Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Download Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day

Free download available now!

Too many times I see people struggling with non-optimum work situations that are thoroughly covered in my book. If I could get my book into the hands of more people, I feel it might give them the edge they need to achieve a brighter future. I would like to make that happen.

I want to give more people a chance to read this unconventional guide to surviving corporate employment so they can find out what is REALLY going on at work and DO something about it.

In order to do that, I've set up another round of free downloads for those who would like to get some helpful career advice, but are financially strapped or live where books are prohibitively expensive.

If you are experiencing employment distress, why not download Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day and get your creative juices flowing again.  .

You will need high-speed internet and an Adobe reader for this 1.4mb pdf document, but you will find it to be well worth the effort.

Give the paperback version as a gift this Christmas

There are many people you know who are half-expecting to be laid off this Christmas. Instead of empty words of sympathy after they are jettisoned, why not buy them a paperback version of Danger Quicksand and send it to them now, when they can still do something to lessen the blow.

If you find yourself working out of a difficult situation at work, you might want to get yourself a paperback version of my book so you can make notes in the margins as you work your way along. A number of people have found that Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day makes for great occasional reading, because you can open it anywhere and find something worthwhile that you can read in five minutes. Keep this book at hand so you can read it over and over until you can think with the material and use it as your own.

Keep the book in your desk at work and read it when you take a coffee break. Sometimes all you need is a nudge to get you unstuck from a frustrating series of events. Try reading Danger Quicksand in small snatches. Read until you feel a sense of relief, then put the book down and get on with your day.

Do any of you read books in short takes?
Or, does everyone read a book from cover to cover?
I would like to know as I am looking at different book formats for the others in this series.

Children of the Internet - part 3

While repressive cultures may view them with horror, the Children of the Internet bring hope for a new future, not destruction.

A technology-based civilization needs an abundance of highly skilled citizens. Our school systems, if you have been watching closely, are not uniformly good at educating our children in technical and scientific subjects. Some seem to be concentrating on political indoctrination, rather than education.

Fortunately, an immense amount of factual information is available on the internet and it is readily available through search engines. Recent developments in digitizing printed works will probably result in an exponential increase in the amount of information available to researchers of all ages.

I saw my grandchildren access the Internet to learn how to make the ultimate paper airplane. I wouldn't have expected that information to be online, but it was.

However, their experience showed me that researchers can become very sophisticated at any age. After many attempts to follow the instructions given for building a certain paper airplane, they concluded that the author didn't know what he was talking about. The explanations and illustrations were useless!

I was enlisted to help figure out what was wrong and I had to agree with them. Complex explanations and unhelpful illustrations are a sign of incompetence. People who really understand things can explain them in simple words and with simple diagrams.

The search for information on the Internet will become faster and more convenient. I have every reason to believe that wireless internet access will drive the development of smaller, faster, handheld computers for everyday business and educational use.

Your ability to look up the information you need at a moment's notice will give you the edge in an increasingly competitive world. We are beginning to see that winning edge in our Children of the Internet.

If you regard information as dangerous in the wrong hands, you will have your work cut out for you determining who should and who should not have access to the knowledge of the Internet. China and North Korea seem to be leading the push to put restrictions on the Internet, but I think it is too late. Like King Canute commanding the tide to obey his will, these rulers will find themselves washed away by communication exchanges they cannot control.

Freedom of expression and freedom to access information have universal appeal. Trying to check these impulses toward freedom is a losing game.

As children around the world become accustomed to finding information at their fingertips, any effort to keep them ignorant and shut them away from this data will have long-lasting negative effects on their loyalty to their current group, whether it is a family, a tribe, a political party, or a nation.

Have you seen the effects of trying to keep children, or anyone, away from information they want to know?

Has it ever been done successfully?

Building/moving to a new home - day 68

And now...A Miracle Happens?

Have you ever seen one of those project charts which has a little box with this label way out near the end? It appears on those projects where it is deemed almost impossible for everything to appear on schedule.

On a chart they look like this:

In the physical universe, they can look like the scene below:

We came across our house modules today while driving down a winding country road in the rain. The four modules were sitting in a field next to Marvin West's dairy about a mile from our future homesite in Floyd, VA.

The sight of these completed modules in such close proximity to their final location really made our day!

We have been watching the weather deteriorate and did not know how it would affect the completion of our house. We were prepared for the worst, so to see the house modules all ready to go was a huge boost to our morale!

The team that transports house modules for Southern Heritage Homes had moved the schedule up a day and brought the four module trailers to a staging area near the construction site. This should enable the crane operator at the site to place all four house modules on the foundation in one day if everything goes smoothly.

We plan to be at the site early tomorrow. We do not want to miss this opportunity to photograph and blog the installation of a new house on our homesite.

Wish us luck!

Children of the Internet - part 2

The Children of the Internet will introduce change into our society in ways we cannot easily predict because they are bypassing traditional sources of information.

A culture controls change if it can restrict the flow of information. As long as a child only learns skills, attitudes, and fears from its extended family, that child is protected from the corrupting (and civilizing) effect of "outside ideas".

The child of such a culture can be raised to regard all outside the group as inferior or as enemies to be slain or subjugated. By the time the child is old enough to see that these "inferiors" have superior technology and lifestyles, it can be so warped that its only recourse is to destroy that which it cannot emulate.

The internet, with its overwhelming abundance of information, incredible beauty, and skillfully delivered lies, presents a challenge to any culture, even an advanced and open-minded one. The internet, even in its present limited form, presents the ultimate threat to closed cultures. The open flow of information exposes many lies that these cultures use to keep their citizens under control.

In the past, children would not be immersed in cultures outside their immediate environment until they were at least 12 years old. Today, five-year-olds are finding out that Mom, Dad and other authority figures really do not know what they are talking about. This places greater importance than ever on telling your children the truth.

When women of a closed and degraded culture see that intelligent, strong women of other cultures can excel in business and in war, it stirs up the kind of ideas that despots really hate! When races deemed inferior by some, can see that others of their race are worshipped as popular heroes, it tends to break down the mindset that caste systems rely on to survive.

Children given free access to the Internet may not easily unlearn lessons of hatred and bigotry, but they will quickly spot when the "truths" they have been taught bear little relationship to reality. This is true whether they live on the eastern seaboard of the US, in the heart of Los Angeles, or on the outskirts of Baghdad.

I feel that access to unlimited information will eventually result in children selecting the best parts of many cultures and synthesizing their own, to the shock and horror of those who insist on acting as "guardians of culture".

Some of the recent extreme fashion trends coming out of Japan may be a harbinger of things to come. Fashion may be a leading indicator of change because it is so visible. I think the real changes will be those that we cannot readily see because they represent new ways of thinking and dealing with people.

I hesitate to predict anything more specific other than this: those who cannot embrace change will go down fighting as they are rendered irrelevant. :)

Tag: Children of the Internet

Children of the Internet - part 1

The Children of the Internet live among us almost undetected, their numbers growing every day. As they tap the vast resources of the Internet to feed their hungry minds, they find each other and slowly become conscious of themselves as a culture in the making. Embedded in a society that is almost too busy to notice them, they undergo a transformation from talented individuals to a potent political and cultural force.

Unlike religions that have a mission to overthrow and subjugate others, the Children of the Internet are transforming society from within. These are our children and grandchildren and they bring knowledge into the household that isn't pre-screened by Mom and Dad.

In the past it was understood that children received most of their knowledge, attitudes and opinions from their parents until they approached their teens. Once they reached 12 years of age it was quite observable that in most cases, children regarded parents as highly suspect sources of information. Most twelve-year-olds went to outside sources for real data about the things that matter.

This was a direct result of the efforts that many parents make to protect their children from the unpleasant truths of life. As children observed that their parent's explanations about life did not make sense, they went outside to sources that may not have been accurate, but which were willing to communicate.

Today, children can access information about almost anything and are making decisions for themselves about issues that are completely off their parent's radar. They become passionate about wrongly-made decisions and are beginning to communicate about them in ways that are being noticed. One ten-year old friend of mine set up a website and wrote well-researched articles about the unfair dismissal of a favorite teacher.

Another ten-year-old I know is waging a personal campaign to bring back Invader Zim to Nickelodian. Once he discovers the  online petition to bring back Invader Zim, there will be no stopping him.

I had never heard of Invader Zim until this weekend, but since then I have been subjected to long, passionate harangues about the unfairness of dropping a show that provided witty entertainment and thought-provoking dark humor.

What makes this remarkable is that this ten-year-old is ranting about a show that was dropped several years ago! I am not sure he ever saw the original show as he would have been only seven years old at the time.

His last comment to me was that he was writing a letter to the person responsible for dropping the show.

To get the true perspective on this, you have to realize that his parents have had no part in this. They respect his passion, but sit bemused as he lectures them at the dinner table about the unfairness of it all.

Multiply this upset consumer by ten million and you begin to see some long-range effects from the Children of the Internet.

In future posts, I want to take up some observations on how the Children of the Internet are teaching themselves new skills.

Have you observed some Children of the Internet?
Do you think they will create changes in society?

Tag: Children of the Internet Invader Zim

Extreme cooking - deep fat frying a turkey

On Thanksgiving Day, we had the opportunity to watch a neighbor fry a 13 pound turkey in deep fat. The results were spectacular, but I would rather watch someone do this rather than try it myself. This is a highly dangerous procedure. Any carelessness can result in serious bodily harm.

This gas-fired cooking pot holds several gallons of peanut oil heated to 350 degrees F. The trick is to lower a 13 pound turkey into this hot oil without getting splashed and severely burned. The task is made more difficult by the fact that the turkey contains moisture which generates steam when it hits the hot oil.

The chef must lower the turkey very slowly and ignore the spatters of hot oil which are ejected when moisture bursts into steam.

Dave Raymond, pictured here, has at least five deep-fried turkeys to his credit. He demonstrated flawless turkey handling technique, never flinching when eruptions of hot oil shot several feet into the air.

He carried it off beautifully, but I would suggest wearing a heavy, long-sleeved jacket if you were to attempt this stunt yourself. Dave is wearing long barbecue gloves, but his arms are bare. One good splat of searing hot oil and his grip on the turkey hook could have been severely tested. If he had dropped the turkey instead of lowering it slowly, he would have been hard-pressed to avoid the resultant shower of hot oil.

Once the bird was in the oil, Dave said cooking time would be about three minutes per pound, which meant the thirteen pound bird would be done in 39 minutes.

We returned just in time to see the turkey come out of the oil as scheduled. As you can see, the skin is quite brown and appears to be well-done. Dave's father tested the bird's internal temperature and pronounced the bird done. Three minutes per pound is an amazing acomplishment!

Here you see Dave holding his turkey aloft in a final victorious gesture. Once again, man has overcome all obstacles to achieve the perfect Thanksgiving turkey!

Tag:  Thanksgiving

I am very thankful...

It's been a great year, and I have a lot to be thankful for. Let me explain.

I am married to Gretchen, a talented and understanding woman who embraces change willingly and provides unstinting support while I find my way through this post-corporate life.

I have a wonderful extended family which includes my children, Gretchen's children, all of our in-laws and outlaws, and my vast, and growing, family of online friends.

There are so many bloggers who have inspired me with their wit and wisdom that I cannot name you in one post. However, if you search for your name using the engine in the left sidebar, you will see that I have acknowledged you and your contribution. Most of you know who you are and I am extremely grateful for your interest and advice. I welcome both.

The world of blogging, which I discovered in 2003, continues to enrich my life and has begun to provide sources of income.

My first book, Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day, has brought me tens of thousands of readers and has opened the door to a role as purveyor of unconventional career advice.

I find new topics to blog about every week and your comments help me decide which topics are worth pursuing further. You have helped me identify five areas that are worth documenting as books or Podcasts. When the move to our new house is complete next month, I plan on getting book production into high gear.

I have gained so much from having you as friends and readers that I want to find ways to give more back. I have a few ideas which will take weeks to roll out, but I will start by beginning a new round of free downloads of Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day. Details to follow in another post.

This version will be identical to the paperback version and can be printed out by those who cannot read comfortably on a monitor. This free download will make my book freely available again to readers from every country on the globe. Of course, those readers who want a signed copy with a glossy cover will still be able to purchase it online.

Thank you, one and all.

Tag: Thanks Thanksgiving

Don't give up your day job - part 3

There is at least one really good reason for not giving up a day job in order to do something you love. The things you love to do may not be exchangeable for enough income to live on.

This scenario of dull remunerative day job vs low-paying ideal job may be the most common situation of all. Many of us enjoy doing cool things that are a lot of fun and have found that very few people want to pay us to do them.

Photographers are keenly aware of this. Shooting beautiful photographs of exotic locales has enabled them to earn respectable incomes in the past. Today, digital cameras put professional technology into the hands of anyone with an American Express card. It is a lot easier to capture a hummingbird in mid flight or a boxer at the moment of impact than it was in the past. Digital cameras and minicams allow everyday citizens to capture events in high resolution color  and sound that were the sole province of professionals just a few years ago.

Singers and musicians often find local venues which they love and where they are thoroughly admired. These venues often cannot afford to pay them very much, but they do offer them an audience and time on the stage. A weekly gig in front of people who love you does a lot for your soul and for your skills. The rewards are so great that it is worth keeping the day job.

Abandoning a friendly local venue for larger and possibly indifferent audiences in order to make your art a paying proposition calls for a drastic change in your attitude to your art. It is no longer a labor of love, you have to make decisions that will maximize your income. You have to play what the listeners want, not what you consider important. It has become a job. And then some drunk in the back yells, "Play Freebird!" and you wonder why you ever gave up your day job...

Programmers run into the same kind of trap. They start out writing games or cool applications at night and they find out that no one wants to pay for them. They haven't done their marketing or they would have found that people readily pay only for dull things like maintaining legacy software or utilities that run on Windows machines. Innovative software applications take an incredible amount of creative effort and require endless amounts of support, which startups rarely plan for and almost never deliver.

Freeware is the programming equivalent of a musician playing for the joy of it. Shareware is the equivalent of playing for tips. Both have their place in the world and are best supported by a solid day job that does not take over your life.

There are exceptions to every rule, of course, and I know when someone works very, very hard doing what they love and pushes themselves to achieve greatness, that their creations DO eventually command prices that free them from their day jobs forever. This may take years of struggle and personal deprivation, but it can be done. Furthermore, these people may still love what they are doing, even when it has become a livelihood instead of a labor of love.

Jeannette Caruth has made that transformation, and is reaping the rewards of years of learning to paint while supporting herself with a day job. I know of several others who have mastered a skill while supporting themselves with a day job.

The acid test is how good do you want to be? Good enough to be applauded, or so outstanding that people bid for your services? In either case, keeping your day job allows you to flex your wings before you have to fly for a living. In many cases, you may decide that a balance of a secure job and a non-paying but rewarding career is the optimum path to follow.

How many find that this describes your situation?

What would happen if you could keep this going for years?

Sunday Morning with Marla Olmstead

I was browsing through my Blogroll this morning and I discovered some more paintings by Marla Olmstead.

Sick Teeth 

The power of aesthetics is amazing. It is like a carrier wave on which one can put almost any message. This painting is titled "Sick Teeth" and that is the emotional impact I get from looking at it.

Contrast the emotional response from "Sick Teeth", shown above, to "Candyland", shown below. The first painting feels painful, the second feels almost sugary.

Another view into the mind of a gifted five-year-old painter....

Take time to visit Marla's website again as it is continually being updated. I get an emotional lift whenever I browse through her photo gallery.

Visiblemotion.com continues to do an amazingly tasteful presentation of Marla's life and her works. A PR website by this talented group could be an asset of exceptional value.

Tag: Marla Olmstead

Don't give up your day job - part 2

Working for yourself is not an all-or-nothing proposition. If you have been able to accumulate enough money to live on for six months and additional funds to launch your new business, then you might very well abandon your day job and succeed as a self-employed business owner. Otherwise, you won't.

Far too many of us have started a business with inadequate funds and hoped to make a go of our dream by working incredible hours, only to find that the law of gravity has not been repealed and that credit cards will only carry us so far.

There are an infinity of mistakes that can be made in any business and our chances of success are increased greatly if we have a decent financial cushion to recover from a few of them without going under. If you are spread so thin financially that one mistake will put you under, you are merely gambling, not investing in your future.

If you continue doing your best with your day job, your manager's insanities, and the interminable bs staff meetings and useless reports, while developing a business of your own, you guarantee that your family will go on eating while you reach for a more rewarding game in life.

This is not for everyone, because you are essentially working two jobs at once and many companies expect you to work 150% on the job they hired you to do. They expect that because the organization spends too much of its working day in meetings and useless report writing to get much useful work done.

However, there are a few jobs that deserve 150% of your effort. If you have one of them, you probably think about work on a 24x7 basis because you are being allowed to create and use all of your abilities. You do not need another job. You probably have difficulty remembering that you have a family and a life outside of work. :)

If you have the all-too-common dead-end job in a company that is slowly losing ground, you owe it to yourself to look out for your future. You may not feel up to looking for another job in the same industry for fear of being discovered and dismissed, but you had better do something soon. You can see the handwriting on the wall, but you sit frozen in your cubicle hoping that you can make it through another quarter. You need to investigate a second job or the possibility of working for yourself.

The mere effort of investigating new opportunities will revitalize you and will get your creative juices flowing. Your efforts to develop or discover a viable business model may bring to light all sorts of skills you had forgotten about. It may take several tries to find a business model that works but you have the luxury to try and try again if you have a day job to support you.

You may also realize that your creativity has been stifled by a manager who does not want anyone to make waves. Fearing for his job, he does everything he can to stifle ideas that might require him to make a decision or worse, to propose a change to upper management.

Once you start making your own decisions and dealing with the repercussions and the successful results, your confidence will soar. When your self-employment starts generating real income, you will know when it is time to phase out the day job.

Even if you find that you eventually need to return to working for others, the freedom of being on your own is not forgotten. If you learn from your mistakes, you will be better prepared for the next time you go out on your own. The chances are that you will eventually make it. The freedom and responsibility of self-employment is almost impossible to resist.

How many of you made more than one attempt to develop your own business?

Of those that did so, how many found that each time was easier?

Did anyone try once, and having failed never tried again?

Tag: career advice, day job