Ho hum, it’s snaining here in Langley, BC., Canada.
(Snow and rain mixed together, for the uninitiated.)
Tags: snow, rain, snain, snaining, langley, bc, john koetsier

Saw this link to the 10 occupations in the US with the top growth rates over the next decade on popurls.

Retail salespersons
Registered nurses
Postsecondary teachers
Customer service representatives
Janitors and cleaners
Waiters and waitresses
Food preparation and serving workers
Home health aides
Nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants
General and operations managers

Aside from health care, which is growing too fast to be sustainable, most […]

Jackie deJonge is the wife of Hendrik, a friend and colleague of mine.
Right now she, Hendrik, and their 5 kids are going through a very tough time - just as they were about to move to Australia, she was diagnosed with a very severe form of cancer in her left arm. She’s recently gone through […]

Blasted

Originally uploaded by johnkoetsier.

I had to take a shot of this … it’s one of the hundreds of trees on East Badger Road, on the route I drive on most days on my way to my Bellingham, WA office.
I hate hate hate to see trees […]

Up at 6:20 this morning (late), skipped breakfast. Left house at 7:20.
At work at 8:10 - working in Bellingham today. Juggled projects and priorities until noon, then had lunch with my boss, Kevin. Worked until 4:45.
Home at 5:45 (border lineup was huge). Eating until 6:00. 15 minutes of hockey - Buffalo Sabres beating the Carolina […]

I’m in LONG meetings every single day this week …
So I’m leaving early in the morning, coming home late. After a few things with the kids, and a couple of words with Teresa, there’s not much time for anything else.
(In case you were wondering why posts are a little sparse this week!)

Tonka

Originally uploaded by johnkoetsier.

A building is going up near my Bellingham office - tilt-up construction in which huge slabs of concrete are poured, then lifted into place.
I’m wondering how the crane is going to get out …

I’m doing some education research lately and happened to come across this article which refers to the “Canada effect.”

Some have quipped that state-level student achievement in the U.S. can be best predicted by proximity to Canada …

In other words, the most northern states typically have the best results.
However, lest we Canadians get too cockey, we […]

Whatcom creek

Originally uploaded by johnkoetsier.

About 3 minutes walk from my Bellingham, WA office is Whatcom Creek.
Just a couple minutes away, but quiet, calm, peaceful, and organic in every sense of the word - a very welcome break from a day inside an office!

I managed to […]

This is the fourth in a series of seminar notes that I’m blogging: good talks I attended while at NAESP in San Antonio.
Before I begin this one, here are all four:

Eric Cupp: touching hearts, changing minds
Christine Todd Whitman: on leadership
Jon Gordon: the energy addict
Glenda Hatchett: a promise to keep

Jon Gordon is an author, presenter, and […]

As I’ve mentioned before, I work for Premier, an educational services company. We provide lifeskills training and tools for over 60,000 schools. This week I travelled to Texas and went with two of our local sales consultants to experience what their life is like.

This is the third in a series of seminar notes that I’m blogging: good talks I attended while at NAESP in San Antonio.
Before I begin this one, here are all four:

Eric Cupp: touching hearts, changing minds
Christine Todd Whitman: on leadership
Jon Gordon: the energy addict
Glenda Hatchett: a promise to keep

Glenda Hatchett was the highest ranking woman […]

This is the second in a series of seminar notes that I’m blogging: good talks I attended while at NAESP in San Antonio.
Before I begin this one, here are all four:

Eric Cupp: touching hearts, changing minds
Christine Todd Whitman: on leadership
Jon Gordon: the energy addict
Glenda Hatchett: a promise to keep

Christine Whitman is a former governor of […]

This is the first in a series of seminar notes that I’m blogging: good talks I attended while at NAESP in San Antonio.
Before I begin this one, here are all four:

Eric Cupp: touching hearts, changing minds
Christine Todd Whitman: on leadership
Jon Gordon: the energy addict
Glenda Hatchett: a promise to keep

Eric’s seminar was one of the best […]

If you need a job (and happen to be an American) you might take a gander at Indeed’s job posting versus geography map mash-up.
Very nice - wish they had one for Canada.

I recently posted a tribute to Henk Berends, the retiring chairman of our company.
Today I actually delivered the speech, after making some changes, and I’m really, really, really relieved to say it went over extremely well.
The difficult thing about this particular speech is that I wanted to imitate his fairly inimitable speaking style, and so […]

Henk Berends, the chairman of Premier, is retiring this month. Here’s something I wrote for a memory book that we are presenting to him on Wednesday.
(I can post it here two days in advance fearlessly, since he is something of a technophobe, and “blog” would likely sound as alien to him as “blickfarx.”)
Without further […]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about giftedness.
It’s kind of the idea that each and every human being has certain gifts, in unique composition and degree, and that there is something, or maybe even many somethings that you, that I, that any particular individual can do better than anyone else in the world.
I personally, because […]

OmniOutliner is an excellent Mac OS X app for outlining and organizing just about any kind of information.
It’s intuitive, powerful, and elegant, but there’s one thing that annoyed me about it: it insisted on printing the title of each document at the top of the document.
This totally violates the WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) principle, since the title, […]