A Dull Fiery Sunday

They say this summer has been hotter than ever and honestly I can't really say I feel it too much. That is to say it is warm but not noticeably warmer than usual. However I appear to be in a minority position as my friends say it is as hot as (put your expletive here) and they are begging for summer to end. I have to say I miss the drama of summer thunderstorms. as rain has been in short supply down here and the clouds have hardly managed to build up to any size at all. Usually summer in the Keys is full of lightning, thick black clouds, sudden heavy rain, winds and then equally suddenly a return to serenity and sunshine.

So another summer of drought and heat, said by some to be oppressive produces modest clouds and skies that are less than memorably spectacular though these early morning pictures were better than I expected. I was taking Cheyenne to a quiet Big Pine neighborhood for her early morning constitutional and the sky was on fire. I couldn't resist testing the lmits of my iPhone to catch color on the fly... 

It has been a strange time for me lately, alternating between work and preparing 911buddy for launch. There are so many odd details to take care of that I feel like I am packing for a long trip and am afraid of not having enough pairs of clean socks. My wife is organizing to make herself the company accountant when our app goers to market. She started out as a lawyer, now she's a teacher, tomorrow she becomes a bookkeeper. That's quite the evolution and not without it's own stress. Walking Cheyenne is a chance to clear my head and now Cheyenne is getting  a little too elderly to enjoy walking much in this heat. I like it but I defer to my 14  year old Labrador.

 We did get to walk to the corner of the old Seahorse Trailer Park in Big Pine. Cheyenne used to love this place when there were people here dumping all kinds of interesting smells in the street. This time she paused, looked and turned back. I hate seeing the empty spaces, homes removed to make building permits available for a new hotel on Stock Island. The county's attempt to control growth requires one unit to be removed for one unit added if you want to build living space beyond the few permits issued each year under the Rate Of Growth Ordinance (ROGO). So to build a new hotel at Oceanside Marina they bought and wrecked the old, infirm but affordable trailer park. The local commitment to affordable housing is all the rage for election season but it doesn't mean much. 

It was so nice to come home to the Keys after another weekend on the mainland conferring with my business partners. I feel more lucky than ever to live here, even though my life is mostly a round robin of work sleep and make phone calls. This year I am actually looking forward to Goombay, the Zombie Bike Ride and Fantasy Fest. I am going to make an effort to take some time and enjoy the madness  even if from the sidelines for a little. I feel like I have missed too much of the events and silliness that marks summer in the Keys this year. All in a good cause, no doubt, but all work and no play makes me dull. And these islands deserve never to be called dull. May your Sunday not be dull.

Another Day

I went in to work last night and it was Coffin Night I discovered as I sat down at my desk. Well, that was a surprise, I had forgotten it is the season for High School High Jinks: Coffin Night. Mind you, Key West seems to have a habit of leaving mysterious, tantalizing hints about what went on the night before. Here on the sidewalk a pair of shoes whose owner seems to have vaporized while striding along the street:

Overhead on Caroline Street I saw a sky filled with cotton wool balls:

And Gallery on Greene always has something whimsical, locally produced to view:

Seven in the morning and hardly anyone was around...

...except of course the wildlife, clucking and fussing as usual:

Cheyenne found breakfast in the aloe in front of the Key West Aloe Company. I have no idea what it was but it crunched quite satisfactorily. The numbers of lost pets in Key West quite boggles my mind: Lost and Found. I am grateful to Cheyenne for being so easy; she uses her dog door to come and go, no fence around the house,m no wandering into the street she just sunbathes on the deck and watches the street from the top of the stairs. When we go for walks she gets her way and we are all happy.

Whoa! Clearly this guy wasn't drinking hard enough the night before!

The massive city operation that is street clean up on Duval, a strictly government operation despite the trash generated by private enterprise and their plastic cups and food containers, is an amazing holding operation in the face of the nightly avalanche. 

I enjoyed this beautiful signage to the world famous sunset affair at Mallory Square. It captures the spirit of the even perfectly. Classy as a friend of mine described it.

After a night at work walking the dog downtown seems beyond the call of duty! I was tired, as tired as my dog after an hour of random strolling.

She loves downtown and won't give up. These days my walks with Cheyenne are one of the rare occasions I get to be in town in the daylight. 

And with the sun coming up it was time to go home.

Where's my bed? My life in Key West...

Working In Fort Myers

Fort Myers is a pretty little river town, but I've seen enough of it over the past year to last me a lifetime. Indeed a life time ago I lived there for a few months and did not much enjoy myself. I am a political creature and living in a place where conservative politics are just assumed to be the mainstream leaves me at a disadvantage. The weather is not the greatest either with frost in the winter, sometimes, and tons of rain like you have never seen every summer afternoon. And yet, I admire Ft Myers' renaissance in the 1990s. The city is clean and tidy in a way I wish Key West could imitate, downtown is lively with bars and sidewalk tables, restaurants and music, art and theater. 

It's a five hour drive from my home in the Lower Keys, up the Overseas Highway, onto the Turnpike at Homestead, then I-75 across the Everglades to Naples...

...where monstrous black clouds gather in the afternoon and then eventually we arrive at the airport La Quinta on Daniels Parkway. My wife likes to shop at Costco and Bed Bath and Beyond and Target and Trader Joe's and all that stuff and then we meet Jeff and go over whatever outstanding issues to move our app-in-the-making forward. The past year has seen us meeting on my weekends off, that is every other week as we tried to figure out how to make 911buddy work, how to configure the drawings for the patent, how to plan our marketing campaign and how to pay for it all.   

Consequently Cheyenne has seen more than her fair share of  downtown Ft Myers in the early hours of the morning. It's a fifteen minute drive from the hotel and the old girl loves trotting around early on a Sunday morning chasing down pizza crusts abandoned in parking lots by heaven knows who the night before.

Ft Myers has done a nice job of preserving these buildings, keeping the streets clean and so forth so I am forced to wonder why Key West is so cavalier about it's own architectural heritage.

The pause that refreshes while I stare at cornices and sky and ponder the meaning of Life.

Is it just that Key West needs to project itself as more edgy, more on the margins of stolid middle class respectability? Do grubby storefronts and broken sidewalks represent the wild side of family vacations? 

I find it puzzling, perhaps because I don't view Key West as being that far off the beaten path. I mean, when you go to Key West you haven't fallen off the edge of the known universe...it isn't an Open City like Tangier in the 40s or Shanghai in the 30s, dens of iniquity and vice where Anything Goes. 

Perhaps I have answered my own question. Ft Myers is nice and clean and tidy downtown (it is certainly a bit more raggedy in the fringes where industry, car sales and the African-American community live) and is thus more familiar. No Fantasy Fest madness, no reputation for...what is it Key West is known for? Gays, wild parties and wretched excess. 

So I guess I can't have Key West be wild and devil-may-care and clean and tidy. I guess I will have to learn to take it as it is.

At some point in my life I will get to spend my alternating weekends off at home. 

The First National 911

http://911buddy.com

"Key West 911, where is the emergency?""Hi, I need the 911 in Charleston, South Carolina. My wife just called and she can hear burglars breaking into our home.""I'm sorry we only serve the City of Key West and we can't connect you to 911 centers in other cities.""So what am I supposed to do?"

Good question. The fastest option is to call your wife back and have her call 911 to get help. You could Google your home police department and hope they answer their administrative line after hours so they can transfer you to their 911 center...or if you had 911buddy on your iPhone you could have hit the locator function and been connected, with your wife on the line to her 911 center.

Reality check: 911buddy is currently being built by my partner Jeff with VezTek, an iOS development company in Los Angeles and the idea is to have the app up and running by Thanksgiving which will be here sooner than we think... Delays are possible as this is a start up and we have learned to expect the unexpected over the course of the past 18 months.

This essay includes screen shots from our Web page, HERE which is also under construction. I promised readers of this blog a sneak preview of my project and here it is.

Two years ago I was wondering what to with myself. My marriage had gone through one of those rough patches as we seemed to be living divergent paths after we lost our house to foreclosure, a loss that with the passage of time has resulted in liberating us in ways we had not previously imagined. I wanted to do something different and usually my response to tedium is to get on my motorcycle and ride away for as long as I can. Or go sailing, however we had no sailboat, Cheyenne is a daily responsibility, delightful but not a great traveler, and, small point, we had no money to speak of. We have pensions and the wreckage of the great crash of 2008 which induced panic among some fellow investors we had invested with, and who sold everything at a deep discount. Buy low sell high we said but we were in a minority and the syndicate sold low and that was that, we got out with our nest egg sliced and diced. Enough it turns out to start a company, but not enough to retire on.

How, I thought to myself can I possibly find meaning and purpose with my wife in my life sparing us the slow steady and certain decline into a tediously impoverished retirement? Electronics, I said to myself in the manner of Mr McGuire in The Graduate who thought plastics were the future. Well, I thought, I know the 911 system real well after ten years working in it, maybe there is something we can do there. And of course I got yet another call from someone in Key West frantic to connect to a 911 center somewhere else in the country and I started mulling over a possible application for a smartphone.

It seemed like a good idea, the more I thought about it but I could find nothing similar anywhere, nor even any discussion about this peculiar hole in the 911 system, and that gave me pause. Was I crazy? Well, I finally decided to broach my idea to my wife and she would either kick me in the backside to sell the idea to Quirky, my original non-entrepreneurial plan, or she would tell me to go back to sleep and double down on the overtime, our original economic recovery plan. As it was she thought it was a great idea and started nagging me to act on it which plan freaked me out. Me? Put myself to a public test? I think not... Then I thought of Jeff Abbott, a long time reader of this blog who helped me re-set the page once when I screwed some delicate HTML mechanism in the back of Key West Diary. I had never met him but with my wife, the harpy from hell nagging me, I called Jeff out of the blue at his Cape Coral home...the first of many nerve wracking cold calls I have made on behalf of the John Avery Company, of which I am now President and of which Jeff is Vice President of Technology (and my wife is COO). All of those titles and five bucks might buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks or Panera, the early meeting rooms of the John Avery Company, named I might add, after the most successful pirate in history whose real name was Henry Every.

I have been a wage slave all my life, and it has been a very good life, with organized time off, paid vacations, benefits, properly paid overtime and job security and respect. The banking fiasco of 2008 stabbed my psyche in a very profound way and brought home to me a suspicion I have been harboring for a long time: We do not really matter, in the grand scheme of things. I understand some people turn to God to get meaning but God and I haven't been on speaking terms since I traveled through Africa on a motorcycle decades ago and I asked why the fuck people had to live in such misery amid abundance and God didn't reply. Then in 2008 the message that greed and selfishness trump (pun intended!) decency and selflessness was brought home to me by the sight of millions of Americans losing everything as banks cashed in their illegal shell games and got compensated by the government for their "losses." We got swept up in the wholesale asset destruction and lost the 25% we put down on the house and the extra mortgage payments we had made when our asset income was wiped out. We still had a roof, medical insurance, incomes and a pension. But other people lost their jobs and their homes and ended up in the street with their kids but without health insurance or the certainty of a daily meal. To me the message was clear: we are all Africans now.

So I decided it was time to take care of my family myself and together with my wife and with Jeff we became entrepreneurs. The experience has been eye opening. I am astonished by the chaotic nature of many IT businesses we encountered as we tried to hire a developer. The way people talk about Government you'd think we lived in Nigeria, but if you had shared my experiences dealing with suppliers you would agree with my friend Jack Riepe who reassured me in my dark moments by explaining that American business is "run like a lemonade stand." So, even with my lack of experience I'm in with a chance I thought to myself If I do it right, take my time and get the marketing right. Our government paychecks keep getting cashed exactly on time so we are staying afloat. My paid vacation allowed my wife and I to spend the summer hunting down a reliable company to build the app, for which at last I held the U.S. Patent. All the stress got us bedridden with pneumonia, a first in our 21 years of hard fought marriage, but here we are, on the brink of doing something good.

My thanks to Michael Schein of MicroFame Media in Brooklyn whose guidance has helped us navigate the crazy stressful moments of appalling decision making and who will make 911buddy a household name as we go forward. To Blaine Graboyes whose experience with start ups has given us much needed common sense not to mention an ace Pitch Deck, a start up tool I never even knew existed six months ago. We scribbled so many ideas as we brainstormed trying to keep our eye on the prize. At one point I realized that yes, it's true, you get to the stage where you keep pressing forward because you cannot turn back, failure is not an option, and you're more afraid of failing than you are of succeeding. Thanks also to the Yarmulke'd bankruptcy attorney we met with in Ft Lauderdale one desperate day who told us to just keep going. He was right, we still had some wiggle room. That and endless note taking.

To Jeff many more thanks for being smart and levelheaded, for trusting me when it seemed like the chips were down, for spending endless weekends at La Quinta Ft Myers banging our heads against the wall trying to make the patent work, losing our tempers and our trust in ourselves.

 

I told my Chief of Police at work about my idea and to his credit he got it immediately and we are looking forward to giving Key West the historical credit for developing the best innovation in 911 service since the smartphone was invented. Thanks to him for his support, Captain Brandenburg my boss, and we also owe big thanks to Mary Jane and all the cheerful staff at the front desk at La Quinta Ft Myers, on speaking terms with Cheyenne so often have we been there, every other weekend for a year...Incidental connections all help in the struggle to give birth to an idea.

We were going out of town so often our friends wondered if we were moving to Ft Myers. We had to break down and expose our secret plan to start our own business to reassure them. Frankly I am sick of non disclosure agreements and looking over my shoulder worrying about my idea. Getting the patent was a huge relief. On the subject of friends my colleagues on night shift have known about 911buddy for six months and never told a soul. Kristi, Nick, Shannon and JW have been an invaluable sounding board and generous to a fault in putting up with me as I worry about some setback or another. If 911buddy works as well as I expect it to, they deserve thanks for telling it to me like it is. Last Tuesday night Kristi said to me: "We had four 911buddy calls this weekend!" as I took over her shift. Monday night JW took a call and I heard him tell a caller "We have no way to connect you, sir...YET" and he winked at me across the room. With colleagues like these who needs friends?

And of course thanks to my wife who has trusted my idea and propelled it forward by never letting go, by holding us all to our deadlines, for beating us into action long after we were as dead as the proverbial beaten dead horses. Everyone at the John Avery Company is terrified of hearing from her when deadlines loom. But without that drive this idle dream would never have got off the ground.

Soon it will up to this man, our newest partner in the company to get the app where it needs to be, on telephones everywhere:

 

I've known Joe for twenty years and he can sell anything to anybody, a skill I greatly envy. It's on his shoulders we dump the next phase of this exercise in masochism known as running your own company. A strangely enjoyable masochism it turns out.

Last but not least my thanks to you the readers of this page. My warning last year was cryptic but heart felt: I knew I was going to have less time to devote to composing this page, less energy to run down ideas, less content to post, and believe me I am truly sorry about that. But I hope it is clear now that my time has not been wasted and my commitment to this page is as strong as ever. I have promised myself if 911buddy ever makes me some money that first, my long suffering Triumph Bonneville will get a refresher of new parts and some small mechanical improvements my 86,000 mile motorcycle long since deserved, but also I'd like to expand the photography on this page with a telephoto lense. And perhaps one day I will have more time in my life than I do right now to take pictures that go beyond my rather small trips that I need to make To Get a Things Done. On that subject thanks to two blog readers who have given advice and support at critical times and kept the secret long enough to get me here: Gary in Tennessee, and George in Prague.

I hope you will be among those that will gain some benefit from buying my $30 app -that price includes a six dollar discount on the full price- putting it on your phone and feeling reassured that anyone you care about, anywhere in the U.S. (and Canada when I can get around to it) can call on you for reassurance and help in a crisis and you can easily give it to them from your iPhone (Android to come as soon as Jeff can build it). Hell, I'll see if I can organize a discount for Diary readers...

Cheers

Michael Beattie

President John Avery Company

Click to buy our reduced-price pre-sale national 911 app on our website http://911buddy.com

 

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Fantasizing Key West

I really quite liked this Automated Teller Machine when I strolled by. How perfect I thought: "Welcome To Key West; Get Cash." That about sums it up really.

Not true, there are bargains if you know where to look and knowing where to look depends in large measure on knowing who to point you to, in order to look in the right place. Luckily I am overloaded with spare pink Crocs at the moment. I'm not sure why they make them in men's sizes as they are so hard to sell they practically give them away, lucky me.

An incautious scooter renter managed to get park and get a ticket, $25 or even $35 depending on the mistake...This in a town where free parking for motorcycles and scooters is everywhere. Welcome to Key West, get cash. Pay off the little white slip of paper wedged into the speedometer.

I missed the Fantasy Fest party last weekend when I was working. Had I not been working I'd probably have missed it anyway. The idea is to raise money for assorted events leading up to Fantasy Fest week and whichever people get the most money become King and Queen. Monies raised go to AIDS Help which gives the whole Nudity Fest a veneer of respectability. Fantasy Fest is another of those bones of contention in a town that loves a drag down debate from time to time. The problem for Fantasy Fest opponents is that the grotesque dress down show brings in tons of money and in Key West money always talks. Besides which, looking at the pictures in the paper Fantasy Fest remains firmly in the hands and for the entertainment of a mostly older crowd. Which leads the ageists in our midst to assume that older people shouldn't strip however as usual the older people have the money and the buff young things don't. This means there is a natural, progressive and apparently unstoppable drive to see older participants in the Fantasy Fest week at the end of October.

This year the Fantasy Fest Grand Parade falls directly on Halloween and the city wants families to take trick or treating outings to the night of All Saints, November 1st. That suggestion has raised the predictably combative opponents and once again crass nude commercialism butts heads with the families of Key West. I am no great fan of Fantasy Fest but to me it's just another messed up week(end) similar to but more intense than Lobster Fest, Bike Week,Mini Season, and whatever other money spinning events they have conspired to create. For a town that used to die, economically, every summer, Key West has got the money flow figured out these days.

Now it is September and the seven weeks between now and Fantasy Fest will fly by before people start to pour in, in droves. Everything now starts to take on the calendar divide of "before" and "after" the Grand Event. And the last week of October will be a week when not much gets done in Key West when the city pretty much gives up trying to function. In a way its a rather nice evocation of big local holidays in the medieval past when cities would shut up shop to celebrate a patron saint or some such local festivity. The fact that Key West in the Age of Internet is willing to shut down for a few days, totally ignoring the outside world, is rather quaint I find. I wish it wasn't to honor people getting shit faced, taking their clothes off and acting stupid, but there it is. We must make the most of it and commiserate the end of Daylight time and the start of short winter days and no more swimming. Winter comes after Fantasy Fest.

---------------------Preview-------------------

Tomorrow's essay will explain in detail my business project which is supposed to come to market, fingers crossed, by Thanksgiving. I apologize for the delay and the toll it has taken on my ability to devote the full measure of my attention to this page. There has been a reason for that and I believe it will prove to have been worthwhile. Fingers crossed, as always.

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Summer Sunday

I like this picture I took in the Spring. I was hunting for a geocache (not found) on Washington Street, so I figured I would re-post it to remind myself of the beauty of summer shadows and light.