This weekend, at the Madonnaro Street Painting Festival in Pier Park will feature returning artist Tracy Stum. Tracy painted the portrait of the Dalai Lama that when looked at from a specific angle, it appears as though he is actually sitting next to Tracy.
You guys should all come out to Pier Park this weekend to see all the awesome art. Tracy will begin her painting, along with Jeanie Burns, on Friday, and everyone else begins painting on Saturday at 9 am.
Here is some of her other work.
I couldn’t pass this up. As you can imagine, I get email forwards from all over, and pretty much 99% of the time, I don’t even look at them. But, this was just too darn good.
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TiSP: Going with the flow
Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.
Installing TiSP
Installing a typical home TiSP system is a quick, easy and largely sanitary process — provided you follow these step-by-step instructions very, very carefully.
Remove the spindle of fiber-optic cable from your TiSP installation kit.
When the GFlush is complete, the spindle will (or at least should) have largely unraveled, exposing a connector at the remaining end. Detach the cable from the spindle, taking care not to allow the cable to slip into the toilet.
Congratulations, you’re online! (Please wash your hands before surfing.)Note: If you have any difficulty installing, operating or simply living with TiSP, we suggest joining the TiSP Help Group.
Advanced TiSP Options
Professional Installation Service
You can also choose to request our professional installation service, which dispatches an army of factory-trained, sub-contracted nanobots from the TiSP Access Node. The nanobots travel with exhilarating nano-speed through the sewer system and into your home to perform the installation service, which should be complete within 15 minutes. Note: For your own physical safety and emotional well-being and in consideration of the nanobots’ working conditions, please make absolutely certain that your toilet is unoccupied at the scheduled appointment time.
In-Commode Package Delivery
With professional installation service, you can also have your Google Checkout purchases delivered directly through the sewage network into your bathroom. Each package comes pre-sealed in a watertight and nanobot-resistant bag made of biodegradable corn-based plastic. For a limited time, TiSP subscribers who sign up for a Checkout account will receive free bathroom delivery on their first ten Checkout purchases.
TiSP for Enterprise
We’re actively developing a higher-performance version of TiSP specifically tailored to small and medium-sized businesses, including 24-hour, on-site technical support in the event of backup problems, brownouts and data wipes.
Panama City, FL (Nov. 10, 2008) – The Panama City – Bay County International Airport Authority has directed Airport Executive Director Randy Curtis to evaluate the options for establishing a Foreign trade zone at the new international airport currently under construction in West Bay.
“The airport board believes it is important to establish a Foreign Trade Zone at the new airport in order to maximize its economic development potential,” said Airport Authority chairman Joe Tannehill. “Having a foreign trade status at the new airport will put us in another category altogether and be an important differentiator in competing for new jobs and business expansions.”
The action taken by the Airport Authority is in consideration of extensive statistics documenting the importance of foreign trade to the Florida economy. It noted that establishing a Foreign Trade Zone at the new Panama City – Bay County airport would make the new facility one of 10 airports in Florida.
Airport board members agreed that Foreign Trade Zone in West Bay would benefit the community and the region by facilitating and expediting international trade, providing special customs procedures as a public service to help firms conduct business, encouraging and facilitating exports, attracting offshore activity, assisting state/local economic development efforts and creating employment opportunities.
The action taken directs Airport Executive Director Randy Curtis to begin immediately preliminary work to create a Foreign Trade Zone at the new international airport in WestBay.
Specifically, the board asked Curtis to develop options for the airport board to consider concerning the size and boundaries of the trade zone, including a discussion of the costs and benefits associated with each option presented. Further, the board asked Curtis to investigate public/private partnerships to stimulate intermodal infrastructure development.
Florida Trade Facts:
The U.S. is the world’s largest trading nation, exporting nearly $1.3 trillion in goods and services and more than one-fifth of the growth in U.S. GDP depends on exports. (1)
Manufacturing exports support an estimated 5.2 million jobs, including 1 in 5 manufacturing jobs, and jobs supported by goods exports pay 13-18% higher than the average wage. (2)
More than 30,000 companies export from Florida locations, including more than 28,000 small and medium-sized businesses. (3)
Florida’s export shipments of merchandise in 2007 totaled $45 billion, up 80 percent from $25 billion in 2003, ranking sixth among the states in terms of total exports in 2007, and exporting to 222 foreign destinations. (4)
1 – Office of the United States Trade Representative, 2005 data (latest available).
2 – Office of the United States Trade Representative, 2002 data (latest available).
3- International Trade Administration and Bureau of the Census, Foreign Trade Division (2006 data).
4 – Revised Origin of Movement State Export Series, Bureau of the Census, Foreign Trade Division (2007 data).
Contact:
The Panama City Bay County International Airport
Randy Curtis, Executive Director, 850-763-6751 ext. 203
In an effort to drop inventory levels, The Shores of Panama Condominiums in Panama City Beach are selling brand new condos at like-auction prices.
Just to save you some time scrolling (since that is inevitably what you will do first to find the price), I’ll just give you the price up front: $253 per square foot, on average. Now, let me tell you about why I think this is a great deal.
If you haven’t been to Shores of Panama, you really have to check it out to appreciate it. Short of going to Edgewater or Boardwalk, it really is one of the few ‘true’ resorts in Panama City Beach. Featuring resort amenities such as 2 full service spas with massages, facials, steam rooms, and saunas, two tiki bars serving lunch and dinner, conference areas, a 14,000 square foot pool, indoor heated pool, and tons more.
The sense of arrival is spectacular as you pull into the covered grand portacache. The scene includes elegant fountains and a quaint cafe with the entrance being accessed through oversized solid doors. The colors are warm and the mood relaxing.
As you walk into the large lobby, you have a view directly onto the lushly landscaped pool area and out into the emerald green Gulf of Mexico. The lobby is finished off with huge chandeliers and large-tile floors. The granite counter tops are large and majestic, and the furnishings look and feel expensive.
This expensive look and feel isn’t just skin deep, either. The entire709 condominium building was constructed using concrete tunnel form, firmly planting the entire structure on the beach. With an all concrete structure, residents can stay, and own with the peace of mind that their property is safe.
As you walk out into the pool area, you are greeted with palm trees and other native plants to this area. The 14,000 square foot pool weaves in and out of the various nooks and crannies that give this huge pool character. Flowing under two bridges, the pool gives the swimmer constant views of the Gulf of Mexico and is serviced by two tiki bars.
The 2 full service spas, separated for men and for women, provide massages, facials, steam rooms and saunas and are available to guests and residents. There is a spa located on each side of the U-shaped building. The fitness center features high-end Life Fitness brand cardio equipment, fitted with individual flat panel TV’s.
The large indoor heated pool and hot tub offers residents and guests an opportunity to enjoy a swim regardless of the weather.
With 3 elevator systems, you never have to walk too far to get up to your floor.
Centrally located in Panama City Beach, Pier Park, restaurants, Wal-Mart, and pretty much everything else you’d want while you were on vacation are just a few short minutes away.
Ok, so we’ve established that the Shores of Panama is a true resort, but lets talk numbers.
Recently, beachfront condos have sold for around $200/sq ft at auction.
The price here is $253 per square foot, but you get so much more. I walked around some of the other condos that have sold at auction, and they simply just don’t compare to the package you get at the Shores of Panama. Others that have recently sold, really are just a building with a pool.
As far as rentals, the pros at Oaseas Resorts have you covered. Last season, 65% of the guests who visited the property re-booked for next year. With an Oaseas Resorts office on site, getting in touch with them should be no problem.
For more information:
For the first time, Madonnaro 2008, Emerald Coast’s Street Painting Festival will be held at Pier Park on Panama City Beach. Painting will be November 14 – 16 and is sponsored by the Visual Arts Center of Panama City.
Street painting has been popular all throughout Europe since the 16th century. Street painters in Italy were known as madonnari because they often created pictures representing The Madonna, one of the central icons of Christianity.
Madonnari were nomad artists who traveled from town to town, festivity to festivity to cover the streets with their art. Historically, using bits of broken roof tiles, charcoal and chalk, the artists would paint images, sometimes larger than life that would wash away at the first rain. When the festivities were over, the artists and paintings would vanish.
Today, “street-artists” use varying shades of chalk to depict their creations and several forms of media, including digital photography, video and blogs to share their work with the world.
Be sure to support this unique form of art at Pier Park in this weekend.
There were people everywhere. There were cars everywhere, classics, muscles, customs, rat-rods, you name it, it was there.
The Emerald Coast Cruizin Classic Car Show was awesome.
Words can’t do the pictures I got justice, you have to see them for yourselves.
Pier Park played host to The Beach’s Taste of The Beach Friday evening. With hundreds of wines to taste and 8 restaurants participating, a broad range of flavors wafted through the air.
“We expect 600 to 700 people here tonight,” said Paul Wohlford, VP of Sales and Marketing for the Resort Collection of Panama City Beach.
I’ve never been a good estimator of quantity, but I’d say if they hadn’t hit that mark, they sure were close.
Pier Park closed off the main boardwalk section between Hofbrau Beer Garden and Buffalo Wild Wings to place two tasting tents with a wide assortment of wine, cheeses, food and deserts. Sponsors came from all of northwest Florida to participate, in addition to local Pier Park restaurants.
The restaurants that had a food sampling were Baja Grille, Margaritaville, Back Porch, Reggae J’s, Hofbrau Beer Garden, Buffalo Wild Wings, Longhorn Steak House, and Firefly. All of the food was great, and many offered discount cards to dine at their restaurant during the off-season.
As people tasted, reggae music floated through the air. The mood was pleasant and everyone seemed to be having a good time.
The schedule for the rest of the weekend:
The monster motors are loud, very loud. The 25 inch slicks on the back barely grip the pavement under the strain of 500 horses of power under some of the hoods of Panama City Beach’s visitors this weekend.
Robert “Rakes” Parish said that we’ll see over 3000 cars at the Emerald Coast Cruizin Classic Car Show tomorrow. “You won’t be able to move, there will be cars lined up with only five feet apart filling up this entire field,” said Tommy with TCG Productions, the sound and light manager on site this weekend.
“We have people from all over, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Illinois, everywhere to come to this show,” said Parish, “people come from all over to show off their hot rods.”
The hot rods are everywhere, and their owners, typically middle aged consumers with good incomes are filling up our condos, hotels and restaurants. They are driving money into our economy during one of the slowest weekends of the year, and notably one of the most beautiful.
Many of these cars have 10’s of thousands of dollars invested in them with everything from custom engines, custom body work, to fully restored classics.
“Last year was a huge success with over 50 cars that sold at auction,” said Rap Peavy, owner of Big Boys Toys on Thomas Drive, across from the Navy Base, “this year, as of right now, we have over 80 cars registered. We expect more to show up tomorrow.”
Show activities around the beach have been going on all week with tomorrow to be the huge show. The gates open early in the morning and the action will be taking place all day.
I’ll be out there, be sure to say high if you see me. This is a great event, and great for our area. Local businesses, be sure to support this event, we need stuff like this to make it through our shoulder seasons.
See ya at the show!
In addition to talking about MTVu, today’s TDC meeting included presentations from the board’s top 3 web development companies that submitted their RFQ’s to build the CVB’s new web site for Panama City Beach.
The three included Miles Media, Jennifer Barbee Inc., and Simple View, in order of presentation.
If you subscribe to our Twitter page, you may have seen some opinions as the presentations took place, if not, well, you missed out.
First, I’d like to say, working in the digital media/marketing world for the last 3 years, I’ve consistently noticed particular trends. Most of the time, the guys that can create brilliant back-end cms systems with tons of “coded” features including data collection, reports, functionality, automated processes, etc. tend to really lack on the creative end. Their pretty pictures may look pretty to them, but to everyone else, they are pretty plain and not very visually stimulating. This is good for some, but not for all.
Next, the agencies that are great graphic artists, that create very visually stimulating graphics using trendy, relevant and current design elements tend to lack on the back end capabilities. The sites look good, but don’t do much.
The trick is to find an agency that is good at both, not good, but great, actually. The agencies that are great at both are few and far between. This observation was consistent with the presentations today.
The first group to present, Miles Media came out guns blazin, suits ‘a wearin. Ok, not really, but they were all wearing suits. Their presentation began with intros by none other than Roger Miles, himself. They rotated what looked like a practiced and choreographed routine, sharing presentation points with the entire team of 3, plus Roger.
They began with credibility statements, explaining that they had doubled their revenue and more than tripled their client base in the last 5 years. Currently they have over 180 clients and $35 million in annual revenue.
They operate one of the largest travel web sites in the country, visitflorida.com, which fights Vegas for number 1 with regards to most visited in the tourism/travel industry during the peak season, and falls to around number 5 during the shoulder seasons. They’ve never spent any money on any SEM efforts and have always focused on SEO. SEM = search engine marketing, or paid placement; SEO = search engine optimization, or optimizing the site so that search engines will pick it up on crawls. “Competitors spend millions annually on SEM, we spend nothing,” Roger Miles said.
I took a bunch of notes, but I’ll cut right to the chase. Their creative was weak, their ideas were OK, just OK, and nothing in their presentation poped. I think I said in one of my twitter updates, they were good, but not WOW.
Roger, I know you read pcbdaily, no hard feelings. You guys do great work, just not what PCB is looking for right now.
I’ll skip Jennifer Barbee real quick and go to Simple View. At first, the board thought Simple View had the lead, and I agreed. They seemed to have the experience we wanted, the client list to back it up, and the capability to fulfill our creative marketing desires. I think they blew it with their presentation, which was very dry, boring, and displayed their complete lack of creative talent. They started the whole thing out with a 5 minute video that looked dated, poorly put together, boring, and entirely too long. At first, I was able to tolerate the vid, but after about 2 minutes of the same music, no narration, and screen-shots and words flashing across, they lost me. They started reviving me when they showed some of their web work, which some was pretty good, but I started dozing off with the “tech-talk” on how the back end cms system works, etc. Their entire presentation seemed to be working up to a system that the TDC could take and make changes themselves, with the ability to create pages, new navigation menus, or new web initiatives. This seemed like good flexibility, but everything seemed geared towards, “ok, we’re done, here ya go,” and then the vendor disappears.
All in all, the board decided they were NOT what they were looking for as they worried Panama City Beach might get lost in the middle of all of Simple View’s ‘big’ clients.
Last, but not least, Jennifer Barbee Inc. Their presentation was second, and I knew right away, they would probably be the best. First off, their presentation was very graphically oriented, very fun to look at. That captured my attention, I was ready to see what they could do on the back end. It was very apparent, very quickly, that they were great graphic artists and could make very visually stimulating creative. And, the more Jennifer spoke, the more impressed I was.
Jennifer started out as a software developer, and over the years morphed into web development and marketing. As of two years ago, she had worked her way up to be (I think) one of the Presidents of USDM, an interactive marketing company, regarded to be one of the best in the destination and tourism industry. Her separation from them was because she wanted to get back into something that was smaller, or a boutique. She wanted to get back that intimacy that came with having only a few select clients. She isn’t the only one that I’ve know to do that over the last couple of years. Sometimes “corporate” just gets too corporate.
One of the big concerns in the RFQ review process with Jennifer was her company size and age. The marketing committee was concerned that maybe she was inexperienced or that her company didn’t have the resources to handle an account like Panama City Beach. Turns out, this is exactly what ended up giving her the greatest value. She conveyed the feeling that we would be special and given personal, individual treatment. Something the TDC very much liked.
Jennifer clearly demonstrated her knowledge of all the latest trends in the social media side with innovative ways to implement marketing initiatives across the web, not just on the Panama City Beach web site. She mentioned not only the importance of up-to-date, fresh content, but the importance of distributing that content across the web using social media, link exchanges, paid bloggers, videos and more.
Something else that was cool was their idea of customizing site content based on user submitted information. She showed an example of a visitor coming to a site, a brief survey may come up, and based on the results, the visitor is taken to a page that is specific to what that visitor may be looking for, with interactive capabilities that are tailored to him or her.
Jennifer spoke into her agency’s capability to make marketing recommendations based on varying environmental changes, i.e. economic downturn, etc., tailoring initiatives to best leverage what people may be looking for during these times.
At the end of the presentations, it was clear that Jennifer Barbee Inc. had the graphical talent to stay on top with the look and feel of the new site, and a strong back end knowledge to create a site that has tons of interactive capabilities.
The board was all in agreement, with the exception of Mr. Walsingham, that JBinc. was the right choice.
Even PanamaCityBeach.com’s Charles Mason commented at the end his agreement with the board – there’s your published confirmation Marty!
I was convinced that JBinc. was not just the best of the three, but the best for the job. Congrats Jennifer!
Having been on both sides of the vacation rental door, I’ve discovered what it takes to be a re-invited as a guest. As an owner, I already know what I expect from my guests, and how to be diplomatic about those expectations. But how do I convey this to my potential guests without sounding like an overprotective harpy? Well, like I said, I’ve been a renter as well, and the number one attitude I’ve come away with is – treat it like it was mine, better yet, treat it like I had guests coming too.
Wherever we’ve stayed, we’ve always been good about leaving our hotel room or vacation rental, in good shape. But we’ve also felt like if we damaged anything, that we’d be honest enough to inform the owner. We observed the rules during our stay, and went beyond the general checkout cleaning procedures. Maybe I’m insecure enough to not want others to think badly of me. So we’d clean, pick up, fold, wipe down the shower, you name it. But that’s just us. Here I’ll discuss a few ideas of what it takes to make your rental landlords want you back.
As owners, we’ve been quite fortunate to have only a few instances of wear and tear…ones that are hard to avoid from regular use. We’ve had spoons sacrificed to the disposal (I’ve done that myself, DOH!). A few suitcase scuffs on the hallway walls (I highly recommend those miracle sponges!), and red mystery drink spills, presumably from someone’s toddler. These little hiccups are halfway expected and life happens. One time, we got a call from a frantic guest that as they sat and watched television, a picture hanging between the patio doors just slid down the wall and crashed to the floor, breaking the frame. She didn’t want us to think they were negligent in any way. Well, truthfully, I’m surprised it hadn’t happened before. It was not a logical placement and was probably knocked off the hook by the opening and closing of the vertical blinds. We replaced the picture with a small tin wall hanging…one that even if it did fall, wouldn’t break. So no harm, no foul.
Here are some important pointers guests should consider when renting a vacation home.
If you liked your accommodations, and you wish to return again, it’s for a reason. Do the owners a favor and refer the home to your friends and family. Let the owners know it too. As you develop that relationship as repeat customers, you may find yourself recipients of specials, extra amenities and a whole lot of self-respect. You know, the whole “golden rule” thing.
Well, I hope I given you just a glimpse of what you can do to be great guests. It’s not an exhaustive list, but one that will put you on the road to having a good reputation as a responsible guest. Yes, vacation homeowners need your business. But vacationers also want good rates, smooth transactions and great memories. Respecting the vacation homes you stay in will make this possible – and you’ll find that owners will be inviting you back year after year.
PCBDaily 