The 2000s

Ten years ago, I was preparing to join my brother Jim and his partner Joe to ring in the new millenium in Los Angeles...a big city where we laughingly thought we'd last at least a few days should the dreaded Y2K hysteria actually come true.

My, my. Ten years later, it seems as though the hysteria was simply drawn out like a giant piece of taffy, stretching across a decade of anxiety, war, bubbles and recession.

TIME Magazine has "stolen" my term, which I began using with friends in Denver about a year ago: This is a lost decade.

We began with a contested election decided by the Supreme Court, but we all seemed to collectively shrug it off, feeling that whomever had won in '00, he would be a one-term president because of the inevitable downturn following the tech bubble.

September 11 changed it all. We had an unprecedented terrorist attack, followed by wars that absolutely no one would have predicted in December of 1999.

Add the housing/real estate bubble, and now the worst recession of our lifetimes, and I think many of us are gasping for air, impatient for the calendar to turn to 2010 so we can all say "well, at least that's over."

And yet...even in the midst of this decade of bad news, fear, and the only RIF I've ever endured...this decade will always be remembered as the decade of my absolute best job ever: My gig at RockResorts with incredible people like Linda McGill, Ed Mace and David Dudar. I may very well spend the remainder of my career searching for a way to capture that magic again.

It goes to show you: There are always things to be thankful for. As crappy as the past ten years have been collectively for the country, I look around and see all of my brothers and sisters and their families happy and healthy, and although it's not my first choice of cities in which to live, I do have a job that is very close to RockResorts model.

An old Joe Walsh song includes the lyric "I can't complain...but sometimes I still do." I recall that lyric especially now as the media helps us throw out this decade. I should complain less; we probably all should.

But, oh how I am looking forward to the "Teens!"

Into the Bar

One of the web boards I frequent has a little spot for "guy in a bar" jokes. Including my all-time favorite:

A skeleton walks into a bar and says, "I'll have a beer.

"...and a mop."

For some reason, goofy humor runs in my family. Tom and I are probably the absolute kings of the pun, and Jim and I sometimes seem to speak a secret language that Jim's partner Joe is absolutely in awe of.

However, the joke-telling champion of the O'Neills has to be Patrick, my nephew. Not necessarily Patrick today; I'm thinking more the 7-year-old Patrick. For a while back then virtually every joke he attempted came out something like this:

"So...hey...Uncle Brian...I got a joke! There's this...and he walks in a bar...a BAR...and he says...no, wait...and then the BARTENDER says...he says...oh, it's not a guy, it's a DUCK...and the duck says...put it on my BILL!!! Cause, you know, ducks have BILLS! On their FACE!!!!"

Thanks for the memories, Patrick. Love you much.

Oh...and a dog with his leg wrapped in bandages walks into a bar. He limps up to the bartender and says...

"I'm lookin' fer the man that shot my paw."

Blue Tape

If you're in the hotel business I've been most of the last 19(!) years, you may know the fable of the blue tape.

When a new hotel opens, in the weeks before welcoming guests there are all sorts of final finishes going on. Walls must be textured and painted, woodwork stained and sealed, tiles laid, mirrors placed, artwork mounted just so. This process is repeated for 100, 200, 300 times...or more. Once for every room and suite; once for every hallway; once for every elevator lobby; once for every public space and meeting room; and on and on.

In the course of all this finish work there are inevitably small (and sometimes not so small) errors that pop up. A piece of trim has an inadvertent gouge; the artwork that was supposed to go above the bed accidentally ends up above the desk; tile grout didn't quite make it all the way into all the crevices.

This is where blue tape arrives to save the day. Those in charge of a hotel opening use roll upon roll of blue painter's tape to help them create a "punch list" for each hotel room. A ragged square of blue tape marks every flaw in the finish work. Workers are drawn to the blue tape to fix the flaw, allowing them to remove the marker.

Most rooms end up slightly freckled with blue tape spots. Some rooms end up worse than a sunburned Raggedy Ann.

Now, often this is because the hotel opening team is (rightly) super-anal about every single nick, uneven surface, and overpainting throughout the hotel. Once the hotel is actually open, the rooms only make money if they're occupied. It becomes exponentially harder to get all the details right once the guests start to populate the place.

So, in the last few weeks before a hotel opens, blue tape sprouts up everywhere. I just witnessed this during the pre-opening of our new Macon Marriott City Center hotel - a stunningly gorgeous hotel that will instantly become the premier accomodation for 75 miles in any direction.

Walking through the property and enjoying its bright, vibrant color palette, I also noted the ever-ubiquitous blue tape. Some squares marked marble tiles that were ever-so-slightly misaligned; others pointed to a minor crinkle in the wallpaper; still others noted an unnatural color variation in stain between two trim pieces that (as befits the finest Marriotts) should look more conforming.

Most of these pieces of blue tape will disappear just before opening, as the engineering team performs their "punch lists" and makes the minor, and sometimes, major repairs necessary.

But this is where the fable of the blue tape gets interesting: Because there are always too many pieces of blue tape, and so many rooms to "punch," and so many niggling flaws from floor to ceiling...a few pieces of blue tape always slip through the cracks and remain after a hotel opens.

Sometimes for years.

If you're like me and look up from time to time when staying at classy hotels around the U.S., you too might spy an odd looking scrap of blue tape in a corner somewhere. I spot them every once in a while.

If you do, you're peering back into the hotel's history to that frenzied time when the hotel was fresh and new...and full of little errors. That piece of blue tape marks something that someone saw and wanted fixed...but missed in the chaos of pre-opening.

Tires that Bite

One of the many bells and whistles on my gorgeous Cypress Green Toyota Highlander is a low tire pressure sensor, which lit up a couple of weeks ago. I checked pressures and everything seemed okay, so I added a couple of pounds of air all around and the light went off.

Only to return a few days later.

I suspected the right rear tire, and sure enough, my adopted Toyota dealer in Atlanta found a nail through the sidewall.

For those of you who haven't experienced the joys of nails through the sidewall of a tire in recent years, here's the news: No one will repair this kind of hole anymore. Unless you are one of the lucky few to get a nail in the bottom of your tire, you are SOL. You'll have to buy a new tire.

Here's a bit more news: It doesn't make much sense to buy a single new tire when your others are about 5,000 miles away from replacement.

And the topper to the news: Toyota put one of the rarest sizes of tires on my Highlander Sport. It's a 19" wheel - very sharp looking on the SUV, but extremely rare. Most trucks and SUVs of this size use an 18" wheel.

So for me, there are exactly three tires available to use. One is the Toyo that came with the car, and given their relatively short life - 35,000 miles - I wasn't keen on a direct replacement, even though I could have bought 2 of 'em and run them on the back for a while before replacing the fronts a few months later. Ah well.

The second option is a Bridgestone that has horrible reviews all over the interweb.

And the third option: Another Toyo, made in China (of course!), but this one has a deep all-weather tread with nice rain channels that could come in handy in Wetlanta. Given my extremely wide selection, I decided to go with those.

Total bill for four new tires: $920. Oh. My. God.

At least these are rated for 60,000 miles, and I did add the "road hazard" insurance, so I'm completely protected against any further nail-in-the-sidewall incidents. I'm thinking that long before another 60K rolls off the odometer, I'll fall in love with another Toyota vehicle and will bid farewell to the Highlander.

And I sure hope I feed a few Chinese for $920.

Man on the Moon!

Oh, boy!

That was Walter Cronkite's reaction to the landing 40 years ago July 20. No doubt it was the reaction of all of us who were lucky enough to live through and experience the apex of mankind's achievements to date.

I'm sure it was my Dad's reaction as well. On that Sunday evening, sometime after the actual landing and before Neil Armstrong's journey down the ladder to the surface, Dad came in from the farm early.

Dad never came in from the farm early. If us kids didn't know it already from Walter Cronkite and CBS News, we knew it was a momentous occasion just from Dad's behavior.

I don't recall a lot of our family's banter or interactions on that evening, probably because I was the "space nut" of the family and so totally engrossed in what was happening that I simply tuned out everything except the foggy black and white images coming from a quarter million miles away. (With respect, Tom was a space fan as well.)

What I do remember is my favorite newscaster's complete loss for words that afternoon when the lunar module settled down on the surface of another planet. I am deeply saddened that Cronkite didn't quite make it to the 40th anniversary; I would have loved to hear his reminisces about this golden age of spaceflight, which coincidentally was also the pinnacle of his own career.

Then, in the evening, Armstrong made his famous "giant leap for mankind" speech and we kids were enraptured by the pictures, by the commentary, by the concept: Man on the moon!

As the decades have rolled on (the years keep comin' and they don't stop comin', to borrow from Smash Mouth), I have come to see man on the moon not only as the greatest achievement of mankind to date, but also as a kind of benchmark of the "American Way" that, sadly, we seem to have strayed from. What I mean is: Kennedy gave us a vision to do the unthinkable in a very short period of time, and guess what? We did it. We did what we said we would do.

I hope that we re-learn this fundamental aspect of the American Way, and well before another 40 years passes.

KQMA plus 25 years

We're less than a month away from the anniversary and so I thought I'd write down a few thoughts about this big project from "Act I" of my life.

Most of my business colleagues and some of my friends don't know anything about how I planned, built and operated a 100,000-watt FM radio station in my hometown. I don't usually list it on my resume as it doesn't really fit what I do today (leadership training, quality, standards, that kind of stuff)...and it's quite literally so long ago. With July 14 approaching we're coming up to 25 years since we went on the air. July 14, 1984 at noon to be exact...but more on that later.

I have a wonderful person to thank for first putting me on the KQMA path by putting me on the radio path...Tad Felts. Tad was the news director at KKAN, the AM station in my hometown of Phillipsburg, Kansas. Some time around 1972 or so he was casting about for kids from the local schools to provide a minute or two of "what's happening" for use during his news broadcasts. As he told me many years later, most of what he got back was pretty low on the "broadcast standards" totem pole, but one voice sounded professional, as if was recorded in a studio, and included actual interviews with other people like basketball coaches and principals. That voice, luckily, was mine.

Tad liked my weekly "Junior High News" so much that he asked my mom if I could work as a DJ at KKAN from 5-7 PM weekdays. And so, at age 14, I started my "radio career" at a very nice $1.60 an hour.

A couple of years into this gig, Tina Pool and I were co-hosting a Saturday afternoon call-in show on KKAN called Rock On, and amidst all the requests for Grand Funk Railroad and ABBA, Tina piped up with "You know, what this town needs is a good 100,000-watt FM radio station. The music would sound so much better."

So I built one.

Ok, ok, there was much more to it than that. I went to K-State and majored in radio-television, managing the student radio station to get an understanding of how things might work back home; I began to research how to actually go through the FCC process of allocating a radio frequency to Phillipsburg and then applying for a license to use that frequency; and I started figuring out how much all this would cost. (About $300,000 back then, as I remember.)

Most people don't know that along the way, there was much scheming by the owners of KKAN to keep my station off the air, including an offer of $50,000 to "go away." I don't think they ever realized that KQMA was never about the money...it was about realizing a dream and giving my town something that, in my mind at least, put it in the "big city" category.

I learned the concept of "leveraging" early by enlisting partners to donate enough money so that the First National Bank would loan me the rest to get the station on the air. Those partners included Mom, the "evil stepbrothers"...and Tad Felts. What an exciting win-win for me. Tad came on board and got ownership of a radio station, something that KKAN's owners wouldn't do for him; and I got what could only be called Phillipsburg's reigning celebrity to anchor all of KQMA's newscasts. Talk about irony: In 1972, I was 13 and providing news items for my "boss" Tad; in 1983, I was 24 and ostensibly "boss" of Tad. Neither of us seemed to be bothered much!

KKAN's owners stalled my applications, fought against my financing, and generally sulked about things, but we did it. The picture within this blog is a shot taken by my great friend Jeff Zillinger, whose dad worked as our "chief engineer" and who, along with his brother Fred, provided unbelievable support to me in the spring of 1984 as the station took shape. That's me in the pic looking at about a third of the 400-foot radio tower going up. (Jeff has pictures from the very top; I was way too chicken to ever go there!)

And on July 14, 1984, we did two big things: First, I got to celebrate my 25th birthday at the Vista Room of Martha's Cafe...and then Tad and I flipped a "switch" that Fred Zillinger Sr. had rigged up to bring KQMA alive and put the station on the air at noon. You can see the switch here with me on the left and Tad on the right.

I was determined to be "professional," so we used an automated format (very high tech in those days), with NBC News at the top of every hour and adult contemporary and Top-40 music playing most of the rest of the time. Tad brought his famous "Tadpoll" talk show over from KKAN...and we were an instant success.

All that before age 25! Perhaps too early for me. In any event, I decided after about a year that I really wanted to go explore more of life beyond Phillipsburg, and so in the end, we actually merged with KKAN and then I sold my interest and went on to Denver, and AMC Theatres, and Marriott, and RockResorts, and Noble...and now.

KKAN and KQMA continue to be a literal beacon for northwest Kansas, and Tad remains an icon of the community.

So, in a few weeks, at noon on July 14, I'll pause to consider two things. How I've come so far in life that "pre KQMA" is now exactly "post KQMA"...and how much fun I plan to have in Act II!

Wow, that'll never fill up

I just got back from an interesting vacation, first to Lincoln to help Ryan till a yard so he could replant his lawn (my back!)...and then to Long Beach to help Jim with what I always help him with: His computer.

I had gotten Jim a receipt scanner for his computer last Christmas, but Jim let me know he couldn't install it because he had no hard drive space left. And so I came to the rescue.

I had actually gotten Jim the computer as well - a state-of-the-art Dell desktop with all the latest features...for Christmas 2002. My, oh my how time has flown! Both Jim and I had to look at the original receipt to be reminded that his machine wasn't just "a few years old." In computer years, he might as well be using an abacus.

Jim's computer sports a whopping 30GB hard drive. Yes, that's thirty. I'm certain when I ordered his computer from Dell in '02, I thought to myself "he'll never fill that up." Sure enough, with the explosion of picture and video files starting around '05 or so, he has managed to choke his hard drive almost completely full.

When I checked its properties some seven years later, I saw that I had endowed his Windows XP "screamer" with all of 256MB of memory. It's hard to remember that there was even a time when such specs were considered healthy. Ah, progress. No wonder Jim was complaining about slow loading of programs!

So we took a field trip to Micro Center and did some shopping. Mind you, there really isn't a great deal to do in order to "upgrade" Jim's current setup; I would have had to give him a reasonable hard drive, plus upgrade his video card, and so we opted for a quick fix until I can buy him a computer for Christmas 2009: More RAM.

Amazingly, this particular 2002 Dell maxes out at 1GB of RAM, but that's a heck of a lot better than 256MB, so we invested $80 to tide him over. Jim also used up a gift certificate to get a really great 22" monitor bargain, which will help him now and can be used later when the new computer arrives.

A bit of partition resizing doubled the size of his main C: drive to 20GB...which I promptly began to fill up by doing all the Windows Updates Jim had ignored over the years. (Jim is the landscaper in the family; I am the computer geek.) But it still left enough room for Jim to get his receipt scanner installed and use the beast until we can do a complete swap-out in December.

At that time, no doubt I'll spec something like a Windows Vista machine with 4GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive. He'll never fill that up.

HDTV - 25 years ago

I'm comfortably settled in front of my LG flat screen in the living room, and about two hours from being comfortably settled in bed, in front of my LG flat screen in the bedroom. Whether I'm watching a cool episode of "Life After People" on the History Channel or the latest installment of "Lost," the quality of the picture is absolutely stunning - especially when you compare it to, say, 25 years ago and the old, curved, not-quite-rectangular, heavy, static-y, vertical-hold-challenged TVs we all had to put up with then.

Except...the gorgeous picture we all take for granted today actually existed in 1983. I know because I saw it then.

Back a little more than 25 years ago, I was a post-college kid struggling to make KQMA work. This was the radio station I founded in my hometown. In between dealing with the sorta-evil competition (the local AM radio station) and the definitely evil stepbrothers with whom I depended on partnership funding, I had a chance to go to a National Broadcasters Association convention in Las Vegas.

I stayed at the Riveria, which back then was a classy hotel near to the convention site. I was overwhelmed by all the technology of that year - and in one special corner, JVC was showing off "high definition" television with an unbelievable 1,080 lines of resolution.

About all they could show were live pictures being taken on-site using models and props. And yet, we conventioneers were blown away by the quality of the broadcasts. "When will we see this in our living rooms?" I asked. The answer would make a salesman of any generation proud: "This will be in homes in two or three years."

Ten times that prediction had to pass before we actually got it. And, if you do actually look at your HDTV picture, no doubt you'll be reminded of what it used to be like: Constantly fiddling with the tint controls, adjusting antennas or turning the "rotor" control, and of course, when in doubt, banging on the side of the set encased in its real wood cabinet.

When it comes to watching sitcoms, we really have come a looooooong way.

Ahhh, Denver in April

I'm off to Denver on one of my regular trips back home this weekend, and it looks a bit dicey weather-wise. Some forecasts are calling for rain, some for rain mixed with snow...and some are calling for a flat-out raging Colorado blizzard with a foot or more of the heaviest, wettest slush you've ever seen falling from the sky.

As is usual, the media will have a field day if the wet slush falls. "A Denver blizzard in springtime April!" the headlines will blare. There will be lots of pictures and video showing hapless drivers trying to dislodge their cars from the drifts. There will be countless reporters interviewing stranded travelers at the airport, who will all be blaming the airlines or the airport for not having 10,000 beds and blankets on hand "just in case."

And I'll smile. This is Denver. This is how it is every spring. We usually get one or two of these surprise hits every year. And two days later, it'll be 60 degrees and sunny.

Luckily, most people remember only what the media tells them, so in their minds, Denver = cold, snowy, mountain-ringed village that one would certainly never want to move to.

And that is just fine by me. Much better to have some sort of containment to keep the population exploding in what, to me, is the absolute best place to live in the whole country.

Pump, then pay

I felt like I had done some time travel this weekend. After a quick jaunt up the road to some factory outlet stores (mostly looking, pretty much shopped out after the previous weekend with Ryan) I took a few back roads to get back on I-85 to head back to Atlanta. Just before getting back on the freeway, a gas station proclaimed unleaded gas at $1.73 a gallon.

Now, as many of you know, I'll drive 20 miles to save 3 cents a gallon on gas, and in this case, the price was about 10 cents lower than the prevailing rate in the city. So I pulled into what appeared to be a fairly modern station.

Except for one glaring omission: There were no credit card swipes at the pumps.

Channeling 1975, when driveoffs were as rare as buying gas with a credit card, I took a chance and simply shoved the nozzle into the tank and lifted the handle switch. Five seconds later...the displays reset to zero and gas flowed. As it used to do regularly in the days before cheating and paranoia swept the nation.

It was a fun five minutes at this pump. I imagined the air I was breathing was a little sweeter; the people around me a little friendlier; and heck, even the gas was a little cheaper. Somehow I had found a little spot left in the country where trust and doing the right thing still win out over dishonesty and suspicion.

Of course, after finishing my fill, I walked into the convenience store and paid for my gas. As it once was. As it should be.

Interestingly, I also bought a Diet Mountain Dew for the road. Maybe the owners of this station still understand the concept of maximizing sales...and maybe this corner of the world still has a population that cherishes real values.

Anyone else out there have a neighborhood gas station that still allows one to pay for gas after pumping?

The end of newspapers?

As an avid reader of science fiction, I've often been exposed to futuristic stories where everyone gets news by cyberspace, or "interlink," or "the net," or some such electronic geegaw. Over the years, I've noticed it in fiction, but newspapers seem to have kept on coming. I frankly don't know how I'd handle my daily 30-minute elliptical run without a trusty USA Today to pass the time.

But lately, and I mean just in the last few weeks, I'm noticing what may be the death of newspapers.

--Here in Atlanta, the Journal-Constitution is exceedingly thin. Fry's ads that used to run every day on the back of the sports section are suddenly running only a couple of times a week. Just today the paper announced that the entire business section was being folded into their general news section in a few weeks. The entire daily paper is down to 40 pages or so.

--Of course back home in Denver, the Rocky Mountain News is in danger of imploding and going dark.

--I've seen other stories about some papers (Detroit) stopping home delivery and going to a M-W-F scheme.

--And no matter what paper I see, I'm noticing far more Associated Press stories and far fewer local-author stories.

I fear that this recession is finally doing what years of sci-fi has predicted, for different reasons: The true death of the major daily local newspaper.

Yes, you can get all the news you want on the web.

No, it's in no way the same experience.

Realistic dreams

Some of my friends tell me that they dream, but rarely remember anything about them. I've always found that interesting because I dream - but remember lots of things.

Last night was typical: I dreamt that I was helping to remodel a house and I clearly remember placing two dark green plastic knobs on top of two lighting knife switches on a wall panel in a bedroom. Ok, ok...why would a bedroom use those kinds of switches? I have no idea. I simply remember the color, texture and feel of these particular circular dark green plastic knobs.

And in real life, I've never come close to that kind of hardware. Never seen it, never felt it.

Now I must admit, my dreams fade after a few days so I don't have explicit memories of most of them say, 20 years later. But I do experience "living" in dreams that I have no reference for in the "real world."

Anyone else have these kinds of dream experiences? Or are you stuck with flying, falling and being unprepared for a high school test, like 95% of my friends talk about?

Credit card fraud happens

Well, I almost went 50 years, but credit card fraud smacked me today.

I was minding my own business running errands most of the day today - to the Toyota dealership for my 25,000-mile maintenance; to the full service car wash that I like on the north side of town; to every TJMaxx, Marshalls and Ross in the area looking for a particular kind of black socks...

...and I ended the day with a quick meal at a Golden Corral so I could read the newspaper.

Fully gorged and insufferably pleased with my accomplishments (except for the socks), I checked the cell phone to see a VM left by Chase. "Fraud Protection Services," the recorded voice said. "Call us right away."

So I did, and after negotiating the menu screens, the friendly fraud guy said, "We noticed a lot of activity on your account today." I agreed - because 3 CC swipes in a day IS heavy activity for me.

But no, the fraud guy said, more like 6 or 7. Huh? We reviewed each one and when he came to "Macy's for $181," I knew something ridiculous had happened today. It became over-the-top when he mentioned I had "spent" $3 at McDonalds. Those who know me know that I go to McDonalds approximately once a decade.

So, quicker than it takes to write this blog, the friendly fraud guy closed the account, ensured that I wouldn't be liable for the $200 or so that "evil fraud jerk" had charged, and I'd get a new card in a few days. No big deal for me; those who know me know I carry cash and use it far more than credit cards.

Of course, it still begs the questions: Was it the Toyota dealership or the car wash that stole my CC number and manufactured a fake card? Should I care, never patronize those places again, tell them anything?

And perhaps the most intriguing question of all: Why did the evil fraud jerks go to Macy's and McDonalds...and not Best Buy or Fry's?

Renovation Revelations

While many were relaxing and watching the endless parade of bowl games of the holidays...I somehow found myself at Ryan's house in Lincoln, Nebraska completely renovating his only bathroom. Oh joy!

Luckily, Ryan has a tenant in the basement with a bathroom, else we would have been very, very smelly after a week.

Ryan, I and Tom (a very capable assistant) did our best to occupy, simultaneously, approximately 50 square feet of bathroom space for a near-complete demo and restoration. Only the original 1929 tub remained; Ryan liked the sculpted border and it could be successfully reglazed.

There were really only two significant pain points during the enterprise. One is that evil force known as drywall. You can't just put this stuff up; you then must tape it. And mud it. And feather. And mud again. And again. And again. And of course, once that's all done, you have to sand. Whoever invented drywall should be sanded to death.

The other no-fun piece was the beginning of grouting the wall tile. Silly us, we mixed the grout a bit too dry. This is because nobody has the magic recipe for grout vs. water and no one wants to even speculate on what that recipe is. By nobody, I include every grout company on the planet. Their instructions are comical: "Mix grout with water." We first went with the "peanut butter" consistency theory, which supposedly gives you a grout that is wet but not too wet. Unfortunately we went just a smidgen too far into "cookie dough" territory, with the result that when we tried to trowel the grout onto the freshly tiled wall...it promptly slid off into the bottom of the tub.

Luckily, two important steps saved us: First, of course, we added more water; and then Ryan produced a grout bag from which we could inject grout into the joints just like icing a cake. I highly recommend that particular method for wall tile for the approximately zero times I will ever be doing this again.

Amazingly, the actual physical pain (lower back) was pretty low for this multi-day event. I think my obsession with lower back stretches at the gym paid off. And in the end, Ryan has a pretty nice bathroom (and a major surprise for his upstairs tenant when she returned from break).

As we've discussed before, Ryan and I talked about doing this full time with fix-n-flips. It is kind of appealing to me...as long as I don't have to tape and sand drywall.