final impressions blog - February 2008

February 23, 2008 - Coffee Shop Seized

As I reported on Feb 3rd we pulled our artwork out of the Fairport Village Coffee shop, and lucky we were to do so. On February 21st it was seized by New Yory State for back taxes. Ouch. If we had artwork on consignment in the shop we would be fighting NYS for our property. Not a fun thought.

Now I guess I get to write off last year's artwork sales as a loss on our business taxes.


February 16, 2008 - Select Works now available for Online Purchase

Bazaar Bazaar Online Art Gallery and Gift Store has selected works for purchase online. If you prefer online shopping then I encourage you to browse their store.

in the Photography Catagory.

February 10, 2008 - New Fairport Location

Our work has been picked up by Main Street Mercantile at 62 North Main Street in Fairport. We hope to be able to stock a complete inventory of my Fairport work. As soon as we get them stocked, which we hope is today, we will add them to our merchant list.

One interesting challenge we had was coming up with a consignment labeling system. They assign a vendor ID and each item needs to have a unique number. That was easy because all of our pieces have an inventory number. However my numbers are 6 and 7 digits long but they requested 6 maximum. We also needed to put the item numbers on a removable tag.

So on Friday we went out and bought a Dymo label printer that connects through USB to a PC and has a standard windows driver. This means it's accessable from any PC on our intranet. Then I put together a database for the consignment items and wrote an application "Consignment Tag Writer" application so we can simply select the item and press a print button and we get a nice label for the item. It only take a few seconds to get the right information printed.

I was able to get the windows application up and running yesterday so all we have to do now is get the fairport items into the database. We are always looking for ways to automate our process and conserve time for more important things that hand writing consignment tags.

February 3, 2008 - Removed prints from Fairport Coffee

A.K.A. Fairport Village Coffee, and Fairport Coffee and Wine Bar. This was a difficult day for us because we have always had a great relationship with the coffee house, but a lack of payments for artwork over the last year has forced us to remove all of our inventory from their shop.

We hope to get it all worked out, but are not afraid to go to Monroe County small claims court to resolve the payment issue.

In the meantime, several other locations have expressed interest in handling our work, so we are not leaving Fairport, just moving around a bit. More on this later.

February 2, 2008 - More Site Changes

I hired my son Ryan "Zieak" McFarland to make some recommendations for my site. One thing he suggested is that the html pages for the pictures use the title of the image. So this morning I made modifications to the IndexCompiler and also generated redirect pages for those of you that have direct links to some of these pages.

This also means most of your booked marked pages are no longer valid. You may have delete all of your bookmarks and start over. Sorry.