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Saturday, May 2, 2009
Saturday Night - 9:00 pm
We can hear the crackling of our neighbor's campfire and music from our other neighbor's CD. Ooh, just heard
that unique metalic sound of an aluminum can opening outside my window. In a way I wish we could be "playing outside"
with our friends, but in another way, it feels good to be excited about our projects.
Mike is tweeking
the download for our Computer Game Maker-Lite sale. He created a pop-up window so we could offer a
free deck of Obama Solitaire with every purchase of Game Maker-Lite. I hope a lot of teachers will hurry and buy a copy
so they'll have it to make one last hurrah before the school year is ended.
I think Mike understood, for the
first time tonight, what Computer Game Maker Lite means to me. We stopped at McDonald's and for
some reason I started going on about how, if I were still in the classroom, I would be so happy to download this software.
I told him if I were teaching 2nd grade deaf kids again, and if, for example we were going for a year end trip at the Milwaukee zoo,
I'd go to that website and capture every picture of every animal we were going to see. I'd import those pictures
into Computer Game Maker Lite and type names like: rhinoceros, king penguin, Chinese alligator, Pacific Giant
Octopus (or better yet, have the kids type the names and import the pictures) and voila', they'd have a memory
game to play so that by the time they got to the zoo, they'd know all the names of the animals! Or I'd call
the parents of the deaf kids in my class (deaf ed. classes are small enough to do that) and have them send pictures
of items (or relatives far away) whose names they wanted the kids to learn with fingerspelling and word recognition.
I oculd go on, but it's late and you've got the idea. I love what our software program can do. That's
why we created it.
10:12 pm pdt
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
No April Fool's Joke Here - We Are Actually Adding a Blog Entry Today
It's been a mighty long time since we blogged at Windmill Works, and, as any "Good Business Practices"
manual will tell you (if there were one), procrastinating on blog writing is not a good thing. But it's not because we're lazy. We've been really, really busy - once again. 1.
For starters, we finally completed our update of our company's unique, exclusive deck of cards,
Presidential Solitaire. Originally produced in the '90's, yikes, the deck included Presidents
 Coolidge to Clinton. In order to update the 300 some decks we kept in storage after President Clinton left office,
we needed to add cards for President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama. Since Solitaire is played
with 13 cards, we eliminated President Coolidge and President Coolidge. The new game now starts with President Franklin
D. Roosevelt through President Obama. We thought this would be a nice supplement to our online game of "Obama Solitaire"
and a tangible product that people could keep. Perhaps one day it might even be collectible since only about 350
of these decks of cards are in circulation. If you have a website or a retail store and are interested in carrying this
product, we offer wholesale pricing per dozen ordered. Just email us at comments@windmillworks.com 2. We have decided to offer our customers products other than our own creation and therefore, set up an affiliate
site with amazon.com. That means if you see a product that you like from Amazon, click and end up purchasing it, we
receive a small commission. It's been fun to find a myriad of offerings at Amazon that complement some of our
games and CD's. It was especially fun picking out products to feature on our " Irish Facts and Fun Page." We added Irish T-shirts, Irish mugs, and even some little Irish ducks! We don't know why either! Those are only two of the activities that have kept us from the blog. We'll write more news soon about
our other renovations and changes. I promise. Cheers, Billie
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Fresh and New
Again, I wish I had never seen that "Mad About You" episode where Paul went looking for a couch with Jamie and stated
that "Everything takes four hours". Really, that's how it has seemed lately, except three months
would be more like it. We made a huge decision to NOT feature highlighter tape anymore. Instead, we decided to
focus our attention in two areas, well, actually three or four. All of this has taken a great deal of time. Our new focus:
1. We decided to update our Presidential Solitaire DECK of CARDS
to include President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama. These will actually become collector decks of cards
because they are part of the decks we had in storage since about 1996. "Presidential Solitaire" had sold at
Games by James in the Mall of America and at various political conventions several years ago. Because we are such
a small company, when we started to work on our software to a greater extent, we stopped selling the deck of cards after
President Clinton (the last of our series) had left office. We now have the updated the deck to an Obama edition
available on our website and through Amazon.com. This is a game solely designed by our little company and we're proud
of it. The idea came to me out of the blue one day years ago, and I sincerely believe that it aids in memory and
cognitive skills. So we're proud to offer this game once again. 2. We also will be focusing on
adding more free online games on our website. Of course, all of this takes time and effort; hence, we need to add google
ads, affiliate ads, and hopefully some cute video ads my actress daughter will produce. 3. We're
still trying to get our lovely, slick, easy-to-use software game-making program, Computer Game Maker-Lite into the
hands of more teachers of the deaf, speech/language pathologists, special ed. teachers, and home-schoolers. It's
really another program we're so proud of. The user can easily input his or her own information in the classic memory
game and create a meaningful learning experience for students. This program allows the user to input voice as well
as pictures and text. If you're a speech/language person please send your colleagues to our site. Gotta
go. We just created an Academy Award - Best Picture online game and we have to make the page look pretty. All our best to you, our wonderful visitors.
Monday, November 17, 2008
A Dollop-A-Day
Ok...Where do I go to cure an Avatar Addiction? After the election of Barack Obama, I really wanted to place some kind
of commentary on Windmill Works' web site. So the avatar on the home page reciting exerpts from Martin Luther King's
"I Have a Dream Speech" was what we decided on. And thus was the beginning of an addiction! Not to worry,
we'll be back to normal after the first of the year!
11:52 pm pst
Sunday, October 26, 2008
If ONLY It WERE Just Vacuuming
 This is how we're feeling at Windmill Works! If ONLY it were just
vacuuming and mopping the floor, then we'd be just physically
exhausted. But for the past month or so, it's been a complete web site revamping and all I can say
is that our exhaustion is under some kind of comprehensive plan: we're physically, mentally, and any-other-way exhausted!
We did an entire remodeling of our Kids' Page, adding new learning activities for deaf and hard of hearing students, English As a Second Language learners, and
mainstream students as well - a lot of syntax, i.e., sentence structure stuff, subject-verb agreement grammar exercises, and
a whole bunch of other things I'm frankly just too exhausted to list! Please take a look and see what you think.
Mainstream teachers, speech pathologists, special education teachers, and parents, we would love to know if these
activities are as meaningful as we're thinking they will be. Just sign in at our brand new guestbook and your comments will be posted.
Next we've added more high school and college activities which are accessible from the kids' page. In our soul searching of ethical practices,
we decided to continue to keep the page for the young kids totally free of advertising or any other links except those to
the Martin Luther King, "I Have a Dream Speech," and the "Gettysburg Address," (We've judged those
links as very safe). For the high school and college kids, we have decided to put some links to educational products
at Amazon.com and to add pertinent google ads. The reality is, to keep a website afloat, there does need to be
some revenue from clicks - just so we can buy some fruit and vegetables at Trader Joes to keep body and soul together
until our ship comes in - which reminds me of a sign I saw somewhere around Surf City (Huntington Beach) last year.
It's one that all of us probably can embrace in these economic times:
"I hope my
ship comes in before the dock rots!"
Back to the site: We've also tried to make our navigation
easier to help visitors locate our software products. So we've repeated a list of our educational software
games on several pages (For example, on our home page, our biz blog page, our Scooter's dog blog page and so on.)
But through all the exhaustion, we've learned a lot - especially
me (Billie). I'm getting pretty comfortable with cutting and pasting html code and recording mp3 files and putting
up cute little avatars like the costumed girl from oddcast.com on our home page.
It seems as if
it's a time when we all are working a bit harder just to get by, but if I think if we all pull together and try to
help each other out, if we continue to feel a greater commitment to each other and to our fragile little planet - we
will not only get by, but we'll thrive once again! Yes, we can.
Cheers,
Billie
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