I am pleased to say, and by pleased I mean elated, lit-up, beaming, that I have accepted a position at a Lower Mainland based marine and industrial electraonics manufacturer and parted from my old employers, a marine appliance manufacturer. I am very excited by the possibilities of the new position and the non marine markets that I will be operating in. It is great news for my family as it offers competitive compensation and will not leave me angst ridden at the end of each working day.

I start the new job August 20 2007 and between then and now I will be tying up loose ends and showing of my beautifyl baby to my far flung family. More on this later.

Yes, I feel as though I have a Heart of Oak.

Ha! Now this is as self serving as it gets. During the last post in this series I wrote about Gillianic Tendencies. I considered making this entry about one of the Blogs I actually read frequently as the next entry in my series of Blogs-I-Read. Instead I will crassly refer only to some other websites I author my self.

Dickinson Marine is my employer and they make marine appliances. At Dickinson Diesel, I write posts containing corporate events, technical data and other information useful to the customers of our stoves and heaters. I like writing here because I know the posts are useful and I get to use my own voice a little. As it is my occupation, I will not give any additional detail.

In addition to this boat-related website, I have started Slocum’s Locker. This site is my first attempt at a productive blog where I use my skills and contacts in the marine industry to provide niche content on a website soon to host sponsored links and advertising. Just content at the moment though. No ads. Joshua Slocum was a famous navigator and author during the turn of the last century. He was the first man to sail around the world alone and he wrote the groundbreaking book. Sailing Around the World Alone, now part of the navigator’s canon. The site is to look like some of the blogs I will write about in the next Blogs-I-Read post.

I know, your may think “He just wants us to link to the sites to bump up his traffic.” Um… Yeah! Link away!

Within moments after the online tech-news portals began publishing the news that Google had inaugurated an online patent search tool, Briana emailed me with the news and I started searching. The first thing I noticed was that my boss now thinks I am a genius! I come up with wierdly detaied solutions to technical and mechanical problems, find hard to source parts and anwser arcane science and physics questions with my use of google, wikipedia, and the internet generally. Now I can add drawings and measurements from the last two centuries of innovative advancement to my catagories of known genius. Sweet!

It is very entertaining to peruse the ages of patents presently parked on the google service and I would bet it will be very useful for many as well.

Blogged with Flock

This city is at the same time very livable and very hard to live in. It is a beautiful city with great people but part of what makes it so interesting, also makes it, well, unnerving.

Their are bicycles everywhere. They are strapped to every tree, locked to each lamp post and crouding every intersection. The handsome (and beautiful) Dutch whizz around the city silently with excellent posture as they make thier rosy cheeked way to their final destination. The other side of this eco-pefect reality (enjoyed by young and old) is that if you are a pedestrian or a motorist, you are either constantly worrying about hitting a quickly moving cyclist or being slammed into by one of Amsterdam’s silent, two- wheeled assasins.

The Canals are perfect. I love them and the presence of water traffic and the possibilities for exploration and transportation are fully exploited. Further, the canals beautify the city and divide the different sections of town from each other so it is all a tidy series of connected worlds. The need for canals on the other hand, combined with the many cyclists and cars (mostly parked) means that the pedestrian is constantly squeezed out of what ever space was available and has to resort to leaping from 1m x 1m brick islands between bike paths and traffic lanes to avoid being hit by one of the aforementioned land hazards of Amsterdam. Add to this the Metro stations and the tram lines and the adage “spoilt for choice” becomes “too many cooks in the kitchen…”. With so many well thought out transportation modes to participate in, the limitations of space and the mutability of human life impinge on the full enjoyment of getting around in this city.

The Red Light District lends the otherwise meticulous Dutch an air of excitement in an otherwise visceral-free zone. Stimulation in the rest of the city will tickle your brain and your purse, even your creative juices but for true excitement, go directly to the amygdallic brain-stem people: the Red Light District. While possibly not visited by choice by Dutch over 25, the Red LightDistrict of Amsterdam is busy, vibrant and, well, full of smoke and, well, windows. The smoke is emmitted by visitors of a youngish demographic and the windows are the dwelling places of sex workers (or tourist landmarks) displaying a wide variety of genetic variability and generally trying to look sexy and bored at the same time. From a citizen’s point of view (and Amsterdam is a city of its citizens) the clientelle this district attracts (think frat boys and soccer hooligans in particular) effectively excludes a portion of the city from use. If I lived in Amsterdam, I would probably never go there.

There you have it. My 2 Euro cents on the subject. Hello to you all from the City that the Dutch took back from the Sea.

A beautiful day in Holland means beautiful pictures in Amsterdam. Here, close to the flower market, a residential building shows off its many windows over the canals in the center of the city.

Blogged with Flock

I shouldn’t be surprised. The three plane voyage from Vancouver to Annapolis had me changing planes faster than Belinda Stronach’s Party affiliation. I lept off one plane in LAX and on to another in a different terminal in under 20 min (I know, in LAX? Really?). In LAS I walked off the arrivals gate, crossed the smoke filled departure lounge to a gate accross the way and was the second to last person on the (mostly-empty-thank-god) jet to Baltimore.

As we ascend in to the darkening emptyness of the transcontinental atmosphere, I am thinking, “I wonder if my bag made the transfer?”. I had asked the smiling lady at the gate, she had said that the bags always transfer quicker than the people. Not so… and now I am bagless (24hours so far) in Baltimore-Annapolis.

The town is nice. I like the Historic part of town and the boats. The shops are nice and tourist and Navy dollars seem to be doing a good job at keeping the otherwise pervasive feeling of decay, perversion and rot at least ten blocks away from the Annapolis town center. I am in the same silly clothes I travelled with but the airline gave me some mini toiletries and I am off to the races at the annual Annapolis Boat Show.

Bree told me, not this time but other times, “always keep a change of clothes in the carry-on” but as usual, I probably made a “ppbsiiisht!” noise and waved my hand flippantly. Goes to show ya, listen to the Bree Bopper. She is a sharp one.

Well, that is all my good buddies. Talkchya later.

Recently, at work, I was participating in water-cooler type conversation when I learned something rather shocking. Some one had commented that I had just cut my beard short. These trimmings are always overdue so when I do get around to them I get a little crazy. My beard is, for the time being, significantly less fuzzy than usual. I replied to my co-worker that, yes, I had cut my beard very short and that I had lost all of my superhuman strength as soon as my chin hairs hit the sink.

Blink.

There were four persons in the room between the ages of 21-29 and none of them could pick up what I had just put down. I should have said, “ya I have Ryker beard now”. That they would have got but all I got were crickets.

Shocked (as referenced above) I explained, in brief that this guy in the bible named Samson was wicked strong and he would wrestle lions and then he met with this dame Dalila. He said his strength was due to his doo and so she went and truncated his fortitude, follicle by follicle. Amen.

No one had heard the story before. No one had heard of Samson at all. Strong like Samson? Is that supposed to mean something? Nope.

Now I may have it wrong but I thought that, like Noah and the Ark, the Samson story transcended the religious myths and had made it into the cultural ones. Noah they got.

Hmmm. Interesting.

Today I sauntered off to the business BC offices on Cordova street (with Wagner and my own personal arm candy) and plunked down the $45.00 to register a business name with the government.

Actually I registered three names. You see, it is pretty likely that ‘one name or another’ will be taken so to get the one you want (I seem to be chanelling Deborah Harry) you register three names. If your first choice is already being used (by some looooser) then the second chioce may be an option, and so forth.

You have to choose one with certain features and you may not use expletives or reference the royal family or the government. (&*%@@*^ Campbell is a Queen Ltd.) You also need to keep it general and all purpose if you plan to have a business that has a wider focus than just one product or function. They have to have an purposive element and a descriptive element. “The Business” is not permitted. Think instead, “Vancouver Cat House” or “Jimmie’s Illicit Narcotics Delivery.

Here were my choices in order of preference. Remember: general names. These are not product names or neccessarily the public name for the company.

Brilliam Holdings
Coast Quadra Holdings
Cerebus Enterprises

I know, pretty bland but still, I felt good to do it. Gee, at this rate I will be building a forty storey office tower with my name on the side in no time. “Tomkinson Tower” Sweet.

I have a passionate, immediate need to blog and yet nothing is currently in the forefront of my mind to post about. I really want all of my posts to be “on message” or topically coherent. I have read and enjoyed blog points that are meandering or more personal but I have never posted thus. Until now I guess.

I have just finished the Vancouver Boat Show where I represented the company I work for and spearheaded their efforts to sell more stoves, heaters and BBQs to boaters. Hum. Endless yacking to peoples of various intelligences and politeness. Endless belly-aches, the same questions. The same sales pitch. Briana said I was talking in my sleep last night telling her about the three year warranty. Yes, yes darling, warranty, hmmmn.

I have a dog. He is a puppy. His name is Wagner. He is a Schnauser. See below posts and Bree’s Bopping. He doesn’t really bark. He likes people. He behaves in a typically puppy like way.

Bree is talking to Sharon here in the ‘Banff Apts’ . They are yaking away about shoes and hair colour and boys and feelings and other et ceteras. Aparently this someone has a low tolerance for men and treats them in this certain way and that is perhaps not the best thing and although they disagree with this behavior, they can relate.

Spinny Birds.

Gads,

You know, I am plagued by business ideas and I am starting to get frustrated by my inability to carry things out. Ok, having ideas cannot be compared to swarms of locusts, rivers of blood or any actual PLAGUE, but still ‘out out damn jot!’ ya know? The ideas are all product based generally and vary from importing consumer soap products to distributing recycled cotton nappies as industrial rags.

Here is the crux: as I am not possessed of bags o’ cash, any of my ideas need financing. To gain this financing, one produces a business plan. These are very useful documents to create because they not only clearly display your intentions to your investers, but they also force the entrepreneur to face up to potential problems.

So what is the problem, you say? The first one is that the research needed to create this document necessitates a committment of time that borders on a full time job (one of which I already have, thanks). The second is that you need certain sums of money to be able to undertake the research in the first place. Consider the following dialogue:

Hmm, for the business plan, I need to identify potential customers, their possible consumption and extrapolate my total sales volume from that.

But the customer will not indicate interest or volume with out samples and,

The statistics needed to extrapolate from this possible customer to the market as a whole are a) proprietary and b) prohibitively expensive. So shelling out for design, shipping, sample making and research is holding me back just now.

And yet new ideas and products just keep on coming.

I know I will be able to over come this trouble. I have some folks already willing to invest in a good idea once the business plan is done but the long process of getting there is still a bear.

Where are you on this? Any thoughts? I know I am not the only one to think the business thoughts and for some it is movies or tv shows. I can get it past stage one or two but finishing the business plan is so far the brick wall. I just have not yet found a way to glean the required information.

We will see.