HELP! (by just sending an email)
Apr 25th, 2009 by jeb
If you enjoy this website and could spare a minute to just send an email, we desperately need your help -- not your money, but your assistance in helping the website to stay up and running by emailing Florida state and local tourism organizations and asking them to help us out with a couple of things. You can skip the following wordy verbiage and just page down to the email information if you have already decided to send the email (thank you!).
.We maintain this website on a non-existent budget and are currently in a jam financially -- yes, we live near the beach, but long-story-short it takes most of our social security income just to take care of that luxurious expense.
First and most importantly, we anticipate that our old personal computer, with which we maintain this website, is showing signs that it is going to become dysfunctional in the very near future (we have had to purchase a new one every two or three years in this humid salt air enviroment and this PC is almost three years gone). If it crashes, it may be quite a while before we can manage to procure a new PC, at which point we will experience considerable lag time installing the operating system, rebuilding the software, and restoring what files we will have managed to backup -- from experience, a very lengthy and tedious process in itself.
In order to avoid a prolonged if not permanent outage, we need to procure a new PC now and transfer all files and software to it before our old one crashes, and we simply do not have the funds to do that. However, since there are organizations like "Visit Florida" with multi-million dollar budgets for promoting tourism, and since we do promote Florida tourism on this website, we feel that they should procure a new PC for us. We (and our viewers no doubt) would also like them to replace our low budget video camera with a high-end camera so that we can capture much better videos for the website --- which is now also beginning to become highly dysfunctional and may not last much longer.
We have contacted several of the above mentioned organizations, so far to no avail, as times are tough, they have suffered recent staff and budget cuts (but out of well over $30,000,000 they could surely help this site to stay up and running by either procuring new equipment or providing some of their old hardware)... If you could take a minute to send an email to the people noted below, we would greatly appreciate it. If you cannot take the time to send an emial to all of them, just start at the top of the list and do whatever is feasible for you. If you do not want to take the time to create the text for your own personal message, we have provided a sample statement below the email addresses which you can copy and paste into your email.
If the thirty-million-dollar-plus publicly funded tourism industry does not help us out, and the daily posting of new videos suddenly stops, you will know what happened -- on the other hand from a positive perspective, if the grainy videos on this website suddenly become crisp and clear with zoom and macro mode, you will know that your efforts to help us out succeeded.
.------------- Email Addressees -------------
Manuel Pila, Hollywood Beach CRA mpila@hollywoodfl.org
Judy Erickson, Hollywood Downtown CRA jerickson@hollywoodfl.org
Sarah Byrd, Promotions Manager at "Visit Florida" sarahb@visitflorida.org
Jill Morrison, Internet Manager at "Visit Florida" jmorrison@visitflorida.org
Beth Rice, Industry Relations Manager at "Visit Florida" brice@visitflorida.org
Stacie Faulds, CVB Communications Creative Director sfaulds@broward.org
South Florida Tourism Council tourism@bellsouth.net
.----------- Canned Text for Emails -----------
Below is the canned text that we came up with if you did not want to bother with creating your own personal message -- feel free to modify in any way.
This is a request to expediently help the owners of the video blog website "Life's a Coast" to procure a new personal computer in the interest of preventing their website from encountering a prolonged outage should their existing PC crash. I feel that it would also be in the best interest of visitors to the website and consequently for Florida tourism to also provide a decent video camera for the website. The email address of the website owner is jeb@lifesacoast.com and the address of the site is http://www.lifesacoast.com
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I really am impressed with this website! and thank you for taking the time to inform and entertain us who are potential visitors to your area. love it! (p.s. you misspell the word "boardwalk" throughout the entire site, though. you spell it as "broad" instead of "board"......oops!)
You are welcome Janice, and we appreciate the praise from you, makes it worthwhile to drag our rear ends out of a warm bed to video the sunrise when the wind chill is in the 30's (which for us feels more like 30 below) and conversely to get out in the heat and storms. One thing, the broadwalk here is not a boardwalk, it is paved without any boards and it is a broad walkway, hence the moniker of broadwalk. We do have boardwalks here, but the are not oceanfront like the broadwalk, and serve as overwalks on the intracoastal waterway where we video the sunsets, and also at local parks where they serve as walkways over mangrove swamps. Thanks again!