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| Thanks! |
| 11.24.05 (12:24 pm) [edit] |
Happy Thanksgiving!It is noon on Thanksgiving here on the Big Island and I’m doing a non-traditional Thanksgiving. Granted, many people in the islands do non-traditional Thanksgivings, but that is because they were here long before the Pilgrims made it to the mainland. Still, mainlanders and visitors brought traditions the same as previous visitors so all holidays get celebrated. Over the past couple of weeks I have been spending quite a bit of time helping everyone else here. Between working on websites for neighbors, to helping creating the New Kona Coffee Council website, to updating membership rolls and sending out emails, I’ve gotten little of my own stuff done. When I discovered the steel belts showing through on my truck tire, I bought a heavy-duty jack and some jack stands and replaced my front drivers side tire with the spare. Actually, I was amazed that getting the spare tire off the truck was so easy. Ford has a small hole in the back near the bumper. You insert the jack rod and twist and the spare tire lowers to the ground, almost effortlessly. Then I jacked up the front of the truck, steadied the driver’s side with a stand and lowered the truck onto it. IN a few minutes I had the tire replaced. Now I just have to find rugged yet inexpensive tired to replace the current tires. I have seen prices ranging from $58 to $208 so far. Although the tires may fit and be appropriate for road use, I did a lot of driving over rocks just on my driveway, so need to have pretty good tires. When that project was done, I went back inside to get my coffee beans. I had been soaking the coffee parchment overnight and it was time to plant! I have 300 ½ gallon black plastic bags filled with a nursery mix of black cinders and some organic matter. The organic part consists of macadamia nut shells and what smells like corn husks (all quite plentiful on the island). After placing a pinch of fertilizer in each pot, I poked a hole and inserted a bean into each pot. I found I was about 30 beans short for the number of bags. I am soaking some more beans as I write this. I currently have 270 bags filled and planted. Although I have some coffee on the property already, these plants will be the beginnings of the estate coffee to fill the middle 5 acres of land. Unfortunately, 300 plants is just about 1/3 of an acre, so I have about 10% of what I need. That will include a few of the plants that don’t germinate. If you want to see some photos, I will put a link on the left side of the blog here. In the past few weeks I have spoken with a number of people who are thinking of making Hawaii their home. Some have done their research and some have not. I caution people that they should come visit for a month and act like they live here. That includes shopping and fighting what traffic they find and meeting and talking with people. Too often people come here for a visit and think this is the place for them, except that their view is based upon being a tourist and having people wait on them. We locals do laundry, shop and yes, even visit the dump. These are not typical tourist functions and tourists can put up with not having their favorite food or electronic gizmo while traveling. Imagine what it is like not to have those things often… In any event, I personally am thankful that I was able to make the transition and each day I feel more at home and less like a visitor. And that is how it should be J |
| To Have or Have Not |
| 11.21.05 (1:58 am) [edit] |
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I have been spending quite a bit of time helping the Kona Coffee Council fix their membership list prior to the Annual General Meeting. Our membership ranks are increasing and we are changing over to a new website. We also are committing to a number of new opportunities to showcase Kona Coffee. It looks to be a very full year ahead. As you may know, I’m trying to get about 3300 new coffee trees started and I’m not making the progress I had hoped. Since I have not been called for Jury Duty again this week, I’m hoping that I can get more done. I’m also removing things in the kitchen in preparation of a complete remodel. On the coffee sales front, I sent out an email to existing website members and picked up some nice sales. Thanks to those who bought coffee and keep watching your email for more deals. I used to write out nice newsletters but they didn’t generate enough sales to be worth the time to format them and come up with content. I had sales every month, I added photos and then also had links to sites, which were fun to access while enjoying a cup of coffee. Perhaps I just bit off too much work before I had enough customers and visitors to enjoy the newsletter. In any event, as time permits, I may be able to continue them, but certainly not in the next few moths. Speaking of sales, I hope to offer a limited number of gift baskets again this holiday season. If you are thinking of sending a gift basket of coffee items, you might want to go to ItsKona.Com and create an account. I’ll be mailing info to registered members in the next week or so. AS regular readers (and people who know me), I am cheap. I try to save money wherever I can. In fact, just today I was at COSTCO and passed the printer section. I saw a gentleman who looked to be ready to purchase a HP printer. I said to him “Do you know that printer will be on sale in the next couple of days?” He did not and thanked me. I may have saved him $35. We chatted for the next hour or so (actually, I seemed to do most of the talking), telling him all sorts of things to save money on telephone calls, travel, and so on. That leads me to an idea that I just implemented. When I prepare a bag of coffee for shipment, I have been labeling it in what I call the “Retail” packaging. That includes full labels and award stickers and a clip to recluse the gusset bag after opening it. As you can imagine, these extra labels and the clip tend to increase the cost of the product. The Retail bag looks nice and is appropriate for a store shelf or to be given as a gift. Not everyone needs a nice presentation and might be willing to save a dollar if they order the lower packaging option. Since the labels I use are not necessarily cheap and I put them on by hand, I felt I would try this option and see how well it is received. The back label explains how Pele helps us create our coffee, but if you have read it a couple of times, do you need it on every package? Knowing my coffee won the Cream of the Crop award might help a store customer choose my coffee over another brand, but if you are ordering online, you have already seen the award and made that buying decision. So whether you think of it as a reduction in cost to not have the labels, or an increase in cost to make the bag more pleasing, it really comes down to a dollar difference in price and you have a choice as to who keeps the dollar J I may extend this idea to other products on the site if this works well. Currently I have enabled the option on bags weighing from 8oz to 2 pounds. The 5 pound bags already have some reductions of cost based upon quantity. The 2 and 4 ounce bags are either used as stocking stuffers or gifts and normally use different labeling anyway. It will be interesting to see how well this option catches on. |
| The Week That Was (and Is) |
| 11.12.05 (8:16 pm) [edit] |
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This week is our annual Coffee Festival Week. If you love coffee or perhaps even LIVE coffee, this would have been the week to be in Kona. Starting with an evening lantern parade and continuing through coffee tasting and farm tours, coffee took center stage. On any other 1st Friday of the month I would have been at the KonaWeb picnic over at the old airport park, but I was at Hale Halawai selling coffee and Kona Coffee Council apparel. Then on Thursday I was called upon to be the auctioneer at the KCC dinner and auction. I guess they felt that my DJ background was sufficient to be an auctioneer. Little did they know that I also used to do a bit of auctioneering and product pushing over on Public Television in Richmond and Fairfax Virginia. With Thursday approaching, I began doing some research on the items to be auctioned and on pronunciation of some of the Hawaiian names. I also came up with a few humorous stories and jokes, just in case there were lulls in the action. I only got to use a few to both my and the audiences good fortune! Early on Friday I took some green coffee up to be roasted and came back home. Usually they clean the floors and do maintenance early in the morning and then turn to roasting later in the day. I can usually pick up my coffee at 4pm. To my surprise and chagrin, I got a call 2 hours later to pick up my roasted beans. I now suspect that because it was a Friday holiday that they were closing early. To avoid making extra trips into town, I cleaned out the truck bed and threw in a few tarps and some rope. After picking up the coffee I proceeded to get gas at COSTCO and then stopped at Soil Plus. There I got two loads of nursery mix (with black cinders) and brought it home. I backed the truck into position under the mango trees and dumped the dirt on a tarp. Then I went to a neighbor’s house to add some memory in her computer. What should have been a 20 minute stop turned into a 3 hours problem, which ended up with me bringing her system home with me to work on until early in the morning. This morning I took the computer back to her and headed to the Post Office to mail some coffee out. Upon arriving back on the farm, I started filling plant bags with dirt and placed them on the pallets under the canopy. I got 120 of them filled before I ran out of steam. In the very near future I’ll plant coffee parchment beans into the dirt and start watering them. Soon, little sprouts will mark the beginnings of 5 acres of new coffee trees. As the regular reader knows, I’m pretty cheap. To that end, I try to save money at most steps yet try to add technology whenever possible. I can’t take credit for all of the innovations, but here is how the project was assembled. To water the plants I could have just stretched a hose or two over to the clearing, but instead I bought an automatic watering valve, not unlike one you would use at a home underground watering system or on a golf course. You add some power from a timer and the valve opens for an amount of time. I hooked this up under the house and above ground ran some PVC pipe to a spigot. Then I assembled a couple of self-supported canopies (common here for garages). As the plants mature I’ll want them to get out intothe sun. Rather than move the plants, two people just lift up the legs of the canopy and move it. In seconds, all the plants are in the sun. Islands are great for pallets. Much of what gets shipped here is load onto pallets and these wooden things are left outside stores for the taking. I would guess that on any particular day I could drive into Kona and find 20 free pallets. The area under the canopies is not level; in fact, most of the island is not level. Rather than buy gravel or level the rocks, took the easy way out. I took a pallet, laid it on the ground and put a level on top. Then I just cut some wood and nailed it on each corner until the pallet was level. Granted, I can never move these things because there is only one spot here that all 4 legs would hit the ground just right and level the pallet. Then under and over the pallets I placed a mat, which will control weeds and give me a bit of support. To fill the black plastic plant bags with nursery mix, I borrowed an idea from a fellow farmer. If you get a piece of PVC large enough to fit the opening of the empty bag, you cut the opposite end at a 45 degree angle and use that as a scoop to get dirt into the bug. Just put the square end of the PVC into the bag, hold it and shove the tapered end into the pile of dirt and turn it upright. The bag is now filled. As I say, I got 120 of them done before quitting today. Photos of the nursery can be seen at the following link itskona.com/photos/thumbnails.php?album=12 |
| Danger Will Robinson, Danger! |
| 11.04.05 (8:41 am) [edit] |
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I used to work in radio in Kentucky in the 70's. On a particular Saturday morning (I think it was Feb 21st 1971) as I drove to the station, something strange was happening. A calm reassuring voice came on the air and told us that the US was under attack by forces yet unknown or identified. The threat was real and was almost immediate! In the 70’s each radio and television station generally had a newswire service with an old Teletype machine. You may see these in old movies or shows and consisted of a heavy metal machine with gears and knobs and paper spewing out of it. Imagine it is a giant electrical typewriter of sorts. Connected to the Associated Press or United Press International, they would constantly type out International, State and local news, sports and weather reports. The term “rip and read” comes from station people ripping the news off of the machine and running into a microphone to read the latest press items to the audience. “This just in”, while being handed a small sheet of paper, also refers to the same type of event. At this time on a Saturday, the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS) would send down tests and we would test the system of notifying the public of major events. I believe this was set up after the Cuban Missile scare. Some may remember EBS as the answer to the old CONALRAD system. The National Emergency Warning Center in Cheyenne Mountain Colorado is a giant underground fortress [made famous in the movie War Games]. On that Saturday, an Air Force person went to his machine to perform the regularly scheduled test. Nearby was a set of punch tapes, strips of long paper with holes punched in it used to make a pre-recorded transmission. He inserted the tape and pushed the button to transmit. As was the process, his transmission would interrupt the news feeds normally sent by AP and UPI to all stations across the country and his machine typed directly to all machines then turned on. I have the actual printout here somewhere but he message read in effect: “BUST BUST” XXXXXXXXXX AUTHENTICATOR WORD: HATEFULNESS THE PRESIDENT HAS DECLARED A NATIONAL EMERGENCY EXISTS. NORMAL BROADCASTING IS TO CEASE IMMEDIATELY. YOU ARE INSTRUCTED TO OPEN YOUR ENVELOPE IMMEDIATELY, VALIDATE THE AUTHENTICAOR WORD AND FOLLOW PROCEEDURES. XXXXXXXXXX Stations across the country opened their sealed envelopes of codes and verified that today’s code MATCHED! This was not a test! Many stations did what they were supposed to, that is to play the announcement message and then go off the air, leaving the most powerful stations to broadcast Civil Defense messages to the public. The Warning center immediately discovered the problem and tried to recall the message by broadcasting a cancel message. Since no one thought ahead, there was no pre-punched tape to cancel an alert as alerts were supposed to be real. Thus the technical typed the message my hand in a very slow manner, one letter at a time... CANCEL CANCEL CANCEL NOT AN EMERGENCY The problem is that the tech did not immediately send the correct keyword, which would verify the cancel command. Stations recognizing that the cancel message MIGHT have been written by someone taking over communications, they correctly did not immediately cancel the alert. Later it was typed in. The code? IMPISH Impish was the correct code, but many stations were already off the air and even some of the primary stations who were supposed to remain on the air, had gone off. Their people just said the heck with sitting in a building all-alone on a Saturday when the US is under attack. I’m going home to be with my wife… etc. The military did not scramble jets because this was the same center that would have known of any attack and called for it itself. The operator who made the mistake was a civilian and had been there many years. He just made a mistake. It was one that told all of the US that a state of emergency existed, when it didn’t. It was not just the public who was perplexed. Congress immediately called the White House. “What is the President up to?” The answer was that the President was not directing us to war and he had no idea what was up. A big deal was made of the mistake because it showed up flaws in the system. The alert looked real but came at a time when the test would normally be transmitted. Many stations used to seeing the row of X’s and hearing the 10 bells, would just rip the sheet off the pages and file it, never taking a second look. Others said, “Well it is a mistake because it came during the test period”. In our stations case, we did exactly what we were supposed to. We played the emergency recording, which directed listeners to change channels. We went off the air and monitored our Primary station. The Primary went off the air in confusion and we immediately came back on the air and continued broadcasting. As the mistake and correct cancel message came down the wire, we played the correct end of emergency message and began normal broadcasting. During this time, our listeners heard the messages about the alert. The messages told them we were under attack and then that all was clear. The messages were delivered by a calm reassuring voice. That voice was mine. Of course it was calm and reassuring. It was recorded. It was recorded months early. I was laughing at the time. I thought the message would never be used. But it was, the joke was on me, and I sounded great! :-) |