Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Antique Ford Truck - eye candy for a Spring day

I saw this immaculate supercharged pickup truck today in the parking lot at the Harvest Moon foodstore in Floyd, VA. I hesitate to call it a restoration because I'm not sure how much of the original metal, if any, still remains.

It seems to have been a very early Ford pickup and has found a new life as a toy for an older, and well-heeled, sports enthusiast.

The body shell and the doors may be original, but everything else seems to have been fabricated of new material to very high standards. The seats are cream-colored leather and the interior is spotless.

This truck is a real showpiece, but it is used for runs to downtown Floyd and is attracting lots of attention. At least four people came up while I was shooting these pictures, including one fellow who said, "It's a shame they didn't leave the flathead engine in it!"

I wanted to bring you some history of this vehicle, but I traipsed through the Harvest Moon foodstore and the coffee shop Over The Moon asking for the owner of the Yellow Ford Truck in the parking lot with no results.

I talked with several well-groomed sportsmen who looked very much like show car owners, but no one was willing to admit to owning this treasure.

If anyone knows the provenance of this beauty, please send me an email.

It has a Lucky Lady insignia in the rear window and Moon insignia on both sides of the cab. It also has a radiator ornament that seems vaguely familiar.

You can click on these images to get a full-sized image.

Here is a view from the front.

UPDATE:

It's a big help having knowledgeable friends!

Iowahawk says, "...that appears to be a '33 or '34 Ford, chopped about 3" and channeled about 7", frame has likely been Z'd . That's a stock '33-'34 grill, but he's running an old Model T radiator cap on it. 

Engine is a small block Ford, probably 302 or 351, looks like a B&M supercharger setup. The pickup bed looks like a shortened Model A. Wheels are either Cragar or Centerline."

"I'll get it in the Earth Day gallery along with a link."

If you would like to see more exotic cars take a look at the Flickr slideshow on the First Annual Iowahawk Earth Week Virtual Cruise Night.

The new Bell Gallery - another reason to visit Floyd

William and Joanne Bell opened their Bell Gallery & Garden today and it's everything we had expected it would be.

The gallery displays work by top local artists as well as work by William and Joanne themselves.

There was so much to admire and the quality was so uniformly high that it was hard to pick out a display that stood out from the rest, but the large framed photographs by William Bell were truly exceptional.

As you can see from the image above, the photos are so realistic that it is like standing in front of a window. William has developed a revolutionary mounting technique for his large format photos that does away for the need for glass to protect the photograph! As a result, the clarity and intensity of the framed photograph is undiminished from the original image.

After seeing one of these photographs, you will never want to go back to the old method of framing again.

The gallery is spacious and occupies the entire first floor of the building. There is a framing shop on the premises and a garden at the rear of the gallery. You will find it easy to lose an hour browsing through the imaginatively designed displays.

Everywhere you look, you will see evidence of the care with which the Bells created this gallery. For example, in the renovation of this historic building, they discovered that the walls were constructed of 8-inch-wide stacked hardwood boards!

As you can see in this photo, the boards were simply stacked one on top of the other with each row offset from the next to provide a gripping surface for the original plaster. The boards were nailed down and were overlapped on the corners like log cabin construction. You can see the inside view of one wall and a detail view of one of the corners which was exposed during renovations.

An original wall section has been varnished and left exposed in the rear of the gallery. For those of you who are architectural history buffs, it makes for fascinating viewing.

While I was shooting pictures and interviewing the Bells, Gretchen fell in love with some of Joanne's unique hanging glass. As a result, we now have some of these pieces hanging in our picture windows. Very nice!

Drop in and visit the Bells if you are in Floyd. The Bell Gallery & Garden is at 112 N. Locust Street in Floyd, VA, and is located right next to Oddfellas Cantina, where you can retire to celebrate your purchases.

Tell them you saw their gallery on the Internet.

Tag: Floyd, VA

More on Chernobyl from Elena Filatova - Kid of Speed

Elena Filatova, also known as Kid of Speed, wants to make sure that Chernobyl is not forgotten.

In an interview with Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's biggest morning paper she was asked, "Why do you devote so much of your life to this catastrophe?"

"Some day those towns and villages will be demolished and I don't want their memory to disappear. I want to leave a record in images, videos and short stories of how I saw Chernobyl. I am sure, in the future people will appreciate my efforts."

Towns and villages in the radioactive area are already being demolished and photos like Elena's may soon be the only witness to what existed in 1986. Her Chernobyl Journal has a running account of her efforts to keep the memory of Chernobyl alive.

Elena captured the imaginations of millions of people with her startling photos of the region around Chernobyl in 2004. She later came under attack for claiming that she had ridden a motorcycle through the so-called Dead Zone.

You can judge for yourselves by watching this video  of the Chernobyl region in the vicinity of Polesskoye taken by a pillion passenger on her motorbike. It will give you a flavor of the experience waiting for you on her new website.

She has updated her websites with new high resolution photos and many streaming videos. They are every bit as dramatic as the original Ghost Town photos which I featured in earlier posts.  The site bears this notice:

All Chernobyl relative texts, photos and videos may be freely downloaded, copied, translated and distributed for any appropriate use.

For a comprehensive look at what Elena has assembled, go to her quick navigation page. There is enough material there for hours of fascinated browsing. I plan on ordering her CD and DVD as soon as my PayPal account fills up again.

Many thanks to greyfox for the original link.

Tag: Chernobyl

Self-publishing is a continual learning experience

The most interesting thing about self-publishing is that each book is like a virtual micro-business. Everything I have written about micro-businesses applies to self-publishing almost without exception.

For example, micro-business success on a limited budget usually requires identifying a niche market in which people communicate about products which they find useful or entertaining. In this kind of a market, a valuable product or service at the right price will benefit greatly from word-of-mouth advertising.

Successful self-published books generally begin in a niche market, although they can spill over to a general mass market if enough word-of-mouth buzz gets generated and there is enough entertainment value to appeal to a broader market. The Harry Potter books are the best-known example of this.

Until you find that niche market, you spend a lot of time and money promoting your book to people who are interested, but don't recommend it to others. The ideal niche market would be people for whom your book is a solution to a problem. Reaching them may take a little doing and may involve finding other people who deem your book useful.

I self-published Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day almost a year ago to help level the playing field for hardworking people who were trying to support their families and maintain their sanity in a troubling and uncertain working environment.

The gritty, no-nonsense advice appealed to those who had been blindsided by career-shattering discoveries, but it turned out to be a quick test of a person's willingness to confront unpleasantness. This statement I made about HR was a typical example:

Page 83: ...Human Resources, contrary to your expectations, is not your friend. HR is there to protect the company and its executives against employees like you.

Some of my book reviewers were incredulous that I would make such a statement. On the other hand, I got rave reviews and thanks from people who were driven to the point of doubting their own sanity because of insane work situations and lack of support from HR.

Thanks to word of mouth, people kept on buying the book, but I did not feel I was reaching opinion leaders for the target market I was trying to reach.

Recently, I have gotten my book in the hands of people in the career management/recruiting/outplacement fields and book sales are trending up.

It appears that my book may help these professional recruiters when they deal with candidates who have not been job hunting recently and have unrealistic expectations.

I felt especially validated when I saw this review by Jim Durbin, of the Durbin Media Group. 

My takeaway from this experience is to find those who my target audience pays attention to and get my book into their hands. I will send a free review copy of Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day to any professional in the recruiting, headhunting, outplacement, and career counseling field. Just send me an email and I will send you a copy within 24 hours.

I have also been helped in great measure by my good friends in the blogosphere who reviewed my book on their weblogs and by friends who have continued to promote my book through ads on their sites. You can see their names listed on my left sidebar.

Tag: self-publishing

The biggest barrier to starting your own micro-business

The biggest barrier to starting your own micro-business is not capital, it is your own mindset. Let me give you some ideas to chew on in the hope that it will let you examine your present mindset and adjust it to your liking.

First off, starting a micro-business is a life-changing activity. You are choosing to embark on a business venture where you make the decisions, you find the customers and you strike up a business relationship with them where you provide them with a product or service at a price that will allow you to continue doing business with them or others.

You have almost unlimited freedom to improvise, but you are the driving force in this enterprise and you have no safety net, except for your own wits and good sense.

This is a complete antithesis to working in a large corporation.

A big corporation is a powerful machine with a lot of moving parts and very little tolerance for parts that are not able to contribute to the motion. Your decisions are limited, even at the highest levels, and your actions require coordination with those around you even when this doesn't seem to make sense.

There is a great deal of momentum in a corporation and it takes forever to make any changes in direction or speed. Your praiseworthy attempts to develop a social conscience in the corporation, or to improve customer support to an acceptable level do not fall on deaf ears, they are an unacceptable irritant to those who are keeping the giant machine going.

In a successful corporation, you are surrounded by people who have figured out how to keep the corporate machine running so that it provides them with money, power, and security. Results vary with your position in the organization, of course. Like a Roman galley, you are all going somewhere at great speed, but some of you are working harder than others.

You may resent the conditions of your employment, but you stay because it is easier than striking out for yourself. For modern professionals, the regular paychecks and the benefits generally outweigh the frequent humiliations and the pervading sense of unease that comes with working in a business that has lost touch with customer needs and employee concerns.

I am not picking on your company, I am merely stating the obvious. It takes a lot of work to get a large corporation to the point where it is profitable. The actions that seemed to make this happen become mandatory. Frivolous concepts like corporate culture, employee trust, and meeting customer expectations are often discarded in order to make the quarterly results look good and keep the stock price up.

You see this around you and yet you hesitate to leave. The kids are in school, you live in a great neighborhood, and you have a position that you fought hard to get. You think, maybe I can work this out somehow... Besides, I don't have enough money to start a business on my own!

Funny thing, but when Mega-Corp finally shoves you overboard in a last desperate attempt to lighten ship, you will often find the means to start your own micro-business, even though you don't have the capital you thought you needed.

The barriers didn't get lower. Your necessity level increased to the point where you were finally able to surmount the barriers and start a micro-business rather than return to the corporate fold.

Don't flog yourself if you can't see your way to starting your own business right now. Just recognize that the time will come when you will need to make a change and improve your quality of life. Keep your eyes peeled for the right opportunity and be prepared to move when it appears. Read my earlier micro-business posts for more information on taking control of your life.

By doing this, you will have started to dismantle the biggest barrier between you and a better future.

If you are giving your job everything you've got and you still feel like the axe is about to fall, you need to read my book, Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day, which is an unconventional guide to surviving corporate employment.

It contains advice you have never seen elsewhere about recognizing dangerous situations and what you can do to avoid them. It also contains time-tested advice about starting over, from people who have actually been there and survived.

Good luck!

Tag: micro-business

Chernobyl - lest we forget

This photograph by Phil Coombs is just one of many included in a series of BBC News articles remembering  the twentieth anniversary of Chernobyl.

The BBC News website revisited Chernobyl recently, and has published a series of articles and pictures that capture the imagination and fill in more details of the tragic nuclear accident that took place on April 26 1986.

There are many articles to browse through and for those who have not read my earlier posts on Chernobyl, they provide a good summation of the the incident, the subsequent efforts to cover it up, and the various estimates of genetic damage that resulted from the incident.

It is interesting to see the amount of wildlife that has flourished in the so-called Dead Zone even in the presence of high radiation levels. It is telling that animals brought into the zone from outside do not do well. I am sure that there is more to be discovered about how plants and animals have adapted to the radiation. After all, it will not diminish for hundreds of years. There will be ample time for study...and for reflection.

If you want a quick fix, check out these links for more of Phil Coombs photos on Pripyat: Chernobyl's lost city.

Lost city in pictures
Contaminated vehicles
Ghost villages

Tag: Chernobyl

Peace and quiet

Since Friday is a traditional cat-blogging day, I thought I would contribute an update to show how one of our pets is settling in after these last mad months of house construction.

It seems as though there is a universal need for a space of one's own. It doesn't have to be large, just big enough where we can get out of the way and have a little time for ourselves.

Buffy is quite grateful that our deck finally has enough plants to provide shelter.

I hope that you also get a little time for yourself today, not necessarily for napping like Buffy, maybe just enough time to plan your future and make important decisions. Happy Friday!

Tag: cat blogging

Is there a civil war in Iraq?

It appears that one has been going on for many years.

Read Michael Yon's thoughtful dissertation on this complex subject. It gave me a different insight on what may lie ahead for Iraq.

To give you the flavor of Michael's writing, I have taken this image  and the following quote from Michael Yon's article:

When I asked this Yezidi headman when he thought the war began, he could not remember a time in his life when there wasn’t a war. Except for the past ten years, when the American military prevented Saddam from committing further atrocities upon the Kurds.

Read the rest of Michael's post, it will provide background material for understanding my previous post about an Iraqi blogger.

Indomitable spirit

I consistently find people who are trying to make things go right, even under the most brutal conditions. All I have to do is look for their stories, which mainly appear in blogs.

One of my favorite Iraqi bloggers writes of a tragedy that struck his household this week. His brother-in-law, a brilliant young doctor was celebrating the opening of a foundation offering essential services to the poor, when he was assassinated.

In his article, Kill us, but you won't enslave us, Mohammed shows the extraordinary courage that ordinary people exhibit when they continue to rebuild a country in which lawless elements are still roaming freely.

In a world filled with hate, it is encouraging to know that there are still men and women of good will who doggedly continue to build a better world, no matter what the cost.

It is a further testimony to the growing power of blogs that stories like this are available to all who care to look. These people are not "news" so their stories do not appear in a mass media focused on sensational trivia. No, their tragedies and triumphs are the real stuff of which our world is made. Understanding them is the key to staying sane in a world that is increasingly polarized by those with a political agenda.

If you really want to find out about an area of the world today, read the blogs of the people who live there. You will get all sides of every issue and will be able to make up your mind as to what is really going on there.

Thanks to Instapundit for the link.

Launching your micro-business - some basics to consider

When you launch your own business your main desire may be to avoid the insanity you observed in your corporate life, but your survival as an independent business requires you to successfully address the same problems that your old company was trying to handle.

You old company may have been a vital and interesting place to work when it first started up, so how did it turn into a bloated organization full of hidebound middle managers and timid or resentful rank and file employees? (If this doesn't apply to the wonderfully supportive organization you belong to, just skip to the closing paragraphs.)

A company goes from a challenging, freeform environment to an ossified hierarchy of dunces by following the easy path to becoming "more efficient". Statistics become more important than real results and it is a short step from that point to the routine fudging of the numbers and to substitution of rotely applied policy for judgement.

If you are starting a company or are planning to do so, here are some ideas you might want to think about.

People

It takes a great deal of courage to hire people on the basis of their ability to produce and to guide them so that they produce what is needed for the company to grow and prosper.

This means that you might be hiring people who do not have degrees and do not wear clothes well. Fortunately start-ups are often desperate enough that they ignore the conventional wisdom of hiring plastic people with diplomas from well-regarded schools. As a result, they often end up with a highly productive staff.

If you are used to hiring people to impress venture capitalists, you probably look for degrees and past positions instead of people who can produce what is needed in a shortest amount of time with a minimum of staff and materials. As a start-up you need people who can do the job. Credentials are secondary. Excellent references are essential.

Look  at what you need your people to do and choose them on that basis and no other. If your people need to interface with customers, make sure they are acceptable to the customers you wish to cultivate. Tattoos and face piercings may turn off restaurant and coffee shop customers but may be just the ticket in a souvenir shop.

Facilities

It is a truism that the building of their "world headquarters" is the point at which many companies seem to lose their way. As a start-up, you only need enough facilities to produce the goods and services you propose to deliver. Keep them simple, keep them inexpensive, and use the money you save to promote your goods and services by every means possible.

Work at home in a space set aside for work and you have the ideal solution for many small business start-ups. If you have high-speed Internet and VOIP phone connections, you are easily as advanced as most cubicle dwellers. Add cell phones and you are able to stay in touch no matter where you are.

Avoid the temptation to go bedouin. Trendy efforts to abolish fixed workspaces often result in disaster as they cost you time. Every time you have to set up or take down a workplace, you are wasting time you cannot spare.

Buy only the software you need. Every unnecessary application will be a millstone around your neck when you are trying to stay focused on meeting deadlines.

Buy only the machinery you need continuously, rent if you can for short-term needs. Borrow or work out an exchange where money is an overriding issue and the need is short-term.

Promotion and sales

"Doing my own thing" is a concept wistfully embraced by cubicle dwellers yearning to breathe free. It may even pay the rent, if you can persuade enough people to buy what you  produce.

A business of your own involves 50% selling with the rest of the time spent on producing, planning, marketing, documenting, bill-paying, ordering supplies, etc., etc. Selling is your primary job and all of the other activities will be for nothing if you can't sell. Selling is not a necessary evil. It is the activity that determines whether you have a chance of making it at all.

If you like to create things, but don't like selling, you will be better off working with or for someone who is able to sell.

My first piece of advice to anyone who is thinking of going out on their own is sharpen up your sales skills on someone else's nickel before launching your own company.

There are more basics which you need to know before launching your micro-business, but I will get to them in future posts. The next post will address lowering the barriers to starting your micro-business.

Tag: micro-business