Happy Hour of the week ending on Friday 7-18-2008 850 Restaurant Cape Coral

Well Derwood commented on another one of his happy hour places last week during the Bar Louie post:

"A non-chain happy hour location that I recently enjoyed - 850. It is in the Cape (sorry!) - in fact it is on 850 Lafayette so not far from the bridge. Happy Hour is all the time which makes the draft beers not much over a buck! Plus they have more upscale offerings as far as food goes - more than bar fare of hot wings and stuffed jalapenos"

Well the 850 is in Cape Coral, obviously. What Derwood didn't tell us is what the happy hour actually was! Well Jeffrey saves the day! From their website:

"THE CAPE'S BEST HAPPY HOUR

MONDAY - WEDNESDAY
11AM - 10PM

THURSDAY - SATURDAY
11AM - 2AM

WELL LIQUORS
VODKA - RUM - GIN - TEQUILA - BOURBON - WHISKEY
$2.00

CALL LIQUORS
SMIRNOFF - BACARDI - CAPTAIN - CUTTY SHARK
TANGUERAY - JACK DANIELS - SEAGRAM 7 - JOSE CUERVO
$3.25

SIGNATURE MARTINI'S
11am - 7pm
$4.75

DRAFT BEERS
DOMESTIC
$1.25

IMPORT
$3.00

BOTTLE BEERS
DOMESTIC
$1.25

BUCKET (5)
$6.00

IMPORT
$2.25

BUCKET (5)
$10.00

HOUSE WINE
MERLOT - CAB - CHARD - WHITE ZIN
$4.00 "

Have a Happy Hour and drink and drive responsibly. Remember 275-Taxi locally in SWFL or LeeTran (the bus)!

Frangipanis, Royal Poncianas, Angels Trumpets Oh My!

On my bike ride each morning, I ride along some of the prettiest landscapes and plantscapes. The fragrant frangipani and angels trumpets, and brilliant Royal Poncianas are along the ride. I love living in the subtropics, and that is mostly due to the vegetation. Nothing like seeing green all year round. Pop in some tunes on my Sony Ericsson w580i and away I roll (which is also what I took the pictures on... this is actually a very good phone as I posted about previously).



The community which seems to have some of the prettiest foliage is Cape Harbor. It is a gated community that I live near (Not in mind you, when I moved here they were just building it and I should have bought in at the ground floor, however now, with the recent real estate market slump, you can get some good deals on the condo's there). Not that they need it, but there was their free plug. P.S. Will Stout, during the build of the place, your contractors kill 6 of my mail boxes. Remit payment to my paypal :-).



Some pictures of the ride:







One of my bikes (notice I have a light for at night!)



The pseudo entrance to Cape Harbor (see my shadow?)



Royal Ponciana just starting to bloom! They will be on fire soon, through end of August! Take a drive down the FL Keys and they are every where as well.




Angels Trumpet (man you should smell them. At night they are more fragrant). We like the smell so much, Jessica and I planted one near our bedroom window so we can smell it during the winter.







The frangipani I ride by every day. I actually got a couple of cuttings from a neighbor of this same plant for my yard because it smells that nice.




A last shot of the "street" scape there at Cape Harbor's condos (they are above the shops. I like the concept, but it would almost feels like Disney Land to live there).



That is part of my morning bike ride.



There are other places I pass along the way I will talk about in a future post.



~Jeffrey

Current reading list for June, July, August 2008

Jeffrey's current reading list:
Fantasy and Science Fiction August Issue
Developing the Leader Within You John Maxwell
Total Money Makeover Dave Ramsey
Creativity and Innovation Management Journal

Free WiFi Networks - How do I set one up?

Asking such a question on a blog that you post to might not get a response, however, I have been thinking about this problem a lot lately. How does one go about setting up a free Wifi Network?

I want to set one up for my local community that is self sustaining. How might I do that is a question?After playing with DD-WRT on my Linksys WRT54GS router, I noticed it had the ability to put advertisements to the web browsers connected to it. So a visible means of support could be local business advertisements.

OK, part one is sort of covered (the money). However, what about a co-op like the electric company? People buy into the company that makes some money by advertisements? What other business models could be done? Other services that could be provided by a free wifi network? Wifi Radio stations on it? Free phone services over VOIP?

OK, next big question is how to get the current services provider in the area to allow me to do such a thing? Or how do I get the WiFi routers connected to the internet without going through the ISP?

I have been looking on wikipedia and community networks, but it looks like the concept sort of died (well I can see that, nobody wants to fund free).I had a friend that I lost touch with that went down to Savannah, GA to try and set one up. Maybe someone from there can weigh in and help? Contact me via the blog.

I would like to set one up in either the business district of Cape Coral or Downtown Fort Myers.

There will be more thoughts on this.I need to flesh it out more on paper to diverge and converge my thinking about this.

I think this could be a good thing. Better than just a list of local area "free" hotspots, but a wide coverage or "cloud" of wifi all can connect to (so you can do wifi radio, wifi phones, etc).

Contact me via the blog if you have any interest, knowledge, or support. Thanks!

~Jeffrey

SCAMPER On Over For Some Creative Thinking

Some of you may have heard of the term SCAMPER in regards to creative thinking, while others just think I am talking about what happy little children do when they are playing. Either way, both can have a positive effect. So, some more of my learning from Buffalo State.

SCAMPER is actually an acronym developed from divergent thinking questions by Alex Osborn. Bob Eberle took those questions and categorized them and coined the acronym in his book Scamper: Creative Games and Activities for Imagination Development.

Check out the definition of the acronym:

Substitute
Combine
Adapt
Modify
Put to other uses
Eliminate
Rearrange

One of the best examples of a write up about SCAMPER was in Luciano Passuello's blog.
I loved his examples and the graphics he used. Excellent work. Since he did such an excellent job, I will not go too much in-depth, however, here are questions from each category one could potentially ask:

Substitute: What can you substitute?
Combine: What sort of ensemble could be used or created?
Adapt: What else is like this?
Modify: How about a new twist?
Put to Other Uses: What might other uses be, if changed?
Eliminate: What can do without?
Rearrange: What if you reversed it?

I have actually seen SCAMPER used to help develop a board game in relatively short time with a group of 6 people. It was, in a word, amazing. Let me know how this works out for you and let Luciano know what you think of his resource.

Happy Creativity!

~Jeffrey