Month: February 2008 Page 1 of 2

Tonight we are going to our friends, Lester and Ester’s house for dinner with Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah. Tomorrow, Lorena goes to a baby shower while the rest of us will take Kelly to a piano recital. We were going to have someone over for dinner in the evening, but I think that will just be too much. On Sunday, we have a big potluck after meeting. Sometime during the weekend, I want to take Dad and Mom to the Holly Springs library to drink coffee and read books. Grandpa Milo thinks we should plant 100 trees in our backyard, so he is going to a nursery to find out what trees work best. He thinks he can send them out from Oregon cheaper than we can get them here. I hope he is right. It would be great to have a hundred trees in our back yard. We might put some in the front and on the side, too. Grandpa Milo has already had a ton of great ideas about what we ought to do with our backyard and patio. I need to make sure we get his ideas on a patio before he goes.

Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah arrived here from Oregon yesterday. I went to the airport to pick up them after work. It is great to finally have them here in our new house. They arrived just a little before the Wednesday night bible study started, so we just ran home airport and had some snacks while we waited for Lorena and the kids to get home from the meeting. The weather has been phenomenal here all winter long. We have had some cold snaps and even a little snow, but I can not remember any time when we had more than two or three days of cold or rainy weather between days with 70 degree weather. Then the Oregonians arrived. It rained and was cold for two days before they got here. It was 27 degrees when they arrived at the airport and 23 degrees on the way in to work. The forecast does not look great.

I no longer buy into the theory that the weather in Oregon is nasty because of the topology, climatic conditions, La Niña, El Niño, water currents in the ocean, volcanic activity, etc., etc. I believe the weather is bad in Oregon because that is where Oregonians live. If Oregonians moved to Florida or San Diego, the weather there would turn bad. It is true. If you want to solve the water problem in the Sahara, send some Oregonians to live there. Believe it.

Some of you might know that I have some ownership in a small wood products company in Idaho named Quality Corners. The downturn in the housing industry hit us pretty hard. We lost a big chunk of business when one of our biggest customers decided to start manufacturing some of the items we made for them. The volume of business with our other customers dropped dramatically. We dipped below break even for a month. The weaker businesses in the industry were starting to fold. We were worried.

That was about four months. Grandpa Milo, who is also a part owner, has always said he did not participate in downturns, but that is easier said than done. What should we do? We knew that many of the best companies try to grow their market share during downturns. They do that by both getting new business with their current customers and by finding new customers. We decided that was a great idea, but the question was how to go about it. We had a base of four large customers and fifteen to twenty smaller, but significant customers. We were (and are) on very good terms with all our customers. Even the big customer who had decided to do their own manufacturing was satisfied with our products and especially our service and delivery. So, we decided to start by talking with the big four to find out if there was anything we could do to get more business from them.

First, we approached a customer who had been buying one product line from us for five years that they sold to one of the large national retail chains. We knew they were buying most of the other products that we make from China. We sat down with them and asked them what it would take to win that business. They loved our service, delivery, and even our prices for the products we provided, but did not believe it was possible for us to meet the prices they got from their Chinese suppliers. Still, since they were happy with what we did for them, they let us quote the business. What they did not tell us is that they were very unhappy with the quality, service, lead time, and delivery they were getting from our Chinese competitors. We gave them a quote for one of two product lines.

The funny deal is that our pricing was good enough to win the business on eighty percent of the products. They gave us a second chance at quoting the other twenty percent and we won the business. The margins were very low, but we knew that if we could get close to breaking even on the first couple of orders, we would learn how to make these products faster, cheaper, and with better quality. We would be able to find cheaper material so that by the third or fourth order we would be making OK margins. That is exactly how it appears to be working. We have modified the processes, materials, and suppliers to the point where we are a little better than break even. We have identified a new machine to build and some new material sources that will allow us to push our margins into more of a comfort zone. We have told them that we want to quote on the last product line that is still being manufactured in China as soon as we have the first one under control. They are very, very happy with the reduced lead times, greatly improved quality, and the ability to solve problems by just picking up the phone.

The company that started doing their own manufacturing to replace us did not have the ability or desire to make some of our specialty products, so some of their divisions continued to buy from us. When they made the change to using their own parts, we thanked them for their business over the previous years and told them we would be happy to help them out with these products if they ever got in a bind. Well, yesterday they called and told us they were in a bind. We told them, “No problem, we can help you out. Let us send you a quote for the parts you need.” Then, based on the new knowledge we had accumulated when we were working to compete with China, we sent them a quote for pricing that was 15% lower than the prices we had previously charged them. The division manager was so surprised, he said “Holy, *$@?%&!” Then he told us he was going to talk to upper management about reevaluating their decision to make these products themselves. We do not know what will happen, but we are optimistic.

In addition to these two events, we have been able to get our foot in the door with one new large customer and are in continuing talks with another. We have added two significant new, unique product offerings and are very optimistic about the future. The reality is that, if an upturn comes, we will be double or triple the size of what we were at time we lost the work from the big customer. It is hard work now and we are not making a lot of money, but we are winning market share and positioning ourselves well for the future. It is really quite gratifying.

I am starting to get really busy at work again. It will probably be like this for the next few weeks. We have a big deadline coming up and I want to get my part of the work complete so I can be sure to be free for spring break. With so many hours to work, I did not have time to correct Kelly’s and Christian’s math last night. Lorena did it for me. Kelly and Christian were horrified when they saw that Lorena had marked just about everything they did wrong. It turns out that, in the schools in Lorena’s part of Mexico, correct answers are marked with a check, while incorrect answers are marked with an ‘X‘. That is just WRONG! Everyone knows the correct way to mark a paper is to us a ‘C‘ for problems worked correctly. The check is reserved for those problems with incorrect answers. There is mass rebellion occurring in the household, but Lorena says she is not about to change. If she is going to correct papers she is going to do it her way. She says her way is the right way. If we do not like it we can correct the papers ourselves.

We had quite an eventful weekend. On Friday night, we had a wonderful birthday dinner for one of Kelly’s friends and her family at Red Robin. Lorena and I split one of their wonderful Whiskey River Barbecue burgers, but it was still way too much. Kelly and Christian went home with our friends, so Lorena had the rest of the evening and the next day to ourselves. We had a great time culminating in some shopping and eating at the Brier Creek mall before we went to the main birthday party and a HUGE potluck dinner on Saturday evening. The family there had just purchased a miniature dachshund puppy. It was a great little dog. I want one. We used to have full sized dachshunds when I was growing up. Maybe in a year, we will get one or two of them for the kids. On Sunday, we went over to the house of a young married couple, Troy and Youngin for lunch after meeting. She cooked Korean barbecue for us. WOW was it good. I really would like to learn how to do that. It was awesome. They had purchased an really great house with huge front and back yards, big trees, and a ton of birdhouses and feeders. We were all very excited for them.

The upshot is that I fell off the wagon again on the diet. Bryan is just KILLING me. I am going to have to start planning my comeback even though Grandpa Milo is coming on Wednesday and will be cooking like a maniac. Maybe I should just resign myself to being fat.

Woo hoo! This is what Christian and I have been waiting for! This could change a LOT of things. It even goes 96 mph!

Air-Powered Car Coming to U.S. in 2009 to 2010 – Zero Pollution Motors – 1000-Mile Range

I am really quite proud of Christian for of his ability to hang on to his watch. Over the last three years, Christian has worn out two watches. Based on the genetics he inherited, that is a near miracle. I had lost an order of magnitude more watches between the fall of 1973 and the spring of 1974 than he will probably lose in his lifetime given that, so far, he has not lost ANY! But it gets worse. I told him that, within reason, because he has been so responsible in this, I would get him whatever kind of watch he wanted. Like any Dad I am thinking maybe it will be a stopwatch because someday he will need it to time his splits while he is doing interval training to get ready for the Olympics. Or maybe it will be a diving watch because some day he is going to be a Navy Seal, saving the world from terrorism. But, to my horror, what did he pick?

Christian’s Calculator Watch

Sorry for not posting sooner.  It is a very busy day today, so I will wait until tomorrow to post a picture I have really been dying to post.

Here is a picture we had at dinner on Sunday.  Black beans, white rice, tacos de barbacoa with fresh salsa and good friends–it does not get much better than that.

We got President’s Day off yesterday. I stayed home to work on some projects and got to watch the kids do their homeschool, something I rarely get to do. It was amazing. I think they might have procrastinated a little less than usual, but they did a stellar job of getting things done. We are well caught up on all of our homeschool now and moving towards the two-thirds mark for the year. Pretty soon it is going to be time to start thinking about research reports.  I am worried about one thing, though.  I have tried to introduce the kids to the classics:  The Beach Boys, Simon and Garfunkel, Chris Kristofferson, etc.  Yesterday, I caught Christian listening to this while he was doing his homework.

On Sunday, we invited some of new friends from Guatemala. We spent the whole afternoon with them and enjoyed ourselves immensely. Lorena cooked up some tacos, rice, and black beans and the Guatemalans brought a pie and a cake, so we all ate ourselves silly. It was just a super nice time. We took some pictures that Christian is going to send me later this morning. As soon as they get here, I will post one or two.

The bad news is that I fell off the diet wagon big-time. Check the graph. Blien-baby, are you ever going to learn how to update that thing? You need to come out here for a lesson! You spend so much time on a Mac you forget how to use a REAL computer!

Check this out.  It has a bunch of pictures of the amount of different types of food that make up 200 calories.  Very interesting.  H.T. World Mag Blog.

Thanks for the push on this one, JoAnn!  Here are a couple of pictures inside our new house.  The fist one is of he kitchen.

The kitchen

Across from the kitchen ( in the direction everyone is looking), but in all the same open room is the “family room”.  There is also, in the same open room, a breakfast table/dining area, not to be confused with the dining room which is a room all of its own.

Family room

The last picture is a view of the (mostly empty because we do not have enough furniture) living room which is next to the room where the above pictures were taken.

Living room

That is all for today.  This weekend is supposed to be a three day weekend (President’s Day) which I kind of doubt I will get to take because we are coming up to an important trial run of our new product with our main customer sometime in March.

This post is about another project.  We have too many now, but this one is pretty cool, peripherally related to some other stuff we are already doing, and maybe could even bring some new visitors to our KamVu website.  When we lived in Albany, cars sometimes drove by our house faster than we felt was safe with so many kids in the neighborhood and certainly faster than was legal.  It never got to the point where we did anything about it, but it seems like there must be a lot of people in a lot of places that have the need to measure the speed of cars passing through their neighborhood.

At the time, I thought it might be fun to put a camera or two in the yard to look at the cars as the go by.  It would be a little tough to set them up, but not impossible.  The problem is that distinguishing between kids, cats, dogs and all that sort of thing might have been a little tough.  I think we still have a wireless camera amongst all our electronics.  I do not know why it took me so long, but it dawned on me that if I just put the camera up a lot higher so it was looking down at the street the vision part of the problem would not really be too difficult.  It would be possible to capture images of cars passing down the street and calculate their velocity.  The whole thing could be done with a remote webcam.  My first search on the web turned one up for $43.99.

The thing that is good about it is that we could do it fairly quickly, it would be fairly useful, and it would cost very little.

Here it is.  There is a link to it in the “Pages” section of the left-most column of this blog, too.

Lorena has been thinking about starting a little business for a long time.  She has come up with an idea that not only sounds like a lot of fun, but is close to the Holly Springs Public Library.  They have a farmers market there on Saturday mornings starting in the spring.  She wants to sell salsa there.  It is almost perfect.  I was getting ready to object that we would be stuck there for four hours every Saturday.  Kelly reminded me that she and Christian could sell stuff there, too, and that I could go drink gourmet coffee at the Holly Springs Public Library and work on my computer!!!  I really did not have an answer for that.  Actually, this sounds like a great opportunity to set up a little business with books and all.  Our good homeschool friends in Indiana have been quite successful at such endeavors.  Their kids are involved.  They learn a bunch, make some money, and it surely sounds like they have a good time, too.  I told Lorena and the kids I will not be involved in any way other than as an accounting and business consultant (After all, I am going to be sitting in the library drinking gourmet coffee — one has to set their priorities!).  It is their thing.  They are going to have to get their offerings developed and a production plan.  They are going to have to put together a decent display, etc., etc.  The reality is that I would not be nearly as good at this sort of thing as Lorena–she loves it, is good at it, and I am all for it.

We are getting lots of visitors in the next little while.  Last night, Grandpa Milo called to tell us he and Grandma Sarah are coming here from Oregon at the end of the month.  Dale and Karen, the parents of Ethne, Kelly’s very good friend from Texas called last night to tell us they were sending her out to spend the week of Kelly’s birthday with us.  We are very grateful for both of those visits.  There are tons and tons of things to do here in North Carolina, but it seems like one never does any of the great things to do in one’s own back yard unless someone comes to visit.  Mom and Dad will probably just hang out with us, do some cooking with the kids, give us some advise on what to do with the new house, and that sort of thing.  We really have been looking for an excuse to go to a play and this might be it!

We had a good friend and her three girls over for dinner yesterday.  When I was taking the salmon off the grill, I dumped about a third of it onto the ground.  Fortunately, no one went hungry because we had plenty of other stuff.  There was even quite a bit of salmon left over after dinner.  Kelly and Christian had a great time.  They took everyone for a ride on Christian’s hovercraft.  We have to hurry up and finish our cat tower so we can go on to the next hovercraft!  The girls are movie makers, too, so I think they spent a bunch of time making a movie with the digital camera.  One of the girls brought her MacBook.  It is the first time any of us had seen an Apple product.  It was pretty nice, but it was not Linux.  I spent a lot of the day Saturday working on KamVu and made huge progress on the line tools.  Part of that time was at the public library in the town of Garner.  We really have a dilemma now.  The Garner library is older than the Holly Springs library, but it is a lot bigger, a lot closer, and really very nice.  The problem is that no coffee is allowed there.  I am not sure how often we are going to go to each, but probably Garner will win most of the time now.  Still, it makes me sad not to be able to drink coffee in the stacks.

I have really enjoyed writing this blog.  It dawned on me that I am starting into my fourth year now of blogging five times per week.  A little less than a year ago, I put a hit counter on the site to see if anyone was actually reading the thing.  I cannot believe that we are getting over 2000 hits per month.  The got to thinking about this when we saw that the hit counter had hit exactly 24000 hits.

I realize that most of those are probably just Lorena, the kids, and I visiting the site and writing to each other.  There is another big chunk due to webcrawlers and spammer.  Nevertheless Bryan, Trisha, JoAnn, Hunter, and some others have been pretty faithful at reading the thing.  Whenever I put up a post that I want family and friends to see along with an email blast to let them know there is something interesting, we have a flurry of activity for a few days.  Still, we are getting over 100 hits per day now and have averaged over 75 hits per day since I started keeping track.  We are getting over ten unique visitors per day, so all in all, for a blog that I would write even if no one read it, we are not doing too bad.

Thanks a lot for reading.  It is fun to try to make the thing more interesting.  If you have any comments on what you might like to see that is more interesting, that would be great.

There were four or five neighborhood kids at the house when I got home yesterday afternoon after work.  All the kids were younger than Kelly and Christian, but everyone seemed to be having a great time.  Kelly was sitting on the ground in front of the garage teaching all the little girls how to knit and Christian was doing something like watch ants are do an experiment with dirt out in the yard.  They seemed like very nice kids.  After about a half an hour, I saw Kelly talking to a couple of girls that were her age or a little older.  When she came in an told me about it later, she had asked them what sport they were “into”.  They told her cheer leading.  I trying to remember whether that was considered a sport when I was in school back in the dark ages.  I do not think so, but I am honestly not sure.  After they left, one of the littler girls told Kelly, that one of girls had been her babysitter, but her mom did not like to use her anymore because all she did the entire time she was babysitting was talk to her friends on the telephone.  Maybe Kelly can start making the big bucks again as the neighborhood babysitter!  It is great that Christian and Kelly both are starting to get integrated into the neighborhood.  Just like always, they will meet all of the kids, and know what is going on in long before Lorena and I.

Special note to Blienbaby:  The contest is back on!  I am at 216!!!  I will dig out the graph.  Where are you right now?  Is the first to lose fifty from where we are now good for you or are do you want to continue with the old contest?

There is a small exercise room in the office complex where I work.  I worked out there today at lunchtime.  It was my first workout in a long time, so I took it slow.  I needed to take it slow.  It feels good to get started again, but right now it does not feel so good physically.  When I got to the gym, a television was blaring with some “entertainment” programming about movie stars and the like.  It was pretty irritating, but a couple of guys showed up, found the remote and changed the channel to something even more irritating–ESPN.  Bobby Knight was self importantly explaining that basketball was only a game while clips of him choking a kid and screaming at people was playing in the background.  I wonder less now than before why I am not a fan.

I did 291 calories in 20 minutes.  That is not so much, but it is a start.