The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

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How to Write a Book — Quick and Easy.

06.07.2023 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

June 7, 2023, Mount Shasta, CA: Here’s how to write a book. Done this way, it’s rather easy. And surprisingly quick.

This method took me 40 years to figure out, and it works. My proof is that I’ve published 9 books, written over 500 microstories, 50-60 short stories, 3 novels, and hundreds of thousands of pages of operating manuals, business plans, how-to articles, advertising copy and lots, lots more.

This method makes writing a book fairly effortless. (Each of my nine published books was actually created in only about a week, but these [Read more…]

Categories // adventure, All, bidness, brainstorming, goals, how to tune a human, making changes, manifestation, personal growth, Projects, self-help

How to Destroy Writer’s Block

06.07.2023 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

June 7, 2023, Mount Shasta, CA: If you experience writer’s block, it’s very easy to change that so that you no longer experience writer’s block. Here’s how …

Get up in the morning, go pee if you have to, then sit down and start typing. Don’t do *anything else* before you start typing.

Type anything. Garbage, memories, nonsense. Snippets of your dreams. Any thoughts. Don’t try to channel it in any particular direction.

Within 3 weeks or maybe even less, you will no longer experience writer’s block.

That’s really all there is to it.

Categories // action, All, comfort zone, consciousness, how to tune a human, making changes, personal growth, power, self-help, Wisdom Log

I Miss my Long-Gone Friend, Harvey Warnke

06.06.2023 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

June 3, 1983, Hollywood: The movie “WarGames” was released. My good friend, Harvey Warnke, created these huge display screens that you see in the movie, just as you see them in this famous scene from the film.

That was 40 years ago. He actually created these huge displays with dozens of slide projectors, projecting from behind the set, triggering them remotely, because computers at the time [Read more…]

Categories // All, amazement, fantasy, friends, network answering service, Projects

Why Does Deadly Junk Food Taste Good?

06.03.2023 by bloggard // 2 Comments

Poison Content in CocaColaMount Shasta, seen on Facebook, 6/3/2023:

A GOOD QUESTION

My friend, Tom Carterus, asks: So how does something that is so detrimental for your health taste so good? I know that chocolate-craving is a magnesium deficiency. When I supplement with the right kind of magnesium, my chocolate cravings go away and all chocolate tastes like wax to me.

Why do we like coke so much? I don’t drink the stuff now. But those adverts when I was growing up were great. The original coke bottle. Way cool.

So why does my body want to drink poison? The soda pop aisle at the grocery store has now expanded to three aisles. More and more and more.

When I was young and was mowing the grass, about the time I was [Read more…]

Categories // All, childhood, health, Looking Back

The Duck that Launched Network Answering Service

05.14.2023 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

San Francisco, September 1971: This was the Yellow-Page ad that created Network Answering Service in San Francisco. It worked.

Here’s what happened:

On the lower right corner of this artwork, the artist’s signature is “LEI,” which stands for Steve Leialoha, who lived in the mission district of San Francisco. And if you go get an old “Howard the Duck” comic book. then in the comic book, you will see that the “inker” for Howard the Duck was … Steve Leialoha.

They make comic book artwork in two steps: (1) a guy, using pencil, maps out each page’s layout (and they can make any pencil corrections), and then [Read more…]

Categories // adventure, All, bidness, network answering service

How to Find the Bloggard Online

05.12.2023 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

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For more true-life adventures in Texas, California, St. Louis, England, Paris, and outer space, you can always just googsearch “Adventures of Bloggard” and find more peculiar microstories about this strange journey.

Categories // All

My Debt to Switchboards

03.15.2023 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

San Francisco, September 12, 1976: This is called a switchboard.

In Henrietta, Texas, in the upstairs (outside staircase, on the right) of the building at Bridge and Gilbert, on the corner of the courthouse square, was the phone company before dial phones were available. that was the phone company before the new building was built over by the Methodist Church, and before the time Mac McGilvray ran the phone company. [CLICK HERE TO SEE THAT BUILDING TODAY] In that upper floor were several switchboards, and that’s where the operator(s) were before the advent of dial-phones. You picked up the phone and asked Gladys to connect you to the Watson’s house.

After dial-phones, high school, and heading off to North Texas State University, I learned to operate a switchboard when I worked at Holiday Inn in Denton, and switchboards were still widely in use in the hotel/hospitality industry for inter-room and inside/outside calls for decades after that.

Years earlier, starting back east, the very first answering services had been created when some entrepreneurs obtained AT&T switchboards, and located themselves in a calling area (ie: near the “central office” where calls are switched, serving one particular neighborhood, identified by the prefix of the phone number. In Henrietta, I think it was Evergreen, but I’m not sure I’m remembering correctly, because San Francisco also had Evergreen exchange, north of Golden Gate Park.)

These first answering services worked like this: They had the phone company wire an extension of the business’s phone and the two wires were connected to ONE of the holes in the switchboard. In this way, when the business was closed, the calls were also “ringing” on the small red light beneath that hole. At the back of the console, shown above, you see the red objects which are plugs. You grab the left-side plug of any pair of plugs, shove it into the hole and now your headset (if you’re the operator) is live as you’ve just “answered” the call, like people at home do when they lift the receiver. Now the caller asks for the Watson’s house, or for room 117, and you plug the right-side plug of that pair into the Watson’s plug or room 117’s plug, and flip the small toggle switch in front of that pair of plugs. This rings the target phone at the Watson’s or room 117.

When the Watsons or room 117 answer, you flip the toggle another way, and you are removed from the conversation. You get another red light when the parties hang up.

All answering services around the country used switchboards to provide answering service to businesses right up until 1976 in San Francisco, when one day I got an advertisement falling out of my phone bill. It was for this new feature, “Call Forwarding.”

I was stoned at that moment and picked up the advertisement, and then said to myself. “I could use this to build an answering service, without the need for a switchboard.”

And … that’s what I did. The beginning of Network Answering Service.

A few years later, and 80% of the answering services in San Francisco had transitioned away from switchboards, to call-forwarding and new types of equipment.
That’s how it happened. Thank you, switchboards!
 

Categories // adventure, All, bidness, childhood, college, Looking Back, network answering service, Projects

What Goals Make You Happiest?

06.15.2022 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

Mt. Shasta, California, June 15, 2022: When I was 26 or so, I figured out a handy truth …

a) Havingness goals, once met, most often satisfy for a few days or a few weeks.
b) Beingness goals may bring benefits, but if you try to dwell in satisfaction, then you’re no longer in that beingness, so you usually spend little time experiencing the satisfaction of attaining a beingness.
c) Doingness goals can satisfy as long as you’re doing the thing you intended to do.
For example, years ago in Dallas, one particular day, I found myself uncomfortable and ill at ease. And after a few days of pondering realized that I’d accomplished the goal for which I had gone to Dallas, and that I needed a new goal–because humans function well when seeking a goal.
And so I chose “creating music” because that is a doingness goal, and you can never reach the end of creating music.
It worked.

Categories // All, amazement, enjoying life, goals, music, personal growth, truth, Wisdom Log

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