Back in action

I had been without a computer for a week, and I felt like an invalid. It was horible. I have a lot to write about but it will have to wait until I catch up on some other stuff. So stay tuned (not that any one is reading this).

Entrepreneur or ADHD

After meeting with the rest of the BlueLine guys and then with Justin again, I have been offered and accepted a job with BlueLine Marketing as an associate, doing business development and account management. Here's a link again to their site; www.bluelineresults.com.

The guys (I guess gals would be more appropriate since Scott was the only guy) at Peyron took me to lunch yesterday for a combined birthday/congrats on the new job/farewell. They of course had several questions about the new job. And also asked if my wife was excited. I tried to explain that after 10 years of marriage and almost as many jobs, she is a little more reserved about my new adventures, at least until it starts bringing in some money. This brought up a comment I've received a few times now that I've been back. Someone refer to it as an entrepreneur spirit. entrepreneur.

In school, and growing up, they called this flaky, and being a day dreamer. They eventually called it ADHD. (Actually at first it was ADD until they later discovered two different groups of ADD kids; the hyper ones and the mellow ones.) My wife calls it frustrating, and financially troubling. Now in the business world I'm an entrepreneur. I'm sure part of that is because I took the leap and owned my own business. If I was jumping around between hourly paying jobs, would I still be considered an entrepreneur, or would I be considered a flake, a risk, or a liability?

Is being labeled an entrepreneur a good thing? It seems to be in the business and marketing world. We'll see if it ever pays off. This is my favorite quote by Theodore Roosevelt:
http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/life/quotes.htm

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."
Theodore RooseveltAmerican 26th US president (1901-09), 1858-1919

Billy Corgan in Seatle

Monday my wife an I drove to Seatle to see Billy Corgan, then after the concert got in the car and drove back to Boise. The whole trip took just under 24 hours.

It was a great concert. The opening bands were good. the crimea www.thecrimea.net is a UK band that's got a very unique sound, I'd like to hear the CD before I judge. Doris Henson www.dorishenson.com from Kansas City was great, lots of energy and very fun. They looked like three high school students playing with two band teachers. The bassist was tall thin and balding, I think he was sporting a comb over. The other old guy looked even more out of place. He was more bald, fat, had one awkward dance move, played the trumbone, and had a mustache. But they put on on a great show and sounded great.

Billy put on a good show to a packed Moore Theatre. After the show he said he was a little disapointed in his preformance. Other than a minor sound problem for the first couple of songs, my wife and I thought it was great. He also announced that hopefully the next time he came through it would be with the Smashing Pumpkins. We wonder how the other Pumpkins feal about this. If you follow his blog at all, www.billycorgan.com or www.myspace.com/billycorgan you know that sometimes he doesn't say very nice things about his old band members, or his dad, or himself for that matter. We saw his last tour with the Pumpkins, the Zwan tour, and his solo tour, and this solo tour was by far our favorite. The Pumkins show was overshadowed by the decission to break up ( which even though it came out after the show, friction was obvious) Zwan, while a good idea, and had some good songs, just wasn't great. The solo show was the best so far, although we both felt that Linda Strawberry was extremly anoying (ditch her Billy). We can't wait for the Pumpkins to get back together. Even if they don't we hope Billy keeps making music.

Seatle is beautiful. One gripe though; How can a town that has 1-2 coffee shops have so few public restroom. Trying to find a bathroom in that town is a nightmare. The shops require you to buy something. We ate at a food court that had no bathroom, you had to go into the mall, only to find out that the downstairs bathroom closes after 6, (???) Only to use the upstairs bathroom which had patroling security.

Hard Math Blog

Here's a friend of mines site. www.hardmath.net he's got a lot of his animation on there. claymation type stuff. he's got some skits about the devil, and some music videos. It's really cool, check it out or die.

Boise Bloggers 7-7-05

It's been a while since I've posted. I finally got my resume blog done, check it out at www.tacsresume.blogspot.com. I've had two interviews; one with the Steven-Heneger college. They're a fast track college new to Boise. I was one of the younger candidates (only 40 out of 350 were called back) I was also the only one not in a tie. It was a group interview with about 15 of us. It was interesting, but I don't think it's for me. My second and much more interesting "interview" was with Justin from Blueline Marketing (www.bluelineresults.com). It wasn't an official interview, but a cup of coffee.

Blueline seems to me to be the closest agency to doing marketing right. So many Marketing agencies are glorified add agencies. And so many PR agencies don't do enough marketing. Marketing should lead with PR and follow with advertising. The other big problem I see is that a marketing plan, a PR plan, and an add plan, for the same company, will be three seperate plans. To me that seems counter productive.

Speaking of blogs, there needs to be a Boise blog ring, or even an Idaho blog ring. I found one for Northern Idaho, but haven't found much conecting the Boise bloggers. How can there not be one with that much illiteration? Besides what a great networking tool. You could even have different classifications, like politics, business, news, personal, ect...

Interns are people too

I went to a Capitol City Communicators meeting today. They had a speed networking luncheon. I gave out some business cards, which link to my resume blog, and met some cool people. Justin from Blueline marketing seemed like a cool guy, and Blueline seems like a marketing company that has some real cool ideas, not just a glorified ad agency.
while I was speed marketing someone asked me if it was hard to go back to school after all this time? For me it was relatively easy, I've always tried to have a learning attitude. What has been hard is going from owning my own business to being an intern.
It's been very interesting for me to watch peoples reactions as I'm introduced as "the intern". You immediately get tuned out. People I've been introduced too in meetings will ask if I'm new when they call on the phone. This is a new experience for me since Tac is typically an easy name to remember. As soon as someone labels me as an intern, you can actually see the switch go off. I've even had people break eye contact with me and never look at me again.
Are interns sub human? Are they inherently annoying? I'm not deformed or stupid. In fact I've done more things than many of them have. Have they ever threw a wakeboarding event in a parking lot? Hung out with professional skatebaorders on the strip in Vegas? Thrown a snowboard contest with more pro's than were at the X-Games at the Hard Rock Casino? And that's just in the last three years.
I know I'm not the typical intern. But they are still people worthy of 10 seconds of your time. Heck maybe you could even learn something from them.

Perceptions. Skaters, the homless and the well dressed

So I'm sitting in front of this book store downtown, finishing my pita before I go into the store, thinking if I were dressed in my skate clothes not my work clothes wondering if I'd be harassed for loitering or not. Then these three skater kids, probably about 12 yrs old or so, came skating down the opposite sidewalk. Wearing the usual t-shirts with skulls, stickered up helmets (that’s how I knew they weren't teenagers yet, they were wearing helmets) when they stopped and gave these two homeless guys a dollar each. I was amazed that these kids would fork over 2 bucks. The homeless guys weren’t even pan-handling, they were talking, and one of them had a sign strapped to the trailer on his bike. I assume the kids saw the sign and felt generous. Yet dozens of well dressed business people were walking by and ignoring the two guys. I hate the pre-conceived notions we all buy into as we get older, no matter how open minded we claim to be.