The Hot Ice Studio creates crystal glazes on porcelain and stoneware, and is one of several ongoing projects at JoeBay U. The Hot Ice Studio website was created with Macwebsitebuilder to showcase the studio, describe the process of creating crystal pottery, and sell studio art on line. Students interested in developing their pottery skills can arrange to take pottery courses at JoeBay U and/or rent studio space. The JoeBay U / Hot Ice Studio facility and equipment are some of the finest available anywhere. Crystal glazes are almost unheard of and rarely seen, due to the difficulty of producing crystals. Consequently, few potential customers would know how to look for and/or search for this kind of pottery. For the few who have seen it, they generally don't know what to call it, rendering an on-line search more or less useless. To mitigate this obstacle, art produced at the Hot Ice Studio has the words "Hot Ice Orcas" on the bottom of each item—this phrase was chosen to help a potential customer who sees one of these pots to locate the origin via Google quickly: just type Hot Ice Orcas into the Google search window and you will see that the first entry on the first page takes you to the Hot Ice Studio web site. This example illustrates the importance of choosing a business name and/or web site presence that can maximize your exposure to a potential audience. Like the "Tools at Work" example, the Hot Ice Studio employs a number of complementary digital tools (digital camera, Filemaker Pro, Quickbooks, Google Analytics, Adobe In Design, etc.) to create a comprehensive and efficient art studio business. In addition, JoeBay U rewrote the original kiln operations manual for the kiln manufacturere (Geil Kilns) in order to make it understandable to the potter community for which the kiln is designed (the first 8 pages of each manual are offered here to illustrate the difference). JoeBay U can assist students and/or businesses in improving their documentation or written communications to create a more effective and professional image to customers and suppliers.

Proactricity is an On Campus JoeBay U initiative designed to promote immediate, practical personal and collective cost and carbon savings with regard to the consumption of electrical energy. The web site was designed using Google's free web site development enviornment "Sites". One of the important suggestions for energy conservation in Proactricity is a load managment activity which reduces, or "shaves",  peak (electrical) demand by shifting loads to off-peak periods during the 24 hour day. To validate the savings to a customer that can occur if he/she alters their power demand to off-peak times of the day, a Filemaker Pro database was developed. This database calculates the Opalco bill to the penny (to ensure it is calculating properly), and in so doing also calculates what the non-Time of Day bill would be.  JoeBay U offers the interested student the opportunity to learn more about how to save money every month on his/her electrical bill (see course list).  JoeBay U can help you learn what to do to maintain your lifestyle while lowering your cost of power while additionally helping the region shift to renewable methods of producing electricity.

Potholes in Paradise, a book published in 2009 by Centripetus, the JoeBay U umbrella entity, utilized several digital tools (Macintosh computer, Pages word processing software, printer, scanner, Filemaker Pro database, USPS on-line postage web site, Quickbooks, Macwebsitebuilder, Google Blogger, Amazon, etc.) to write, edit, insert and manipulate graphics, format, ship electronically to the printer, receive, track and ship on-line orders, maintain a blog, communicate with distributors and bookstores—all tasks that, today, must be done in order to efficiently produce and distribute a book. JoeBay U can help a student to learn and become competent with any or all of these steps, or, if asked, perform some of the "back office" steps for an author by setting up systems tailored to the author's needs.

(360) 376-4549       

blog: joebayu.blogspot.com

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