By Steve Mallory

I have to pay homage to my wonderful wife for all she has done to help with the Bracelet Project! She is the best and has worked her butt off to get the outstanding bracelet orders shipped. Thank you, honey! The good news is that most of the bracelets have finally shipped! Hurrah! Any order that did not ship, last week, is planned to be shipped on Tuesday. The bracelet inventory is at my house so I can say with confidence that every outstanding order is being shipped.

I want to thank all the people who have offered to become the on-line store manager. The people who have volunteered for this position all have excellent qualifications, which makes it that much more difficult to make a final selection. I have been preoccupied with the other tasks that I am trying to finish for the organization and have not had time to look at the big picture of what is happening with our store. This is the primary reason that I have not made my selection and filled the store manager position. Once outstanding orders are shipped I can take a harder look and make my decision, my apologies to the applicants.

My update on the status of the T-shirts and sweatshirts has been hindered by the situation with shipping the outstanding bracelet orders. Also, I need to make sure that the stroke awareness shirt project will not have similar problems that occurred with the bracelet project. I want this project to be successful so I would rather move a little slower than have to live with the headaches from our first project that I am just now getting rid of.

I totally forgot last month to tell everybody that we have a new logo. The logo is on the homepage and was my motivation for the image on the back side of the shirts we will have silk screened. I am really excited about how fitting this graphic is for our website. I understand that not every stroke survivor is in a wheelchair but many of us had a massive stroke and sit in our wheelchair in front of the computer to access our site. It makes sense that our logo would reflect this.

The new skin for our message board will probably be finished in two more weeks. It is coming along great and will definitely knock your socks off when you see it. In the meantime, we are using a skin that reflects spring and was created by the same person who is making our custom skin. Take a look at the message board to see how beautifully designed this skin is and you will know what I mean.

The modification to the message board that I spoke about last month is already installed. I have not made it visible to the board because there is a minor technical glitch. It will hopefully be corrected within the next few days and we can start using it. What modification am I talking about? Just think of it as an instant messenger built right into our message board. It is called a Shout Box and lets you leave a personal message to the whole board. I was thinking we can use it to leave messages if you want to go to the chat room. Anyway, when you suddenly see it on our board I can guarantee that everyone will want to use it.

Also, if you have not already seen the new layout of the forums on the message board you definitely need to take a look. We now have 8 forums for the stroke caregivers, 7 forums for stroke survivors and 7 forums where the survivors and caregivers can communicate. This is a tremendous improvement, especially for stroke caregivers, and makes our board second to none on the entire Internet. Please check it out and let us help you deal with the daily strife that stroke usually causes.

I know that practically everybody in our organization is interested in the use of stem cells, as it relates to stroke recovery so I have scheduled the COO of a Stem Cell Therapy facility to speak to us in our Auditorium on May 24th. Our auditorium only holds 500 people so you better mark this event on your calendars. The time of the chat session will be 8:30 pm EST. The Guest Speaker will be Peter K. Sidorenko, COO Stem Cell Therapy International. His website is located at http://www.scticorp.com/

The chat session will be formatted. This means that the speaker will first make a 20 minute presentation, in which the audience is prevented from chatting amongst themselves. Once the speaker finishes his presentation, the audience can ask questions. The questions are fed into a queue and the speaker will answer them, one by one. The audience is prevented from chatting amongst themselves during the question and answer period, as well, so the entire chat session is controlled and everybody there can read an uninterrupted presentation and then read all of the questions and answers, too!

If you don’t know how to access the auditorium you have 24 days to read the directions on the message board and figure it out. This is going to be very big event so do not wait until the last second to ask how to get to the auditorium. You can use the Help Desk on the message board to get assistance if you are having problems. You do not need to login in order to use the Help Desk.