Day 421

I learned all sorts of little tidbits today. Did you know that anyone can accept credit card payments now just using their cell phone? No contracts. No expensive equipment required. All you do is download a free app at the app store and the software company sends you a little card swiping gizmo that plugs into the earphone jack of your iPhone. It's all free and the transaction charges are way cheaper than what I'd typically pay for a merchant account at my bank. I immediately signed up for this service. I haven't lost many jobs because I couldn't accept credit card payments, but why lose any? I never bothered to get a merchant account for my company because clients only want to pay by credit card once in a blue moon. Now I can accept charge cards on my phone when I need to and never worry about monthly charges when I'm not using the service.

I also learned that YouTube is getting a lot more sophisticated about music licensing. One of my clients wanted me to take a video off their YouTube page and embed it in their company website. I've done this dozens of times, but this time after I embedded the video on the client's site, I got a message saying that EMI Publishing had restricted it to playing on the YouTube site. YouTube must now have some sort of synchronization licensing agreement with music publishers just like radio stations do. I'm going to have to learn more about this, because YouTube used to just pull videos with unlicensed music off their site. I've had problems with this for years, because clients always seem to insist that they can use the Beatles, or Pink Floyd, or the score from an academy award winning film in their corporate videos without paying for it. I don't know whether this new direction YouTube is taking will make things easier or worse for me. It's never been easy to explain music licensing anyway. I anticipate a lot of "if it's playing on YouTube, why can't you make it play on my website" type of questions.

My roof is covered with ice again. I thought that this time I could limit the water damage by sweeping off all the snow covering the ice first. If there is less frozen stuff to melt, there will be less water to leak inside when the weather warms up. I spent several hours getting rid of the snow, but the ice itself is still up there. I'm going to be real glad when Spring arrives sometime in April.

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