TransRio en Ingles

… to everybody who helped with my logo. I expect to thank each of you directly, but I’m going to Córdoba for a few weeks leaving tomorrow, and probably won’t do much e-mail. So I wanted, at least, to write a quick post. Here’s what I ended up with; this is the front and back of my new business card:

Getting ready for the trip I also quickly re-did the old placeholder homepage at Transrio.com.ar; it now has a little letter of introduction. I wrote it myself in Spanish, so it’s rough, but I’m quite proud that I could do it at all. It’s only one tenth as good as what I hope to have eventually, but then again, it’s twenty times better than the old hand-scribbled thing I was getting by with before. So I feel good. I’m traveling with some kind of a business card, and some kind of a homepage. (more…)

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Man, talk about unpleasant and inconvenient…

Four days ago I clicked my own homepage, and saw my antivirus go bananas. Looking at my own source code I saw a strange little script that had no business being there. At first (being extremely naïve way back then, four days ago) I thought, hmm, that’s weird.

I finally got the mess cleaned up. It’s Sunday night, and it took me 20 hours of hard work. I’m leaving for Argentina in a week, so I really needed to be able to point people to my blog. I couldn’t afford to just take it down. (more…)

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I’m trying to make a logo for Transrio, and unfortunately the project has taken on that dreaded look of a long-term hobby. Time to wrap it up. Here are a dozen that I’m liking now:

#1#2#3#4

#5#6#7#8

#9101112

The first two are hand-lettered, and all the rest are identical except for color. If you click on a thumbnail it takes you to a dummy page I made, placing that particular logo in the context of some content. (more…)

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I don’t like to go too long between posts, but unfortunately there hasn’t been much worth posting. I’ve been busy though. After the Córdoba trip I realized there was no getting around it anymore, I needed a business card. This of course sequenced. I couldn’t order cards without a logo. And then again, oops, a business card has the URL… which had better land on a functioning homepage… which shouldn’t be a blog… which can’t be in English.

For reasons which really make no sense, I’ve been doing everything myself instead of hiring it out. That’s probably not the smartest thing for Transrio the business, but it’s been a nice thing for Pete the person. I care about having minimal basic fluency in publishing. I honestly don’t know why, it certainly makes sense to leave all that to pros, everything is so easy for them. But the learning part is seriously fun for me, so I keep going. Hopefully in the long-long run it will pay off somehow. Today, I’m studying the newer body fonts for screen display, so I can intelligently choose a pretty but functional CSS font-stack.

So that’s where I’ve gone for the past month. There’s not much to show yet. But here’s the logo so far, for your entertainment:

This definitely is not the final version. I like the knot, but for the lettering I’ll be going with a legitimate font, not handwriting. And I’m still playing with colors.

All for now; more later.

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Laura & I are back after a quick trip to Córdoba. It was mostly just a fun vacation; Laura stayed two weeks, I stayed three. The first week we learned the city and took Spanish classes; the second week we went to the mountains for hiking. The third week I was by myself, and worked a little on Transrio. Nothing big, but I was proud of myself. I had ten meetings in four days, all in Spanish of course. This was more a credit to the natural easiness of Córdobese folk, than to any ability I might have with the language. Still, it was a lift to my confidence.

I narrowed down my focus for Transrio to franchising, and agriculture. Franchising for obvious reasons, and agriculture because it’s all-pervasive in Argentina, especially in the province of Córdoba, and has such strong parallels to the United States. Agriculture was my original love before Great Harvest. I met with people in both businesses, franchising and agriculture. It was quite encouraging, and now I need to keep working, and do the follow-up.

Looking back on the trip, it seemed quite ordinary — Córdoba is a very comfortable city as cities go, easy to feel at home in (no small credit to Natalia) and the three weeks went quickly. It seems surprising now that actually this was the first time we’ve been able to meet Natalia in person. She and I have been working together on little projects for years. And it was also our first time ever in Córdoba itself, even though that’s been the official physical address and phone number for Transrio, for years. So overall, a great trip, worth every penny of the plane ticket. 90% vacation, but the little bit that I counted toward work was really, really worth it. I learned a ton every day I was there, and I feel energized now with lots of new ideas.

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For the last few weeks I’ve been filling in all the dead-air that I had after March 2009. I’ve written six new posts, assembling them from leftover parts by reporting on projects which I had wanted to write about, but couldn’t. It’s been fun, because by doing that many in a row I smoothed out the posting process itself. It gave me practice, and I got to debug a few things along the way.

So today I hopped online, looked at the things I’d written, felt really pretty good about it all — and immediately got that familiar creepy feeling: "No Backup." (more…)

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This little blog has been quietly sitting here, patient and all alone, ever-expectant for my return. I went missing in action, March 2009. That’s over a year. Transrio itself has received almost zero attention from me that entire time. I won’t go into why. Laura and I got waylaid by an all-consuming project of greater urgency. But now I’m thinking, finally, I might be able to put things back on track.

Today I skimmed my old stuff, re-familiarizing with this blog and Transrio. The whole thing still feels worthwhile. Since I’m not in a race with anyone I’ll just call it an embarrassing bubble in the pipeline and continue where I was. (more…)

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Natalia with her new baby, Federico.

Natalia with her husband Beto and her son Gero, on vacation in Valle de la Luna. She said in her e-mail (more…)

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Tonight I added a new page called Pete’s informal resume. I’ve had this on my list for some time, it’s nice to finally get it done. It expands on the About Pete page, giving more detailed links to articles, books, and other writings, mostly about Great Harvest.

This also means that I’m about done with the English blog, which will entitle me to a celebration. I have one more little project first, but then it will be… on to translation!

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Over the past few days I got distracted from my primary goal of getting the website up, and I collected some of my thoughts, links, and other materials related to development economics. If you share my interest in the subject, please take a peek: Pete’s Development Corner. Anyone familiar with my thinking will know just what to expect — a pro-business take on poverty issues, and a quick tour of the International Development Community (IDC) from the business side of things.

I’m trying to figure out why this seemed to be a necessary sidetrip. It’s unrelated to Transrio, but then again, not completely. My original ideas for Transrio sprouted up out of a mishmash of post-Great Harvest explorations, including living in Bolivia and attending a big IDC convention. It feels personally necessary now to gather this stuff up, put it in one place, and basically forget about it so I can roll full-bore towards opening shop.

I continue, of course, to have a personal side-interest in development economics. But nothing I posted in the “Development Corner” will merit translation to the Spanish website. Having made this little collection, I’m quite pleased with it, and happy to be done with it. If you do take the time to go there, I hope you like it.

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