Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Breakfast at the Beach Thursday, August 9th at Wasaga Sands Golf Club


Subject: NEXT Breakfast At The Beach: register now
Breakfast At The Beach: a Wasaga Beach Chamber of Commerce networking eventCheck the Chamber website for future networking events (and more).
Hello Joe Bickerstaff, (Beach Booster Promotions)
The next Breakfast at the Beach is on Thursday 09 August, 2012 at Wasaga Sands Golf Club, 10 Club Court, Wasaga Beach, from7:00am to 8:30am.
This month we are trying something new — extending our networking time and giving each person attending an opportunity to speak more about themselves and their business in an organized fashion. We are asking everyone to try out their networking skills with a variety of different people. We have created a number of networking 'situations' that will be facilitated by the MC to stimulate you to come up with an interesting response in a limited time.
The situations are ones in which we find ourselves in every day events where you are asked, or have an opportunity, to tell someone something about you and your business. The opportunity in this event is to speak about your business directly to one person. This allows you to get your message out in a spontaneous way and to provide other people with information about you that they wouldn't have otherwise known.
While many people struggle with networking, and some in fact dislike it intensely, it is an important fact of business life these days that is well worth the effort to master. People do genuinely want to do business with people that they know and trust. This event is designed to assist you in moving into your networking world with greater confidence and a larger repertoire of your positive marketing messages.
We have arranged a number of situations, directed by an MC, where you are challenged to communicate certain facets of yourself and/or your business for a short period of time, no longer than a minute. You will address a different person each time.
This month's breakfast will include our now regular opportunity of becoming a Featured Business for those who attend. Should your card be drawn, a two-paragraph promotional blurb about your business will be emailed to all members, one month of advertising in Wasaga'sbeach BOOSTER, and a one-month banner advertisement will appear on the Chamber web site, as well as a thumbnail with this invitation:
Featured Member: Dianna Chycki 
As a CENTURY 21® Real Estate professional, I am dedicated to providing you with the highest quality service possible. My extensive personal knowledge of the local Real Estate market is combined with the power of the CENTURY 21 brand - the most recognized name in Real Estate today.
Let me assist you in finding your dream home, in a neighbourhood that is right for you, and in the price range you want. Or, if you are interested in selling a property, I also have the expertise to help you get the fastest sale possible and at the best price.
I look forward to the opportunity of working for you!
You can find out more at her website, email her at dianna.chycki@century21.ca
or call her on 705-429-2121
The breakfast is $15 for Chamber members and $18 for non-members. This is an opportunity to network and get to know other business owners in the Beach.
Registration begins at 7:00 am and the formal part of the breakfast ends at 8:30 am. However, you are welcome to stay and network further until 9:00 am.
Please confirm your attendance:  
REGISTER
Our sponsors are:

Check out Beach Booster for what's happening at the Beach and how it can promote your business
Listen to 97.7 the Beach, for Chamber events and interviews.

Alternatively, you can call the Wasaga Beach Chamber of Commerce at 705-429-8671 and register your intention to attend. More information aboutBreakfast at the Beach is available online at the Chamber website.
Once you have confirmed your intention, your attendance will be registered and you will receive a confirmation email.
Should you change your mind and decide to not attend, could you please make this known either on the link or by contacting the Chamber. We appreciate your attention to this particular detail since our hosts like to have a reasonable estimate of attendance.
We look forward to seeing you at the Wasaga Sands Golf Club on the 9th August,
The Wasaga Beach Chamber of Commerce Breakfast Networking Committee.

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Be Kind...Rewind


I Am Nick Armstrong: Creative Renegade
Hi Bill! Here's the post from 07/21/2012, entitled Be Kind, Please Rewind

bekindrewindMuch like the concept of a payphone, this one may take a bit of explaining if you’re younger than 18.
I have always loved movies. Watching movies, going to movies, and recounting my favorite lines.
Back in the day, Blockbuster used to carry VHS tapes to rent. Inside of every VHS case from Blockbuster was the equivalent of your mother reminding you to wash up before dinner. A little note that said, “Be kind, please rewind.”
It was a special kind of frustration, when you picked up a movie and popped it in only to have your VCR spit it back out. If you are a little younger than me, you may have had one of those fancy auto-rewinding VCRs, but in my house, we roughed it. You had to time popping in the VHS tape just right, jackhammer the Rewind button over and over again until it took, and then hope it didn’t decide to spit out the tape before deciding to rewind.
It meant the last jerk who watched the movie couldn’t have been bothered to hit two buttons on his remote control before popping the plastic back in its case and shoving it through the slot at Blockbuster. Some antisocial douchebag who could care less if he robbed you of the best possible experience of watching the movie. I sometimes wondered if they did it on purpose.
That meant, if you wanted to watch Land Before Time or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on tape and it hadn’t been rewound, you had to take 10-15 minutes and rewind the stupid thing yourself. This was the time your movie snacks usually disappeared, soda became flat, popcorn became stale, and you contemplated your own mortality as the timer quickly counted backwards.
The concept is kind of similar to popping a DVD into your player for the first time and being forced to watch 15 minutes of previews from that studio because the DVD is programmed to disable the Main Menu button. Except instead of possibly being entertained by what’s coming to theaters next summer (or subsequently losing your faith in Hollywood and Humanity, your choice), you listened patiently for that whir-click of the VCR reaching the start of the tape.
I was up late last night and happened to see the live news coverage of what was happening in Aurora. It reminded me a lot of when I still was watching my favorite movies on VCR instead of DVD: 1999. DVDs were only about 2 years old at that point. We didn’t have many. Certainly not all my favorites. It was also the same year Columbine happened.
It got me thinking that what with all this fancy technology – you know, DVDs that don’t need to be rewound, Facebook walls that let you say “Happy Birthday” to friends whose favorite movies you can’t remember, and Netflix which, for all intents and purposes, has removed the need for DVDs altogether – we still need someone to remind us to be kind and rewind.
My heart is absolutely broken for families who will never again see a movie (let alone anything else) with their loved ones. Lives changed forever, innocences shattered, and all for the want of a real superhero to swoop in and save the day. But real life isn’t like that. There are no grand entrances, no big battles with cinematic scores, no black and white badguy/goodguy separations. Turns out, it’s a lot more fluid, a lot more up to us – individually – and on a much smaller, yet still time-intensive scale, to save the day.
Taking the time to be kind, press two buttons, and rewind… it makes all the difference.
I don’t know what happened in this shooter’s life to make him do what he did. Certainly it would have taken more than a few rewound tapes to have gotten his life back on track, but I do know this: every kindness, big or little,counts.
Most of us have no reason to rewind tapes, but we have every reason to rewind our attention – revisit the people and the things that matter. Play at them over and over again until they’re as well-worn, familiar, and ingrained into our lives as the Vanilla Ice scene in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Go ninja, go ninja, go, dawg.
And just like the timer on our VCR, every time we remember to do this, we can (slowly) reset our cynicism and our stress and our frustration back to zero. In doing so, we’ll have more time and more energy to be kind.
Open a door, let someone merge, stand up for someone, forgive a jerk, smile at a stranger. Be. Fucking. Kind.
In a world seemingly stuck in perpetual fast-forward, it’s time we all take a moment to be kind and rewind.
(Header photo: Be Kind, Rewind)


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-Nick Armstrong
web: IAmNickArmstrong.com
twitter: @ImNickArmstrong