slamboard

I honestly had no idea that night golf was a glowing…I mean growing trend. I spent a few years living beside a golf course and I pretty certain that there were no night games.

I used to walk my black lab on the golf course on moonlit nights. Golf courses at night are beautiful and just a bit spooky.

I can see how it would make a great corporate event. I have played golf with coworkers in the conventional way before and I always find that there is a discord of sorts between the serious golfers and the social golfers. If you have a corporate golf event at night with the course marked out with glow sticks, it’s pretty clear that it’s just for fun. It levels the playing field. The essential night golf supplies include glow sticks of various colors and of course, glow in the dark golf balls.

Don’t under-buy when it comes to the golf balls. I think you will lose a few on a dark night. The balls are available in four bright colors, so each team can have a different color of balls.

PremierGlow.com has a very illuminating interactive introduction to night golf. They also sell those crazy blinking things that people were at trade shows and events in 91 different styles. Somebody gave me one of those things once and I couldn’t get it to stop blinking. I put it in a drawer and I have moved since then. It might still be blinking somewhere.

I have been employed by more than one business that relied on truck drivers from the USA and Canada crossing the border. As an employee of a large lumber mill in the 90s, I took it largely for granted. As a member of a Fair Trade Coffee Roasting Cooperative, there were a few times when the bureaucracy and security measures at the border significantly impacted my working life.

I did not even realize that cross border trucking was not a way of life at the Southern border of the USA until I read his story about the agreements that are being negotiated to allow just that to happen.

The Teamsters union, the Sierra Club and other interested parties have filed a lawsuit against US transportation officials.

Business startups can have a huge appetite for money. Catching the attention of the people with all that delicious venture capital is not a cake walk.

SubmitBusinessPlan.com is a site that allows you to submit your business plan for the perusal of VC guys and Angel Investors. Currently, your plan can potential come to the attention of over 3,000 potential investors.

The process is as follows… first you register by using the SubmitBusinessPlan.com search form. After that, you select the categories that fit your plan and then simply upload your business plan. Once you do that SubmitBusinessPlan.com gets the ball rolling by submitting your plan to all of the selected VC’s and Investors.

This is not a free service, time is money and SubmitBusinessPlan.com is saving you a lot of time. You can use that time to continue to plan, to act, to do whatever it is that is your core competency. Submiting a plan costs $99.

I have seen some dramatic video footage of people boldly going out on foot looking for venture capital. It’s a very gripping bit of human drama, but it’s not how this mostly works. People with experience in managing venture capital can read a business plan and quickly see the potential and the risks. Investing in a small smart companies with driven founders is a calculated risk and it is what VC guys do. Maybe they can do it for you.

I brought the Chinese Cartoon Police thing to the attention of a forum and discussion ensued. That’s what happens when you have intellectual freedoms.

When it became obvious that one of the younger members was unfamiliar with the broader issues in China, I wanted to show her a picture that I had saved a couple of years ago. It is a double exposure of a classic scene of natural an architectural beauty in China AND tanks on Tiananmen Square. I didn’t have a file on the computer thatI was using, but I knew that I had uploaded the image to Bolt.com as part of a slide show. Now I come to find that Bolt.com has executed an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors effective as of August 14, 2007 and as part of this, they have ceased operations. I had quite a bit of content uploaded to their site and embedded on old blog posts. Visitors to those old posts now get a blank space where an image or a movie should be.

If you are interested in buying a failed file sharing social network, they are for sale. If anyone has a link to an image like the one I described, please leave it in a comment. The intent of the image was to slip by Google censors. I really liked that picture. For all the twenty year old people who don’t know, the Chinese government killed peaceful student protestors in 1989.

For certain scales and types of business, bankruptcy has become a strategy, although success it definitely preferable. As an individual, you want to Avoid Bankruptcy if at all possible.

ClearDebt.co.uk is a site that has advice related to the IVA process and they even feature an online application for an IVA. An IVA is a binding legal agreement between you and all of your creditors.

An IVA gives individuals a chance to get out of debt, possibly within 5 years.

I was surprised to see that ClearDebt.com offers strategies to applicants who fail to qualify for an IVA as well. If you are in a dire situation, they might be your go to people.

Here is the cute face of political oppression. According to Global Voices Online, cartoon images of police officers pop into websites originating from cities such as Beijing and Shenzhen. I am usually a day late when it comes to political stuff, but in this case I am a day early. The Beijing cops hit their virtual beat tomorrow, September 1st.

The expressed intent it to provide users with security tips. The obvious unexpressed intent is intimidation. Internet cafes in China have posters that are less subtle.

So, in my last post I mentioned the new computer. I’m working at this computer right now. When we get around to installing the important programs in it like DreamWeaver and Photoshop, I will have to go back to an old computer again. We didn’t buy a new desk and chair to go with this new desk top unit. I am actually sitting at an entertainment center at the moment and my next hurts a bit. It’s not very entertaining. I would like to find a good source for used office furniture.

Cubicle Depot has a great business model. It’s good for business and good for the environment. They professionally refurbish office furniture including the typical units that are being used to furnish call centers. Without Cubicle Depot, much of this stuff would end up contributing to the solid waste disposal problems. They operate in the Dallas area. I would like to see this business model being practiced everywhere. Several years ago I did my own miniature version of this enterprise when the company I worked for was expanding. I actually took the desk that had belonged to the founding manager home and installed in a child’s bedroom. It was a huge hardwood built-in unit. I left it in place when we moved later that year.

It seems weird that expansions result in surplus furniture, but the reality is when people have designers involved and lots of cash flow, they usually want all new, all coordinated furniture. It’s great to have someone like Cubical Depot to take the unwanted furniture and spruce it up making it available to smaller businesses or even individuals.

I just got finished unpacking and setting up a ‘new’ computer. This is an addition rather than a replacement and we decided to go as cheap as possible. We grabbed a ’starter’ computer just before this September’s issuing of student financial assistance results in the local retailers being cleaned out of cheap computers.

I don’t have any complaints so far, except we are already regretting our decision not to upgrade from CD-ROM to a more up to date disc drive. One other thing that I was surprised by was the date of manufacture of the monitor. It was made in 2004. It’s interesting to think about how a three or four year old computer component was considered garbage a few years ago and now they can sell them retail.

This is Hunter. He helps people who who are involved in mold removal near New Jersey. Several dogs around the country have been trained to detect mold. This detection method is cheap reliable and best of all immediate.

Another important advantage of mold testing with dogs is the way they can pinpoint the problem area. Lab testing your indoor air for spores will not pinpoint the problem.

Stephen Barrett is the man behind DietScam.org. I have used information from that site as a basis for some of my work before. After reading his relentless attack on the Atkins way of eating, I decided that I should find out more about this guy. He is a prolific researcher and writer with more than his share of critics. I will throw a softball at the litigious man by saying that I personally think his use of a word like ‘quackery’ that has no legal definition is a very convenient strategy. I would compare it to Listerine claiming to kill 99.9% of all known germs (the word germs has no scientific definition).

I think that, from here, on in I will always present any information that I get on his websites as his opinion, rather than established fact.

The thing that really sets Barrett apart is the broad range of health and diet related methods that he criticizes. He labels everything from acupuncture to organic food as ‘quackery’.