Test Drive College Edition is Ready!

May 25, 2011 By Beth Hood Leave a Comment

We are very excited to announce that our College Edition of Test Drive Your Future is completed and already on Amazon!

We call Test Drive Your Future “The book we wish we’d had before declaring a college major, choosing a career, or spending any money on college!” The College Edition contains the same “test drive process” as the original edition, but is written specifically for college students. The book is in a smaller layout (the High School Edition is a workbook format) with free access to the Mile Marker Expansion Pack online.

It’s time to Test Drive Your Future if 1) You have yet to declare a major or aren’t sure you’ve declared the “right” one; 2) You don’t have the first clue which career path is for you or you’re having a hard time choosing between one or more possible careers; or 3) You want to make the best career choice for your investment of time and money, yet also feel passionate about that career.

Learn more about the book or about choosing a major or choosing a career at http://testdriveyourfuture.com

Filed Under: Blog, Corporate adventures, Things to buy & use, Work, Money & Success

The Fun Theory

January 30, 2011 By Beth Hood Leave a Comment

Check out the Fun Theory in this video:

Filed Under: Entertainment

Test Drive available at Amazon

November 19, 2010 By Beth Hood Leave a Comment


We are very excited to receive a copy of Test Drive Your Future through Amazon. Of course we didn’t need to order a copy ourselves as we have a few hundred in our office, but Jim really likes to experience taking it out of the Amazon box and seeing our names on the book inside. So here it is! So far we’ve had some really great feedback.

Here’s what Joyce Reed, the director of College Goals, and former Associate Dean of the College at Brown University, had to say about the book:

I am so impressed! This is a GREAT gift to young people, and their families. NO ONE talks to kids this way! You hit them with all their senses flaring . . . it’s great. You take them seriously. But you don’t expect them to know more than they do. Beautiful!

We greatly respect Joyce’s work and were really please at her response.

Buy it now from Amazon

Filed Under: Blog, Corporate adventures

Life just got a lot more fun

November 5, 2010 By Beth Hood Leave a Comment

A Little Bit More Fun just got a whole lot more fun with the addition of Amy Stewart and John Penry to our business and our home. Jim and John have been best friends since they were three years old, growing up in the same neighborhood in Edgington, Illinois. John and Amy just moved to the Big Island two months ago after recently being married in Des Moines, Iowa. Our team of two just grew to four and we are having a ball brainstorming, working together, and having new and exciting adventures on the island. Welcome John and Amy to life, work, and a little bit more fun in Hawaii!

Filed Under: Corporate adventures

Organizing a Corporation

October 25, 2010 By Beth Hood Leave a Comment

Seth Godin recently published a post on his blog about how companies should consider organizing for joy rather than for maximum efficiency, and we couldn’t agree more. Here he says:

These are the companies that give their people the freedom (and yes, the expectation) that they will create, connect and surprise. These are the organizations that embrace someone who makes a difference, as opposed to searching for a clause in the employee handbook that was violated.

This is what we are looking for from A Little Bit More Fun, Inc — to break out of the box of traditional corporate “more is better” organizational structure, and break into a new paradigm where creativity, fun, and contribution to the whole are our chief motivating factors.

Check out Godin’s post: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/10/organizing-for-joy.html

Filed Under: Work, Money & Success

Blogging from my new apple iPad

July 11, 2010 By Beth Hood Leave a Comment

Just set up my iPad with the WordPress app on the iPad and pretty excited about the possibilities of blogging without having to sit in front of my iMac!

To fully enable it, you have to go into your Writing options under Settings and click the box under Remote Publishing for XML-RPC for “Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols”. That seems to be it and it’s working for me already! Now I just have to figure out why I keep getting a 500 internal server error with WordPress 3.0….

Filed Under: Food, Drink & Restaurants

Betsy Curtis at Boston Basils in Kona

June 16, 2010 By Beth Hood Leave a Comment

We enjoyed some great entertainment this week at Boston Basil’s in Kailua-Kona when we went to listen to the jazz-stylings of Betsy Curtis. She was a famous singer in the late sixties, part of Betsy and Chris—think Marcia and Jan Brady singing folk songs in Japan—who were so popular they made lunchboxes and stockings with their brand!

She covered a wide variety of songs at Boston Basils—mostly jazz standards, plus a little Aretha Franklin to get the audience and crowds of people on the sidewalk of Alii Drive excited! Keep your eyes open, we think she may be making a comeback in Japan sometime soon…

Oh, and we enjoyed our orders of lasagna and cheese ravioli, although another one of the other guests at our table, thought her spaghetti was a little over-cooked. The atmosphere of the live music was fantastic, the open air lounge upstairs had a great view of the water, and overall our visit there made life a little bit more fun. Cheers!

Betsy

Filed Under: Entertainment, Food, Drink & Restaurants, Travel & Adventure

Our Honorary CEO

June 4, 2010 By Beth Hood Leave a Comment


A week ago today we had a visitor to our home. His name, we soon decided, was Jack (we were big Lost fans and since the season just ended, this influenced our decision). Then a few days later upon closer inspection we realized that Jack was actually a Jill. We were devastated as were already mourning the loss of LOST, and now we couldn’t use the name Jack! None of the other female characters from the show worked for our cat — we tried Julia, Kate, Claire, but nothing fit.  We polled our Facebook friends who suggested Jackie, Jackie-O, Jill, and Zadora (not sure where that one came from!), but alas none of these names seemed to work either.

In the end we named her Charlie, and she has taken up near permanent residence in the extra executive chair in our office that sits between Jim and my desk. Thus we have dubbed her our honorary CEO, or CFO (Chief Feline Officer). Having a kitty definitely makes our work and our lives a little bit more fun, so we hope she will stick around.

New note: Turns out our female kitty Charlie is actually a male after taking him to the vet and realizing that he had already been fixed! We kept his name at Charlie to keep everything simpler!

Filed Under: Corporate adventures

Is “getting ahead” a little more fun?

April 25, 2010 By Beth Hood Leave a Comment

US_$20_Series_2006_ObverseThe question this week is: “Is getting ahead a little more fun?”

Sure, it seemed that doing a lot more work and making more money this week would be a great experiment for me. To give you a little background, at this stage of our lives, my husband brings in the majority of our income as I spend a good amount of time working on our assorted “projects”. Projects like getting our books off the ground, designing our Web sites and doing the hundreds of other things that are behind the scenes to owning and operating three corporations. It generally keeps me busy for 12 hours a day, but I get to work from home, I can take a nap during the day, and I can stop work whenever I want. But this last week I have taken on an increase in customers for web consulting or design, and these particular jobs required that I do a bit more driving with face-to-face meetings.

So I got an inside look at what Jim does every day as a mobile computer technician. Going to places I’d never been before, rushing out of the house to be somewhere on time, and on more than one occasion, trying to solve a problem on the fly that I didn’t fully understand yet. On top of all of that I was using other people’s computers, PCs, which made me feel like a two year old, frustrated because I didn’t know how to do anything. Oh, how much I appreciated my reunion with my iMac and my Magic Mouse!

So was it worth it to take on more jobs, to bring in more income, to “get ahead”? I’m really not sure. Of course we’d like to save up some extra money, but at what daily cost? This week my husband and I were more like roommates than spouses, seeing each other in passing as one of us ran out of the house to do another job. We didn’t have as much time to work on our writing projects in the morning because of the demand of the extra jobs, and we didn’t stop and watch the sunset at night.

Sure a week or two isn’t going to kill anyone, but it seems like this “getting ahead” thing could be addictive and hard to break free of because there will always be something that you are trying to save a little bit more for. But at the end of your life, all you might remember is working, and not being with the people you love, doing the things you love most. So I’m going to try to remember that and keep a little better balance in my life.

Filed Under: Everyday Decisions

Adding Favicons to WordPress or Joomla

April 11, 2010 By Beth Hood 1 Comment

I’ve admired those sweet little images to the left of the url for so long, thinking it was simply out my league to add a favicon to my sites. It turns out it’s actually quite simple. Naturally I chose the beach ball and love what it does for the look of my site, not to mention how much easier it is to find the site when I have 10 tabs open at the same time!

Here are instructions for adding a favicon to WordPress:

1. The most fun part is deciding what you want your image to be (make sure you are using a royalty-free image), then you simply need to resize it to 16 by 16 pixels in your favorite image editor (I use Photoshop) using a GIF or PNG format. Convert your image into a favicon.ico. (I’ve simply done this by renaming the image before I upload it through my FTP program.)

2. Add the following code to your header.php file of your wordpress blog:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico”>

(You will need to be sure to clear the smart quotes from this code. I usually use a simple text editor to copy and paste the code from a blog, before I copy and paste it into my own site to make sure it cleans it up.)

3. If you are using the theme Thesis for WordPress (which is what I use), you won’t be able to find your header.php file. Instead you need to go into Thesis Site Options from your Dashboard and add this to the field called “Additional Scripts”:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” type=”image/ico” href=”favicon.ico”>

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Technology & the Internet
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