Outlandish Laughter and The Kindle 2

Well, Christmas eve, Tamra and I decided to open up our presents that we'd gotten one another... I've always been a fan of Christmas eve present opening... in fact, it was a tradition in the Wilkerson household growing up that we'd always open one the night before... kids choice... and of course, my parents always managed to bring out the gifts from 'Santa' after we'd gone to bed, so inevitably, I'd snag a J.C. Penny's box with an awesome flannel shirt in it that I mistakenly took for a G.I. Joe action figure, but this year, for me, Christmas was different. I was anxious for Tamra to open hers up, just because I thought it was cool, and that she would get a kick out of hers... so she's into yoga, Bikram Yoga actually, (which by the way, apparently involves doing yoga in a sweatbox) well, I was wandering around the mall on Christmas Eve day, you know what they say- if you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute- when I found myself wandering into some store called 'Lululemon Athletica' well, I must tell you, I've never heard of this place. Ever. But I'm browsing around, and it turns out this is the modern woman's answer to Jo-Ann fabric. Well, they have these cool yoga mats... at least I thought they were cool. So I placed a txt to Tamra's best friend, Emi, who would know these kind of things as to whether or not a yoga mat would make a good gift. Turns out it wouldn't. She already had one. Figures. But, her best friend says, if you go to a shop called 'Lululemon' she really digs the Yoga clothes in there. I walk outside the store, look up at the sign... score. Well, I found her some cool pants and a top and of course, had to get the Bikram Yoga Mat cover. Apparently, when you are doing the upside down 'falling lotus' or reverse 'half lord of the fishes' and you are covered in sweat and barefoot, traction on ye ole' yoga mat becomes an issue. So they made these Yoga Mat covers that are covered with little rubbery traction dots, that help keep your 'downward dog' in position when you are slathered in sweat. I got it for her. She liked it. So much in fact, she can't wait to use it. Hopefully she doesn't hurt herself with all those poses.

So, it came time for me to open my gift... and much to my unexpected surprise... it was a Kindle 2. Now, keep in mind, I wasn't thinking about a Kindle, never even really wanted one.... I've got a Kindle Reader app on my iPhone, and I thought that would be plenty. But once I saw the potential of this awesome device, after holding it in my hand, after seeing the incredible paper-like digital screen, after syncing it with my http://www.amazon.com/kindle account and reading my books on it, after emailing myself some .pdf's to my new kindle email address, after hearing it read books to me, I'm sold. And I'm stoked that I've got it. No more heavy books in my bag on long trips. Thanks Tamra- you are the best!

Anyway- so the whole reason I started this post, however, is not really to talk about Christmas or gifts or Yoga or my new Kindle... but was because I was actually doing some reading on the Kindle and came across this article in the New Yorker from back in August. But what I really wanted to share was the clip of Jeff Bezos being interviewed on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Or to get to the real, more telling, heart of the matter, I really, only, wanted, to share, this little gem-of-a-mashup of Jeff Bezos' infectious, obnoxious laugh.

It will definitely make you laugh. Guaranteed. Merry Christmas all.

Farewell 2009, Hello 2010!

What a year. I've been so fortunate to have been guided-to or led-to or attracted-to, or whatever-to some incredible people, concepts, ideas, books and businesses this year. I know it's only December 22nd, and the year isn't quite over yet, but I can't help but reflect on all the good things that have happened to me this year. Some highlights: I took a real estate investing course the first week of the year. Learned more in that 4 day course about this business than I think I could have on my own in a year. In early February, I competed in a business plan idea competition to join a 'Master Mind' group and was one of four selected from a pool of several hundred people to be a part of a group led by a successful local real estate investor committed to sharing our ideas with one another and sharpening each others business acumen through challenging the way we each look at our businesses. We have met on average every two weeks for this entire year, and it's probably been one of the best experiences I will take away from 2009. I also hired a 'life-coach' or mentor, if you will, in February to help me lay out my business plan and life purpose, goals and a plan to achieve them. It was a 12 week process and drastically changed the way I look at life and achieving my goals. In March, I began working with a company called United First Financial in the evenings and on the weekends, and have found success through working with them part time this year. April, May and June found me traveling to areas across Asia for work on multiple trips for Uncle Sam. Good trips, but not real profitable for me from a personal improvement standpoint. June 30th, I closed on my first home. Quite an exciting day for me. I was very fortunate to have my mother and father on-Island for that event, and they were kind enough to help me move from Waikiki to the wonderful suburb of Kapolei, out in West Oahu. August and September and October I had some more trips to Asia in addition to painting my house... that was, by the way, the first and last time I'll ever paint my own house. I don't recommend it to anyone that has any semblance of sanity and also wishes to keep it. I barely did myself. Women, for some reason, enjoy it. I, however, do not. I was fortunate to have several great friends that helped me with some of the work. September brought with it a visit from my Aunt and Uncle, October brought a visit from a great friend from high school as well as college and also I began communicating with a certain special someone whom I met on eHarmony. Yes, I've been on eHarmony this year, and well, I think it actually works. After some weeks of communicating, we actually met in person in November, and have been spending quite a bit of time together since then. Her name is Tamra, she is an incredible person, and I'm very thankful to have her in my life. Her birthday was Saturday, and we had an awesome birthday weekend celebration for her. Hano Hano Room for Dinner, Stage Restaurant to meet up with her best friend, Emi, who is a singer/songwriter and surprised her and Emi with some birthday cupcakes and lots more friends showing up, then off to Rum Fire Waikiki for some Champagne and dancing. Good times, no, make that great times. It was a great night. Saturday night was her 'Yakudoshi' (she is of Japanese descent so this is a way that her family celebrates their culture with her birthday- Google it) and I had a chance to meet her family. All-in-all it was a great weekend. This week is incredibly slow at work. So slow that I wonder why I'm actually going in, but oh well. Tomorrow is a light day, and Thursday and Friday are days off for Christmas. Next week, I work one day, and then the first week in January, Tamra and I are heading to Kauai for a week. She is in Medical Sales here in Hawaii and has to go to Kauai for that week, so she invited me. How lucky am I? I'm going to use the days while she is working to be productive in preparing for my upcoming transition from active duty Naval service to being a plain-old civilian. Speaking of which, I have started a Property Management Company and will be doing that here in Hawaii on a full-time basis once I get out of the Navy in June. I am very excited about it. My company is called 'Hal Property' pretty simple, pretty straight-forward, but effective and to the point. My website will be http://www.HalProperty.com It's not up yet, but will be launched on February 1st. Check back then and see how I'm doing. If you live in Hawaii and have a need for a property manager, please let me know. I will be the best property manager in Hawaii. I'm going to be focusing on multi-unit dwellings but will work with single-family homes and condo's.

All in all, it's been a great year. Some amazing things have happened to me, I've met some incredible people, and I think I can put 2009 in the books as one of my best years to date. Of course, I say that at the end of every year, and I must say, my expectations for 2010 are even bigger than 2009. This year was a year of trials and tests for me. And by trials, I mean trials to experiment with my businesses, and tests for me to test some of my ideas. There were some other big ones in there this year, that have come and gone, but I don't need to mention those, as they are water under the bridge. I know I haven't shared a lot of this with my online social network, but that was on purpose. Those that are close to me have known, but 2010 is the beginning of something new. Half-way through this year I will no longer have the easy W-2 income coming in from Uncle Sam. So I've been preparing for that fact since January of 2009. It's a pretty big step that I'm going to be taking in 2010. In fact, I'm going to be adding all of you who are my friends here on FaceBook to my email distribution list to which I will be sending out periodic updates for my company. If you choose to keep the subscription, I thank you in advance, if you choose to opt-out after I start them up, I certainly understand.

Well, I guess that's all for now. 2009, thank you for an awesome 52 weeks. 2010, let's get it started!

"Observe people who are good at their work— skilled workers are always in demand and admired; they don't take a backseat to anyone." -King Solomon of Israel (Proverbs 22:29)

4 Days in India...

Broken, dusty, sidewalks. Rocks, dirt, walking paths filled with small, eager hazards, like roots in a forest, but more unscrupulous and easily missed. Awaiting the opportunity to trip the unaware foreigner used to nicely paved paths and walks. Especially in the dimly lit streets at night. Pedestrians wandering aimlessly through the streets, carrying baggage or a chicken or a stack of magazines to peddle to cars on street corners. Appearing purposeful in their direction, but disregarding any and all pedestrian law or etiquette you may find in a western country. Jaywalking is a national past time, but reeks of danger, amongst the zooming cars making rules up as they go, yet pedestrians boldly venture across the dangerous streets as if they were immortal. Beggars banging on your window with their wares while you are stopped in traffic, as they try and get your attention and some rupees. Ignore them or a simple glance will encourage them and fortify their efforts to extract rupees from the well dressed, well kept foreigner in the backseat of a luxury car. People sleeping on curbs mere feet from a major automobile artery. No care whatsoever for their propensity to certain death should just one of the thousands of vehicles driving by them each hour run amiss. Cars, and Auto-Rickshaw's and Bicycles and Scooters; all with a seating capacity of at least a family of four. Converging in one direction with divergent goals. Complete disregard for traffic laws or lanes or right-of-ways. He who is boldest is first. It's a continual game of chicken. Near miss, head-on collisions are the norm. Shrill cry of horns, from low, toyota beeps, to creative high-pitched after-market 'look-at-me-my-horn-blows-yours-off-the-road' shrills. Long blows, short beeps, High-pitched staccato cries and low-pitched moans. Constant near misses and near hits by vehicles among the cacophony of sounding horns that never ends, 24 hours a day. Flash your 'dippers' (brights) and honk to pass at night, honk to pass in daylight. Friendly signs on most large trucks admonishing the participants of the constant roadway grind to do just that. Dismal, Orange, Brown Suffocating Smog, that hides the blue sky and cloaks the sun with a muted, filtered appearance and seems ever present, yet gives the redstone artifacts of millennium gone past a strange proper framing of sepia treatment. As if the smog has come to terms with it's purpose in life and that's to give all of India a brown hue. More pedestrians, gaggles of women, young and old, dressed in brightly colored sarongs of lime green, bright maroon, blaze yellow and subdued brown. Heads covered and mysterious dark eyes peering through the folds, forehead adorned with simply a spot of red or sometimes an intricately designed bindi complete with jewels and gold that give the hindu soul an eye.

Children. If they are old enough to walk, they are old enough to beg. And can and will do so fervently. Otherwise, toddlers can be found sitting near their finely adorned mothers among the dust and smog and litter and mud and dirt and dogs and cows. All within a stones-throw of the other. Sitting contently as their beautifully dressed mothers congregate in groups to share vishna-knows-what with each other on the corner of poverty and chaos.

Cows in the street. Wandering the villages at will. Skinny, malnourished and seemingly oblivious to the hubub of auto-rickshaws, motorcycles and truck traffic, honking, weaving and challenging each other for the right of way. Chewing their cud contentedly as a sacred, zen-like presence amongst the chaos.

Trash. Littered and scattered about as if it belongs. It's hard to find pride on the streets of India. Very hard. 500 million people here live on 100 rupees a day, which is about half the price of a grande' latte at your corner Starbucks, or less than $2 put simply. Picking up trash and litter is the least of their concerns. It blows around and settles and litters like sand being stirred up on the bottom of the ocean ruining a good snorkel experience. Trash everywhere. Pervasive; smelly; obtrusive, yet accepted.

Dogs... seem to be the happiest of all species here as bitches with swollen, sagging teats from multiple litters seem to be everywhere. They play part of the scenery. Not on leashes, not collared, belonging to no one but the chaos. And you can still see them smile. Sleeping in gutters, napping in parks, trotting along the roads, feeding on trash, India is a dogs paradise.

Palatial beauty. A huge disparity between the haves and the have-nots. A US Government sponsored visitor stays at a Five-Star Enclave that is a World-Heritage site complete with gates and security and isolation from any and all riff-raff that may be found outside. Colonial British built buildings with ornate marble and hardwood floors, luxury carpets Victorian style furniture, gold-inlay wall decor, servants hired from the chaos outside to butter your toast and shine your shoes. Serve you coffee, turn down your bed with exquisite linens, clean your room, give you a towel and cold bottle of water as you step off the treadmill.

The cognitive dissonance between what is reality for most residents here and what is reality for visitors like me doesn't escape my wonder. The only thing I can truly come to terms with here, is that no matter what their lot in life, living condition or caste: Jesus loves every single one of these people equally, just as He loves me, you, and every other person on this incredibly diverse planet.

A new home...

Well, it's happened. I talked about buying a new place here last August, and here I sit, almost a year later, moved into my new home. I LOVE it. Interesting enough, I was looking at buying a foreclosed home, and actually started looking pretty hard back in January. Well, as it turns out, short-sales take a REALLY long time, and I didn't really have the patience to go to a Foreclosure auction, and well, there were just never any deals that struck me as something I wanted to buy. Keep in mind, I was considering some Real Estate Investment properties, but in all honesty, I really wanted to own my own house and have a place to call my own... so, back in February, I was out in an area called Makikilo Heights out here in Southwest Oahu, looking at a place that was a short sale (for those that don't know what a short sale is, it's when a mortgage company takes ownership of a house and sells it for less than what the owner owes on it... i.e. short of the full value or price... it's happening alot in this market these days) Anyway- well, I was literally in the driveway of this place that I was thinking about buying on the phone with the realtor when he got news that a contract had been accepted on it. Literally within the hour. Soo... back on the hunt I was going, but as I was going back down the hill from Makikilo, I remembered this one community that had really intrigued me when I first started my hunt for a house in Hawaii while I was looking on the Internet in Japan. It was called 'Nanala at Mehena'. The concept was building on the 'planned community' that the city of Kapolei, HI has been focusing on for about 20 years now. Except Nanala was going to be what was termed a 'Live, Work, Play' community. In that it is zoned as a mixed-use community. Well, it intrigued me when I first read about it, because the whole idea of working for myself and from home has been a long term goal of mine, and these units (some of them) have integrated retail/office space on the lower level. They are also completely energy efficient, have fiber-optic data lines all the way to the premise of each unit, have top of the line appliances, etc., etc., not to mention they are all new. So there I was that day, coming down the hill from Makikilo Heights, when I saw the sign for this community that had so intrigued me a year before. They hadn't started building yet, when I first got to Hawaii, and now, they'd built the first unit and, wouldn't you know, they had a model to show. Well, I stopped in, met the realtor that was showing them, and she took me for a look. Well, after she offered me 16K in sellers credit and knowing I would get another 6K in credit from my buyers agent, I found it hard to resist when I knew I could have a say in all the details of the asthetics of the place, it would be new, and it would be something that I could call my own. I signed a contract on the place two days later. Being that I used a VA loan, it took some time for the appaisal to get finished after the construction was complete (due to the economic environment everyone is using their gov't loans these days and the appraisers are having a hard time keeping up with the demand), but I finally closed on it on the 30th of June. I'm pretty happy with it to say the least. I managed to sell all my old furniture to the tenants that were moving into my old place, for a good price, mind you, and as I write this I'm waiting for the new furniture that I ordered to arrive next week. It is a bit out of the way of things as to where I lived before. It's kind of hard to beat the convenience of living in Waikiki... I really don't think it gets much better than that. But it's actually much more quiet out here, not nearly as many sirens or buzzing scooters going by at all hours of the night, and really, Target, Costco and Home Depot and all the other random little retail stores are all about a 5 minute drive (literally- maybe 6- I've timed it) from my driveway, so I can't really complain. And do you need any other stores than those three? Murphy also digs it because he gets to run off the leash every morning and evening because there is tons of undeveloped land out here that we walk each day. Even the commute to work isn't as bad as I thought it may be. Although I've been told that because school is out for the summer it's not nearly as bad as what is usually is. At any rate, life is good. I'm pretty happy with my new place. I've also got a lot more room now than I did in Waikiki. So if you find yourself in Hawaii, you are welcome to stay. I call my place 'Hal's Hawaiian Ha'ole Hostel' I've got a bed with your name on it if you are heading to the islands. Check my FaceBook page to see some sunset pictures from my Lanai too. I really couldn't be happier about my new place.

Well, thanks for reading my blog... it's been a while since I've updated it, but thanks for stopping by! Cheers and Aloha!!

Monday's a Funday...

So today I'm not working... well, for the Navy that is... I'm heading to Japan tomorrow, and I had tons of stuff to catch up on today. So I took a day of leave, as we call it in the military. At any rate, what a great weekend- my church hosted a huge Easter celebration at the Neal Blaisdale Center here in Honolulu... and I sang in the mass choir. I had one friend ask me if I was going to be the Easter Bunny- I thought that was funny, but no, I just wore a yellow shirt and stood in the back of the choir, trying to remember the words. It was powerful though. If you haven't seen the status updates, you can get a taste of the production here The opening was pretty amazing- there were 5 different styles of drum ensembles from around the world, from Japanese style drums, to African Jimbae's to Revolutionary War style snares, to hip-hop style street drumming to modern day drum and bugle corps style purcussion. It was simply amazing. If anything, check out the opening of the production.

Another thing that I was turned on to this weekend was the power of Twitter... you've probably been hearing about it in the background for a while now, as have I... but I finally saw the light, so to speak, this last Friday. I attended the Social Media Club Hawaii at the ING Direct facility here in Waikiki, and was impressed to say the least. I met someone who has over 66,000 'followers' on Twitter... although I didn't know it at the time. Someone told me after the fact... and then I realized that whatever this lady has to tweet about... there are 66,000 people that are going to listen to it... and then I realized that's pretty powerful from a marketing perspective. So anyway... I'm jumping in... check my tweets out at http://www.twitter.com/halwilkerson and if you are a small-business owner and/or are in sales/marketing, Twitter seems to me to be a pretty powerful platform for leveraging relationships for business in this new information age we are living in.

Well- I'm not getting any items done on my to-do list, so I'd better sign off!

Cheers and Aloha-

Hal

Bob Dylan - Forever Young

I dedicate this song to Larenda. An amazing, classy, beautiful woman, who showed me that life isn't always about the big things, but often it's about the little things. I love you Larenda, and I'm sorry. May God bless you and keep you...