Owen's X10 Blog

So, I recently left the nest for good. I graduated from Washington State University just about this time last year. 4 years was good enough for me. Living in Pullman, Wa for those years definitely gave me the chance to live on my own and with roommates. This is the first time that I’ve left my parents house with no plans on becoming a basement dweller again. Don’t be sad Mom, I’ll still come by on the weekend to tease you guys and walk the dog. (Yes she reads my Blog, she’s still my biggest fan).

Moving into a new place is tiring work. Especially when you have a mountain of old clothes to sift through. It was about time for that anyway. One of the biggest kicks I’ve had so far is my roommate’s appreciation of my X10 stuff. I have been interested in technology for quite a while, stemming from an initial interest in computers. Yeah, call me Kip if you like. If you’ve seen Napoleon Dynamite you can probably imagine how loud I laugh during Kip's wedding when he sings his new bride a song, here’s a bit of it.

“I love technology, but not as much as you, you see... But I STILL love technology... Always and forever. Our love is like a flock of doves, flying up to heaven above... always and forever, always and forever...”

Don’t worry; I’m not on that side of the dork scale – not yet anyway. I get home from work about an hour earlier than my roommate. This gives me time to sneakily install the new X10 gadgets that I get from work. If you could have seen his face when he walked through the door and I began flipping on lights in his path to the fridge with my remote control. His face went from pure confusion to absolute delight before I could even hit the last switch. He was sure that he had acquired some great power which would turn on lights everywhere he went. Just before he could declare his superpowers to me, he saw the remote in my hand. I think his response was something to the affect of, “So that’s what you do all day”. Yeah it’s a great aspect of my job – playing with home automation products. Since that day he shows off our fully automated bachelors pad to every guest he has, “And this button controls our weird Ikea light that Owen bought because he couldn’t resist the moving lights”.

I often find myself sitting on the couch wishing I could turn the bathroom fan off without going upstairs, or the outside light on before I go to take out the trash. If this situation comes up and I am out of the stuff I pick up at the office, I check out the daily newsletter. It really is the only place to find out about current deals, also a great place to get 4 SocketRockets for less than a new Xbox game. If you are interested in the newsletter go to www.x10minitimer.com and enter your email address in the little box on the left side of the page. There have been a few unexpected and exclusive sales as of late. Looks like I can finally get my hands on the Lola system, hooray.

Goodnight

Posted by Owen Robinson at 05:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's Friday here at X10 and my copywriter is doing her best to make me very jealous of her tickets to this weekends sasquatch music festival. Over the weeks I’ve done my best to shrug it off, a lot of the multi-band concerts I’ve been to have fallen short of keeping my attention the whole time. (See bumbershoot lineups 1999-Present)

Then the curtains opened and she showed me the finalized band lineup and schedule.
Writing with tears slowly welling up behind my now frustrated eyes I try to shrug it off again. It’s ok though.

I have had a pretty good year concert wise up to this point. Last summer I was treated to something exceptional. My sister-in-law, Sue, works for Pearl Jams Management Company. If you knew me, you’d know the gravity of this situation. We picked our tickets up at will call under; get this, “Guests of Pearl Jam”. No opener, it was just three hours of everything I’d want in life, umm I mean a show.

A few months ago I received some last minute tickets to see Ben Folds at the Paramount. I’d seen him before, but there is something inspiring about watching a virtuoso at work. That man has crispness to his voice that for the most part is unparalleled. I won’t even try to describe his playing…I just won’t.

Finally, my favorite band of the past three years played a show near my sister’s home in Portland for 13 bucks. Yeah no typo there, 13 dollars to see probably 5 of the most in tune with each other musicians in the current music scene. Pinback, sorry, that’s the name of the band. Never heard of them right? That’s what I thought. That show was amazing as well, together they perform as one giant machine hurdling through song after song bending notes, muting strings, and synthesizing chords until no one is left sitting. They are probably one of the more upbeat bands I enjoy. Rob Crow – the front man of Pinback – is a madman. I do not have enough fingers and toes to count the number of bands he has been in and currently performs with.

All this talk of music makes me want to get home and be the quiet rock star that I am. I have no place to plug in my amps and let go full throttle. I can’t crank it to 11! So it’s all finger picking and minor chords on my trusty acoustic. That’s ok though, it’s about time to write some new songs. If you want to hear any of my stuff just ask. I have been pondering how exactly I could in corporate the Videosender into a performance or recording situation. I think it would be perfect for my home recording setup. I could put my mixing board and microphone boom in a quiet area and send the recording wirelessly to my laptop. Great – now I have to buy more X10 stuff!

So have fun Lyndsey...I hope it rains...kidding....no really I'll be sending a rain dance in the direction of eastern wa.
I used to live somewhere out there - so I've got that kind of power, husky.

Goodnight

Posted by Owen Robinson at 04:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Up to this point I’ve hinted at the attention to Google my job has begun to require. You see not only do I create the sparkle, but I help with the shine. While Lyndsey, or Princess Copywriter as we have become accustomed to calling her, does her thing – and the SSI Master himself (Marko) clicks keys, confirming CSS styles all the while maintaining his European mystique………..I knock out the imagery and find other holes to fill.

With the morning rain I roll in typically at 8:47 and 43 seconds, parking two spaces from the end as I always do. Check my pockets…cell phone….Ipod….car keys? Got em’. Slide through the glassy exterior of X10 into the belly of the beast. Up the stairs I climb, through a waking call center. Clock In, Log In, and get the day rolling. Quickly, I finish updating our reporting spreadsheets so Marko can inform the world that we sold another wall mounting bracket. And the day goes on…

One important part of hearing the rumblings of Google’s movement, for me anyway, is to pay attention to WebProNews. This is typically how I receive notice of new services, changes, and other interesting SEO happenings. Exciting right? Well it has been important for not only the x10 websites I’ve been working on – but also my own personal site.

I am no insider by any means, and if you are up to date than this can be seen merely as a refresher. So my team is responsible for producing new websites to X10. As I’ve mentioned up to this point we have created the Protector Plus site and the MiniTimer site. The first thing I would like to mention is Google’s “Sandbox”. My reading and experience has shown that new websites have a certain state of WWW purgatory before Google will see them fit for indexing. The “sandbox” is for the young websites to play in, while the big boys are running wild on the playground. So what helps?

(The following is my opinion, and will not lessen the lameness of your site)

External Links: Links from other respected, high page-ranking sites. This is where many small website owners fail. Link exchanges, can be more of a hindrance than a help. Just because your url shows up on 100 websites on the web does not make you more important to Google. Try to find solid sites to post your link. Try forums with high traffic that if possible are related to your site…

BigDaddy: Sometimes your Google indexing will fluctuate. And yes sales can suffer. Recently Google updated their Datacenters – (google bigdaddy for info). One day we had 15 links on google and the next 0. Three days later we flat lined at 240. Be patient.

Some useful tools from google:
http://www.google.com/coop (a place for people in the know – to share their expertise)
http://www.google.com/trends (a tool to see google popular searches over time.
http://pages.google.com (creates, hosts, and publishes websites for free – and fast)
http://groups.google.com (create your own web group, basically a forum)
http://labs.google.com/ (a directory of tools like those above, and other google ideas)

A useful link analysis tool: http://www.submitexpress.com/linkpop/index.html
(we are pretty positive that the data displayed is not 100% accurate but an adequate resource for seeing movement)

And finally – check out www.bruceclay.com – this site has a lot of tools (many free) that can help you see how your website is doing.

A quick peek outside tells me washinton is still bathing - I better float on home.

Posted by Owen Robinson at 06:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Washington took a bath today. My long drive home through a swampy interstate five afforded me plenty of time to think of a new blog post. Halfway between Federal Way and Tacoma I began to consider X10 and my favorite aspects of our home automation products.

Remember those series of books called Choose Your Adventure? If you do you are probably smiling right now because of how cool you feel recollecting the great times you had up in your special “reading tree” with a good Choose Your Adventure book. You chose option C, turned to page 74, and slayed the evil minotaur. Come down from the tree, high-five dad, and celebrate the great victory over a nice PB&J. Ok, so maybe it didn’t quite go like that for you - but my mom made really good sandwiches. I’m sure you recall the books even if your celebration wasn’t the same as mine.

Wondering how I will make the correlation between X10 and CYA Books? Here we go. With X10, anytime you are in your home you can think to yourself, what home automation project do I want to try next. Should I automate all of my lights, set up a protector plus security system, or setup a garage surveillance system? The possibilities in my mind are endless. My next project will probably be a Lola wireless music system. Maybe next paycheck I’ll splurge and make myself even more lazy, I mean umm, make my life more convenient.

If you’re like me, you’ve ripped your entire CD collection onto an external hard drive with ample space for your catalogue to grow. So now you have a digital jukebox just waiting for action. One problem, the party has to be where the music is - and now its in your computer room. That’s where Lola comes in - its basically a wireless jukebox connection for your MP3 collection to play over your home stereo. Yup, hook the video sender up to your computer and stereo and let the Lola software do the rest. You can scan your music library on your TV and choose which album to play next from the itunes on your computer. If I had known about this thing in college I could have been a hero, a dorm party savior.

Anyway - that was the adventure I chose for tonight…

Posted by Owen Robinson at 09:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In the same vein as Mark Cuban and Matt Cutts comes to you a blog about…..nothing?

Well not exactly, I may not be as popular in the public eye as those two bloggers, but my mom thinks I’m pretty cool. I’m a Junior Graphic Designer…Graphic Merchan-…Web Graphic Desi- …lets just say I put together the pictures you see for some of the newer sites to the X10 family. Particularly I have been involved in creating http://www.x10minitimer.com and http://www.x10securitysystems.com.

I also seem to have developed the knack for keeping in touch with the daily changes that Google introduces to the World Wide Web. They are taking over the world after all, aren’t they? This would explain my reference to Matt Cutts above. He is a face to the Google-Monster that so many SEO nut’s look to for information, most of it derived from his blog. Why Mark Cuban you ask? Well, he has a blog and his team the Dallas Mavericks just knocked the evil Spurs from winning another championship. Yeah I like basketball.

Me? Well I have quite a lot going on lately it seems. I joined X10 in January 06’. I recently moved out of my parent’s basement, no more free rent :(. I’m a musician, a three point specialist, and pocket billiards extraordinaire. Well ok, I’ve been in garage bands, I haven’t played basketball for months, and my pool cue is getting pretty dusty. I am pretty good at Halo 2 though, a little too good. Seems for a while there I traded studying for finals, for scouring the elaborate levels the guys over at Bungie created for Halo 2’s multiplayer modes. So I graduated from WSU last year, but kept my Xbox Live account.

Who has time for Xbox Live when you work at X10? I do require sleep, so I’ve made a deal with myself. I turn my Xbox on a little while after I have arrived at home in the evening. To keep myself from playing all night I took a page, well a webpage – this one to be exact http://www.x10minitimer.com/video_control.html - from our Mini Timer site. I set my MiniTimer up so at midnight the power to the Xbox is turned off. I’m sure all those gamers across the Xbox nation are relieved when that time rolls around and my character vanishes, halting my overwhelming Battle Rifle attack before their over shield can be completely depleted. (Insert comment about me being a Nerd here) Or maybe they don’t care. Either way, now I don’t fall asleep with the Xbox on and instead know its time to go to bed…..

Goodnight

Owen

Posted by Owen Robinson at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)