arTau

Pink Cadillac

You may or may not be familiar with the meaning of the pink Cadillac. Basically – if you see one, in all likelihood, its someone who has done very well selling MaryKay Cosmetics. Its a pretty cool idea – I’m not even sure if you can order one in pink if you’re not a MK rep.

In any case – most of the ones you see around are pretty standard Caddy models – they’re all variants on a 3 letter model name now – CTS, DTS, etc – but there’s one in my neighborhood what is a pink Cadillac XLR – which is probably, in my mind, one of the sexier vehicles that Cadillac ever made.

The vehicle in question lives on a fairly busy street near my home. Here’s what actually gave me the idea to write about this – since its on a busy street, they have a circle drive, and the ability to head nose-out into the street. Twice in the last week, I’ve seen this car pull out, and I’ve become fairly certain that the woman who drives this car is to MaryKay what Batman is to crime fighting.

Somewhere, someone shines a light in the sky in the shape of a lipstick or something – and she races to the rescue in her pink Cadillac to take care of the cosmetic emergency.

Hobbies

When I was a kid, there was a store that, above all others, was my favorite place to go shop and look and think and dream.  It was called Hobby Haven –  you can still go there, though its moved to a new location.  They had trains.  Model rockets (which I flew quite a bit).  Model kits (which I assembled quite a bit, though never well).   Radio controlled cars (which I REALLY wanted, but never had).  They had more than that  - but I loved just walking the aisles.  Looking at all the pieces of brass tubing, fake grass, miniature gas stations.  Dreaming about what it would be like to fly one of the radio controlled planes hanging from the ceiling.

The bed I spent a good chunk of last summer building for my daughter

Now, I’m a grown-up.  I don’t  build model rockets anymore (though I have a couple in the garage that are Carson’s – so maybe I spoke too soon).  I do, however have some hobbies.    That word clouds things a little bit – it conjures up visions of late night spent bent over a workbench putting a sailboat into a glass bottle.  I guess its more fair to say I’ve got some interests.

Maybe I have too many interests.  Which is part of the problem.   Here’s a short list of things that I’m interested in and have some plans to do this year;

• Smoking delicious meat products.
• Brewing delicious beer
• Making things out of wood
• Taking pictures of things
• Geocaching
• Camping
• Landscaping/Gardening

That probably isn’t a comprehensive list, either.  There are other things I’d like to do, too – I’d like to build kinetic sculptures, I’d like to learn to weld.  I like to write (albeit not well).  I’d still like to learn some rudimentary computer programming skills.  I should stop this paragraph, or its liable to get very, very long.

I feel pretty strongly that, especially for guys, people need something they do.  Something they’re into.  An activity that is separate from vocation that provides some mental health and productivity.  But seriously, how many do I really need?  Would I be better served to sell the power tools and just focus on being a great photographer?

I’m struggling with the question of whether I need to excel at things, or whether its alright to take the long approach – hoping that by the time I’ve got the time to do the things that I want to do, I’m good enough at them to make it worthwhile.

Do It!

Today is the day. Right? Today is the day that I’m going to do it. I’m going to be totally focused. I’m going to keep my desk clean. I’m going to hit 5:00 and be amazed at the day.

Maybe.

Its been a rough 18 months or so in our business. That’s not really revolutionary information, seeing as we’re pretty heavily tied to real estate development. Tracking things back to about October 1, 2008, our workload pretty much shut off as if someone had cranked down a faucet. I haven’t wanted to write much about it, well, because it isn’t very much fun to talk about. I’m guessing that if I were to graph the number of things I’d written in general over the last five years, there’d be a pretty substantial drop right at about that time.

But today is the day. Today is the day that it turns around. The turnaround is less about how many projects are walking in the door, less about how I feel about things, less about whether the day is a win or a loss. Today is the day that I realize that after a year or more of uncertainty about the future of our company, the one thing I am certain of is that God has provided for my family precisely what we needed the entire time. Remember the Lord’s prayer? “Give us this day, our daily bread” – That’s precisely what we’ve experienced as a company – and ever month we’re able to keep things going is a win.

The thing is, regardless of the situation, regardless of the feeling about the circumstance, you still have to soldier on. There’s been some pretty good temptation to be a quitter, to give up. No way.

That’s about all I’m hopefully ever going to say about where things are, work-wise. Today’s the day I’m done worrying about it.

Today is the day that I start writing again. Feels good.

Time to clean my desk.

Chain Mail

I’m getting a lot of forwarded emails lately. Like, a TON of them. It feels like a whole crop of folks in my life have suddenly discovered the Age of Angelfire.

I remember when I got a chain letter in about 1985. It seemed like a good idea. It was novel, if only to see where you might get responses back from. Turns out, nobody wanted forwarded messages in 1985 either.

In case you’re having trouble distinguishing between the vital pieces of information that friends forward to you (there is an entire discussion wrapped around whether friends even use the forward button in their mail client, but . . .another day) and those pieces of inspirational informational spiritual political satirical mail that fill your inbox, here are some things to look for, when trying to decide if its worth your time.

1. Background images. Really? Flowers?
2. 65 pt Comic Sans and other typographic atrocities
3. Enough email addresses and names in the various chains of forwards to start your own direct mail company
4. FW:(FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:)[FW:MUST READ]FWD:
5. Keywords: Bush, Obama, Lucky, Prayer, Funny, Interesting

On and on.

That forward button? The one you’re thinking about using? don’t do it.

The Price of Rice

You may not have heard, but we’re in something of an economic downturn. This may or may not be the cause of what I have to tell you today.

As part of this economic downturn, we’re trying some new things with regard to looking for new projects. One of the things I’ve done is to use a site called Craigshelper to build RSS feeds of a couple of searches, so I can keep an eye out for 3D projects that may pop up around the country. I haven’t landed anything yet with this method, but have gotten close a couple times, so it seems worthwhile. We’ve also been watching a site called Elance.com, with similar results. As I’ve been watching the postings that show up, I’ve made some observations about some recurring themes that have shown up on both Craigslist and Elance postings.

First and foremost, is the tendency of posters to want a very high quality product. We all want that. I can see that. People do a pretty good job of explaining what they want. Some even provide examples. Fine.

There is a very simple saying that applies very strongly to the work I do and throughout my industry. It goes something like this; “Time, quality, or money. Pick two.” Another variant is “Good, fast, or cheap. Pick two.” It works. Every time.

Which leads to the second problem. People posting for these jobs are trying to pick all three. I guess thats the bottom line. I don’t have a problem with people wanting to shop their work, or get bids, just to make sure they’re getting a fair price. Heck, I don’t even have that much trouble with someone wanting to outsource work to India (because I know that if someone in India called me asking me to do work, I’d surely do it).

So what’s my problem? My problem is that someone is saying, “I’d like to get Product X. I’m willing to pay $10 for it.” Not a problem, in and of itself, except that a fair market rate for Product X is closer to $200. Its like walking into a Cadillac dealership, saying you need to have a new Escalade, and you have $3500 to spend. They’re going to laugh at you. The price that they’re offering to pay has absolutely no relationship to the actual cost to produce the goods.

Here’s a great example of what I’m talking about . . .

Maybe I should just be laughing at these jokers instead of getting mad.

The other thing I’ve noticed is a theme that goes something like “Great for a student to build their portfolio”, which is code for “You should be honored to work for about $.50 an hour, and might even want to consider paying us for the honor of doing the work for us, just because you’re a student.”

Anyway. Just needed to get that off of my chest. Pick two. Seriously.

Portfolio

I had an interesting thought a few weeks ago, as we were polishing up our portfolio of work at the office in preparation for some marketing.  Due to the nature of the work I do, for the most part, every time I finish a project, its a little better than the last one I did.  In theory, we’re the opposite of the clip of Peter from Office Space that you see above.  We hope.  Cleaning up our portfolio largely consists of taking everything we’ve done since the last time we updated things, and taking the best of that stuff.

The thing is, though, when I use the standard of the work I can produce today, things that looked great even eighteen months ago look like crap.  Projects that I was extremely proud of are culled like its nobody’s business, because they don’t hold up to what I know now.  The end result is that you see the sixteen images I’ve carefully selected to show you just how awesome we can be.  

I was wondering something.  Would it be more impressive if I was to show you everything?  If I was to show you just how far I’ve come?  If I showed you the things that embarrass me today next to the bright shiny stuff, would the bright shiny stuff shine brighter or lose its sheen?

All of this pondering of the merits of my portfolio – of the nature of my work, led me to an interesting parallel with my faith in Jesus.  There were times in my life where I thought, “wow, I’ve got this really figured out – look how well its going.”  Now, in retrospect, I see that I didn’t really.  It wasn’t that I wasn’t working at it (well, sometimes even that wasn’t true), its just that I had to, as Paul tells us in Philippians 2:12, work out my faith with fear and trembling.  

So, my hope is that, just as my work looks better the more I work at it, the more that I end up having a faith that brings me closer into relationship with Christ as time goes by and I keep working at it.  I’m pretty sure that once I get a little further into my own faith-story, I’ll be able to look back, shake my head at the Ryan of 2008, and be excited to see how I’ve figured a little more of it out.  Also, like my work, I wonder if my faith doesn’t shine brighter next to the reflection of who I once was.  

One of our favorite pseudo-mottos for our office is “we don’t suck as much as we used to . . ” – and as much as we say it in jest, at the same time, it holds up.  We know we haven’t gotten there yet, but we’re working on it.  Hopefully, in another year or two when I look back at my work and my faith, that motto will hold up.

Skating Party

It is possible that those are my legs.  It is also that tonight was my first visit to Skate West, the roller rink of my youth, in approximately twenty years.  Much has changed.  The building has been reconfigured, some kids wear inline skates.  The lights were on – I remember it being a very dark room most of the time.  

Some things have not changed.  Open skate.  Girls Skate.  Guys Skate.  ALL-SKATE! Reverse direction.  Limbo.  Backwards skate.  YMCA.  Dice Game.  I had the realization that these guys have been pretty much running the same routine every single friday night for twenty-plus years.  Thats a thousand Friday nights.  In any case, it was a Cub Scouting Skating Outing, which is a lot of ing.

The funniest thing of the night, which you weren’t able to witness, was the moment that I had my right foot roll off of a single step down.  That wasn’t that funny, but the fact that my body wasn’t planning a roll off of the step means that the rest of my ever-so-slight frame came down that step behind my right foot, in a slow motion crash that several other parents from our scout den watched, witnessed, and laughed at.  Then they asked if I was ok.  Which I was pretty sure I was.    Now – four hours later – I’ve got a pretty sore knee.

You may now commence laughing at the expense of my pain and suffering.  I allow it.  Carry on.

Identified

So I’m on the phone.  Like – right now.  With an organization I will refer to in this post as “Bank”.  You may know them as an organization that uses a stagecoach as their identifying symbol.

I had a little bit of business to conduct with Bank.  Namely, they were charging me a fee that they shouldn’t have been charging me for a service that they were giving me that I didn’t ever ask for.  The kind of thing you have to talk to a person to fix.

I call bank.  First, I get Dahlia.  Dahlia asks for my account number, last four digits of my SSN, then asks me for my verbal password.

“Verbal password,” I reply?  What is this, a swiss bank?  I don’t have a verbal password, but I do have a home retinal scanner.  Let me fire it up. 

Evidently, I set a verbal password a long time ago in a bank branch far far away.  I’m stumped, I have no idea what it is, so we go through more information to verify that I’m me.  Savings account number, credit limit on Visa, etc.  Dahlia is satisfied that I am, in fact, myself.  Dahlia and I have a nice conversation about my issues with the extra cash that Bank has been extracting from my checking account to cover its butt while it tries to figure out this whole mortgage mess.  Dahlia is just about to transfer me, when I ask,

“Now that you know I’m me, can I know what my verbal password is?”

“No, we can’t give it out, but we can set a new one,” says the representative of Bank.

Fair enough.  (just hung up after 25 minutes OTP with them)

I give her a new verbal password.  She transfers me (of course) to another department that is the one who has to address my specific issue.  Never a good sign.

“Good evening, thank you for calling Bank, my name is Edwin, how may I assist you?”

I tell Edwin my issue.  Edwin says these magic words;

“May I have your verbal password, please?”

Ah-HA!  I know it!  I just changed it, so this time I know it!  I give Edwin the password, and hear,

“I’m sorry, sir, that is not that password we have on record for you.”

Me: “Ah, well I just changed it moments ago with Dahlia.  Must not have propagated yet.”

Edwin: “I’m not sure what you mean, sir.  We’re not able to change verbal passwords over the phone, it can only be done in person at a branch office of Bank.”

Me: “Um – but we just did.”

{insert standardized round and round with customer service rep, who firmly holds the line}

Finally, I give in.  ”Can I guess?”

“Sure.”

So I guessed.  Guess #1.  Nope.  Guess #2.  Nope.  Guess #3.   Long pause for effect.

“Thank you, Mr. Tow, how may I assist you?”

All very James Bondian.  I appreciate the need for security as much as the next guy.  I have passwords that, when people hear me say them, give me funny looks.  I get it.  But things are getting ridiculous.  The identity thieves have won.  When you can’t give every piece of information about yourself, and still be believed to be you, its over.

Now if I can only remember that verbal password for the NEXT time I call, four years from now.  I hope I get Edwin.

O.B.O.

I have a habit.  This habit involves making sure I see about 37% of the for-sale postings on Craigslist, specifically the Des Moines site.

I’ve successfully used Craigslist to dispose of a trampoline (I’ve never had so many emails so quickly as when I advertised “Free Trampoline” – goodbye, legbreaker).  I’ve given away windows (with a post so witty it got angered responses).  It brings me pleasure, and one of these days, I’ll buy something from someone.  Until that day, I use it as a window into the lives of my fellow central Iowans.

I’ll reserve comment on things like grammar, spelling, and general writing ability, because as we know, I can’t write either.  I do,, however, have one issue I’d like to address.  It goes something like this.

I’ve got a ‘74 Widgetblaster Special for sale.  (I’m not telling you this, but you know its the third time I’ve posted it).  Works ok, but could probably use some work.  Its pretty much totally used up past its engineered lifespan.  It cost $125 in 1974 (adjusted for inflation), and I’d like $90 or best offer for it.  I’ll go lower on the price if needed.  $65 is my bottom dollar.  

There are a couple issues here.  First of all, folks, once stuff is used up, it is used up.  Nothing illustrated this more than the prices people were asking for 25 year old mopeds once gas hit $3.75 a gallon.  $800 for an ‘86 Honda Spree?  Yeah, I’m pretty sure it retailed new in ‘86 for about $1200, so that seems like a fair price considering its been thrashed by eighteen different eighth graders over the last 22 years.

Secondly – why would you tell me a price, then tell me you want best offer, THEN tell me what your bottom dollar is?  What is my motivation to give you more than $65?  I don’t get it.

By the way, I’ll sell you this post for $18, though I’m willing to take a bit less.  In this case, a bit is equal to about eighteen dollars.

Vocab

It isn’t always apparent, but kids are always learning. My best example of this is from the language they use.

Normally this is where you expect to hear about how I heard my son say a word that he learned when I let him watch Pulp Fiction. Don’t worry, he’s not a fan of the earlier Tarantino work.

This is more about the wonder I have at how much is going on in the head of an almost four year old girl.

Last night, Madilyn said she was “ecstatic” to go sonewhere.

A break in my thought;

As I am laying here on my bed typing this on my iPod touch, Shana asks me what I’m writing about. I say Madi saying ecstatic. She says ” you know she got that from the Fancy Nancy book. ”

I did not. So I guess I don’t have myself to thank for the vocabulary of the little girl. I only have myself to blame for allowing her access to books. I’ll work on that.