots, and chard, they’ve got your veggie purchases covered. They also sell locally grown and processed chickens. I haven’t tried one yet, but will keep you posted.

The Tamale Booth. I don’t know these folks’ names, but they make delicious tamales for $1.50 each. You can eat them there, or take them to go. Last time I was there, they had chicken, beef and pork. They also sell Spanish rice and sides of salsa. I can’t speak for the rice or salsa, but the tamales were a real treat. Give one a try!

Here are the official details on the market:

Operating Dates: Jun 15, 2009 – Oct 14, 2009
Hours: 10:00 AM-2:00 PM
Location: Pine St., McCall, ID 83638 (Between Hotel McCall and Gravity Sports)
View Larger Map

Here’s a quick tip for you. Like Google and Yahoo, Bing.com defaults to ten (10) results per results page. Both Google and Yahoo enable you to change this up to 100 results by clicking their “Advanced” feature. (Well, with Yahoo, it’s “Options” and then “Advanced”.

However, Bing’s “Advanced” link doesn’t follow Google and Yahoo’s lead and it had me scratching my head. Ultimately, I found what I was looking for up in the top right-hand corner of the page under “Extras” and then “Preferences”. Once you get there, you can select up to 50 results per page. Not quite as handy as Google and Yahoo’s 100 listings per page, but I’ll take what I can get. There you go, hope it helps!

My Slow Frontier DSL Internet Service in McCall

I hate to complain about this service, as the technicians who’ve come out have been very nice, but here’s the truth: I have very slow Frontier DSL internet service.  Performance will be “fine” (fine equals about 80% of the speed I’m supposed to be getting) much of the time and then just seriously cut out throughout the day and evening.  You really notice when you’re trying to watch a movie on Netflix or a Hulu video, etc.  I should clarify that last statement.  I really notice it no matter what — watching a movie or video is practically impossible.  Heck, blogging right now is utterly terrible.  With Netflix, the Silverlight software figures out what speed and quality to play, sets up a buffer, plays swimmingly well for 20 minutes or so (mileage varies) and then bam, you get the “Your internet connection has slowed message…” and 5-10 minutes later your up and running again.  Lame.  This will often happen multiple times throughout a movie.  I’m constantly managing the buffer and pausing the movie so it doesn’t crap-out and restart the whole process.

I’ve called Frontier multiple times — as this is far and away the slowest and most sporadic broadband Internet service I’ve ever had.  I’m pretty sure that takes us back to the Clinton Administration.  Not sure, but it’s been a long time.  The routine is the same — they tell me to go to speedtest.frontier.net and run it.  Yada, yada.  The test usually comes back at an acceptable level, which is frustrating.  They’ve sent two technicians out who haven’t found a problem with the lines or the modem.

The technicians who come out keep asking me if the slowdown is “time of day dependent”.  My response is “not always,” but it does seem worse in the evening — which makes sense, as that’s when the bulk of folks are streaming lots of zeros and ones.  However, I’m not streaming movies during the day, so daytime slowdowns would be a bit less noticeable I would guess.

The last technician that swung by said that all of his tests indicated that the line from inside the house up to the road was fine — and his money was on a bandwidth issue.  As in, someone with an infected PC somewhere on Frontier’s DSL network is stealing all my bandwidth.  He said he would run it up the chain of command.  I should have asked him what next steps were for contacting me, but I was in a trance it would seem and nothing concrete was established for a follow up.  Ball’s in my court.

As a bit of an aside, what doesn’t make sense to me is that DSL providers love to throw around in their marketing materials that unlike cable broadband, DSL service doesn’t suffer from other users hopping on the network.  As far as I recall, it’s basically DSL’s ONLY play as cable generally beats the snot out of DSL speeds hands-down.  And evidently it’s perhaps not even really true.  I don’t claim to be an expert in this area, just know what I’m experiencing.

So where am I with all this?  I’m not really sure.

I think it’s time to call again as things are really creeping right now.  It’s so bad that it inspired this post.  And I happened to grab a doozy of a screenshot showing  just how bad it is.  For those of you that didn’t notice, that’s a download speed of 48kbps!  Wahoo!  Surf is up.  I might as well plug in the 56K dial-up modem and see what free internet service I can get that outperforms this baby.

Is anyone else experiencing similar service?  Frontier, if you’re reading this, drop me a line.

-Scott