This week we have a special guest post from our own Jon Kiger...
I seem to be especially hard on deck shoes. Maybe it's the Georgia climate that lends itself to wearing them year round, but I seem to go through a pair in about a year. A few months ago I sprung for a pair from a company that has an airtight guarantee of satisfaction. Those shoes started to come apart at the seams and they had me return them 'no questions asked' for a repair that would take two to three weeks round-trip.
I'm not a huge fan of Twitter -- I prefer my conversations to be a touch deeper than 140 characters will allow -- but I follow turf-related tweets and do find certain things of value. Amidst all the extrania, I love the photos. Golf course sunrises, maintenance practices du jour, summer crew shenanigans, golfer foibles... they're all good.
Somebody out there in the Twitterverse had the foresight to register the Twitter handle @superproblems and aggregate tweets from superintendents all arou
Used to be I wouldn't give a second thought to extended warranties on consumer products. Just a way for retailers to pad their profit margins, I'd tell myself as I smirked and shook my head when offered them at the checkout counter.
I'm rethinking that in light of what I'm experiencing as a new low in consumer product quality.
I have railed on this before but I'm gonna do it again. The newest inhabitant of the boneyard alongside my garage is the electric pressure washer I bought from No
No sooner had I written my last blog post on the decision to repair or replace an item was I confronted with the situation again. I walked into the kitchen to grab my iPad to do a quick search about something and, struggling to get the just-a-bit-too-magnetic Zagg keyboard cover off, both slipped from my hands and tumbled to the tile floor. Oops. Spiderweb cracks all across the iPad screen.
By no means am I a power iPad user, but I do need it to test new website layouts and configurations..
The question of whether to 'repair or replace' rises to the surface as any product ages, be it a household item like a washing machine or dishwasher, a vehicle, or a piece of turf equipment.
In our increasingly disposable culture the answer is most often 'replace'. Products manufactured overseas in countries with economies very different than ours keep the cost of replacement artificially low. Rates for service technicians ranging from $50 to over $100/hour further sway the decision toward
One of the things we wordsmiths often do is ask someone else to proofread a column or article before we hit the publish key. That's one reason why newspapers have editors, of course.
Other than correcting grammatical errors or catching typos, the real benefit of a second set of eyes (SSOE) is determining if the piece reads well or otherwise makes sense. You see, when one is intimately involved in writing or creating something (or tending to a golf course for that matter), everything makes s
The subject line of a somewhat curious email I received last week caught my eye. Regarding an impending local chapter meeting, it was titled "Sad state of affairs", and went like this:
"I was wondering if anyone can help me. As I'm sure to be asked, please help me with the answer to 'why do we have 12 class A members signed up for the July meeting'? and of that, more than half are board members. Luckily with others we have almost 50 total. Sad.
That's right. A great venue with educa
Music used to be a HUGE part of my life, at least on the listening end. All encompassing, enveloping, everywhere. Massive stereo system, an entire wall of electronics and a library of vinyl.
Fast-forward 40 years or so and the vinyl and high-end audio components have been replaced with an iPad, a Bose SoundDock and a Sonos Play5 system for wireless streaming from Pandora or my iPad. (The Sonos was a gift rather than an investment of my own.) My CDs are either scratched from the car and toss
This just drives me nuts. A superintendent is squeezed between the egos of a green chairman and a few other "influential people" and his obligation to the membership that is paying the bills. A classic tale of what ails this business. The AF (Asshole Factor for those not familiar with the term) brought into stark relief.
The superintendent in question is managing one-year old greens. They're young, not ready for aggressive management practices. An amateur tournament is approaching. You kno
To many of us, the term unplugged commands visions of MTV and rock bands doing acoustic sets with adoring fans gathered around.
But of late the definition leans more toward disconnecting oneself from the "collective electronic consciousness", so aptly stated by Urban Dictionary. An alternate definition is "to be seperated (sic) from the borg-like creation of being constantly connected through digital communication tools".
As I sit here on a Friday night anticipating our long-awaited es
I was chatting with Larry Stowell of PACE Turf the other day about the state of the industry in general, our businesses in particular and the challenges of making sense of the rapid technological change today.
In his unique role as "maestro" of his and Wendy Gelernter's turf research clearinghouse (for lack of a better term, as PACE Turf — like TurfNet — defies definition in a concise sentence or less), Larry has long been a voice of reason in our sometimes heated or volatile Forum discussio
It has been interesting to watch the shifting in preferred 'social media' platforms (I'm beginning to hate that term) over the past year or so, between personal blogs to Facebook to Twitter to the TurfNet.com Forum (and sometimes back again). And Linked-In is in the midst of that somewhere.
Some guys have posted on their blogs that they have "moved" to Twitter and will be posting in their blogs infrequently at best moving forward. "Easier and more convenient" are commonly cited reasons. Perh
I was clicking through some archived editions of TurfNet Monthly (on hiatus now) and came across a column I wrote back in 1997. It seems that Nat Binns, then superintendent at Schuylkill Country Club in Orwigsburg, PA, had phoned me and offered a tidbit from a copy of the SCC newsletter he had found, dated April, 1967. It was an excerpt from a Paul Harvey broadcast from November, 1966. See below:
The Year the Grass Died
Any proud homeowner looks with admiration and envy at the lawn-scap
Good to see the USGA's "While We're Young" campaign on picking up the pace of play. Kind of ironic that it was announced mid-US Open with it's 5+hour rounds... but the spots were well done and will hopefully be embraced by the golfing masses.
It was particularly refreshing to see a major PR campaign from an organization like the USGA focused on something that has the potential for an immediate and lasting benefit to all golfers, across all skill levels and choice of golf course. Too often
We at TurfNet intentionally stayed away from Merion Golf Club during Open week, anticipating adequate coverage from the regular turfies as well as near-manic '#Twysteria' from the cub reporters new on the scene.
Somebody had to stay home and tend to the rest of the turf industry.
We saw little need to further clog up the maintenance area, tweet more images of "the fairway mowers going out!!!" or burden Matt Shaffer with yet another interview request.
But wait... Matt! What a class
