August

Well I back from vacation and am kind of ready to do it again, do it again.

I have to tell you that coming home from the beach sucks ass.

All last week I was super busy and just could not get my head in the game.

Now I am sitting here on Sunday night thinking about work and my head is yet to center up.

Surveying. Why do any of us do it? Do we love or did we fall into it?

In my case it was the latter and before I knew it I would have had to take a drastic pay cut to jump over to something else.

I have done a lot of things throughout the years. Surveying has always been my day job but I have this habit of always chasing the shiny new thing.

I have owned several other small businesses, I have done MLM and actually did well (I hate sales), I have been involved in failed companies and have my hands in new ventures. I am always trying new things and coming up with killer ideas and inventions. Yes I write them down and pursue them, ask anyone who really knows me.

I'm kind of like a musician that is smart enough to keep a day job.

Last week I just got beat to shit. I got racked on the shin with a rock, slapped in the face with a cat claw, gouged on a chain link fence and my shoe filled with blood, knocked in the head by a tree branch, bitten by ants, got lots of splinters from lathe, felt like I was in a steam room from all of the humidity, got burnt by the tool box and the list goes on.

So there I am standing there administering first aid to my freshly gouged leg that occurred because I had to bail a fence because the client neglected to take the lock of of the gate asking myself "why in the bloody fuck am I doing this"?

Am I going to get rich doing it? Do I love it? Do I consider it my future? Do I want my kids doing it?

Deep down inside I know that the answer to all of them is no.

So here we go, here we go, here we go again.

Some of you will get this, some won't.

At the end of the day though it's all OK.

Peace love and booty grease surveyors, make it a great week.

July Hiatus

OK boys and girls it's July. I am going to take a month long blog break.

I have an action packed month in front of me that include a lot of Biz meetings, birthdays (not mine) and a much needed vacation.

I will be on the beach with a constant BL in hand for a while.

I want to leave you with some good thoughts.


First never let anything get you down. Remember, Nothing can hurt you until you've done what you came here to do, no one can eat you and if they try fall back on the below pic.

Next it's beach season and no matter where you go or what you do life is what you make it.

Which one is it? Todd the lense killer? Or the line of Smokin Hottie's? Or is it all good?

Enjoy your July!!

On the lake

The other day I had to get some depths on some lakes in a gravel pit on the Salt River.

Many of you may remember the video I posted of me and Dane in the rubber boat and I was dropping a chain with a brick tied to the end to get depth. Check out the youtube page right side of this page.

This time I got a little smarter. I bought this cool little 1955 row boat and went and picked up a depth finder.
I then went all MacGyver and fashioned a bracket made of framing strap and screwed it to the boat and then attached magnet setup to the depth finder transponder so I can slide it up and down on the strap to hit the water.

Then I dug through my shed and found an old triple magnet strip, actually a framing strap with 3 magents from stereo speakers that I used for the gps head on the truck roof and I also found an old bracket from when I had a Legacy E and had to keep the radio off of the head. I attached the bracket to the magnet strap, used C clamps and stuck it to the seat and had my gps attachement.

I dug a 12" rod out of the shed and screwed to the bracket, attached the head shoved off and went collecting.

I was able to take a bunch of shots while trolling along, looking at the finder and using the depth as my descriptor with good xyz and was able to provide the client with a much better reading of the lakes.

I could most likely do a full bathymetric in this manner it would just take quite a while. Fortunantly he did not want all of that.

I am thinking if this keeps up I may have to budget in some Hydrographic equipment to do a real bath.

Until that day this will work.

Critter

Ladies and Gentlemen our little friend here needs no introduction. His fame and reputation proceed him.

I met our little buddy while crossing a street out by the White Tanks on Tuesday.

He eventually got out of the road and crawled into the desert no doubt to ensue mayhem on some poor little critter he refers to as snack.

Old School

Anyone recognize this photo? Yes that's right it's Wild-Heerbrugg T2.

For anyone of my generation and older you will remember this or something very similar that was a huge part of your survey up bringing.

This particular instrument was used primarily for rapping angles. We used a T1 for construction because it was lighter, a little less accurate and it was easier to zero.

There were 2 kinds of T2 that I used, one with a single and the other with a double inverted vernier.

While using the T2 for control we never zeroed up. We would just site and go. Direct, reverse, horizon, then mean it out. We would do no less than 5 sets and then if one came in with more than a 3 second split we did 5 more.

In hind site this was some accurate stuff. Would would rap the angles, remove the instrument from the tribrac (if you had your head up your ass and loosened the tribrac you started again, once the tribrac was set it stayd until the legs were moved), then toss up a distance meter, calc and adjust the parts per million and proceed to shoot several distances. I have never used an attachable distance meter.

We would do this all day doing the longer distance stuff early to beat the heat blurr, jumping from set up to set up and at times standing there waiting for the chief to set a new site. (Lot's of pace circles around those instruments loaded with cigarette butts).

The point to all of this is we did some amazingly accurate stuff in those days without the awesome money making technology of today.

Here is an example of a combo of old and new.

A few years ago I was hired to do an asbuilt on a building in old town Scottsdale. The place was 2 stories with a basement and roof that needed done so a total of 4 floors. It was gutted and all of the floors were exposed and they needed to have floor heights, footprints and column locations run to the roof.

I started with gps, I broke down the block and set 2 control points across the street on the side walk. We then leveled though the control points, adjusted the vertical and set up a freshly calibrated total station and back site on the points.

I then went to the first 2 floors and and the roof and set 2 control points on each one. I then set a tripod with a prism and freshly calibrated tribrac on each point (moving between) and had my gunner rap and shoot each point both direct and reverse 10 times, starting direct, then a flop then back to the back site each time shooting a distance. We had to traverse into the basement from the street.

After all of that I reduced and meaned everything and had my control.

Now comes the part of developing footprints and locating metal vertical columns from the first floor to the roof, the basement had concrete poured around the metal all typical in size, the footprints were pretty typical.

I started on the first floor and what did I use?? Yes that's right a T2 and a chain and we turned angles to every column and chained the distance and wrote it all down in an actual field book. In this particular instance I zeroed the gun and then turned the angles to a constant corner on each column, sometimes multiple corners. Each one was treated as an individual.

After all was said and done I had a full building footprint and column asbuilt with .03' of error from basement to roof horizontally and .02' or vertical basement to roof, all of which I meaned and developed a really cool drawing file.

Could I have been more accurate? Absolutely. However my consensus was that kind of error though 4 floors basement to roof which the only place the columns were fully exposed were the first second floors was pretty damn good. By the way there was only .005' H&V between the first and second floors.

On a side note we took level shots at each column and footprint corner using a Chicago Rod. Amazingly those floors only had a 1/4 inch +/- float in them.

This was a tedious project and I had a lot of good people working for me at the time, however I did it myself and I grabbed an old school RLS who actually taught me a lot of stuff back in the days of old out of the office went and knocked the bitch out, mostly because he knew what we doing and the idea of having to teach some newbie as I went on this project made my head want to explode.

Today it would most likely be the laser scanner for this project. I would simply set the control and then turn them loose. It would be faster. As to being accurate I am unsure because I think people are still trying figure out the whole point cloud thing. That's just my opinion.

That was the last time I used a T2. Will I ever get to use one again? Who knows. I will tell you this. It was just like riding a bike, once you do it you can't lose it.

Biz is picking up

As the world gets better we are all going to have to gear up and re-expand.

I have spoken about this a lot in the past and have gone back and forth on it so many times and that is the topic of contracted labor versus employees.

It is today that I tell the world that I am going 100 percent contract labor.

There are so many reasons why but one of the main ones is quality control. By contracting people with great long term experience instead of hiring may cost me a little more up front but the end result is going to be better, therefore it is money well spent.

I was at a party the other night and the topic of quality control was presented to me. "How do you maintain quality control"? I thought about it for a couple of second and laid it out as such. By hiring contractors that have more experience than I do and ensuring that they all carry insurance, by removing myself from the mechanics and just monitoring a project and go through the end result I can achieve better quality than if I had 20 people running around. Hiring another person to do the mechanics (the right person) can be very beneficial in the long run.

Can I remove myself all together? Hell no, but using other people that are RLS is a start to expansion and it also employs them.

Creating jobs is very important to me as a business owner and also being a person with strong beliefs in my community makes it even more so.

I have been studying companies that practice this model and most of them are wildly successful. Why?Because the owner constantly monitors the quality of the final product.

I really enjoy doing field to finish but if I am going to get to where I want to be, to a level of actually making some money I have to expand and this is how I will do it.

It's a test drive but I have the utmost confidence that it is going to work better than anything I have ever done.

Endings and Beginnings

First a beginning. I am taking RJR to the social media. I have put RJR on Facebook and have recently joined linked in. I am still setting them up, so I am asking anyone that follows this blog to either friend or like us. Just follow the giant FB banner on the right side.
Thanks!!


Now bloggy stuff.

Last Friday was my last class of Scottsdale Leadership.

I will start by telling you that I am a little sad that it is over. It has been really nice to escape from the world and immerse myself into the community every other Friday.

There have been a lot of great moments over the last 9 months. I now have a very well rounded idea of how a city really operates and I am aware of many things that I never knew even existed and the fact that there are so many leaders in so many fields, it kind of makes the mind spin.

When I first signed up for the course I did it with the idea of business networking in mind and if I learn a thing or two, great but my mind was focused on business development.

After the first 2 classes I realized that this was going to go an entirely different way than how I thought it would, which is the case most of the time.

Turns out that yes I have developed some business contacts that will be with me forever but more important I gained a better understanding of people and most important a better understanding of myself and how I view things.

My perspective has opened up to a level that I never imagined and I am now trying new things and pushing my self to greater limits than I ever have.

An important message I learned is that if one is to progress professionally one must progress personally first.

Today is the ending of one of the greatest experiences of my life and the beginning of the rest of it. I guarantee that it is only going to get better from here no matter what kind of curve ball the world tries to through at me.

Now there is not competition there are only colleagues, I no longer provide a service I provide a product, there are no bad clients just confused people that need my guidance, all clients are awesome and I can learn from all of them, besides I can always decline or fire them, this list goes on and on.

Point being is that we can develope our skill all day long and be very good at our craft but for me personally it will never be enough. I want more.

How do I get more? I work at it everyday.