About Us
I suppose a post about the most important thing in my life is in order. Make no mistake, most of my posts will be about me. Sure, it may seem a little selfish, but I’ve also got the Hughes Family Blog set up for touchy feely type stuff. See? Selfish, but considerate. I assume mostly people who know me (or know someone I know) will read this blog, but should some interested stranger lose their way and end up here drop me a line to apologize.
I grew up in Virginia. I moved to Utah when I was 15 and attended and graduated from Meridian High School (I met my wife, Francoise, there). I served an LDS mission in Alabama. I married Francoise in July of 2001. I went to BYU until my brain was full and then started my company, Blade HQ LLC on 2002. We live currently live Lehi, Utah. There are five us at the time of this writing. Me (29), Francoise (29), Michael (3), Claire (2) and Gabriel (4 months).
Francoise has recently joined us part time at Blade HQ. It’s a pleasure to have her aboard. She’s a mighty lighthouse in the sea of fiscal disaster (”You’re out of money! Stop, stop it!”). In addition to helping us at work she takes care of our children (three full time jobs, all rolled into one hellish ball of unrelenting pain). She’s big into organization, keeps our house immaculate and still finds time look delicious. Yes, I really said that.
Michael is a three year old who appears to be Francoise’ earth-life nemesis. He lives for destruction, thrives on disorder and would test the patience of Job. On the other hand he’s intelligent, he can be very thoughtful and sweet and the way he’s absorbed my interests and hobbies makes him impossible not to love.
Claire is passing through her terrible twos. Well, maybe not “passing,” more like clawing and ripping. “I want ice cream, okay?” I love how she tacks “okay” onto everything. She’s cute as a button, gives the best hugs but has the attention span of a monkey on fire.
Gabriel is four months old. He spends most of his time smiling or crying. He can almost hold a bottle. Big things ahead for this kid.
This is where we live (it’s in an Ivory Homes subdivision in Lehi called Hunter’s Grove). We were really lucky to snag a lot when we did. Francoise found the subdivision and we decided it was perfect. The only problem was that we already had a home in Provo. We decided we couldn’t sign with Ivory until we sold our Provo house. We put it up for sale and bam! It sold in 6 days. We just barley crept into the second phase of Hunter’s Grove. We felt (and feel) very blessed to be in such a great area (Wal-Mart is about a mile away… hell, everything is about a mile away! Whoo hoo!).
I spend a good chunk of my day at work. Some days it actually is work, but most of the time I have fun. You can’t ask for much more than that. Except maybe super robots who do your work for you… for free.
By now I can only assume you’re wondering what PowerLime is… Maybe it’s “the” PowerLime. Maybe it’s “a” PowerLime. Only time will tell. But I can say this much- sometime in the next year it will be something.
BladeHQ is What I Do!
These are my five main home boys… well, four if you don’t count me (but the question is: am I my own main man?). That’s me on the left (Big Cheese and all around Super Guy), Tom (Warehouse Overlord and Mystery Manager) , Ryan (Customer Disservice Superman & Phone Phenomenon), Jake (Website Wonderboy and Graphic Girly Man), and Greg (Graphic Guru and Tech Tinkerbell). Not pictured are: Fran (Awesome Accountant), Daryl & Hal (Clean Up King and Queen), Jim (Software Superstar) and Chris (Email Ambassador… or he would be… if there was a guy named Chris… and there isn’t). I have no idea why I gave us all odd titles just now. It must have something to do with the fact that it’s 3:24am. Anyway, we work here:
“Blade HQ - Your source for Boker, Buck, Benchmade, Microtech, Kershaw, SOG, Piranha, Protech military and law enforcement automatic, spring-assist, and collectible knives. If it says “in stock” it really is!” I pulled this off my website homepage. It pretty much sums up my job. I’ll go into slightly more depth here (if anyone one wants a lot of depth you can read our company history).
Back in 2001 I had a fun little hobby. I collected knives. Mostly automatic knives (the PR terms for “switchblades”). I had a couple of good sources and I’d buy 12 at a time, sell 11 on eBay, and keep the 12th knife. Essentially I got to collect for free. Then I got the idea to set up a web shop (I always hated eBay). With Jim’s help we set up www.bladeplay.com. Jim whipped up some ecommerce solutions for us and we were on our way.
I eventually bought out Jim’s interest in the company and Jim’s solutions morphed into the excellent web store software offered by his company, Blaze Commerce.
After Blade Play, we delved into some higher end knives with www.bladehq.com. We recently opened up www.defensestop.com and we’ve got several new shops in the works (watches and jewelry, emergency preparedness products and some secrets). And that’s about it! I sell knives. It works. Who knew?
If you’re ever bored you can play with the way back machine. If you check out our website from a few years ago you’ll find some very interesting designs. We periodically update our website (BladeHQ has a redesign coming in about a week) and it’s fun to see how we’ve changed over time.
Need for Speed
This is a post about my obsession with vehicle power. I’m not trying to be tacky, I just love modified cars (plus I have a lot of blog catching up to do…). It started out innocently enough back in 2003 with an Acura Integra. It was a forest green 1995 model with 142 horsepower. I loved it. Compared to our 2000 Honda CRV it was a rocket. It was this car which got me hooked on the idea of upgrades. I looked at cold air intakes, exhaust systems, toyed with the idea of an engine swap and then one day, quite by accident, I found my new car.
It was a modified silver 2002 Acura RSX-S and I had to have it. The base engine would have put out 200 horsepower but this RSX was equipped with a Greddy Turbo, Intercooler system and an upgraded exhaust which shot the output to a little over 300 horsepower. Perfect for a speed freak. The acceleration was satisfying. Time moved on and my appetite for power increased (as did my understanding of engine capacities and limits). I wanted something more powerful but upgrading the Acura wasn’t going to give me what I wanted. It was time for a change. I looked for something that would reflect my personality a bit better. I moved away from Japanese innovation to…
…American muscle. I purchased a black 2006 C6 Corvette a few months ago and I couldn’t be more pleased. With 680 horsepower (more on this in a sec), unrivaled handling and heart-pounding acceleration I have found true automotive love. While it appears to be a Z06 model, my vette is really a clever impostor. It’s the standard C6 coupe with every Z06 accessory such as body panels, brakes, emblems, etc. While the base coupe has 400 horsepower stock, this Vette attains its massive power via a twin turbo setup (you can read all about the APS twin turbo upgrade here). There are numerous advantages to the stock coupe with the upgrades. The Z06’s lightweight engine materials (i.e. titanium, magnesium, etc) make it dangerous to add more pressure to the cylinders via forced induction. The LS2 engine of the ‘06 coupe, while smaller and heavier, is actually much better suited to a turbo upgrade. It’s my opinion that you can safely get more torque and horsepower out of it than the Z06 block. In addition, with the coupe you get a removable top, better gas mileage (I’m averaging 25mpg!), the option for an automatic transmission (I’m loving it), it’s way cheaper to insure (it’s only $7 more a month than my Acura!) and it costs less then a comparable Z06 model. Spiffy.
Maybe one day I’ll trade out the Vette for something a little faster… or maybe not.
Internet TV
I used to feel a small amount of regret about not having television piped into our home. The only up to date information I had came from reading the news on Yahoo. I’d be forced to buy DVD collections of TV episodes I enjoyed, but I was always a year behind. “Oh my gosh! Did you see what happened to Clark? I can’t believe they were able to… oh… sorry Cam.” I often resorted to reading episode transcriptions (how sad is that?). Well no more! Rachel recently turned me on to the fact that all these episodes are available on the Internet. Somehow I managed to miss the moment when every major television studio decided to make content available online. You only have to endure are are a few ads and you can watch The Office, Prison Break, Smallville and more. Hooray… maybe.
The Blogging Begins…
So here it is- my first blog post. We have Andrew and Greg to thank for making this happen. Andrew came by my place to instruct me in the ways of WordPress. Greg designed the very odd graphic that adorns the website (if someone could rip something out of my mind, it would look very similar). Andrew may wonder why the first post has taken me so long. To answer this question I will post two pictures of a work-related mishap (after the pictures I will expound).
While tweaking a knife something went terribly wrong. One minute I was holding the knife and the next it was on the ground and I was spraying blood everywhere (yes, you can spray blood from your thumb). Luckily one of my guys was there to drive me to the hospital. They stitched me up (as seen above). I probably won’t have any feeling in my thumb for a long time, but somehow I managed to miss my tendon. There’s always a silver lining. Needless to say this impairment makes typing difficult.
More to come later!
-Cam
PS- Both Greg and I are having a terrible time trying to format things with the WP software. Even the “Code” option is proving quite useless as WP inserts its own “magic tags” into every nook and cranny. It may be a template problem though… not cool.