Are You Using Twitter to Its Full Potential? – Come and Learn What Really Works

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Are You Using Twitter to Its Full Potential? – Come and Learn What Really Works

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We really don’t need the post office…

Let me follow-up on my piece yesterday regarding our failure to create a paperless work environment. I just took a brief walk out my front door to open my mailbox and see what the postman had delivered. Let’s see – there is something called “The Flyer” that claims to contain the best local values – a 32 page advertisement that I would never look at, don’t need and always throw in the garbage. A waste of a good tree. Too bad I don’t own a bird in a cage. Next item is a large glossy advertisement telling me all about Verizon Fios. Don’t care – garbage. If I wanted to switch cable companies, I would have researched my best available options online.

There are “Hot” car deals from yet another annoying car dealership. Coupons from Harbor Tools – known for their junk from China. I say buy USA – Craftsman. Another advertisement asking me to “lock in” a price for one year with Direct TV and another large color piece of wasted paper offering to save me $25 on any 4 tire purchase. Don’t need any of it. There is a post card from someplace called the Learning Connection “We produce results!” – voted #1 best tutoring service 6 years in a row. It’s addressed to my wife – a teacher. Finally a letter – actually a form letter that could have been sent to my son via e-mail – it would have received more attention that way. It didn’t look “real”. Nothing for me. Yesterday’s “mail” was similar. This is what the US Postal Service does with 218,000 vehicles – the largest vehicle fleet in the world – and 583,908 workers – working 6 days a week, year round except on Federal (not taken off by normal workers) holiday’s.

Today, it was reported in The Wall St. Journal “Postal officials say the agency, an independent arm of the federal government that is supported mostly by postal fees, has no choice but to downsize as people increasingly click on their computers to communicate and pay bills rather than drop letters in the mailbox. Despite cutting $12 billion in labor costs over the past four years, the postal service expects to face a deficit of between $8 billion and $9 billion in fiscal year 2011, and recently maxed out its $15 billion line of credit with the federal government.”

Based on what I see in the mail, 99% of it is utterly unnecessary – the other 1% can be e-mailed. Parcels and packages can be shipped by FEDEX or UPS. My wife and I have our power bill automatically paid on line every month, yet, the utility still feels the need to stuff an envelope with a statement and pages of dumb suggestions how to save energy and reduce our bill. I don’t know anyone that reads it. In the garbage it goes. State Farm, our insurance company loves to mail us more stuff that we never read. All we need is our car insurance card and we can print that out. Since we’ve been customers of State Farm for over 20 years, all that information should be imbedded on/in our driver licenses. All that data is already on-line with the department of motor vehicles for the State. No paper is really necessary.

Receiving a greeting or Christmas card is quite nice every once in a while, but there are hundreds of services that will e-mail you a nice on-line “card” with music playing and a “celebrity” telling you how special you are, for about the same price as a “real” card with the postage. On-line, you get instant service, so you can sent it right now. You can’t do that with the post office. Groupon and other coupon services sends me whatever coupons I need to my phone. Many times, when I go to the supermarket, the coupon is POP or point of purchase. I might try a different mustard because there is a $.25 cents off coupon next to it attached to the shelf. No need for the post office.

I’m racking my brain here. Why do we need the post office? The answer is we don’t. Racing doesn’t need NASCAR, to go to Mars we don’t need NASA, truck drivers don’t need the ATA and the post office is a concept whose time has long since passed. It’s just another bureaucratic excuse that stands in the way of our society going paperless.

PS/ WSJ’s Jennifer Levitz reports the U.S. Postal Service is expected to announce that nearly 3,700 post offices, mostly in small towns, will be shuttered as first-class mail business has dropped by 28% since 2007. The link to the piece is here USPO/WSJ/LOTR

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Kentucky Speedway! What a Joke! Are You Kidding Me? Really?

It really doesn’t matter to me that Kyle Busch won the inaugural Sprint Cup race at the Kentucky Speedway, what sticks in my mind is the complete and utter mismanagement of this facility. They knew full well how many tickets they sold and in relation to that how many people they would need to direct traffic and park cars not to mention how many people to staff the concession stands or how much food and drink to order. In case you haven’t heard or you have been living under a rock, the Inaugural race at the Kentucky Speedway was a logistical nightmare! That is putting it lightly, I had other words in mind something to do with a cluster something or other but I’ll keep it clean. I am ashamed, upset, and a generally annoyed with the past weekends event. For years prior to this even, namely the Quaker State 400, we have heard and read about Speedway Motorsports inc. or SMI wanting a cup race at Kentucky. Hell there was even a lawsuit over the deal. One of Nascar’s main concerns was that the track did not have the facilities to handle a “Cup Sized Crowd”. Bruton Smith assured then that by the time they got a race there the facility would be able to handle the crowd. What a joke!

            There were so many problems last weekend where do I start? Lets start with the traffic problem. The interstate there near Sparta Kentucky is not in any way suited for the amount of traffic a Sprint Cup race will bring to the area. Oh they resurfaced it but they didn’t add enough lanes or provide any more access roads going into the track property. What we had last weekend was gridlock 20 miles in either direction. There were an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people that never made it to the track due to the traffic. Those that did get there late found that there was no parking left and were turned away. People were mad as hell and threw their tickets at anyone who looked like they worked for the event. That was probably not happening as often as I think because that brings me to problem number two. There was no organized management of the parking system there. I mean people were reported to be parking all Willy Nilly without much direction form anyone affiliated with the track. People were allowed to set up camp so to speak in the parking areas, setting up tents, dinning fly’s and a myriad of other tail gaiting stuff taking up more than one parking spot sometime two or three. There were reported parking lots that were half empty because there was little or no communication between the lightly scattered parking attendants.

            The problems didn’t stop with traffic and parking, they continued on into the campgrounds and the facility itself. There was no ice to be found for sale in any of the campgrounds by the time that the Sprint Cup race was winding up. In the middle of the influx of traffic they had porta john service trucks pumping out motor homes and portable toilets causing traffic to have to attempt to go around them. Once you got into the track the concession stand promptly ran out of food and shortly after that they ran completely out of any kind of beverage. It was very hot in Sparta Kentucky this past weekend and you couldn’t even buy a bottle of water inside the track. So did people think ahead and bring a cooler inside? Uh hell no! Coolers were not allowed into Kentucky Speedway this past weekend, it seems like Bruton Smith and his gang of cronies was only concerned with making money this weekend. Did they have a big meeting a month before hand and figure out that if they ran it half staffed and only bought so much food they could make a killing off of the stupid fans in this area of the country?

            Let me tell you something, had I been in that crowd on the road in and not got in I would never be coming back! Nor would I be had I been inside the track and found that after I was told to take my cooler back to the car, that there was nothing to drink inside the concession stands, same reaction! I’m done with Kentucky Speedway and SMI in general! I mean come on SMI! You sorry people argued and argued for years to get a cup race there and this is how you handle it? You just made Nascar’s point in the past lawsuit for them. The first thing that Bruton Smith did was blame the Kentucky infrastructure namely the roads and interstates around the speedway! Are you serious? You had understaffed parking crews that couldn’t communicate worth a dang, people camping in the parking lots taking up needed parking space and such and you want to attempt to blame the roads? How about you fix your management of that track from the top down before you dump on the people of Kentucky? Maybe that was a completely dumb place to put a track in the first place? I remember the folks at Nascar warning the people that built that track there about building a track before you could be guaranteed a race date there. It only took twelve years to get a cup race there gee in that amount of time you would have thought that they would have been working on some kind of a plan to handle the crowd! Do you see the waisted lanes in this picture? There is no traffic going out so why not use all four lanes? This is just plain dumb Bruton!

            If I were Bruton Smith I would fire the whole dang crew from the top down and start fresh! If I were Brian France I would pull all cup dates from that track until they prove that they can handle it. As far as the racing goes there it was fantastic but it was far overshadowed by one hell of a mess off the track!

            In my opinion the previous weekends events at the Kentucky Speedway were an utter failure! I don’t care if the racing was the best that the world has ever seen, if twenty thousand race fans missed the whole damned thing because of traffic, then the whole thing was a failure!

            Today I am embarrassed to be a Nascar fan.

Stay safe out there

TW

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Nascar Is Now North Carolina’s State Sport. Really?

North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue signed a bill Tuesday at Charlotte Motor Speedway that makes NASCAR the state’s official sport. The bill was an idea that came from North Carolina elementary school students, who discovered that their state lacked an official sport. Really? Did it take this long to figure this out because they thought that there was something else going on in North Carolina? I wonder what the “Tar Heels” think about this? Or how about Duke basketball? Don’t get me wrong, I think its great that Nascar is now the official sport of the state that held its racing roots. I am just shocked that they didn’t have an official sport. As a matter of fact I wonder how many states have an official sport. I live in Illinois now and according to Wikipedia there doesn’t seem to be an official sport for my state. If I had to guess it would be “Attempting to put Governors is prison”. Just sayin.

Among those on hand for the signing were 2011 Hall of Fame inductees Bobby Allison and Ned Jarrett, current Sprint Cup Series driver David Ragan, and the students who originated the bill. “Sometimes it takes really bright kids to tell all of us grown-ups what we ought to be doing,” Perdue said. “And that’s what these students are about today.” The students had worked over a year to get the bill passed. According to a Charlotte Motor Speedway release, the motorsports industry employs nearly 20,000 people in the Charlotte, N.C. region.

            in other news Dover Motorsports Group announced that it is going to move it’s spring race back to it’s original June setting due to soft attendance at it’s recent spring race. I have news for them, it had nothing to do with the date and everything to do with the poor way they manage their race track properties. Dover Motorsports Group has not dropped ticket prices on any races that I know of and in light of this awful economy that is just plain stupidity. They have lost touch with the fan bases at their only two remaining facilities, Dover and Nashville, and fans are trying to tell them about it through lack of ticket sales. I don’t know who is in charge up in there but they must be completely ignorant or just so in debt that they have no choice. They already had to sell Memphis Motorsports park and last year shut down Gateway in my back yard, what is next to get the axe? Nashville? Dover itself? Somebody up there in Dover needs to wake up and smell the coffee because they truly are not getting the message. They can try all they want to blame the rain or lack of it, on the weathermen up there but I’ll tell you this much had there been no threat of rain at all you would have still seen the same empty grandstands.

            This weekend Nascar heads out to wine country. Running at Infinion raceway, a road course that,,well I think is a wasted race date. I’ll make no bones about it, I think road course racing in Nascar is just plain boring and I will be looking at something else to do besides watch a freight train of stock cars chase each other around a road course. I would however love to go out there to see wine country and all that it entails. I imagine there are some really nice places to eat up there as well as the great vineyards. As far as stock car racing goes up there it might be cool to see it live, sort of walk the course and watch it from different turns but it is really boring to watch it on television. If I had to pick a driver to win out there this weekend it would be Carl Edwards. Maybe I would go with Juan Pablo Montoya or Jeff Gordon. Carl seems to take to road courses like a duck to water and Juan came to Nascar from a racing dicipline that predominantly ran road courses. I would however stay away from the road course ringers like Patrick Carpentier and Boris Said due to the fact that these so called road course ringers have not done well for the most part when it comes to Nascar. I hope you all enjoy the racing this weekend including the Nationwide race at Road America in Elkhart Lake Wisconson. I will be working in my garden or watching a movie. its just not my cup of tea.

Stay safe out there.

TW

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