When I was originally invited to jam with three other guys I wasn’t expecting to be invited back but it was a good feeling when that happened. The initial jam session was one of those less than formal things, awkward for the first five minutes perhaps, but as I’ve returned to jam over the last couple months I’ve collected a list of things our band needed that we didn’t have and slowly filled in those gaps.

Hey wait, what if I can’t find a band to play with?
Finding other musicians that enjoy the same types of music isn’t easy. While I wasn’t really looking to being in a band before being invited to play with this band, I have been looking for others to play with since and that process needs its own how-to. There are sites like Bandmix.com which might help out, but the following tips assume that you have already found a band to be in and that you enjoying playing the same basic types of music. A death metal guitarist is probably not going to be a good fit for a jazz band.

The band organizer role
I wouldn’t call myself the leader of our band, and truth be told I’m not sure a band leader is absolutely required, but I’ve definitely taken an organizational role. I think it’s critical that at least one person — it can be by committee if multiple people want to fill this role — be an organizer. There are a bare minimum number of things a band needs to, well, be a band.

Before getting into tips showing how to be a better bandmate, let’s look at what is required to call the group of musicians you’re playing with a band.

Band requirements
1. Musicians with equipment. You aren’t a guitarist without a guitar, no more than a drummer is without drums. First phase: buy or rent the equipment. Phase two: learn how to play. It is possible to learn how to play in a band setting, but most bands aren’t going to tolerate a new member who doesn’t have the basics down before looking to play with others.

Guitars: you should learn a few songs all the way through, including guitar solos and be able to tune and keep in tune your guitar. Learning tab is handy too. Learn common chords like E, A, D, G, C, B, F and be able to fret them cleanly as both open chords and barred. I’d check the internet for one of a zillion different websites that covers scales and learn a few scales too. I’m not hardcore like some are about scales, but if you plan to play lead guitar and solo, scales will help your playing immensely. Rhythm guitar? Not so much. Also make sure to change your strings after 15-30 hours of playing or when the sound starts to sound dull.

Drummers: Be able to play, keep a beat and perform periodic and creative fills. Keep the drum heads tuned. Have plenty of extra sticks handy. If the drummer can’t keep time, everybody can get messed up. Timing is everything.

Bassists: the one and perhaps only part of a band that can be average or fairly new and still get by. This is a good place for people brand new to play. Playing badly is still playing badly, but you really only need to know how to play in key and keep the rhythm. Not trying to diminish importance of a skilled professional bassist, but I think even seasoned bass players would admit of all the parts of a band, a bass is a logical, safe starting place for someone brand new to a band.

A great bass player will help a band immensely while an average bass player can sink into the background and not be annoying. An average drummer, guitar player and/or vocalist are a lot more noticeable than an average bass player — and not in a good way.

Vocalist: take care of your pipes and memorize the lyrics. Obvious: make sure you don’t come to practice with no voice and sans lyrics. You can read off a lyrics sheet for awhile, but if you plan to gig out lyric sheets are not very cool to carry around. Get the lyrics down.

Keyboards: know how to program and play your keys. Helps being able to read sheet music because the band can give you the sheet music for songs and you can get up to speed. Same as guitar, know a few songs all the way through and being able to play without making (many) mistakes.

2. Place to practice. This could be a basement or garage or pretty much any place that is ok sound-wise. Should be relatively dry as electrical equipment and moisture don’t get along. Also need to have the temperature be tolerable. It can get pretty hot. You also need to be able to practice where the noise level doesn’t adversely impact neighbors. The later at night your practice the bigger an issue the noise becomes. If you’re playing in the middle of the day you can probably get away with being a little noisier, but if you crank up the Marshall stack after 9pm, don’t be surprised if the police come knocking.

3. Regular practice schedule. A band that never practices isn’t a band, it’s a bunch of guys that play music together once in awhile. Whatever schedule and time works for the band as a whole, stick to it so it becomes habit. I know we practice on Sunday nights at 6pm unless it’s a holiday weekend. Easy to remember and not something that has to be written down. Pick a schedule, stick to it, show up and play.

That’s it.

Notice I didn’t get into picking a band name or logo or website or slick myspace page. The band I’m in currently doesn’t have any of these things. We have played one original song only one time and haven’t recorded a lick of video or audio yet. I suspect we’ll be playing more originals as time goes on, but first we are figuring out what kinds of music we sound best playing and tightening various cover songs. That process can take some time when you’re only playing once a week. Once we have the music down because hey, it’s all about the music, it’s easy to worry about promotional activities and gigging out.

I think coming up with a name for your band happens after you have actually written and performed original music and make plans to record and/or play that music at a gig. Who gives a crap if your band has a cool name if you don’t have #1-3 above locked down first? So, no, we don’t have a band name or some catchy myspace page, but we’re still a legitimate band. You will be part of a band too if you are doing #1-3 above.

At home we have a drum set, PA, bass, guitars, amps and mixer. We have a place to play, but we don’t have a regular practice schedule. Therefore I’d say we’re not a band, just a family that practices playing music together once in awhile. If we setup a regular schedule, we could become a band.

Enough descriptions, now that you know how a band is defined let’s get to the good stuff.

Tips how to be a better bandmate
1. Be willing to learn, practice and play music you don’t like. A major frustration I’ve read about is not having compatible music tastes. If you don’t like playing song X or band Y, suck it up and compromise. This doesn’t mean playing in a band with an entire genre of music you can’t stand like playing country or rap if you only like rock, but it does mean being flexible with different types of country artists if you are in a country band or being willing to cover pop songs when you are in a rock band. That kind of thing.

I remember a situation when I shared a Whitesnake song with the group and the artist was universally panned. Oh well, no Whitesnake then. Move on. Personally, I think Whitesnake has some killer songs, but there are thousands of bands to choose music from that you don’t need to be hung up on covering one artist that the rest of the band doesn’t like. A good band mate shouldn’t get hung up on having to play any one artist.

2. Leave the drugs and alcohol out. I enjoy playing with other band members who are not stoned or drunk and treat my band mates with the courtesy of not showing up — ever — messed up. If you want to get high, do it on your own time, not during practice or performances. The band I played with in high school this was a huge problem. So much that after a few songs, we sounded much worse. It always bothered me because I felt like we weren’t respecting the music and our progress was being hampered. Playing music and having fun doesn’t require drugs or alcohol.

We’ve all heard the stories about rockers who seem to be “better” when they are high or drunk, but I’ve yet to meet even one real musician in a real world practice and/or performance scenario that was a better player high than straight/sober. I’m sure there people who are awesome musicians straight and are better than average players when they are high, but it’s a shame not to see musicians at their absolute best. Not trying to be preachy but drugs and alcohol impair, not improve.

3. Bring at least one new complete (or almost complete) song to each practice session. Let’s face it, if you play the same music over and over again without trying/learning/playing any new songs, yes you will get better at those songs, but eventually things will get boring. I make it a goal to come to each new practice session with at least one new song the group hasn’t played together before. I think a good band mate tries to grow in their craft and bring in new songs that the group might be able to play together. Some songs work out of the gate and others will require multiple plays to stick.

There is a limit to how many new songs make sense. People that get together to play don’t want to waste too much of that time learning new songs, so just mix in at least one new song every practice session. I actually shoot for 3-5 new songs, but no less than one new song. This way if the first song doesn’t go well, there are a couple other new ones to try.

4. Keep track of what songs gel right away. The best songs you perform are worth playing again and again and added to a regular playlist. They should be practiced and refined so that every band member feels good enough to be able to go in and out of them in any order.

In order to know what songs we’ve played (and played well), I keep track of every song alphabetically sorted by artist in a text file. I use an asterisk for songs we have not played in front of the song and the + for a partial song performed. I keep two three ring binders. The bigger binder contains lyrics for all the songs we’ve ever played. The smaller binder contains the lyrics and list of the songs we’ve played that sound the best.

To make it from the big to small book a song has to sound pretty good. This way, we have a list of songs that the group could choose from to play at live gigs someday and/or practice regularly if there are no plans to gig out.

5. When it comes to covers, listen to the originals as group and individual. I keep several special playlists on my Zune with the original and/or live recordings of each song we are playing. If I don’t have the song — a new song perhaps another band mate has shared with the group — then I’ll go buy it from AmazonMP3 or one of the other online stores over the next week.

At band practice I plug the Zune into the mixing board and the group can listen to the original to get certain parts of the song down. This would be good for sharing original song ideas too.

A bit of music philosophy here: I don’t think covers should be exact copies of songs unless we’re talking about games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero. I know some bands try to cover things exactly. I think it’s more important to give a respectful treatment to the song. This means that a) you get all the vocal parts down and b) you include the main musical parts of the song. By listening to the original you will learn what is important in a song and can improvise and enhance from there. Frankly, I find exact covers — or close to exact — boring and uninspired.

If the others in your band disagree and want to create exact copies of songs, then you have an important choice: practice to get the songs down as close to the original as possible or search for a different band that has a more liberal approach to covers.

Our band enjoys guitar solos so we take songs like Tom Petty & The Heartbreaker’s “Breakdown” which the original song is less than three minutes and make it a 5-7 minute song with some creative changes and nice solo breaks. We also don’t play it with keyboards which I think adds a slightly different dimension. Not going to say anything bold or crazy like our version is better than Petty’s, but I think if you heard it at an event or in a bar, you’d not only recognize the song but think the treatment was good.

6. Be flexible, willing to switch instruments and/or from lead to rhythm. Three of the four people in our band, including me are flexible and willing to change from lead guitar to rhythm as well as play bass. Our drummer is the only set player in the group. When it comes to singing, two of the four in our band take turns with the lead vocals, although I could see us getting a dedicated vocalist for all the songs and the current vocalists becoming backup singers.

I put this tip last because it won’t apply to bands who have set members, but it is handy for bands who are trying to work through what combination of players works best with each song. It is also good when one of the group can’t make practice. We have two very capable drummers, so if our regular drummer doesn’t show, the other member can step in competently.

Respect, patience and having fun
I could have made the bolded title above the only tip because a lot of being in a band is about respecting other members. It’s also about having patience to work through new songs and troubled spots in existing songs. Above all others, it should be fun playing music. If you don’t enjoy playing music, or get super stressed in expectation of a playing with others, a band is the last place to be.

I’m looking forward to when we start creating some original music and recording. And perhaps beyond that if all continues to go well someday if/when an opportunity arises to play a gig and realize that we have to pare down a list of songs to the ones we enjoy playing best. It would be awesome if that list of songs was well over 100. Then again, if we never gig out, it’s just fun as heck playing and learning new songs. Money? Fame? Not part of any of our band’s agenda at the present time. No idea what the future holds but in the meantime we all seem to be having fun.

Should you ever decide to be in a band or are already in one, I hope this helps you become a better bandmate. You’re welcome to and encouraged to add additional tips below or trackback from your blog. I stopped at six tips, but I’m sure there are plenty more.

Disclosure: As of June 1, 2008 I’ve been helping with Zune podcast submissions in the Zune Marketplace. Do you need help with your Zune podcast submission?

I’ll get back to this disclosure shortly since it’s new to readers. It’s the first time I’ve mentioned this gig in a blog post here. This news has been part of the new MakeYouGoHmm about page added last week.

Zune links
A Friendfeed everyone search for keyword ‘zune’ just led me to a new Zune feature this morning: Zune links.

To use the tool, just enter in keyword(s) and the tool will return matching links to: artists, albums, playlists, music videos, podcasts and videos. I’m curious how the playlist search works especially because I have my privacy settings set to allow “everyone” to view my Zune social settings, but don’t see any of my playlists. Maybe that will be a future feature?

Here is an example link for the the Hmmcast (stale, I know, it’s been over 5 months since last update), which I added border=’0′ to it:

Hmmcast

You will need the Zune software installed on your computer to follow that link.

As Sean Alexander, a Microsoft employee, points out, the iTunes Music Store has had this feature for awhile so it’s nice to see the Zune team add it. Sean adds:

My personal favorite, the Zune Social experience. The links take you directly to Zune Social where you preview the songs, see stats on listenership, read a review and more.

Sean also makes a good suggestion for somebody to possibly create a Live Writer plugin. Developer readers, there’s an opportunity.

Why are you helping with Zune podcast submissions?
It shouldn’t be a huge surprise to long time readers that I’m helping out in the Zune podcast area. I have been podcasting and writing about podcasting since the word was penned and this gives me an opportunity to get knee deep in podcast submissions all over the world. I also have written positively of the Zune player since launch (do a search for past ‘zune’ posts). Also, my whole family has been beta testing at Microsoft HQ in Redmond for several years, although I think we won’t be able to do that any more (?).

Rob Greenlee who is the lead for the Zune podcast area, invited me to guest co-host several of his WebTalk podcasts some time ago and mentioned that they could use my help reviewing podcast submissions. I jumped at the chance and as of the first of June 2008, here I am. If you are a podcaster and reading and need help with a podcast submission pending in the Zune Marketplace, please feel free to drop me a line either through Skype, Twitter, email (Gmail to my name works great) through the Zune Social of course or any of the dozens of other ways to contact me online where I’m currently active. I’m also regularly checking the official Zune forum podcast area and have already gone through the 1,400+ posts made there.

I’m also doing keyword searches for zune podcasts and tracking conversations elsewhere on the web (hence the genesis of this post), so don’t be surprised if I show up in your comment area if you’re talking about the Zune Marketplace podcast area and/or blog here and trackback to you.

Without getting into too much more detail, this is a contract gig for our online business and will be additional work, not something that replaces any of my current jobs. I still very much co-own an offline business and our online business and have been happily self-employed for 14+ years. I am also happy to be helping in the Zune podcast area and helping the podcast community at large, which I hope is crystal clear in this post.

Accordingly, I’ve added a ‘Zune’ category and will be adding the disclosure at the top of this post to any Zune-related posts where relevant going forward so that readers are clear of my professional involvement with the Zune team. I think you’ll see me promoting more new podcasts I’m discovering in the coming days more than writing that much more than I have in the past about Zune, but felt it was important to make the professional connections clear.

This new Zune link feature will make it easier to post direct links in the Zune Marketplace to these cool podcasts other people share with me and I discover through helping with the podcast submissions. So far I’ve already found some really well done podcasts that I didn’t know about.

Paul O’flaherty wants to run web apps from his desktop without having to launch the browser:

I’ll give a big hug to the first person to come up with a lightweight stand alone application that I can use to broadcast on services like UStream without having to fire up a resource hogging browser.

Paul, I’d suggest giving the open source Mozilla Labs project Prism (Windows) a try:

Prism … the web platform integrated into the desktop experience. Web developers don’t have to target it separately, because any application that can run in a modern standards-compliant web browser can run in Prism. Prism is built on Firefox, so it supports rich internet technologies like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and <canvas> and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Using Prism is as easy as launching the program and typing in the URL to the application, giving it a name (see picture at top of post) and then double clicking the icon on your desktop like any other application.

To answer Paul’s second concern: memory consumption. Check out the windows task manager with Ustream.tv running through Prism vs. Firefox 2.0.0.12 with two windows and 17 open tabs.

For Mac users reading, check out a similar app called Fluid.

The Zecco UI and account screens continue to be unclear. I didn’t see anywhere in the trade section where these $4.50 trade commissions are being applied which prompted this post. In the account activity area it shows “principal amount” and then the “net amount” shows $4.50 less, so this must be where we are supposed to see the commission fees reflected (?). If you know of a better place to track the commissions than this, please reply in the comments.

How to locate the commission fees in Zecco
STEP 1. inside the Trading area choose “Account Records” along the left column.
STEP 2. choose “all activity” beneath the section.
STEP 3. select the “From Date” and “To Date” and click on “go” button in the account table cell.
STEP 4. you should see something like the snipped screenshot pictured above.

Why not just have a commission column that shows the amount charged for each buy/sell? Maybe Zecco will add that going forward. That would make more sense.

Recognizing a stock loss
As you can also see above, I just took my first stock loss trade at Zecco by selling Zarlink (ZL) which I bought 60 shares back on July 20 at $1.69 and sold today at a dismal $0.64/share. To add insult to injury, I paid my first $4.50 commission for the trade bringing the grand total of the loss to $66.90. Like buying a video game that is played once and shelved. Like filling up somebody else’s tank of gas.

I lost money.

Why did I take this loss instead of waiting for it (hopefully) to bounce back? I’d waited nearly six months already for ZL to do something besides go down and there is a looming threat of them being delisted. I’d rather suck up the loss and move onto something else. I turned right around and bought 6 shares of Shortel (SHOR) paying a second Zecco $4.50 commission. I already own SHOR shares through Sharebuilder (and paid $15.95 commission there, ouch!), so this adds to my holdings, only at a different online broker.

The impact of commissions in 2008 versus 2007
We’ve known the Zecco free ride on trades for those with balances under $2,500 was going to end in 2008 so this doesn’t come as a surprise.

I added a “fees” section to our stock competition Google Finance shared spreadsheet to reflect these $4.50 commissions per trade throughout the year. Even with the ZL loss and $9 in commissions, overall my stock competition portfolio is still +2.96%. I sold seven stocks in 2007 at a profit (GMO, BQI, ATAR, RSTO, MCZ, SIRI and SAPE) and 0 stocks at a loss, but I could (and time will tell if I should) have taken the ZL loss in 2007.

Of those stocks sold, 2 of 7 are currently showing higher than the amount sold: GMO which is at $11.50 and was sold at $8.05 and BQI which is at $4.19 and was sold at $3.67. On a percentage basis (5 of 7 = 71.4%), I’m happy to have sold when I did. This is a real world example of the uncertainty in the market that everybody is trying to time; buy low, sell high.

The last six months on the market have been rocky, so I’m not disappointed with the performance. If $4.50 commissions would have to have been paid on all of the 2007 trades, I’d be looking at an overall portfolio loss, so this will continue adding an additional wrinkle in 2008.

I covered some of this in my 2007 stock competition recap post, but at the time hadn’t done the following:

1. paid any commissions to Zecco
2. taken any losses on trades

Now I can clear both those off the table. Let’s hope #2 doesn’t happen very often in 2008. As I’m about to publish this, SHOR has lost 27 cents from what I paid for it already (dropping from $6.17 to $5.90). Argh, isn’t the stock market fun?

For example, let’s say you have a problem with dishes being broken on an evening shift and you’ve narrowed the list of possibilities down to one or two people that always work the evening shift in the dishroom.

Fear one on one
You could call the employees in the office one at a time and rant about how you don’t want any more dishes broken and how most of them are happening on their shift. For a first meeting on the subject this is ill-advised and seldom works. As the boss you become the bad guy and on the outside chance you are fingering the wrong person, you could demotivate a good worker.

Group shame
Holding a dishwasher meeting and telling every dishwasher that there are too many dishes being broken on the evening shift won’t matter to employees who work in the morning or afternoon. This strategy is too random. You’re hoping that the person(s) breaking too many dishes will hear the message, while being negative to the rest of the group. Don’t do this.

Group participation
If you hold a general meeting and want to bring up the subject of broken dishes then show the dishwashers numbers. Here is how many dishes we bought last quarter in the business, any guesses how much this cost? Then offer a prize of some sort for the answer closest. Make this is a regular theme at these meetings so that the dishwashers begin to understand the cost of each dish. I’ve had some success gluing each dish to a board in the dishroom above where the dishes come out and writing in green marker the cost of each dish.

Follow the leader
In every group of employees I’ve ever managed there is at least one leader, even if not designated with an official title. And sometimes the leader with the title isn’t the real leader. You could approach the leader of the evening dish crew and ask for their help: “we are noticing an increase in the amount of dishes being broken and would like your help in finding ways we can reduce the number of dishes broken. We’d like to pass along some of this savings to you. Would you be interested in this arrangement?”

What if the leader is the one breaking the dishes? S/he will be less likely to want to break into their bonus and the dish breakage in the evening will be less likely to happen. If the amount of dishes broken increases, you can return to the leader and have a different conversation that focuses on how the employee thinks the dish breakage should impact the dishroom: “since getting your help in this issue, even more dishes appear to be broken, what do you recommend we do to put this back on a positive track?”

The rat out
The situation you want to work toward is having the employees, peers, managing each other. When a dish breaks, you want the other dishwashers to put pressure on their co-workers, not you. But what if the leader(s) come back to you and finger specific dishwashers which are breaking dishes? Time to have a meeting with the leader and the employee and encourage the leader to ask questions. Let’s say the employee’s name is John: “Hi John, thanks for meeting with us. We’re having a problem with an unusual amount of dishes being broken in the dishroom. Do you have any ideas how we could improve the situation?”

As the manager, you’re there for support of the dishroom leader, encouraging, mentoring for how to deal positively with the problem. I’ve seen this situation turn negative where the leader fingers the one breaking the dishes and that allows you as the manager to step in and correct the leader, that it’s better to ask questions instead of use accusing statements (periods). It’s important that in advance you talk to the leader privately that you want the issue to be brought up using questions and not statements so if you do have to jump in, the leader isn’t demoralized.

Sometimes the person responsible will admit to you that they have some sort of problem breaking dishes. That’s when you’ve struck gold and can begin to work with them on improving the situation. You want the employee to admit they’ve made a mistake and seek guidance for how they can fix the problem. You can’t mold stone, but can work with putty.

Varying management styles based on individuals
Some employees won’t like or respond to the question approach. They’d rather have you call them into the office and lay the facts on the line. You can still do this in a way that asks questions: “You appear to be one of the people breaking more dishes than others, can you shed any light on how we can either change this perception or reality?”

People are different and to manage everybody with one style is flawed. Some people you can’t raise your voice at ever, other people won’t think you’re serious unless you raise your voice. One rule of thumb in effective management that doesn’t change is we all appreciate questions more than statements. So the next time you have to work through a problem with one or more employees remember to try and frame the initial process as a series of questions rather than statements.

Punitive actions, maybe
Eventually, and there should be a timeline in mind, you might have to move to a progressive punitive phase (write-up, termination), but first start with a discussion and try to fix things by Q&A and getting participation in the solution. Human beings respond better to being part of fixing things than being the subject of an inquisition or interrogation.

Applying this to your business
This doesn’t only work with dishwashers in a restaurant, it’s applicable to managing people in other industries. Let’s say you are the leader in a group of bloggers. I’m in one of them now. See if you can apply the leader among peers suggestions above to your group.

The tech space is boring me a bit lately, including CES which didn’t come out with anything that exciting from what I’ve seen so far, so I’m going to share some other tips. If you have some good tips to share about working with and managing other people, please leave them in the comments below and let’s discuss.

Testing connection inside the Wii options was successful but the system process would hang with only a small part of the progress bar. I kept telling myself to check this out on the web and finally got around to it today. Seems like changing the router’s wireless channel from the default of 1 to 11 was all that was necessary to fix the issue. It couldn’t be that easy, could it? Consult your wireless router admin area under basic wireless settings or similar for this setting.

Also been having a lot of trouble with Xbox Live over the holiday. Talk about crappy timing. Hope your holiday is going well, we’ll be ringing in a new year soon.

You could listen to traditional radio, free, but ruined by too many commercials. Sirius and XM offer commercial free stations in many different genres but you’ll need a player and a monthly subscription ($$$). In the last few years there has been an explosion of online music sites like Pandora and last.fm which are good free options.

What if you already have a favorite artist and would simply like a list of related artists? Try entering in the artist into the Music Artist Cloud and a page will be returned with a tag cloud of similar artists and links to YouTube videos. Along the right you can see what a search for Quiet Riot returns.

There is the less technical way of talking to friends and family members. Yesterday was my sister in law’s 21st birthday and she wanted a CD by a group I hadn’t heard before called Living Syndication. We played it in the car as we spent the day taking her to all those got to be 21 sin places.

Today, I bought Living Syndication Aneurythm (affiliate) at Amazon MP3 for $8.99 which contains one of my new favorite songs: “Love Your Disease.”

Way down, you gotta live to breathe,
way down, you gotta love your disease

There is a short clip of them playing the song live below at YouTube.

Nice cowboy hat! My sis-in-law told me Living Syndication sounds a lot like the band Perfect Circle but the Music Artist Cloud oddly doesn’t recommend Perfect Circle. Sometimes it’s still best to go offline for related artist recommendations. I’m going to have to check out Perfect Circle too.

I decided it would be fun to make some myself. To do that, I learned that you need the following items:

- a Dehydrator (affiliate)

Nesco offers several different dehydrator wattages. The higher the wattage, the shorter the drying time. Wal-mart sells them too if you don’t want to go through somebody online like Amazon. Wal-mart is where we bought the one pictured in this post.

- knife
- some granny smith apples
- some oranges
- a can of pineapple juice (for pre-treating apples)
- zip lock bags or saran wrap
- (optional) sugar

The Nesco dehydrator we bought didn’t require any assembly. Simply open the box and remove the instruction manual and jerky spice bags. I’m not going to cover making jerky in this post, but that’s another common use for a dehydrator.

There are four trays that stack upon each other with the blower inserted at the top and down through a hole in the middle. Whatever you’re dehydrating — fruits, vegetables, flowers — is placed on these trays.

How to pre-treat apples
According to the instructions that came with the dehydrator, most fruits do not require pre-treatment, but ones that oxidize more should be pre-treated. Oxidation is what happens when sliced fruit turns brown.

Apples, pears, peaches and apricots have a longer shelf-life, are more appetizing and higher nutritional value when pre-treated. To pre-treat apples, once sliced immediately put in a holding solution of pineapple juice. Do not keep the apples in the solution longer than an hour. Slice the apples in half and then into 1/4″ or less slices, place them in the solution, wait a few minutes, and then lay out on the trays.

You can also squeeze a few orange or apples and use that juice for a pre-treatment solution. Tip: drink the juice when done pre-treating, it’s good for you.

Oranges
You can optionally peel the orange. Cut the ends off the orange to where there is a small amount of peel and mostly orange on the inside. Then cut the orange in half down the center and cut into 1/4″ or less thick slices and place them in a circular pattern around they trays.

If they are touching they will stick together when dried, so try to leave a tiny bit of space between them. You can mix the orange and apples on the trays.

Notice how the apples appear a bit brownish in the picture below? These were not pre-treated. I wanted to run a test batch that wasn’t pre-treated to see the difference in taste. There is a loss of flavor and vitamins A and C if not pre-treated.

As mentioned above, the dehydration process varies based on the wattage of the dehydrator as well as how full the load is on the trays. The instruction manual provides a range of 6-12 hours for apples and oranges to dehydrate. The first batch I tried took about 8 hours to fully dehydrate three of the four trays.

Optional: you can shake sugar over the fruit before drying. This will make them a bit sweeter. You can also add sugar afterwards. If you’ve ever had the apple chips in a bag, you’ll notice they are sugary. The oranges have enough flavor as is. I prefer the granny smith apples dehydrated to the oranges.

Once done remove the trays and either put on a plate and wrap with saran wrap to keep the air out or put in ziplock bags to store. You can also use tupperware. If any condensation appears on the lid then you didn’t dehydrate the fruit long enough.

Beyond dehydrated snack chips
You can do a lot more with a dehydrator besides fruit snacks like make your own leathery fruit roll-ups, beef jerky and vegetables. If you’re like me and don’t eat enough fruit and enjoy snack foods like potato chips, pretzels, consider dehydrating your own fruit and vegetable chips instead. A healthy alternative.

Got any other dehydrated foods you enjoy that we should try out?

Face it, neither your websites or ours are perfect. We need help. We need to listen to what visitors are saying aggravates them and do something. One good way to becoming a better listener is being accessible through services like Skype, answering email and replying to comments (instead of claiming you’re too busy), perhaps even [gasp] getting involved in social networking where your site niche is relevant.

The list scene is hot right now. Some days I think maybe that’s all we should do is just sit around and make lists. Would probably increase the traffic to this site tenfold. One interesting list I came across today was from PC World.

Noticeably missing from their 10 Biggest Web Annoyance list is something very annoying:

Unnecessarily spanning pages for articles — almost always to artificially increase page views — that could easily fit on one one page. It’s inconvenient and insults reader’s intelligence. Note that PC World’s list spans four pages instead of one. Shame on them. Why didn’t this make the top 10 aggravation list? Are there people out there who actually like having to click multiple times to read one article?

PC World’s list of 10 aggravations
With that said, let’s check out what is on their list and suggest some possible tips for how to combat aggravating site visitors and readers.

1. Dubious Privacy Policies. Aggravation factor: 69 percent. Privacy concerns continue to abound on the web. Do we need any more evidence that people visiting your site want to know what you’re doing with their information? If your site collects anything from people, what is the site doing with this information? Can they get it back out through an export function or non-crippled API?

How to avoid aggravating tip: Spend some time reading and going through and stripping the legalese in your privacy policy. Shorter is better. We need to do that with our privacy policy at Hmm. Short and straightforward privacy policies are better than long and convoluted.

2. Difficult Online Forms. Aggravation factor: 65 percent. I wonder how much we should thank spammers for this? The need to incorporate CAPTCHA or other less and more complicated techniques to trick the bots has added complexity to online forms. Also, with a growing desire to collect more information at some sites (see #1).

Tip: forms gotchas to avoid:

• illegible CAPTCHA. Offer quick refresh option like we have in the comments below using reCAPTCHA.
• forms with too short timeout. Ticketmaster, anyone? Not everybody is a speed typist.
• should allow entering in secure passwords. Why have a password field if one can’t enter in a secure password? This means allowing for password lengths as much as 12-24 characters, allowing symbols, upper and lowercase as well as digits. If your password doesn’t allow all of these or forces passwords smaller than 12 characters it is insecure.
• let us enter in valid emails with a + in them. A frequent gripe. It’s a handy Gmail filtering technique, although I picked up another one recently using a period in the email address (e.g h.m.m at gmail same as hmm at gmail).
• too many items on a single form. Unlike page spanning articles, I’d rather see page spanning for large forms. Let me go through the process in stages rather than show me a bunch of different things that are wrong.

3. Overcommercialization of the Web. Aggravation factor: 62 percent. I think with popup blockers in the mainstream we’re past that, but publishers and advertisers still have plenty of other annoyances to throw at us. I’m not a fan of those hover over text ads. They always seem to get in the way. The Flash overlays that run across the article you’re trying to read suck. And let’s not forget interstitials — those “skip to next page” full page ads.

Nice bit of honesty from PC World:

At MySpace, Yahoo, and even (we have to admit it) PCWorld.com such advertising has grown more aggressive, increasingly annoying, and impossible to avoid.

Tip: Laser focus about where to put ads and instead of adding more advertising, add more content. Keep the content to ad ratio no less than 70% content to 30% advertising on each page. Shoot for 90% content to 10% ad or better. Your visitors will love you and bookmark. So will the search engines.

4. Need for Standards. Aggravation factor: 58 percent. From the publisher side, trying to design sites that look good in all the major browsers isn’t quite rocket science, but feels like that with all the competing formats. We experienced this recently trying to get the search box CSS in the header in Internet Explorer (thanks again to web designer reader, Mikull).

Tip: Use tools like browsershots.org to see how your website looks in different browsers and work with designers — or do it yourself — to get your site looking good on the most popular browsers. And don’t forget about mobile users.

5. Trolls in Forums. Aggravation factor: 58 percent. Free for all forums aren’t about Free Speech, they are about free abuse. I’m in the crowd that strongly believes in at least some moderation of public areas. I’ve yet to see any completely unmoderated area that hasn’t devolved into a spam, flame and troll infested swamp. Yes, some of the comments from the “anonymous cowards” are funny, but too much and they turn people off.

Tip: moderate public areas and employ policies that keep some level of civility.

6. Buying Event Tickets. Aggravation factor: 54 percent. A whole annoyance devoted to Ticketmaster ticket fee gouging? Guess I don’t buy enough event tickets through Ticketmaster to get upset by this one. I’m thinking there are bigger annoyances than this, although it’s interesting that Pearl Jam thinks TM has a monopoly.

Tip: I don’t have any tips for this one, do you? Use the comment section below to suggest how to get a better deal buying event tickets online.

7. Web 2.0 Help Doesn’t Help. Aggravation factor: 49 percent. This could have been classified better as ‘Unhelpful help.’ I’m not sure who started the whole knowledge base scene, but I cringe when I’m being sent to one of those for help. The more technology employed, the higher the level of possible compatibility problems, I get that, but our browsers and OS can stay caught up.

Tip: don’t send people to a knowledge base or customer support form for support. Try using live help, provide Skype or other IM options. Don’t staff those live support options with people who follow moronic scripts.

8. The Expense of E-Books. Aggravation factor: 41 percent. I wonder if the expense of eBooks (or is it E-books?) have hurt the medium as much as the fact that people don’t want to read books on a computer screen? There is a distraction factor associated with computers. Some people associate — perhaps rightfully so — that the computer is for work, not for pleasure. I’d argue against this perception that the computer can be used for work and pleasure. Work hard, play hard, but I understand those like my wife who would rather relax with an old-fashioned paperback book over an eBook any day of the week.

Tip: If you release an eBook version, make it half the cost of the paperback version, at least.

9. Disappointing Web Video - Aggravation factor: 38 percent. No, they’re not talking about Scoble’s seemingly endless raw footage … or are they? It’s criticism of not enough top shelf tier content. Projects like NBC’s Hulu might help which bring more of the shows we see on TV to the computer screen. The subpar resolution and bandwidth constraints are a real issue. I’d like to see more HD quality video being released over the web. People are shooting HD video but then compressing the hell out of it so that it looks like pixelated crap when shown on a larger monitor or TV screen.

Tip: Shoot and share more high quality video using sites like blip.tv (better quality videos than YouTube). Use the medium (edit, edit, edit!). Don’t waste people’s time.

10. Boring Virtual Worlds. Aggravation factor: 9 percent. Since being active in virtual worlds since December 2005, I’m convinced those who label virtual worlds “boring” just aren’t trying hard enough. Go spend some time and really, really try to have a good time in virtual worlds. There are tons of things happening covering thousands of different interests. To say virtual worlds are “boring” is a statement about one’s own ability and effort, not about virtual worlds. The 9% aggravated need to be more creative.

Tip: the group blog I’m part of, VTOReality, is having a Halloween Avatar Contest tonight at 6:36pm PST. Dress up as your favorite avatar, create one from scratch, buy one from one of the virtual stores, and stop on by. Maybe we’ll judge yours as the best and you’ll win some L$.

Parting thought on the importance of listening
Stop a minute and ask yourself how good a listener you really are? Lately I’ve been trying to increase my listening skills by getting much more involved with a few third party sites/services that focus on social networks. I hope if you enjoyed or disliked this post you’ll take a second and either rate it above and/or leave a comment. Give me something to listen to, good, bad or indifferent.

zune://subscribe/?PodcastTitle=PodcastRSSFeedURL

Our Hmmcast Feedburner feed is:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/makeyougohmm/hmmcast

So the Zune format link would be:
zune://subscribe/?Hmmcast=http://feeds.feedburner.com/makeyougohmm/hmmcast

I’ll be getting this added to the Hmmcast category page as soon as the Zune rollout begins. Thank you, Rob!