I decided to take a day off and get some work done on the two woodworking projects I’m trying to get finished for our soon-to-be here daughter. The weather turned out to be pretty cold, so I didn’t even feel guilty being indoors. Below is a shot of one of the two end frames being glued up. I picked up some new Bessey K-body clamps because I didn’t have any long enough to do the final glue up. They’re pretty nice, but heavy, and also a bit prone to jamming. Most of my other clamps are their Tradesman bar clamps, which are great all around clamps. My wife always rolls her eyes when I talk about clamps, but you can never have enough of them.

I got as far as getting the two end frames together, along with the top pieces - the photo doesn’t show it very well, but there is a cherry piece under the top cap. It looks pretty nice, although when my wife came down the first thing she said was “It’s huge!” She’s right – it is pretty big. I had originally designed it to fit dimensions of a changing table we found at Target, but then decided to add an inch here, and inch there, and, well, those inches add up pretty quickly! The good news is that the baby will never fall out of it – she’ll die of thirst long before she’ll be able to crawl to the edge to fall. Seriously, it’s not quite that big, but there will be plenty of room.

As you’re read here before, I’m a fan of Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software, which I use with my digital voice recorder. I got the software when I bought the recorder a while back, and since then the folks at Scansoft have come out with a new version of software, Dragon Naturally Speaking 8.

I know this because they have sent me an email every week for the past month or so offering me a fantastic upgrade deal. Well, sort of. The deal is for the “Standard” version of the software, and they’re offering it for 50% off. This would be very tempting except that to use a digital voice recorder, I have have to have the “Preferred” version of the software. No deal there, except a paltry 25% off as the standard upgrade offer on their site.

What has me puzzled is why they’re sending me an offer for a software package I have no reason to buy, when they presumably have the info they need to make me an offer I can’t refuse. I don’t even have any reason to forward the message, because I intend to recommend what I have - a software and recorder bundle - not what I don’t have. I would hope they would know which version I have, because the only way they know who I am is from registering the software. I guess they decided to ignore that information.

This is disappointing because they could have had a very easy sale - which I let them know by return email - offer me the preferred version at the same discount as the standard and I’ll take it today.

So close, yet so far away.

Corporate Engagement has an interesting post on Kryptonite’s lock problem and its discovery and propagation by the blogosphere. While I am very happy to see posts about business blogging, there is one statement made by CE that sticks in my craw:

It’s an excellent example of the ability of the blogosphere to damage a brand’s reputation.

This is not correct. When you make a bicycle lock that you promote as being the strongest, most secure lock out there, and then it’s discovered that those locks can be bypassed with a ball point pen, well, that’s not really bloggers damaging your brand. That’s stupidity of design damaging your brand. The bloggers just made it happen faster, which probably saved them money by preventing further sales of defective products that would have to be replaced.