I just got a FedEx package from Hong Kong.

It left China one day ago and arrived on my doorstep at 9:25 am this morning.

In this package were three carefully-packed, individually-cased skeins of 100 business cards. My business cards. And I cannot tell you how pleased I am with how they turned out.

First, a brief explanation:

Now that I’m freelancing for a living, it’s become very apparent that I need to increase my visibility as a service provider. I realized quickly that having business cards (despite not having an actual “business”) is an essential component to being able to keep potential clients in touch with me.

I’ve had just about every experience imaginable with getting cards printed for clients in the past. Some good, some bad; but almost all were marred by either delays or sub-par print quality. So I decided to try a recommendation I got from some of the folks on 9rules: Print100.

Print100 is a global print service based in Hong Kong. They do much more than business cards, but I believe their chief stock in trade is the card market. You can check the website for more info about them - I’m just going to give you one customer’s perspective.

I uploaded my own design for the card to Print100’s site (based on the templates they provided). But no sooner than it was uploaded, I realized I’d made a mistake and needed to fix a design error. So I emailed the service department about correcting the order. Within hours I was contacted by Eric from the international division of the company, who told me to send the corrected versions to him and he’d process the new order immediately. I did and he did.

From that point, it was a waiting game. I wondered how long it would take. I mean, printers here in town usually take a couple weeks to get around to print jobs and you never know how well they’ll turn out. I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Using Print100’s little client interface thing, I was able to keep track of the status of my order. One day after submitting my (fixed) print design, Eric emailed me .jpgs of the front and back images to confirm they were correct. After confirmation, the status indicator in my client interface read “printing” for 4 full days. Then, last night, it changed to a FedEx tracking number. I clicked the number to find a detailed tracking report of my cards’ shipment. They left Hong Kong the morning of April 26 and by the time I woke up on April 27, the FedEx truck was pulling into my parking lot.

Now that’s service.

But the best part is yet to come.

Getting the cards out of the box, I was incredibly pleased to find they were printed beautifully. The waterproof matte finish on the surface is supple and so much more high-quality than the standard gloss stock you normally get from cheap digital printing. Both sides are printed in full color, and I had the corners trimmed and rounded (because that’s the cool way to do cards these days). These are the nicest business cards I’ve ever had in my hands.

Total cost? $29.99.

Seriously. Waterproof finish, trimmed corners, two-sided full color, international one-day shipping - free. I paid about $10 per 100 for the nicest card prints I’ve seen. 300 full color cards, custom trimmed and delivered within 7 working days from the day I orderd them? For under 30 bucks?? From the other side of the world!? Unheard of.

Does it sound like I’m pleased and excited? You bet. Any time a company can provide a customer with an experience this good, it’s worth spreading the word. So if you need postcards, letterhead, envelopes or business cards customized to virtually any specs imaginable - and you want great service and quality - my money is on Print100.

Check the cards. Of course the photos don’t do them justice.

If you’ve been to this site before, and you don’t know me personally, you probably got here via StumbleUpon.

SU has long been my favorite Firefox plugin, but I’ve come to love it even more because it drives a good portion of the traffic to my website. If you don’t already have it, by all means download StumbleUpon now.

In an effort to turn an already great product into something even better, the folks at SU continue adding great functionality to their service. For example: StumbleVideo.

If you’re using SU to surf, then you are likely stumbling onto great videos already - mixed in with the other content you receive. But if you’re interested in just stumbling through the best videos on the web, make StumbleVideo your destination of choice.

StumbleVideo’s interface is as uncluttered and clean as possible. As you’re watching a video, the controls and page content dim to black, so as to keep from being a distraction. You can hit the “Stumble” button at any time to find the next great video, click thumbs up or down to rate what you’re watching, see how many others liked or disliked it and even share your favorite videos with friends via a simple button click.

You’re going to like this. So start Stumbling!

My iPod currently has 12Gb of music and 15Gb of movies/television shows stored on it. It is as much a video player for me as it is a music player. But getting those videos onto my iPod from sources outside iTunes can be a bit tricky. Converting .avis or .movs into iPod-compatible MPEG4 video is old news, thanks to tools like Videora. But how about converting YouTube videos or other embedded movie files from the web into iPod format?

Interested? Sure you are.

Read the rest of this post »

Back in my day, we used to have to scour the internet for hours in search of a freeware app or some shareware trial software that could convert audio files between formats. We prized…prized! those hand-coded conversion tools that turned our .avi’s into .mpg’s or Flash .flv files.Clandestine image formats? Markup language text? If you wanted it, you found some niche application to get it converted. Sure! It was hard work. But it built character. And we were grateful. Our parents worked overtime to provide for us so we could have audio tracks in .ogg format and .doc files converted to Acrobat-ready .pdf’s.

Uphill. In the snow. Both ways.

But now. Now..the kids have Zamzar. And Zamzar can do nearly any conversion you can think of - online.

Without downloading anything, Zamzar lets users upload document, image, audio or video files (up to 100Mb) to be converted online into an alternative format. The newly-converted file is then emailed to the user.

The service is, as the best of these things are, free. It is also, as most of these things seem to be, still a beta version. But don’t let the “beta” fool you - it works just fine.

Now, while you go convert your 300-page doctoral thesis into a convenient .pdf, I’m going to go chase some kids off my lawn.