Many years ago, a marketing specialist schooled me in my erroneous description of what I do as a Feng Shui consultant. I called it a “business” and he refuted that term. He told me that a business, from his perspective, could make a person money while they sleep, either with automated mechanisms in place, or through employees doing the work. Instead, he emphasized that I have a “job.” This was before I had written books or had other products for sale on my website, so I had to agree that my area of expertise was in fact “a job,” since the bills don’t get paid unless I am working directly with a client.
For my “job” as a Feng Shui practitioner, I rely on certain tools of my trade, not all of which are used by other practitioners, so I speak for myself in this article.
The Internet
Even as I consider myself a “low-tech” person, and even with the way I use technology, I still owe much of my livelihood to the internet, well beyond just the global exposure it has offered me. As a comparison, a restaurant may have a website, an on-line menu to view and an on-line way to order food. But the product itself, the food, is still made at a physical location and foot traffic might still be the main income source. Going back more than thirty years, the vast majority of my clients were local to Southern California, but that has changed dramatically and I now have a huge amount of clients sprinkled all over the world. And for that I am very grateful.
Aside from the fact that I email reports and conduct virtual consultations with people far and wide, the preparatory work I do in order to provide remote readings is also reliant on the Internet. For example, with a few key strokes I can usually confirm when a house or a commercial property was built. Compare this to 1992, when I would physically go to my local tax assessor’s office and look up on “microfiche” when properties were built. I had to go during regular business hours, so I wasn’t capable back then of giving clients instantaneous input at midnight about whether or not they should buy that house.
Even the very “20th century” use of a copier-scanner, is vital to my job as I review and mark up floor plans on a near daily basis.
Real Estate Websites
It keeps getting easier and easier to do remote readings, especially with real estate sites offering a large number of property photos, video and sometimes even floor plans. This takes a lot of guesswork out of the remote consultation and the client does not have to provide this vital information on their own.
Remote Compass Readings
Back in the 1990’s and prior, a traditionally-trained Feng Shui consultant would show up in person with a Chinese Feng Shui compass, called a Luo’ pan. I carried two in my briefcase, just in case one failed me or I needed to do a comparison when the compass reading was borderline between two distinct directions. The second compass was the “second opinion” in that regard.
Then came Google Earth in 2005 and I would literally slap a compass transparency over my computer screen, to compare the difference between True North and magnetic North. To this day, there are some poorly trained practitioners or Feng Shui enthusiasts who do not know there is a difference. And with the advent of Compass Apps, even more confusion has ensued.
Google Earth produced Google Compass and that was a wonderful free website which calculated for the viewer the magnetic compass reading for the address being viewed. More than a decade ago, the Google Compass website went down, causing quite a bit of stress for me since my global clientele was steadily growing. Months later, Google Compass morphed into “SetCompass” and each user has to register, put a credit card on file, and the whole process is not exactly user-friendly. It was then that I came to find out that others (millions of others) besides myself, were using SetCompass on a much grander scale. Google saw the opportunity to make money from all this activity.
Businesses around the world use that site thousands of times a day, compared to me using it perhaps only a hundred times a month. There are other on-line compass and on-line Feng Shui programs available, but SetCompass set the standard for me and I want to continue to use it without any glitches. Fortunately, there have only been momentary glitches with the site on my end and I hope it’s available and essentially free for ordinary people to use, indefinitely.
NOAA.GOV (Magnetic Declination Calculator Page)
Another website that I use on a regular basis is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration site. It’s a U.S. government website and the magnetic declination page, in particular, is vital to my accurate analysis of any property, done in-person or remotely. What this site does for me is allow me to see if the declination (compass reading) has changed since the property was built. In many parts of the world, the magnetic declination does change slowly over time, moving either easterly or westerly.
Here is one example of how this could make a profound difference, having this knowledge through the Declination Calculator: let’s say that today I do a reading for a house that currently faces 85 degrees east. That is a sector called East-2. But what if this house was built 90 years ago, and when it was built, the magnetic declination was 20 degrees further easterly back then, compared to now. Or said differently, the magnetic declination has moved westerly since built. If the house was originally facing 65 degrees, that is the third sector of northeast. This is paramount information, much like an astrologer needing to know the exact place of birth to create a natal chart. If I were to assess that house as facing east, when originally it was deemed facing northeast, I would be working with incorrect information and dispensing incorrect advice.
The NOAA.GOV website has an option to go back in time to as far as the year 1590. Other magnetic declination calculators (such as ones from Canada, Germany, Australia) are much more limited in their scope. One declination calculator I found was JUST for the continent of Australia. Other declination calculators require the entry of much more data, they are not user-friendly, or only able to go back 20 years in time. This is simply not good enough for much older properties. And while I don’t review many properties over 150 years old, the most important part of this is how much a declination may have changed, whether it is over a 20 year period, 80 years, or however much since initially built. With the photo examples shown in this article, Washington D.C. is currently 10 degrees West of True North. But in 1900 it was only 4 degrees West of True North. So the declination has moved westerly by 6 degrees.
This U.S. government-based site has gone down a few times since I found out about it. One memorable time was during a government shut down. This site, as well as other governmental agencies not deemed essential, will simply not be available during a government shut down. This is why I’ll pay a handsome fee to anyone who can find me a reliable alternative, that is not actually “borrowing” their data from the NOAA.gov website, as others around the globe do.
So far, the glitches have not lasted too long, but we don’t know what the future will bring! More recently, in August of 2023, the Noaa.gov website blocked my access for days, required me to register, wanted to know who I was, why I was using it and if I was affiliated with the military. No, just a humble Feng Shui practitioner, sir.
Author: Kartar Diamond
Company: Feng Shui Solutions ®
From the Feng Shui On-Line Students Series
