Retail Optimization TSO 3.7 Video

Rachel put together this demo video of TSO 3.7 and posted it on Vimeo. It's a great overview of what the ROI software does.

Introducing TSO 3.7 Optimizing the Potential in Your Store from Rachel Hronek on Vimeo.

Luigi Bosca Reserva

I always wanted to keep track of good wines that I drank. My friend Dan keeps notebooks with his tasting notes. Not sure I'm going to get too detailed, but WOULD like to capture the vineyard, varietal and a picture when possible.
Here is my first entry:

A 2006 Luigi Bosca Reserva $15.99

Let's Make Faces Book Published

I'm happy to see that Jerry Langeler's book Let's Make Faces has been published. And from what he tells me, it is selling very well. You can learn more about the book on his website www.letsmakefaces.com. Jerry is a super nice guy and sponsored our Autism Spectrum Walk team last year and even made the trip down from New Hampshire to join us on an unusually cold spring day!

Eddie Breen

I have been bidding on Eddie Breen paintings for years. I've never won an auction, but I hope that Eddie will make prints of this one. Cool to see @eddiebreen has found twitter. He signed up the painting to have it's own twitter account as well @artismylife

Qik for Quick Video

I tried having Evan use Qik on my Nokia e71 to record Hayden's music concert. Neither the sound or video quality was really good enough to post. I did take this little snippet to see if I could embed it into the blog.

My Very Own LOL Cat

I found this picture searching through some old photos circa 1997 of our very first cat Ursula. Boy was she a mean one!

Testing Streaming MP3 Players

Evan had some problems using flash mp3 player on his blog superread.blogspot.com so I wanted to run some tests to see if I can find a player that works for everybody. My brother Michael pointed me to this site with instructions on embedding MP3 players on your page. Give each of these a try and post your results in the comments. All songs I used for the test are written and produced by Evan Nork:

Google Reader MP3 Player (Song Title - "Evolve"):



Yahoo! MP3 Player (Song Title - "Instrumental"):




Odeo MP3 Player(Song Title - "Life"):




Well, my initial tests are:

1. Google Player: On the first round had to refresh the page to get the Google player to work, not sure why... I would like this one best if it works consistently. This is the only one with a volume control

2. Yahoo Player: Takes quite a while to load, does not show up right away when the pages loads. No volume control

3. Odeo: Seems to work, but this is the player that DIDN'T work on several other people's computers when Evan used it on his blog

The Newest Nork to Blog - superread.blogspot.com is LIVE

State of the Norkosphere
I started my blog back in 2005 and have been pretty quiet for a long time. Starting the new job at ROI meant that I had to move the blog off of the Mason servers. In that process I started reading some of my old posts and recalled how much fun blogging can be! My brother Michael has been much better about keeping up his blog about life in the peace corps in Romania. He also has a great photo gallery. I recommend you check them out!

BUT the big news is my oldest son Evan is now blogging! We heard a story on NPR several weeks ago about a wovel. What's a wovel you ask... well its the mash-up of "web + novel" = wovel.
Evan is a fantastic writer and has been putting together stories, poems and comics for several years (including the now famous Dr. Bill's Windmill in the Ficsher Gallery). He really got excited about doing his OWN wovel. I'm proud to announce that the blog superread.blogspot.com has been published and he has already posted 5 chapters of his first story tittled "Mars 3000". Do you like science fiction and fantasy? This this wovel is for you! If you check it out, be sure to leave him a comment, he LOVES the interactivity and response to his writing.

Best Way To Manage Twitter Stream

I have been using the social networking tool, twitter for quite a few months now and just posted my 2000th tweet this morning!
When I first started, I was using twitter.com for sending and receiving tweets and quickly moved to using my cell phone. I have looked at several twitter clients and used twhirl for a while. (Techcrunch has posted links to an exhaustive list of twitter software.)
I have found the best tool yet called peoplebrowsr.com.

It has quickly become my main twitter interface on both my work and home computer. PeopleBrowsr has tons of features all straight through the browser (no downloads or installs necessary).
A few of the cool features PeopleBrowsr offers are:

• Tagging friends and other people into groups
  
• Find people geographically
• Search keywords and have a streaming list of tweets with the matching term.
  
• Gather your blog, Flickr Photostream, YouTube channel, Facebook profile and more
  
• Update your networks

I have a column for friends, one for replies, one for direct messages, one search for my company name, and I am in the process of organizing different users into groups each with their own column (i.e. family, retail, technology etc). the only thing it doesn't have is the ability to post tweets from multiple accounts (could come in handy for keeping personal and business accounts separate).

Check out Brian Solis' blog post for a full run down of features. And a cool video demo by Robert Scoble here. Feel free to follow me on twitter @jcnork or www.twitter.com/jcnork

New Retail Optimization Inc. Website is Live

Check it out at www.retailoptimization.com!

Gotta Love The Onion! - Apple Wheel, LOL

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

When we were down in NYC last week I saw a news stand with printed copies of The Onion! Love it :)

My Favorite YouTube Videos

I've been playing with ways to embed YouTube videos onto a client website, here's some of my favorite videos :)

Insane Rates for AT&T Cell Phone Calls In Romania!

Well I'm getting ready for my trip to Romania on Friday. I figured I would check on the per-minute rates for calls. Can you believe it's $3.49/minute to send and receive calls? Well obviously, that's just not going to work, so I had to come up with a 'plan-b'. The first thing I needed to do was to get the unlock code for my phone. I had heard horror stories from others trying to do this so I was ready for a fight. None needed! I just called customer service and asked for the subsidy unlock code and about 5 minutes later I had an unlocked AT&T phone that will except any SIM card. Step 1 completed!

Next, what service should I use when I am in Romania? I had heard of other people purchasing a SIM card in the airport to use. I bought a international SIM card several years ago from GoSim.com but never used it because my data plan didn't work (and still doesn't). My GoSIM card has an Estonian phone number. Not sure why, but it does... Step 2 done.

Next step How can I have people get in touch with me without having to dial Estonia to do it??? I was going to try using it with a skypein number relay calls to my European cell number, but my tests were less then impressive with both sound quality and reliability of the call being delivered. But good news! -- It turns out that GoSIM has gateway numbers for $0.35/minute people here in the states can call a toll free number and have it ring my international cell phone. Many countries have free incoming calls, Romania isn't one of them, they have a $0.10/min charge for in-coming calls. Not bad. So for $0.45/min I can receive calls anywhere in Romania and people here just have to dial a toll free number and then enter my new cell number. Three easy steps :)

I tried it and it seems to work like a charm! I put $50 on my card so that should last me the trip as long as I don't spend tons of time on the phone with work! :-) Off to the land of Dracula!

Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog
This Joss Whedon video staring Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser) is fantastic. It reminds me of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer musical episode. Check it out and let me know what you think :)

Mike Nork Featured in the University of Connecticut Alumni Magazine


I'm proud of my brother Mike. He has been in the Peace Corps for over a year now.
My Mom, oldest son and I are going to visit him next week. Meeting in Budapest and then taking a train over to Romania.