Coyote Blog

Other than the demand among the status-conscious for Chanel handbags, the demand for a product or service generally decreases as its price decreases.  This is an observation so trivial it is almost stupid to write down. But I guess the point is still not understood in Washington.

"The Center for American Progress, often called the think tank for the Obama White House, recentlyrecommended another increase in the minimum wage to $8.25 an hour. Though the U.S. unemployment rate is 9.1%, the thinkers assert that a rising wage would "stimulate economic growth to the tune of 50,000 new jobs." So if the government orders employers to pay more to hire workers when they're already not hiring, they'll somehow hire more workers. By this logic, if we raised the minimum wage to $25 an hour we'd have full employment."

My wife has more of her patterns she has designed for knitted handbags for sale, here or at her own site here.

Well, blogging has been light again as I a) watched the incredibly unlikely prospect of the Arizona Cardinals hosting a NFC Championship game become a reality and b) built yet another new web site, this one for my wife.  My wife has for several years had a business selling designer handbags and other fashion accessories, for which she has won a number of awards.  This week she is kicking off a new business selling knitted handbag patterns.  You can guess who was named, in absentia I might add, the new business's CTO and webmaster.

Anyway, not wishing to add another platform to my stable of web site solutions, I built it using wordpress using a template that may be suspiciously familiar to Coyote Blog readers.  No appologies here, because I spent way too much time making the transaction engine work (it turns out that digital fulfillment is actually harder, rather than easier, to implement than regular mail and ship).   Since this is basically a hobby of mine rather than a real job, getting one template to work flawlessly using css is my limit.

Anyway, check her out if you are interested (or even if you are not, she will be thrilled to see some traffic).

PS-  before I get comments, I know there is something wrong with the image manipulation system I used as the site is hanging up serving up resized images.  Working on it.

My wife and I went to see the opening of Dale Chihuly's new exhibit at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix.  Chihuly is, if not the leading, certainly the most famous modern glass artist  (he is perhaps best known for the lobby at the Bellagio, though this is far from my favorite work).  He has done garden exhibits before, but the shapes and colors were perfect for the desert landscape.

I don't have pictures yet from Arizona (we saw the exhibit at night), but here are some examples of his work:

And from a garden show in New York:

Information on the exhibit is here.  Highly recommended for anyone visiting Phoenix this winter.  I think one of the reasons my wife and I like his work is that his work is in some way reminiscent of the handbags she designs.

Yeah!  Last night my wife won the Arizona Rising Star Fashion Award for best new Arizona accessory designer for her funky handbags at Kate Groves Creations.  It was an interesting evening, being about the only male, and perhaps the only straight male, in a room of about 100 women.  I will try to supply pictures, including some of her award, but right now I am piling my family on an airplane for Hawaii (yes, you can email me your condolences, but someone has to support the hotel industry).  I will leave you with some pictures of her bags:

I tried to warn you to buy one of my wife's designer handbags before she got famous.  It may be too late.  Next week she will be a finalist in the Phoenix Rising Star Fashion Awards:

Phoenix may not be an international center of fashion, but it is a hotbed of design.

The Valley brims with independent designers who make everything from
purses to baby clothes to yoga wear, all available at local boutiques
and/or online.

Three promising Valley designers will receive Rising Star awards on Thursday, given by the Phoenix chapter of Fashion Group International,
a networking organization for fashion professionals. Awards are given
in three categories: clothing, accessory and interior design.

(click image to enlarge)

Sorry, newspaper photos really don't scan very well.  They just had to use the chick with the guitar for the online article, so my wife's photo didn't make the online edition.  Many of her funky handbag designs are online, and I posted here about the last exposure of her designer purses in Yes Magazine.

Technorati Tags:  fashion, knitting

A woman in Nigeria wants to buy 10 of my wife's handbags.   Right now, we have paypal's foreign credit card option turned off, and of course the Nigeria angle sends off warning bells.  Are there any good ways to accept money from Nigeria with minimal risk of fraud?

Its been a frustrating day dealing with the Arizona Republic.  The day began pretty exciting as they had a beautiful article in the style section today featuring the handbags my wife creates.

Our first disappointment was the fact that the paper forgot to include my wife's web site in the article, giving readers no contact information in the article if they are interested in the purses.  Then we found that the link to her article in the style section of the Republic online was wrong, and only produced an error.  Now, mistakes like this happen - I actually messed up a link to my wife's web site in this article, but I quickly fixed it when an alert reader noticed.  So I emailed the webmaster at the Republic, and, several hours later, I got an email saying something like "here is the correct link".  But the link online is still broken!  In the time they sent me the email with the correct link, they could have just fixed the link online.  Six hours later, it still is not fixed.  This strikes me as classic dead-tree journalism, thinking in terms of making corrections days or weeks later rather than in real time.

UPDATE:  Yea!  Link fixed.  Wonder if my sending them this blog post helped or if they were doing it anyway.