Archives for 2009

Radio Daze

September 2, 2009 by Dave Hampton

I joined the college radio station as a freshman: WRVU, the student-run Voice of Vanderbilt, Nashville’s Music Station. Album rock, special jazz, folk, and classical, news-of-the-hour. I’d originally joined to be a board operator, fascinated with all the buttons and lights (the studios of a Paris FM station, left, was my vision), but the station had their on-air talent operate the controls, so I became a DJ. As “Dashing” Dave Roberts, I lit up the late night airwaves with teeny-pop and oldies, migrating to the late afternoon drive-time slot. It was a wonderful experience: I made a lot of close friends and had a ton of fun.

Facebook started a WRVU Staff Alum group, and its been amazing to reconnect with all of the folks I knew. Some stayed in radio and enjoyed good ratings and careers, others went into related work in audio engineering or voice entertainment. Fred Buc, for example, hosts an oldies show on Lightning 100 that I can stream into the Netherlands on Saturday evenings (highly recommended while cooking dinner). It made me dig out the olde yearbooks from that forgotten era, and I was able to get some decent scans of the staff and facilities for the group photo page. We’ve all been trying to pin names on the players, swapping stories about who did what.

Of course, my daughter couldn’t help but notice the activity. I was around 20 when this all happened, her age now, and she thinks it’s a hoot to see what I looked like then. Even more so, the blonde woman next to Nick, Ben and I in the picture above was my girlfriend at the time.

“You had a girlfriend ?!?!” “But … she’s cute ?!?” Yes, dear, yes: Dad was once a hot property…

‘funny how we come full circle from not believing our parents were ever young. I still don’t always understand how many years have passed, I don’t feel that much different.

The sensate pleasure of cycling

September 1, 2009 by Dave Hampton

The expat-car went back to the lease company a month ago: I armed myself with a discount pass for the train and a strippenkart for the bus and braced myself. So far, though, things have gone swimmingly. The office is three blocks from the apartment and shops (winkels) fill the neighborhood, so I usually walk (still a novelty) to the loft for work, stroll to the stores, putter over to the PT.

Life (in summer) is good.

This week, I borrowed a bike to pedal over to Il Fiore for some exercise (ironically, to do the exercise bike), and found myself completely captivated within five minutes. I passed the club, continued along the river out of town, and nearly on to Eijsden. It’s a wonderful evening ride; the sunset glints off the river, the town dwindles off into farms, and the traffic gives way to cattle. Regions of warm air alternate with cool, enveloping smells appear and disappear: the air has much more texture than when walking or boating.

I haven’t got the full Dutch style yet: riders are either “upright and nonchalant” or “hunched over and sweaty”. There’s no way that I’m doing the super-suit, glasses, and helmet, opting instead for a comfortable jeans and t-shirt combo, one hand on the steering, one ready for the bell.

The biggest hazard is not cars: if you can read Dutch street markings, the bike lanes are a mirror image, and cars really do yield to cyclists. Rather, it’s the motorbikes that sneak up, pull around, cut in, roar onward. A momentary distraction, occasionally unnerving.

I could get used to this; at the moment, I’m alternating nights out and am starting to hunt the classifieds for a used set of wheels. It’s hard to believe that I let three years pass before I picked up the habit.

Live, from the Global Command Center

August 31, 2009 by Dave Hampton

When I first started working in Maastricht, I remember that a stylish corner office was one of the early thrills. Glass furniture, territorial views, a personalized nameplate were all pretty exciting perks for starting the new position with confidence. I gave that all up, of course, opting for a substantive workspace befitting the modest beginnings of my new enterprise. Outplacement assistance provided an office, really more of a room (?), no, actually a table in a hallway, free for six months. So, I have a nice big workspace, live internet connection, communal coffee, and a fair amount of quiet in a second-floor loft in the central Wyck. The temperature control isn’t great, the window faces a brick wall, and the firewall blocks e-mail and Facebook, but its home each day from nine to five.

Time is evenly divided between building business structures and completing work for the first client. I have a notebook of thoughts and questions that is rapidly filling with ideas, arcane drawings and scattered sentences culled from friends, books, and podcasts. The cash-flow diagram finally simplified to something that could be reported to the government for my first VAT accounting, and the logo got its first public airing in my first invoice for payment. Things feel pretty humming and happy as the new week gets underway.

I had a really good conversation with a member of my fledgling board of advisors last weekend, a group of august grey-beards (even the women) possessing vast experience and endless patience. How do I delegate tasks effectively; how do I avoid over-managing my contractors? If there are opportunities to grow beyond the hours I have to put into it, how do I find and manage help (without taking on employees). What should the business become when it grows up, and what jobs should I refuse along the way? Should I become known beyond my circle of friends and, if so, how do I brand and market to my audience? While I can hypothesize about all of these answers, it really helps to have folks to bounce ideas and alternatives off of. A little interaction energizes me for the week, and the fertile space of the Stone Bridge Global HQ gives room to find the answers. I am doing a lot off little experiments and seeing how things turn out, how they feel. Then I talk them over, press the best bets, and grow new shoots from there.

I don’t know if this is how professionals set up new businesses, but so far it’s helped me to avoid a lot of the mistakes I made with the last few attempts.

Sunday’s Thumbs Up /Thumbs Down

August 30, 2009 by Dave Hampton

‘gotta love the Maastricht Food Festival and Chateau de Jehay, but CarTrawler and Microsoft are causing trouble…

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Thumbs up to the four-day Bite of Maastricht, rolling into the Vrijthof Square this weekend with 40 food booths and live entertainment. More properly known as the Preuvenemint, it resembles US festivals from Seattle or Chicago, where local restaurants offer low cost / low volume samples. It’s ideal for noshing a wide selection, discovering a hidden gem or finding an old favorite. It seems to be yet another opportunity for locals to dress up, eat, and socialize against a backdrop of colored lights and bouncing music. I can’t fault a culture that enjoys so many varieties on this theme.

It’s a more expensive event than its American counterpart: patrons purchase coupons for 1.80 euro each, then redeem them at the food stalls. Beer and wine cost one coupon (lassen); small samples cost 3, small plates cost 5, and champagne and drinks run 6-8. This pricing tends to attract an upscale crowd: there were more evening jackets and cigar smoke than I remember from any other Dutch festivals. The grounds were packed, though, and the food samples were excellent.

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Thumbs down to Skyscanner’s new Car Hire service. I’m a big fan of their discount airlines search engine: it’s the first place I go when I need to find a cheap flight. I was excited that they added car and hotel booking to their service, and found offers at about 2/3 the price of other sites. The first booking with EuropeCar went fine, but the second, with GoldCar, got ugly very quickly.

My flight arrived early, so I was at the rental counter at 3:15 rather than 4:00. GoldCar told me that I could accept a micro-car for the same price, or wait 45 minutes. I cooled heels until the appointed time, then went back to claim the car. The booking, prepaid, was for 165 euro. However, the desk agent started adding fees for taking the car out of Spain, for extra insurance, and for prepaid gasoline charges, bringing the total to 300 euros. When I objected, he said that was between me and CarTrawler, the agent behind SkyScanner. I called them, and they said that the fine print in the contract allowed the agent to add on excess charges at pickup, at will.

So, there is really no way to know what the booking will cost, and because it’s prepaid, I can’t refuse and go to another vendor? “Sorry, sir, you need to read the contract and call us if there are questions.”

Since I had already dropped 45 minutes, I had time and inclination to press the point, and got the booking down to about 200 euros. But beware: the quotations can be an absolute fiction.

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Another thumbs up for the Chateau de Jehay outside of Liege, a large country house with a wonderful collection of rococo procelein and clocks. The owner was also a sculptor scattering his uninhibited copper statuary across the gardens and pools that surround the house. There’s an exhibit of abstract works expressing the idea of colour in the gardens, and a museum exhibition of drawings by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux.

The owner’s tastes are both colorful and erotic: he depicts the female form in many happy poses and variations. Having taken a few life drawing classes, I always enjoy seeing how artists capture the human form, and there are wonderful works in this collection. Some of the works will surely provoke a smile: his statues of women draped over insects and waterways are absolutely unique.

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And one last thumbs-down to Microsoft. A recent update to 64-bit Vista has infected my computer with the Blue Screen of Death every time I unplug a USB device; no fix is yet available. Both Windows Live Writer and Windows Live Mail have died; tech support has escalated my issues for the past week before notifying me that they have reproduced my problem, thanks for bringing it to their attention. In the meantime, I have yet to find an alternative WYSIWYG editor for Blogger: I’m limping along with a combination of Word 2007 and a draft editor from Google.

Windows 7 can’t come too soon…

‘been a busy month…

August 29, 2009 by Dave Hampton

I was counting the days that I’ve been away, and I think I’ve hit a new low of being in the Netherlands only about a quarter of the month of August. Family travel, medical transitions, business meetings, even the occasional vacation day has kept me busy and off-line. Duriing the dog days of summer, it’s not a bad thing: I needed the break after navigating all of life’s recent changes. And the outcomes have all been good: note the two feet, both flat on the ground. A big change, if you knew me before.

It hasn’t been easy to keep in touch with the blog: especially since I’m struggling with a few computer problems. Live Writer has mysteriously quit working, and Microsoft is still sifting logs and escalating the problem. In the meantime, I can’t upload pictures easily and the formatting has gone to pot. I’m also beset with a sudden squall of Blue Screens caused by a recent Vista upgrade: Microsoft promises a solution real soon.

And the IRS is sending me purple notices saying that “Your entity has defaulted to the category for which you have already qualified under your entity classification. Since the entity election is already its default classification, filing the Form 8832 is unnecessary: your business is classified as a Disregarded Entity.” Ummm, thanks? Especially since they enclosed my original Form 8832 along with a pre-paid, pre-addressed return envelope.

But it’s a sunny day, warm breezes, and I can’t complain. Especially not from two feet.

Back after some work

August 21, 2009 by Dave Hampton

The resolution to be a more faithful blogger crashed quickly…

I’ve just returned from a business trip to the US, exercising my new consultancy in the service of a paying client. It was an engaging experience. They have a new diagnostic technology that is almost complete and want to have their clinical evidence portfolio ready by next summer. The device review and business plan discussions lead to just the right conversations about patient needs and target markets, competition and reimbursement. The indications for use and claims for what the product will do flow nicely from that discussion, and that, in turn, defines the clinical study and patent strategies. Funding and resource needs support the plan, and a reasonable timeline and plan emerges. These are smart, motivated people and it was fun to be collaborating on ways to build the business and to bring their product towards market.

It did make for an intense visit, though. We worked about 14 hours each day, rotating among topics and working groups. Jet lag ensured that I was up early, so there was time to reflect on the previous day’s discussions and to prepare questions and suggestions for the upcoming meetings. It was a great learning experience for me as well, finding out how my role as a contractor best supports them and occasionally reminding myself of the limited part I needed to play.

Aboard a crowded plane with work to do, both coming and going, and with limited time in hotels overnight, there was no time to develop thoughts in essays. Instead, I scribbled notes to expand on when I returned. Similarly, the books I brought along went largely unread; I skipped the new movies on the plane. Life is changing.

The airline lounges and breakfast buffets were filled with corporate folks on sales and strategy missions. I feel a lot of distance from them now. As a small business owner, I’m thinking more about value, cost, impact, and building the future, not about project milestones and negotiated leverage. (Even the vocabulary is changing, isn’t it?)

Things are happening faster, but there are so many more things to do. It could feel overwhelming, but things feel remarkably steady at the moment. The business structure is well in place (sans web site, still under development) and my focus is shifting towards filling it with good projects and relationships. It’s a fun period, full of potential with many small experiments and experiences illuminating the way forward.