Tim ‘Gonzo’ Gordon

If 40 is the new 30, that means 50 is the new 40.

Which means, if you continue the new math, that 60 is the new 50. But if you extrapolate percentages, do the math manually and throw in a little Body English, I think 70 is also the new 50. And if that’s the case, 80 must be the new 60. And 50 must be the new 30. So that means 30 is the new 10-year old.

So if I’m 50 and I’m dating a 35 year old she’s either 50 like me, or 12 which means I’m probably going to jail.

Can somebody please explain to me how this works?

Salem, Oregon will soon have a new community radio station. Last night was the first public gathering of would-be volunteers, announcers and supporters. The station is still at least 14 months from flipping the switch, but energy was good and it bodes well.

I’ve been out of commercial radio for just over 7 years and would love to get back behind the microphone of an actual radio station. Yeah, I podcast every week at CommunicationSteroids which is a blast, but when you’re on the air you are able to receive immediate feedback from listeners.

Brief backstory to the station, which was shared at the meeting last night: A few years ago some local community radio supporters heard there was going to be a frequency opening up in the Willamette Valley. The FCC gives you a 5-day window to accept the applications, which takes a few months to prepare. Plus the group that applies has to be a non-profit group that’s been in existence for at least two years.

After doing some footwork, the organizers Karen and Steve (and others but I didn’t get all of their names) hooked up with the Salem Folklore Society who were willing to support the effort.

So when the 5-day window was announced, the application was filed and the waiting began. Finally it was announced that Salem would get the frequency.

Steve told the story of how the call letters came about. He said that he’d regularly go online to see what call letters were available and, as he put it, ‘most sucked, or were weird combinations’ but one night he saw that KMUZ was available. A Spanish-language station in Gresham, Oregon had just given up the call letter. So he added that to the application (or whatever the process was – he didn’t elaborate) and it became a Real Thing.

Still a long ways to go. Lots of money has to be raised, grant requests have to be written, and volunteers need to be organized – but it’s all very exciting.

Sounds like the station will be doing a logo contest, manning a booth at the Oregon State Fair and getting out into the community in a variety of ways to start to drum up interest.

At last night’s meeting they were soliciting tax-deductible donations of $40 or more, which would allow you to become a ‘charter’ member and supporter. Yes, that’s me!

Check out the website for more info:

KMUZ.ORG

I run two (well at least) blogs using WordPress. Both are using version 2.7.1. Yet the ‘back office’ where I plug in new posts has a different look and function. Check this out:

One blog, TimGonzoGordon.com, has a posting version that looks like this:

Another blog at Tradeshowguyblog.com has a different look:

Can anyone tell me why it would do this? Makes no sense to me. I’ve upgrade both sites to the newest version of WordPress. This is one of the daffy things about WordPress that confounds me.

BTW, I just started a new blog at ProFreewayGolf.com and it looks the same as the back office at Tradeshowguy. Go figure.

Not only are those differences very noticeable, but when I insert a link there are differences. One allows me to have the link open in a new window or not, the other (the first) does NOT give that option.

Yes, it is strange.

I joined GoodReads a couple of weeks back thanks to an invitation to an acquaintance in the tradeshow industry. It’s yet another ’social networking’ site but built exclusively around the books you have read or are reading.
And of course if you read a lot like I do that means you have dozens if not hundreds of books you can put in your list. I haven’t added more than than about three dozen, but give me time.
Just this morning I added three new ones that I’ve started reading in the past week. Yup, three. During the day or evening I’ll pause for a chapter or two in Problogger from Darren Rowse and then a chapter or two from Michael Port’s latest “Think Big manifesto.” Both have great interest to me; I’m always interested in learning something new about the craft and art of blogging, especially if there’s a chance to make a living from it (I’m not now!). And Michael Port is a smart, engaging guy who’s writing is inspirational to us small business-types.
Check out GoodReads.com and sign up if it feels right.

If you don’t know who Rudy Fernandez is, this probably won’t make much sense to you. If you do, it still probably won’t make much sense. After all, it’s a dream. Actually, two dreams!

Rudy is a rookie guard with the Portland Trailblazers. Just finished his rookie season, and as of this writing the team is in a playoff series with the Houston Rockets. As a rookie, he had a pretty good season with a team that far exceeded expectations with 54 wins. Rudy set a new rookie record for most 3-pointers made by hitting 159 during the season – hitting 6 in the last game to set the record. He’s a dynamic player, fits in well with the Blazers and is great fun to watch.

Last week on Sunday morning, I got to sleep in. I usually do on weekends (a bit, anyway), and often have my digital recorder close by in case I have notes to take or dreams to recount.

Turns out I had back-to-back dreams where Rudy showed up. Yeah, I have no idea why. So I took my two somewhat sleepy-headed dream descriptions and edited them together.

I am rooting for Rudy and the Blazers to get even and take the series from the Rockets, fer hevvin’s sake. Would be nice to see. The odds probably don’t favor them, but one can hope, right? And root!

 

 Rudy Fernandez Dreams [3:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Yeah, I’m not a huge Colbert fan, but hey when he puts Paul McCartney on his show I’ll take a look.

Won’t you?

Yes, let’s go skiing! From the top to the bottom of Hoodoo Ski Bowl in Central Oregon on Santiam Pass, here’s a quick drop…

hey, let’s go skiing!

When I was a young skier, around 10 or 12, I already had a lot of experience falling down.

I ‘crashed and burned’ (as me and my crazy ski-nut brothers call it) dozens of times a day. It was part of learning to ski.

In fact, years later, after we reached our 20s or so we’d go back to the resort and the ‘easy’ runs and go do what we lovingly referred to as a ‘dummy’ run, in which we acted as if we couldn’t ski. We’d zoom through the slow folks and plow into the bank, dig ourselves out and do it again.

Man, that was fun.

I didn’t know it at the time but from an early age I was learning to fall. And I think that’s pretty damn important, because when you fall correctly, all you do is dust yourself off and get up.

If you fight the fall, you can injure yourself.

It was the same when I studied martial arts. It was an unusual class. The instructor was a refugee from the typical schools and belt system. Instead, he founded his own school and taught what he liked about all the styles of fighting he had excelled in. I think he had black belts in nine different styles.

So we learned kung fu, ju juitsu, karate, animal fighting and god-knows-what.

But one thing we worked on all the time was learning to fall correctly. This time I was VERY aware of what we were doing, unlike when I was a young skier.

To keep from getting hurt, we’d open our palms and slap the mat as hard as we could. First, we did it from our knees, falling over forward and slapping with our forearms and palms. Then we’d move up to doing it from a standing position. Eventually we did the same during sparring sessions, and finally move onto doing in not on the wrestling mats, but on a hardwood gymnasium floor.

It worked. The theory was that even if you fell from a very high height, if you dissipated the energy correctly you could survive even a fall from an airplane. Yeah, I never did want to confirm that theory, but for some reason it’s in the back of my mind when I fly. Weird, I know.

So after soaking up those lessons, I think they’re very applicable to business, or learning a skill such as public speaking.

Don’t be afraid to fall down. But fall correctly, so that you can bounce back up and get in the game.

When you fail in a public arena, such as giving a speech, if you get down on yourself and let that single failure control your progress, you haven’t learned how to fall correctly.

Instead, take that failure apart (not obsessively!), find out what went wrong, work on the glaring errors, and get back up on stage again.

If your business fails, or if you lose a job, or a marraige falls apart, learn from it. We all fall down.

A single failure shouldn’t hold you back, but unfortunately for so many people it does.

By learning to fall – and taking the next logical step of getting up and getting back at it – you learn how to get on with life, and shrug off that failure.

I’ve been hanging out on Twitter for a couple of months now, finally getting a feel for how it works. And it’s not immediately apparent what to make of the hundreds of snippets of conversations that show up each day on your site.

Imagine a river. It’s a big, wide, rushing river that seems to keep pushing at its banks with more and more water every minute. It flows in all directions, meandering slowly here, quickly here. Plop yourself down in the middle of that river in a tiny boat with a minuscule anchor and that’s what it’s like to jump into the ebb and flow of Twitter.

Currently I ‘follow’ a couple of hundred people and about the same amount follow me @timgonzogordon. When I jump in the Twitter stream I get dozens of ‘tweets’ per hour. I can watch them go by. I can jump in and offer my own pith conversations. In fact I think Twitter was invented to demonstrate the actual meaning of ‘pithy’. Look it up.

If so desired I can reply to a tweet with a comment of my own. That reply can be published so that anyone can see it. Or it can be a direct message to the originator of the message and only he/she can see it.

The type of tweets simply amaze me. Here’s a sample from the last day or two that have come across my TweetDeck:

>>>

In Tokyo’s Narita airport…on my way to home to Hong Kong

Just went to Facebook for the first time in months. I have 4660 pending friend requests. Holy kaw!

I’m not feeling well all of a sudden…. Maybe call it a day. Tomorrow…. Who knows what tomorrow will bring…

Walking downtown. Gonna get me a new MacBook

Great essay on the dangers of feminist slut-shaming. http://tinyurl.com/6upd8e

Korean BBQ at midnight = extremely tasty.

My Twitemperature is a scorching HOT 139°F (59°C)! “Everyone wants you, but no one can have you.” Check yours at http://twitemperature.com

Hey, @ABartelby, wanna join me for a cigarette?

Xmas posting: What unique and meaningful value & connections have you gotten out of Twitter? Here is our five! http://blog.mrtweet.net/?p=69

>>>

Yeah, just like eavesdropping on a conversation. But if you’ll notice, the tweets show a person’s unique personality. There’s desire, excitement, passion, information; comments about food, cigarettes (?), feminism, popularity, computers, etc.

Now imagine that times a hundred. A thousand, ten thousand, a million.

That’s what Twitter is like every day.

Think of what it’s like for someone like @GuyKawasaki with almost 40,000 followers – and he’s following even more than that. Or Robert Scoble @Scobleizer who has 45,000 followers and he’s following over 20,000 people.

Here I have a tough enough time even catching the snippets of the conversation going on with a few hundred people.

But with tens of thousands it must be a very fast-moving river of conversation, indeed.

You can almost tell a ‘newbie’ to Twitter by the type of postings they make. Typically tentative, or perhaps tossing anything into the river to see what floats to the top.

Marketers in particular I notice try to promote themselves and their products more than the average Tweeter. Now there’s nothing wrong with promoting yourself on Twitter; it’s a great platform to let people know about you and what you do. But it can be overdone. I’ve ‘un-followed’ people after one too many promotional postings. I’ve also kept following some marketers after several self-interested promo messages just to see if they would ‘get it’ and evolve, if even slightly.

To me, even if you have an account at Twitter that you started as a way or letting people know about your business, you still have to let people know who YOU are.

After all, your clients want to do business with you because of WHO you are, not necessarily WHAT you do. Of course WHAT you do is important, but if you really want to attract folks that might do business with you someday on Twitter, let them see who you are.

Lisa Braithwaite @lisabraithwaite is a good example. She doesn’t make a secret of her business as a public speaking coach, but when you follow her tweets you learn who SHE is. You know she’s got a cat with health issues. She comments on how Twitter works, how she finds people to follow, and get a distinct feel for her personality.

Others are similar: they wear their heart on their sleeve and let you see who they really are.

It’s like Perry Belcher @perrybelcher said in one of his videos. Being in social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) is like being at a party. You’re there to have fun, not to sell. The selling part comes when they find they like you, check you out, go to your blog or website and then ask for more information, such as joining your list, downloading a white paper, viewing a video or listening to a podcast. Twitter is the ‘cool conversation’ that shows people who you are.

Of course there’s a whole corporate side to Twitter (@starbucks, @comcastcares, etc.) that takes aim at followers in a completely different way. But when you decide to follow a corporate entity, or at least a person behind a corporate mask, you’re opting in to the corporate messages that flow out from that. No one is beating you over the head with unwanted messages; you chose to follow. You can choose to unfollow with a single click.

That’s the beauty of Twitter. It’s an ‘opt-in ongoing personal/business conversation’ that introduces you to as many people as you can stand. Literally. Whether it’s 500, 5,000 or 50,000 you can mix with those people on a casual or intense basis. It’s your choice.

I’ve heard it said that Twitter is not ‘micro-blogging’ as it has been called; it has evolved into an extremely dynamic social media force that will overpower the staid and conservative formats of MySpace and Facebook.

If it hasn’t already. I mean, where do you get more action?

It seems to me that I put a lot of pages in my book-reading log in ‘08. Here are just the best of the best of the fiction or non-business books I read last year:

Kurt Vonnegut – Armageddon in Retrospective
Published posthumously, it’s been somewhat chided for being too personal or perhaps not so pointed. As a Vonnegut fan, I zipped through it and loved every bit. Acerbic as ever to the end.

Armageddon in Retrospect

Nam Le – The Boat
Take a deep breath before you jump into this collection of short fiction pieces. Nam Le is a young man; born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. The vision and power of his writing will stick with you long after you pass the book on to another reader, which you surely will.

The Boat

Martin Cruz Smith books
Gorky Park (1981)
Polar Star (1989)
Red Square (1992)
Havana Bay (1999)
Wolves Eat Dogs (2004)
Stalin’s Ghost (2007)

Having been a fan of the two original Arkady Renko novels, “Gorky Park” and “Polar Star”, I was surprised to learn early in ‘08 that there were not 1, or 2, or 3, but FOUR novels featuring the same ruffled, dogged Russian detective that I hadn’t heard about. Strange, I know. How I missed them I don’t know, but they’re all page-turners, extraordinarily plotted and written.

Hard to pick a favorite, but both Havana Bay and Wolves Eat Dogs stand out in my mind. In Havana Bay, Renko is in Cuba to identify the body of an old friend Pribula and recovering from the accidental death of his wife. In Wolves Eat Dogs Arkady is trolling the ‘dead zone’ of the Chernoblyl disaster, investigating the apparent suicide of one of the most powerful men in Russia. I kept waiting for my fingers to start glowing.

Red Square: A Novel (Mortalis.)

Wolves Eat Dogs (Arkady Renko Novels)

Stalin’s Ghost: An Arkady Renko Novel

Havana Bay: A Novel (Mortalis.)

Rose

Haruki Murakami – Kafka on the Shore
This breathless, spacey and ultimately satisfying novel was introduced to me by Roger Steffens. It follows 15-year old runaway Kafka as he searches for his missing sister and mother, and is filled with mysticism, magic, surreal experiences and a back-and-forth narrative that ultimately meet up on a mostly metaphysical plane. Yeah, I know, thought what the hell, too? But it’s beautiful, eerie and in some ways transcendent.

Kafka on the Shore

Jon Krakauer – Into the Wild
The book that inspired the Sean Penn directed movie, which follows Christopher McCandless on his adventures after leaving college and heading cross-country. He ended up in Alaska where he ultimately died at the age of 24. Vividly reported, the book is an expansion on a 9,000 word article Krakauer wrote for Outside magazine in 1993.