Flada Blog

There aren’t a lot of good things to be said about living in base housing on a Navy base. But there are a few nice things. I guess it’s like a gated community in that there are armed guards controlling who can access the community. On the down side, you sure don’t want to forget your ID at home when you leave the base.

Last night I discovered the best thing about living here–the greatest trick-or-treating that a kid could imagine. Many housed decorated with very friendly people giving out candy are the norm on this base. One of the houses we stopped at had a sheet over their garage door with a fog machine in the garage and more than a few ghosts, ghouls, and other nasties. I’ve paid to go to haunted houses that weren’t nearly as nicely done as that garage.

My wife walked with our older son while I pushed the stroller with the baby. It was a fabulous night which makes me wish that we could go knocking on people’s doors every night. Conrad didn’t have a costume, so I put some mousse in his hair and messed it up while my wife drew a moustache on him with some kind of eyeliner pencil. It was our attempt to make him an Albert Einstein costume. Although I’m not sure anyone knew who he was supposed to be, he got a lot of comments on how cute he was. Of course, the baby wasn’t wearing any costume and he got a few comments on how cute he is as well.

Anyway, a picture:

Unfortunately, this is the only photo I took of Conrad that actually turned out decent.

Other (non-Halloween) photos:

Click any picture to see a larger image.

In 2003, I left one of my favorite jobs that I’d ever had in Illinois to move with my new wife to Virginia. She had joined the Navy, so she didn’t have much choice about where she was going to be. To save our relationship and build our future, leaving that company was the only possible decision.

There were almost immediate financial problems, however, because my pay had been considerably more than a new sailor’s. After a few months with no luck finding work in my field, I decided to try my hand at selling cars. So for about 4 months, I worked as a “Sales Consultant” for a Hummer dealership.

I managed to gross an average of about $1600 each of the 4 months I was selling, which is quite bad considering the number of hours that a car salesman puts in. But it was a lot better than nothing.

Very early in my time there, I realized that I wasn’t working for the right dealership because their sales philosophy and my business philosophy were at odds. Twice per week, every salesperson and the managers had to attend a sales meeting. The meetings usually consisted of one of the managers giving a “pep talk” to the sales staff.

A sample talk would go something like this, “You can’t think of the customers as people. You have to envision them as wallets full of money, and your goal is to get as much of that money as you can.” Time was also spent on roll playing to develop techniques to deceive customers, steer them away from discussions of price, and introduce them to our manager. Working on perfecting our handshakes was a primary lesson.

The problem with this approach is that your customers are people. Your customers want value and are happy to make an exchange (of their money for your value) when they believe that they are getting enough for their money. The dealership philosophy involved an attempt to extract more value from the customer without actually increasing the value that they were providing to the customer. However, the ideal trade is one where the values being exchanged are equal.

To make the values equal, it requires that both parties have a complete understanding of what the other is offering. Anything other than that is a form of fraud. Even though I worked in an environment where the policy of fraud had become institutional, I made an effort to provide an equal value by offering my customers as much after-sale value as I possibly could. However, the dealership even put roadblocks in place to make that more difficult.

In an effort to change the mindset of the dealership, I gave a copy of U Will Be Satisfied, a book by Bob Tasca, to the General Manager. Bob Tasca is one of the most successful Ford salesmen of all time. He owns several dealerships in New England and his philosophy is simple–satisfy your customers at all costs. Too bad I wasn’t working for Mr. Tasca. I’m pretty sure that the guy I was working for quickly skimmed the book and tossed it into the round bin.

Eventually, I found a job doing similar work to what I had done before my wife joined the Navy, and put the memory of the car dealership behind me. Over my next few years living in Virginia, I heard from many local sources about the terrible reputation of the dealership where I had worked. I was not surprised.

Simply put, if you want to build loyal customers it is imperative that you provide them with values that are at least equal to the money they have given you. That is how you will prevent your name being attached to a reputation similar to the one that dealership has.

I am going to start a new feature where I write about some of my favorite sites that I have found during the week. These may not necessarily be new posts or pages, but they are new to me. This is volume one.

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There have been ongoing discussions on my blog notes about several of my posts regarding home schooling. One reason I listed is regarding textbooks and the inaccuracies. The Textbook League has a great page including text from a letter written by noted physicist Richard Feynman. Dr. Feynman’s findings about the selection process of school textbooks parallels a lot of the problems I have found in textbooks. For those not familiar with Richard Feynman, he assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and was a member of the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In addition to his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing, and introducing the concept of nanotechnology (creation of devices at the molecular scale).

Read more about Richard Feyman at Wikipedia.

Yesterday, I Stumbled Upon this link about making some really basic Indian cheese at home. The cheese is called paneer. I haven’t tried it yet, but I was very impressed with the last thing I made that I found on fxcuisine.com, 300 minute eggs. I made devilled eggs from the 300 minute eggs and they were very good and a bit unique with a light smoky flavor. I’ll be making the cheese soon.

I would be remiss if I didn’t note my sister’s new blog. She has been a valuable noter here at the Flada Blog with great insight about public schools.

Finally, for this week, I point you to a great .pdf called Why Johnny and Janey Can’t Read by Mark Federman who is the Chief Strategist of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.

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If Flada Faves turns out to have value to my readers, I intend to make it a regular feature at the Flada Blog. Let me know what you think in the notes.

My Dreams

When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? For me, it was a doctor. Actually for a brief time, I wanted to be a worm doctor, whatever that is, but mostly I wanted to be a medical doctor. Then again, to a 5 year old, medical doctors are the only kind of doctor. At one point during high school (during one of the brief moments I stopped to consider it at all) I decided I wanted to be a medical technologist. My rationality was that I could use my natural abilities to fix things and still be in the medical community.

Then I got a girl pregnant and decided the only way to pay for the child was to join the military. The Navy convinced me that I would be a great aviation electronics technician–so that’s what I did. And guess what, I was a great technician. After leaving the service, I went on to be an even greater and more diverse technician. There’s only a little bragging involved when I claim that I can fix the electronics and mechanics on virtually any machine. Yet the idea that I wanted to work more directly with helping people never really left my mind.

So after years of being a technican and then a technical manager, I decided to test to become a cop when I was 33. At 34, I was hired by a small department. I was sworn in and had my uniforms, badges, ID, vest, ASP, .40 S&W, handcuffs, and whistle. I had them for a week before I was informed by my chief that they had found something in my background check that disqualified me. To this day, I’m not really sure what they could have found since I had already had a thorough FBI background check in order to obtain a security clearance in the Navy. Anyway, I went back to being a technician and soon added instructor and teacher to my résumé. Since the first time I was an instructor, I decided that’s what I wanted to be. The sad thing is that I’ve actually hated most of the technician jobs I’ve held, and I think that part of the reason is because subconsciously I’ve always imagined myself as something else.

Today, I’m not a doctor, a medical technologist, a cop, or a technician (at least not working as one). But my dream of being a full-time instructor has finally come true–now I instruct new avionics technicians. I’m also going back to school to become an RN. Time will tell which of those I’ll choose as a career.

Changing your Dreams

It comes back to the questions: What did you want to be when you grew up? How many times have your dreams changed? Have you given up and become stuck in a rut?

Well, you don’t have to be stuck in a rut. You can still pursue your dreams, I’m living proof of that. The only thing standing in your way is that you’ve bought into a few myths that you need to get out of your head.

The Myths of Fulfilling Your Dreams

1. You are too old
2. Nice guys finish last so don’t bother trying to get out of last place
3. You’re destined to fail–the cards are stacked against you

You are too old

According to some acclaimed biologists, there is a correlation between age and success. Raymond Huey, a University of Washington biology professor says, “We used to refer to this advantage of age as the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar effect. As he got older, his physical skills declined but he was so smart and experienced that he was able to compensate and still play professional basketball at the highest levels.”

Maybe you aren’t Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but you do have a lot more knowledge and skills than you used to have. You can put those to use turning your course toward your newly found or re-found dreams.

Rodney Dangerfield was over 40 before he changed his career from one of a no-respect aluminum siding salesman to a celebrated comedian who launched the careers of many other young comedians.

You can stop “selling aluminum siding,” too.

Karola Siegel was a sniper for the Haganah, an Isreali paramilitary defense force, until seriously wounded in action by an exploding shell during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. So, Siegel moved to Germany and later to New York where she earned her Ed. D. It wasn’t until she was 52 that Dr. Karola Ruth (Siegel) Westheimer started her Dr. Ruth radio talk show. Today, “Dr. Ruth” is a household name.

You are not too old.

Nice Guys Finish Last

I used to believe this one, and since I was a nice guy I knew I was destined to finish last. I recall being interested in a girl (or later a woman) who would inevitably end up going out with a jerk. Sure, they liked me as a friend. I was there for them when they needed to talk, cry, or complain about the latest terrible thing the jerk had done to them. It didn’t take long to decide that it was because I was nice that I couldn’t “get the girl.” But nice is part of who I am, so I couldn’t really change that. So, instead I resigned myself to finishing last.

Well, I’m older now and the proud husband of the greatest woman I could ever imagine. She is hands and feet above any of the girls or women I once wished could be mine. Hell, I don’t even remember much about any of them and can’t imagine what I saw in them. But I get to see the wonders of my wife every day to drive home my success. And I’m still a nice guy.

The Cards are Stacked Against You

There are no cards. I can’t prove this to you, though. But it’s important that you believe it because although it’s a myth it’s also a self-fulfilling belief.

That is to say, if you don’t believe you can succeed then you won’t try very hard or you will give up easily, saying, “I was going to fail anyway.” Well, no you weren’t. I served with a guy who I’ll call Kenny (because that was his name) who was the supervisor of the Line Division work center. His methods for motivating his workers was to call them “idiots” and “dumb mother f%&#ers.” One time, I caught up to Kenny in a passageway on the U.S.S. Eisenhower and said to him, “you know, Kenny, if you call your guys idiots and dumb m.f. ers enough times they’ll start working and acting like idiots and dumb m.f. ers.” Kenny, unfortunately, didn’t heed my warnings and ended up making his own job much harder.

If people start to believe the ravings of a bad supervisor like Kenny when he tells them they are failures, how do you think it would affect them if they started to tell themselves they were miserable failures, unworthy of success, all the time?

So start telling yourself you can be successful. Start acting like a success, and the success will follow.

For some reason, the DoFollow plugin wasn’t working for me. I discovered yesterday that despite installing and enabling the plugin, nofollow tags were still being added to comment links.

I had to hack a root file on my server and manually remove the <rel=nofollow> occurences from the code of the file comment-template.php. After a quick check, it appears to work the way I wanted.