ZguideZ

Lol! Those look a lot like ours did but we didn't have color - it really makes the difference.

Definitely a market for it. Another Hawaii company, Shaka Guides has a similar concept though with voice-actor recorded tours and they seem to be doing well. Our concept was to have locals sharing their history and knowledge on a self-guiding tour.

The idea of running it through a pair of AR sunglasses is wild! We were doing it strictly on smartphones - some of the biggest headaches came as a result of Apple's App Store process - we had to rework everything and since the back end was independent that meant we had to rework the android version as well.

You should look up the pictures of it - there must still be some out there...

Really powerful experience that I am grateful for (though I wish my hair would grow back - lol). At the moment working on a much more manageable project with a great team (Iwahai.com) and maybe in the future there will be an opportunity to revisit the ZguideZ concept. I still love the idea, but managing a worldwide network of independent guides is more than I want to take on at the moment.

Recent startup failure was ZguideZ - an app that allowed locals to create their own digital tours, charge what they want, and then collect the majority of the profit on tours sold.

It failed because it was a far bigger project than I was able to manage as a solo founder - though I tried. It was beyond my ability to code it and I didn't have funding to recruit quality developers. I hired a budget team and we cut corners to stay in budget. I was unsuccessful in recruiting a team - partly because I had taken on a cofounder who decided he would rather surf than work on the business development end of our product - without a founder agreement, he was dead weight that scared investors and potential team mates away. In desperation for help, I began working with a veteran who had recently separated from Army intelligence - he had undisclosed mental issues and when our business plan was made a finalist in a university bizplan competition, he accused me of being a spy sent to retrieve classified information from him and sabotaged our meetings with investors, potential hires, and the competition administrators. He withdrew us from the competition and sent out insane accusatory emails to our bankers and advisors.

I attempted to carry on but the shutdowns of tourism in Hawaii and sheer exhaustion over my co-founder mistakes led to shuttering this project we thought would be the next AirBnB.

All told, this was a budget MBA program for me which ended up costing about 1/4 what a quality MBA would have cost me and probably taught me far more.

Lessons learned were: 1) the importance of a founder agreement 2) the importance of doing enough due diligence to understand the true scope of a project and then doubling or tripling the amount of work it will take to achieve that scope 3) the importance of working with the right people and refusing to settle when it comes to product or team

Just prior to smartphones, I founded a startup called Puhrump that allowed people to call into a call center and have the operators google anything for them. It was a way to solve bar bets and find things out before the internet was in everyone's pocket. Unfortunately, the internet appeared in everyone's pockets before we had completed our seed round of funding. Great idea but a couple of years too late.

The other alternative to the pointy nose theory was that there just weren't a lot of people who were into having W up their butt, but we felt that must not be the case.

In 2004 my brother and I developed a buttplug shaped like George W. Bush - we called it the Bushplug. Manufacturing was more expensive than we had expected but we sold about 100 of them - presumably as novelty gifts. Our price point was too high for a novelty gift and the nose was a little too pointy to be an enjoyable sex toy. We made our money back and had some fun with being featured on BoingBoing and Fleshbot. Someone tried to sue us. We sent the last of the Bushplugs to the Smithsonian's presidential museum. We made our investment back but didn't become buttplug millionaires.

I'll pass on that one...yuck.

Somehow being told how to think for myself seems like it misses the point.

Try using Slack. Not quite the same, but interesting.

I should spend more time there.

That's pretty good. I wish it was more customizable though.

So, when the post office approached the treasury and requested financial assistance to continue paying pensions, delivering the mail, and doing everything else the post office did – Trump didn’t see a foundational institution of U.S. history – instead he saw a chance to stick it to that fucking Bezos.

He had a secondary reason, that actually might have been more compelling than the primary but which carried less emotional ammunition – the Democrats were increasingly clamoring for a mail in vote in the 2020 election – something that would hurt all the ‘traditional’ election rigging that all of his cronies were engaged in.

Cool. Thank you. I ran into Gopher a long time ago and thought maybe it was gone or dormant. I appreciate your clarification on my ask.

Capitalism requires workers and consumers. The places those children are have plenty of workers and do not generally produce consumers of any volume. Capitalism weighs human life only in terms of profit and loss. It is profitable in capitalism for those children to die because they do not require resources, diminish worker capacity etc. Ugly system probably created by and for evil.

Let's not delude ourselves, workers are already slaves under capitalism. How many times have you heard someone say they were working until they could buy their freedom? That's what saving for retirement is, after all - and most end up failing and having to work in some capacity until they are either unable or dead. Wage slavery is slavery.

I still maintain two blogs:

Vagobond ( https://www.vagobond.com ) is about my travel and geographic adventures along with many trips about how to travel well on a limited budget.

The Korean Penis Park http://vagobond.com/the-penis-park-in-samcheok-south-korea/

All the Books I've written for Free: http://vagobond.com/im-giving-away-all-the-books-ive-written...

http://vagobond.com/ancient-hawaiian-death-and-burial-practi...

Antichrist2020 ( https://www.antichrist2020.com ) is the fusion of the many blogs I've written over the past 25 years with entries dating back to the 1990s. It has wandered all over the place to whatever is interesting to me at the time - today it is mostly about the end of the modern world as we know it, the destruction of the world by capitalism and corrupt American politics and the decline of the American state.

A few interesting posts: Manifesto of a Cultural Terrorist: http://www.antichrist2020.com/2020/01/16/manifesto-of-a-cult...

Manifesto of Peopolism: http://www.antichrist2020.com/2020/02/20/a-manifesto-of-peop...

The Bushplug - Our GW BUSH Silicon Buttplug http://www.antichrist2020.com/2006/09/25/george-w-bush-buttp...

http://www.antichrist2020.com/2006/11/15/we-exposed-bush-as-...

The Governor has called for a ban on tourists for 30 days.

I was at a gun show yesterday and Ammo was definitely the top seller. #2 was MREs (Military rations)

So this one confirms it - social media is a CIA operation -

Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside dope.

And then this - apparently most of our fellow citizens are operatives: Act Stupid.

I wrote my undergrad thesis back in 08 about how Lost was breaking barriers between real world and fiction - part of that was interviewing cast, crew, and writers. On my interview with Cuse and Abrams it came up as the starting point - castaways, mysterious cave, submarine, etc etc. I'll see if I can dig it up.

There was no way they could live up to the expectations - part of the problem was that they kept trying to tease the fans with the future and the fans kept guessing right so they kept trying to change things to stay ahead and as a result - painted themselves in a corner.

They did some amazingly interesting things though - creating events, products, and fake companies in the real world to enhance the story telling in the fictional one. Ground breaking.

A big part of my thesis was how a shared interest in the show was creating real world friendships from online fanboards - something that sounds 'so what?' now, but that was mind blowing back then. People would meet on the boards and then travel to Hawaii, meet up, go to the set locations, even stay together - based on a passion for the 'mysteries' the show created.

Plus..and this is true in Hawaii but not positive about other libraries - when I was a kid there weren't homeless people spending all day sleeping in the library and occupying all the available seats. The main people in the libraries around us are homeless using the internet, homeless using the air conditioning, and homeless using the bathrooms. I'm not going to send my kid to hang out in the library for hours without supervision.

The magic of libraries was discovering a new section of the dewey decimal system, figuring out that other books you liked might be next to the book you looked up in the card catalog, and escaping to worlds you could never see if not for your imagination and the printed word. Now you just google it, find pictures, read everything about it on the wikis, look at a live cam or webcam of the place, use google earth to wander around, read about all the negative things about the hero you just discovered etc. It's not that the libraries aren't there - it's that the lack of other things made them magical.

Glad to hear we weren't the last of the library kids

Canning and food preservation. It used to be all about salt salt salt.

Some of the greatest TV ever made. Shaped my young mind.

Also Heinlein explored some pretty far out things.

It's funny, kids don't get to experience the magic of libraries like we did. I'm a 71 model and I think those that came after the 70s pretty much didn't get to experience it.