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| Packing Up Your Troubles |
| 01.30.06 (5:14 pm) [edit] |
I still have a hard time getting companies to understand.
Hawaii is part of the US, (although some people wish it wasn't). When we want to buy something from your company, you need to try to accomodate us, because our money spends just as well as that from the mainland. I go to Outpost.Com (Fry's) and I find a good deal on a disk drive. The drive will cost me about $87 after rebates. I add it to my cart and check shipping cost, which comes out to about $9.57. When I actually start to check out, the shipping zooms up to $33.35! HUH????? So when I call Customer Service they tell me because I live out of the country (I stop him and remind him that we are one of the 50 states) and he corrects himself and says when shipping overseas, the price goes up. I try to get him to explain why I can ship the same product for $8.10 that they charge $33.35 for and he has no answer. I believe the answer is that Outpost (despite my emailing them often) still does not know that the Post Office has been offering flat-rate boxes for a year ot two now. Those boxes are weight independent and go for $8.10 without insurance. I know this because we use the flat rate envelopes ($4.05) and the boxes to ship coffee. They take 3-5 business days and cost the same for all 50 states. I also know that these disk drives fit in the boxes, because I have had a friend order me drives and pack them in the boxes to ship to me. I go out of my way to find cost-effective shipping methods for my customers. It appears as thourh Outpost does not. They reall keep showing me that they don't want Hawaii's business. In the case of OfficeMax, a retail office supply store, they have a store on the opposite side of my island. If you order $50 or more, they put your items on a truck and deliver them for free. That is a 3 hour one-way trip every few days, although they do have lots of deliveries to make. THAT is what I call customer service. I am just waiting for someone to determine that we have enough critical mass to build an electronics store here on the Kona side. I would sure support them if their deals were pretty good. In the meantime, let me pass along this: If you hurry you can get a deal on my coffee. I have an Ebay sale going at the moment (a sale, not an auction). I'm even offering FREE SHIPPING! Take THAT Outpost! |
| Visitors |
| 01.30.06 (9:13 am) [edit] |
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My Mom was here from Florida for 2 weeks and I got to show here around the island. She had a great time here, but the round trip flights left something to be desired, including that unscheduled extra 8 hours on Maui.
As Mom was getting ready to leave, a friend and ex-coworker from Hewlett Packard stopped by Hawaii with part of her family. I again got to play tour guide and suggester of restaurants. As for the coffee side of things, I now have some of my pots of coffee beans sending sprouts above their growing bags. It won't be long until I have about 300 plants. I am growing them in stages and the next stage will be lots more plants. I need 3300 the first year! I continue to clear trash trees from the 5 acres destined to hold my new stock, and soon I'll have those 5 acres completely cleared and graded. That is, unless more visitors arrive on the island. I still know a few restaurants... |
| Coffee Takeover! |
| 01.24.06 (11:57 pm) [edit] |
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If you are a specialty and/or upscale coffee drinker, read on.
The Kona Coffee Council, the group which has been promoting 100% Kona Coffee has been taken over by big business. Tossed aside are the small farms. Their votes didn't count. A few big processors decided that they did not like the idea of 100% Kona being promoted, so they went through their companies and told employees that they would sign them up, then came and paid cash for all of those people. Oh voting proxies for non-attending members was legal, but voting giant blocks of proxies for people who probably had no idea what the issues were? Certainly immoral. But you know, that is how they do their business. Many of these processors sell 100% Kona coffee, but they also sell a Kona blend. As readers here know, a "Kona Blend" is NOT a blend of Kona coffees, it is a blend of usually 90% foreign coffee and 10% Kona (American) coffee. The State of Hawaii allows them to call it a Kona Blend if there is a minimum of 10% Kona beans in it. Consumers rarely see the note "10% Kona Coffee" on the label and think they have a Kona Coffee. Years ago when the KCC tried to trademark Kona Coffee so we could control the quality and advertising, processors like this blocked that with lots of money. Now they bought the election and have a majority of their own members on the Board. I suspect that few of previous Boards projects for 100% Kona will be continued. Rather they more than likely will be quietly swept under the rug. We saw it happening, but with the money they had to buy memberships, we opted not to. If we had, it would have just see-sawed back and forth until they finally won again next time with even more funds. Over the next few months you will read about this issue in this and other blogs. There will be newspaper articles and discussions. If you want a blend, then by all means, get it. Enjoy it. Just know that a 10% Kona blend is 90% something else, and they don't want you to know what that is. It could be African, Columbian, any kind of stuff they call coffee. Imagine filling up the car with 10 gallons of "gasoline" where 1 gallon was actually gas and 9 gallons was water... I want you to know that we farmers in Kona will continue to ship PURE 100% Kona Coffee. No gimmicks, not hocus-pocus. Look for the words "100% KONA COFFEE" on any product you buy. Shun anything with the words "BLEND" anywhere in the label or identity statement. Don't be fooled. Don't be misled. The word must be spread! |
| What It's All About |
| 01.07.06 (10:52 am) [edit] |
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I attended the January KonaWeb party at the old airport last night; visiting with some old frioends and some new ones. I took meat loaf. Note that I didn't say that I MADE meat loaf, jus tthat I took it. A phoo of the assembled group was taken and posed on Konaweb.com. Look for the PARTY link at the bottom of the page. My Safeway has remodeled and added more of a flair when it comes tothe store. The whole front portion looks like the upscale stores on the mainland. I just hope they don't yupscale their prices to make up for the decorations. So far their house brand soda is still $1 a six pack. I have been working alot on the new Kona Coffee Council's website and helping to make it a great sit. Also I have been creating membership lists and mailings. I hope someone else takes over the webmaster part soon. I am still fixing up the house in preparation of my Mom's visit on Monday. I certainly won't be ready, but at least part of the house will look nice. I painted the back bedroom where she will be, and made sure to do it days ago so the smell would be gone. I added some nice Hawaiian/island pictures on the wall and added a B&B touch; a basket with fresh towels and soaps on the bureau. While Mom is here I think we will spend a lot of time eating out, mosttly because the kitchen is still a disaster (so to speak) and the carpenter I had hoped could fix it, finally told me "Call me in 3 months". They are so busy building things here that 3 months may be a bit on the hopeful side. I am painting the outside staircase to make it look better, although both staircases need to be removed and replaced. In fact, the one on the north side of the house may actuallt collapse while Mom is here. I hope to get the washing machine out from underneath before that happens. Those stairs were not taken care of before and the roof line does not extend over them, so they get water on them every time it rains and then the termites did some damage too. Oh if I had a carpenter... I need to the post office todayto mail out a package and in between, I have to get the rest of the house cleaned, so it will be a couple full days. Sometimes, when I working, my mind wanders a bit. Then all of a sudden a thought hits and I just have to write it down and pass it along. I'm painting the steps and keeping track of which ones I need to not paint, so I can still get up into the house opn the one stairway that will not be collapsing anytime soon. My mind wanders to the picnic last night and the people who are visiting the island. I remember hoow I was when I first visited and how peaceful it was and rememberd why I decided to move here to live. So I'm contemplating life and the wonder of it and what it is all about. Then it hits me, it really IS the Hokey Pokey! THAT is what it's all about! :-) |
| Looking Forward and Back |
| 01.04.06 (11:50 am) [edit] |
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I was in COSTCO before Christmas and see where there is a “keychain” memory card of 5-gigabytes! The capacity of these is really getting up there, but you need to put this into perspective. My last blog mentioned getting rid of the old. Let’s look at the old though. One of my bosses used to have a computer in his basement. Oh I know that some of you are thinking of something running windows, maybe an old PC, but this was a Hewlett Packard 3000 Series II mainframe. The system was two equipment racks maybe 7 foot or so tall. Then there were two disk drives, which resembles small washing machines. The removable disk packs were cylinders resembling a stack of pancakes, separated from each other. This system was a timesharing system, capable of handling 50 or more simultaneous users (assuming we had that many modems) and each user could be running different applications. The system required three-phase power and it had to be specifically run through the neighborhood and into the house. Three-phase power would normally be found in industrial parks and not a home. The reason the system was in his basement is classified, but suffice it to say, he did Government work and wanted a short commute. So this system, which needed air conditioning and rarely was shut down and could handle many simultaneous users and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and ran all sorts of graphics and accounting programs, this system came with 256 kilobytes of memory and 50 megabytes of hard drive disk! You have to understand these numbers. The main memory (soon upgraded to twice that amount) is smaller than the memory in a Caller-ID box, smaller than your cell phone, smaller by far than the memory contained in the smallest and cheapest digital camera you can find. As for the disk space, 50 mb is enough to store perhaps 25 digital photos! Oh sure, over the years the systems like these grew and expanded by orders of magnitude, but it was in our recent past that computers took up a room and were made of vacuum tubes (think light bulbs) and were programmed by way of toggle switches. Initial computer storage for personal computers might be an audio tape recorder… Now flash forward to that 5-gigabyte keychain memory module. It plugs into your USB slot and could hold maybe 2500 photos or 8 full-length movies. It could hold an operating system (or two) and many computers now allow you to boot from that keychain device! A problem with laptops has always been that you had to be careful using them while they move. An example is that I think I destroyed a hard drive because I used it during a flight and we had air turbulence. With the new memory sticks, laptops can now use only steady state memory chips instead of using a mechanical disk! Some PDA and IPOD users already are familiar with this ability. So we are converting from technologies. It is difficult to find computers, which still use floppy drives. I was never a fan of tape drives for storage and preferred to use CD and DVD’s to write data. It is pretty difficult to find VCR’s anymore and even LCD TV screens are the rage over a TV screen with a CRT screen. Although you can buy a GPS (Global Positioning System) to show where in the world you are, you may already have one built into your cell phone. Cell phones and Internet phones are replacing Hardwired telephones in your house. Our local phone company has been advertising that if you have their hardwired phone service and their cell phone service, that you can press a button and switch a call from the cell phone to the wired phone. Movies can be streamed through the Internet rather than rented at a video store. The same can be said for radio stations and live video camera feeds as they wend their way live to your home or mobile unit. We used to lose friends when they moved, now we can look them up on the search engines and see every address where they lived. We can use flat-rate calling plans to talk with them for hours. Yes, you may soon find yourself talking with someone who says you were best friends in nursery school and who has nothing better to do for the next 3 hours than to chat on the phone… “Hey, remember nap time? I never got to sleep because that girl next to me was such a crybaby and the constant whimpering kept me up. Oh and those graham crackers, THEY were the best! I always liked them with milk.” You think “Who IS this person?” Speaking of Long Distance, it used to be a big deal to get a telephone call by long distance. Dinners would be interrupted; conversations were halted while the person hollered into the telephone, trying to be heard ½ way around the world or even ½ way across the state. I remember when HBO started and I can tell you that they used to sign off at midnight. There were not enough viewers to stay up all night just to watch movies. If I am reaching back, let be slip in this, for those who are too young to know. Your Grandparents or Great Grandparents may still have problems calling a refrigerator a refrigerator but rather call it an icebox. Many years ago we kept things cold in a refrigerator that used a block of ice for cooling food. Airline stewardesses used to wear nurses uniforms and yes, they used to have real silver on airline flights and it used to be a big deal to fly across the ocean. Just one lifetime ago, Hawaii had a Queen and before that, Kings. Yet during the same period, while disk drives changed to memory chips, flying around the world became commonplace, countries were overthrown, electricity replaced ice, I can tell you that Kona Hawaii has been growing, roasting and shipping coffee with few changes. We still pick the beans by hand, carefully roast them and send them to discriminating coffee-lovers worldwide. Some things NEVER change! ItsKona.Com |
| Here and Gone |
| 01.03.06 (12:11 pm) [edit] |
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In Hawaiian, Aloha means many things, most often used to say “Hello” and “Goodbye” and “Love”, etc. The New Year has come and gone and there were lots of Aloha’s to go around. Gone is 2005 and in front of us, a brand new, unused 2006. Hawaii allows the public to purchase and ignite fireworks and this year was no exception. I don’t know of any major problems, like brushfires or medical problems, but I can tell you that driving around the Big Island was like driving in a fog. There was smoke and bangs all over. I rang in the New Year down in Kona town by the wharf with perhaps a hundred others, all lined up along the sea wall. Certainly not the crowd that would normally end up there on July 4th, but then again, New Years seems to have been spent at home for most, or at least, not at the sea wall. A month ago a friend moved to the island and stayed at my farm, helping cut trees in preparation of new coffee being planted. On December 31st he moved into his room in town. As I was helping him move his stuff, we were invited to dinner at the house. Having a great time with new friends sure beat trying to find a restaurant open and without a line on New Years Eve. In concert with the ending of the year, the Kona Coffee Council has been changing their website with a complete makeover. We sent out a RFP, reviewed proposals and chose a local guy to redesign and host our new site. To avoid heavy charges from the previous site for another quarter, we performed a flash cut (immediately switching facilities with no looking back) on December 31st. Although we were still modifying pages and especially member record formats, we had visitors using the site within minutes and even had a new member sign up (as we quickly finished testing processes). I am in the process of cleaning up my computers and found that I am still running a few programs in background that I probably don’t need anymore. One useful program was “POW!”, which would stop pop-ups in their tracks. Now I have other processes to do that, but the program served me well over time. Searching the disks also showed up a store of my old dial-up bulletin board software and messages I have not seen in years. I still keep in touch with some of those online users, but many have gone separate ways. The same holds true for friends whom I have met on the Internet. Some stay put and others drift away; sometimes to appear when you least expect them. A few years ago, I found my Uncle’s online FCC license entry and had it updated to reflect that he had passed away years ago. That modification triggered an unexpected chain of events. A Ham Radio writer found the entry and updated a story about some of my Uncles accomplishments. He had done some neat things with bouncing radio waves off the moon and also to communicate over the difficult path between Hawaii and California via meteor showers. I have also a number of contacts related to my Uncle, at least one just a few miles from me here on my island, who is trying to break my Uncles record! I have also been told to expect an audio recording, apparently between one guy’s Father and my Uncle! Of course, these communications will give me a reason to contact my cousin on my Uncles side to pass the information along. I have been painting the back bedroom to prepare it for my Moms visit. She is expected here late this weekend. I tried to get her here in time for the KonaWeb party on Friday, but it was not to be. I checked on the coffee beans I planted on Thanksgiving, but see none of the sprouts above dirt yet. I am waiting patiently, but would have hoped for some action by now. It could take up to 2 months. I have had a couple Ebay auctions for my Pele’s Passion coffee and some sales on the website. I continue to receive very nice comments and reorders. That makes the start of the New Year filled with even more Aloha! |