Feeling Negative

For some reason I was feeling very negative this past weekend. I don't know why, but it just happened. Maybe it was the change of the weather that made me feel this way. Or maybe it is just that there is a lot of negativity around me right now.

Either way, I need to change my attitude so that it does not bring me down. For the last few years I have really tried to change my outlook on life and I have succeeded for the most part. Every once in a while though, even the most positive people can start to feel negative. This is what happened to me this past weekend.

I don't like feeling this way and as soon as I realized that I was, I made a conscience effort to change. It is not something I can change immediately. It will take some work, but I know I can start to feel more positive. There really are more positive things happening around me than negative, so I just have to stay focused.

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Frustration

I am so frustrated with Meg's soccer team. Her practice last night was moved all the way across town in order to scrimmage with another team. When we get there, the coach is not there as usual. I start looking around and I don't see another team that is not normally at our practices. I make a comment about it to the assistant coach and he tells me he does not make the plans.

It turns out that the scrimmage is with the coach's brother's team. The only problem is that they practice right next to us. So why did she move the practice all the way across town? I just don't understand. Typically bad decision making on her part.

Another issue is that Meg's coach has two teams this year. She has a daughter on each team and is practicing with both teams together. The problem with this is that it creates longer practices with a lot of down time. Her end of practice talks with the teams stretches on forever because she has to address each team individually. Her meetings with parents is the same way. We all get lectured for things that the parents of her other team are not doing.

It is just an unorganized, chaotic mess. I know that people will say that if I am going to complain that I should volunteer to coach next year. I have done that in the past and I committed a lot of time to it. My practices were organized and well timed. I was very efficient. I also committed a lot of time to the other responsibilities such as being a referee. I did my part and know it takes a lot of work, so I appreciate her for being a coach. I just don't think she is right for the job.

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Photography

I have thought a lot about TtV photography for about the last three years. To accomplish TtV photography you get an old Kodak Brownie or similar camera and take a picutre through its viewfinder. The photos taken this way are slightly distorted and usually have a frame around them.

I have messed with TtV in photoshop adding the effect to some previously taken photos and have really enjoyed the results. I had not really thought about it for a while, until I got a Photojojo email that had a brief write-up about the technique. It renewed my interest and I started searching for a camera on ebay. I am now following an auction and hope to get it pretty cheap.

I am really trying a lot of new social sites lately. I first started using Blogger to write this blog. Then I joined Facebook to resarch it for work. I started using Twitter for the same reason. I moved on to Tumblr because I found that it works better with photos than Blogger. Now I have started a flickr account. It all ties together.

I started messing around with flickr because of the Hipstamatic app on my iPhone. I went pro so that I can upload more than one hundred megs a month. It is a racket, but I just felt the cost was worthwhile. You can view all of my photos. Book mark it and it will be updated with my new photos whenever you visit the link.

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Hipstamatic

I downloaded a new app for my iPhone 4 a few days ago. Hipstamatic is a photography app that recreates the look of photos taken by a Hipstamatic 100 camera with different film and flashes. It really is a pretty sweet app and I am having fun using it. I have had so much fun that I even started a flickr account. Watch my Hipstamatic photo stream.

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Controversy at Ground Zero

I first heard about the ground zero mosque controversy this past weekend. I guess the right wing, led by Sarah Palin, is up in arms at the thought of a Muslim religious building being so close to the former site of the twin towers.

Throughout history we have fought for freedom. The freedom to choose your religion without the fear of being persecuted. The freedom to make choices without fearing for your life. The freedom to vote in our republic. Remember that our form of government is a republic with democratic rule.

The group that is planning the new mosque is including a museum along with it. They believe that it will be a tribute to the people who died in the terrorist acts that took place on September 11, 2001. This group of American citizens should have the freedom to build their mosque where they choose. Muslims are not bad people. It is just the extreme few that have given the religion a bad image.

We must remember that this country was founded on religious freedom. The people who immigrated to this country from Europe did so to escape religious persecution. All of the men and women who have died fighting for this country have done so to ensure we continue to have the freedoms we have. They did not die for certain people to have freedoms while others do not. They fought for the freedom of everyone.

I think people need to open their minds and put themselves in the place of someone who practices a minority religion. What would you do if you lived in Europe three-hundred years ago and wanted to practice a Protestant religion. You would not be able to without persecution. I don' want that for my country.

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Work of Art

I watched the finale of Work of Art last night. I have really enjoyed this show. It is the first show in a long time that I can't wait to watch each week. There were several people on the show whose art I just did not like, but I think the final five were really talented. I don't know how people get that creative.

Simon de Pury was a great part of the show. He was really excited most of the time and the combination of his accent and choice of words was great. I can see that he was really inspirational for the artists on the show. I wish I was like him.

Miles was the typical tortured artist for the entire show. He had some major social issues, but they did not make him come off as a jerk. He was one of the closest characters to what I perceive a true artist to be. I always think of an artist as a quirky character and that is what he was. I knew that he would make it to the finals, but hoped he would not be the winner.

Peregrine always made pieces that were more crafty than art to me. She was very creative, but I just did not like most of what she did. On the finale Simon visited the home of each of the final three. Peregrin's house was the closest to where I believe an artist would live. The house was filled with art objects and looked very inspirational.

Abdi was the person I thought was the most talented for the last three or four shows. He made a few of the most impactful pieces in my opinion. I think his nature inspired piece was the single best piece of the show. I really like his style and he always seemed to be in awe of everything. I think that personality or attitude or outlook on life or whatever you want to call it is what makes him the creative person he is. He truly deserved to win the show.

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Feeling Creative

I went for a walk last night to check the mail and on my way back I was mesmerized by the moon in the sky. It was about nine o'clock and it was not completely dark yet. The sky was a dark blue with the last vestiges of the sunset near the horizon line. The moon was in the classic shiver shape and there was a bright star directly above it.

I was inspired. When I got back home I grabbed my Diana+ camera and went to the backyard. I did not have a good view so I decided to take a walk to see if I could get a better view. I walked to the open field near my house and got some photos. I went back home and then went into the backyard again with my digital Rebel.

I tried to take one photo of the moon and was not successful so I started looking at the flowers and plants in the yard. I posted some photos on my tumblr site. I was really inspired last night for the first time in a long time. I hope my creativity paid off.

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First Soccer Practice Down

Meg's first soccer practice was yesterday. The coach chose to practice all the way across the field from where the parents sit, so we could not here anything she was saying. It was an interesting choice to say the least.

She coaches two teams. A girls under twelve and a girls under ten. She has the practices at the same time with an assistant coach for each team. The scrimmaged for ninety percent of the practice. I did not see much skills practice at all. At one point, I guess the girls were not listening and she had them do push-ups. That did not make much sense to me. Why not make them run while dribbling the ball?

My first impression of the coach at the parents meeting was that this was going to be a bad year. I can't complain since she is a volunteer, but I can still not be happy. I really hope that our assistant coach gets involved. His daughter is a really good player and I hope that he has taught her what she knows and he can share some of that with Meg.

Having the teams practice together is also an issue for me. Of course the older girls will dominate the skills competitions that you usually have at practice. They will also intimidate the younger girls in the scrimmage portion of the practice. The coach already had to tell them to watch their kicks because they were hitting the younger girls in the face. Meg got hit in the face, but she was OK.

During the scrimmage, the older girls dominated. The coach mixed the older and younger girls on the same team, but the older girls still dominated at each position. I think this will affect team chemistry if she keeps doing this. The girls need to learn to play with each other and that will not happen as long as this continues.

I will keep an open mind, but it doesn't seem like this is going to be a good year.

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A Creative Spark

While The Queen was out of town on Friday night, Meg and I went to a movie. We watched Ramona and Beezus. It was Meg's choice, but I also thought that she would like this movie.

It was a pretty good movie and it inspired me to help Meg with her creativity. Ramona really reminded me of Meg. They are both individuals and are each very creative. Ramona's dad really encouraged her creativity. Watching the movie made me realize that I have not been doing a very good job of encouraging Meg's creativity.

On Saturday morning, Meg and I bought some turpentine to clean oil paint off of brushes. We then got all of our painting supplies out of the garage and set up an easel on the dining room table. We talked a little bit about what the subject of her painting would be and she decided she wanted to paint a picture of Cocoa Bean. I told her that was very ambitious for her first oil painting, but she insisted.

I took a photo of Cocoa Bean and printed it out for a reference for her. I helped her sketch the location of Cocoa's head and told her to paint the background without painting where Cocoa's head will be. She decided that she did not want a realistic background and chose to just paint it blue. I think the color is a great choice because the image of Cocoa will pop off of it very nicely.

This is a learning process for both of us, but it will be a lot of fun.

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My Next Books

I ordered my next set of books on Saturday. I am in a real funk right now and it applies to my blog posting as well as my reading. I hope that these new books will break my funk and give me some inspiration. Here is the list of books I ordered:

• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston
• Raising the Bar: Integrity and Passion in Life and Business: The Story of Clif Bar & Co. by Gary Erickson, Lois Lorentzen
• Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford
• Stirring It Up: How to Make Money and Save the World by Gary Hirshberg

I have wanted to read Stirring It Up for some time and have always put it off. I think that will be the first book of this new group that I dig into. I really hope these books will give me a creative spark.

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My New Book

Well, it isn't really my new book. It is just the book I am currently reading. I am now reading The Sign by Raymond Khoury. The beginning of the book seems strangely familiar to me. I can't put my finger on where I have read something similar, but I have.

I needed to take a break from all of the business books I have been reading to read something that is a little more entertaining. I am still on pace to read twelve books this year, but this new book is a big one. It has four hundred and fifty-eight pages and I am only on page sixty-one. That means I only need to read a little over fifteen pages per day, which is very manageable.

I will need to shop for my next set of books very soon to make sure I get them in time. I am open to suggestions from anyone.

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At the Coast

The Queen, Meg and I took at trip to the coast to see Unk Timmers. Here are some photos from the trip.

I am trying out Tumblr, so let me know what you think.

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I Like Dynamic

I have been working with a new advertising agency for the last few months and I have come to realize that I really like dynamic designs. I don't like printed materials that look static. I want to see movement conveyed in the design and any photography that is used. I just feel that static-looking designs are dated.

The problem is that I am having trouble communicating this to my agency. I don't have all of the answers for how they can achieve the look I desire. I expect them to come up with the ideas for that part of the work. I just want them to be a little more creative with their designs.

I am creative enough and involved enough in the work that is created for my company that I think I can be a pain for an advertising agency. I may be difficult to work with because I have somewhat of a vision of what I am looking for and I definitely know what I like and dislike. I always wanted to be an advertising executive because I feel that I have good taste. I can make good decisions on what is a good design.

This is what makes me a bad customer for a graphic designer or advertising agency. I can't change, but I can work on better communicating my thoughts with the people I work with. That is my challenge.

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The Resistance

Linchpin is a great book full of some really good insights. I have already found myself talking about many of the points in the book. Just last night The Queen and I were talking about education and whether it is worth it for her to pursue a master's degree at this point. I told her that she needs to fight the resistance and get over her anxiety and do what she wants to do.

Seth focuses a lot of time in the book talking about the resistance. Some of what he says is a little counter-intuitive, but once you have a chance to sit back and digest it it becomes a little bit easier to understand. The resistance is what your lizard brain constantly does to try to protect you. It keeps making excuses for you to not do the things you want to do. It convinces you that you will fail if you try, therefore you should just not try. It is trying to protect you from this failure.

As I think back, I encounter the resistance all the time. There have been many things that I have wanted to do and most of the time I give in to the resistance and just decide that I can't do those things. It is really painful to look back and realize how often this has happened to me. I have not been in total control of my decisions and this is bad.

I would like to say that now that I am aware of the resistance I will not let it control me, but as Seth points out in the book it is not that easy. You have to put yourself in uncomfortable situations. You need to think about the things the resistance is telling you. If is difficult to overcome. It takes a lot of effort, but in the long run it will pay great dividends if you can overcome the resistance. I need to make a conscious effort to overcome the resistance before it is too late.

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Fat & Happy

I will admit it. My company got fat and happy. Management, including myself, got complacent. We let our guard down and now we are paying the price for our mistakes. My company is going through a rough patch. This trouble came to us much later than most companies because we had done a fairly good job before the recession. But we are dealing with it now.

Within the last few weeks we have laid off a hand full of employees. Our overhead is increasing and we are struggling to ship product. The layoff was the right thing to do to help our overhead issue and it should not affect our ability to ship product. It is just a minor readjustment that was long overdue.

Sometimes a company has to make the tough decisions. When times are good, companies sometimes put these decisions off. This is a really bad thing. It is important to continue to make the tough decisions even when times are good. We did not do ourselves any favors by putting these decisions off. If an employee is not carying their weight you need to cut them loose. A company cannot afford to absorb the overhead of an unproductive employee.

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Contemplating My Life

Two things this past week have made me think about my life. On Sunday we went to my Uncle's house because another Uncle and Aunt were in town from Oklahoma. Last night we visited one of The Queen's co-worker's children in the hospital. These two things have made me think about my life and life in general.

The visit to my Uncle's house was something I really wanted to do. I have not been to his house in many, many years. I think I have only been there twice and he has lived there for a long time. The reason for this is that when I was still a kid a rift in the family happened. I don't know the reason to this day. All I know is that I was pretty close with my cousins and then all of the sudden we never saw them. It changed my relationship with there family forever.

Visiting their house again on Sunday really made me think about my family. Both of my parents have interesting relationships with their families. Obviously, my mother's family had the problem above with her brother's family and another problem with her sister. My father has one brother who lives locally who we only saw a few times growing up and the rest of his family lives out of state. I guess every family has those members who are a little weird or do not fit in with the rest of the family. I just started to wonder if it was my parents who were the weird ones or if it was their siblings.

We visited the hospital last night because T-Bird's co-worker's daughter had to have a heart procedure. This is the second time she has had to have it and the doctor said that it did not work this time. She will need to have open heart surgery in a little over a month. One of her arteries is smaller than it should be and is going to restrict her growth and cause some other problems unless it is corrected by surgery.

It was hard to watch a little child laying in bed with wires and tubes attached to her. From time to time she would get very frustrated that she had to lay there in bed. At one point she even started trying to pull everything off of her hand. She could not even get up to go to the bathroom and this really annoyed her. She did not want to go to the bathroom in a bed pan. She tried to get out of bed several times to go to the bathroom.

I cannot even imagine what her parents are going through thinking about the surgery that is coming up. The doctor told them that they do about fifty of these surgeries a month, but that does not ease your mind when you are in that situation. I just wish the best for everyone involved and hope that they can just enjoy life a little while they are waiting for the surgery.

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Brainstorming Change

The Queen works for a school in a low income area of town. Many of the parents of students are involved in gangs. Many parents are not home very much, so the kids are on their own a lot of the time. There is a church that is located in a an upper middle class area of town that supports the school with whatever they need. They have one person who is there every week.

This church inspires me. They really support the kids and families of this school in everything they do. If they kids need something, all the school needs to do is ask and the church does there best to get those items for the kids. For example, every year the church supplies many, if not all, of the students with back packs and school supplies. When one of the teachers started a Saturday academy for the kids, he asked the church for shirts and they provided them.

Last year The Queen had this girl in her fourth grade class who was behind in every subject. She could not read or write, but she tried really hard and wanted to learn. Everyone thought she might have some learning disabilities, so they tested her. It turned out that she did not have any disabilities, but was affected because her family moved a lot when she was younger. She was just always behind so she never learned the things she was supposed to. I really wanted to help her and mentioned it to The Queen a few times, but I never acted on it.

Last night we were sitting in one of our favorite Mexican food restaurants and I told her that the book "Linchpin" was really motivating me to do something. I told her that I would like to volunteer in an after school program at her school. We were talking about it for a while and she told me that she thought something involving computers would be good. I said that was fine, but I would like to make it very unstructured so that the kids could choose what we did.

I mentioned that it would be great if we could get a company like Apple to donate some laptops and maybe a company like Canon could donate some cameras. We could then have weekly assignments for the kids to look for. They could find their own solutions to problems like intersecting lines. I think it would teach them to look at their world in a different way. It would show them that beauty can even be found in their own neighborhood. I got really excited about this idea. Now all I have to do is find some way to get some laptops and cameras so I can move forward with this idea. I think this is too much to ask of the church.

I also mentioned to T-Bird that we can't rely on teachers alone to run after school activities for the kids. We need to get the community involved. We need to get local graphic artists to come in and teach the kids about art. We need to get local business people to come in and talk to them about entrepreneurship. We need to get the local college to come in and talk to them about opportunities for education. We need to try to open their eyes to the possibilities that are available to them.

Now comes the hard part.

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Am I a Linchpin?

I am reading the book "Linchpin" by Seth Godin. His writing style does not keep me riveted, but it is a fairly easy read.

The book is very interesting to me, but I am constantly wondering if I have what it takes to be indispensable. Can I be a linchpin? I think I have a lot of knowledge that makes me very valuable to my company. I just don't know if I can be a linchpin.

I don't know how to be a linchpin yet. That much I do know. I need to figure that out.

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Happy Birthday O! Wretched Mortals!

Today is the one year birthday of this blog. My first post was short and sweet. It explained why I chose the name of the blog and a few alternatives I considered. Since that time, I think this blog has changed dramatically. It was originally just an exercise while reading the book "How to Think Like Leonardo DaVinci." Now it it a blog about my thoughts on many topics.

This has been a good exercise for me. I am not usually a person who likes to share my emotions with people. I consider myself almost devoid of emotion on most occassions. This blog has allowed me to explore my inner feelings and put them out for someone else to view, or read. I have grown a lot this year and look forward to more growth in the future.

I have struggled many times over this year to keep writing regularly. Early on my goal was to write something five days a week. There were some weeks when I wrote more than five times and there were other when I struggled to write two or three times. I am going through a very rough patch now where I am lucky if I write something once or twice per week. I don't like the fact that this has happened, but I don't know how to get out of this funk yet.

I really wanted to have a nice post for the blogs one year birthday. I thought I could come up with something insightful and deep. Obviously that did not happen. Maybe I will write something great next year on the second birthday.

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Do I Need an iPad?

On our trip to LA this past weekend, we stopped by an Apple store. Meg and I were standing next to each other playing with iPads while The Queen was watching us. Meg really enjoyed using it and was already thinking about how she could use it if she had one.

I loved the interface and the size. I didn't think that the size was right before I actually got to use one, but now I think it is great. I was just trying to figure out how I could justify the purchase.

Meg was playing with it for a while before asking The Queen how much it cost. She really wanted to get one and told her that she had her own money. When The Queen told her how much it cost she said that she needs to count her change. I did not have the heart to tell her she did not have enough money. Instead I told her that there was no need for her to buy one. I told her that if I buy one, she can rent it from me for fifty dollars an hour. She counter offered one dollar per hour. I countered back with twenty dollars per hour and told her that I could not pay for it at the rate of one dollar per hour. She agreed.

I was not being serious with her, but obviously she was really thinking about it. She valued it enough to agree to pay me twenty dollars per hour for using it. Wow! She really wants an iPad. Now I just need to be able to justify it in my mind.

So far, the three major downfalls in my mind are that it does not play PowerPoint presentations, it does not have any ports other than the standard iPod/iPhone dock connector and that it has to be synced with a computer. I think it should be a stand alone device with the necessary USB, firewire and HDMI ports.

I searched a lot this week to see if there was an easy way to convert a PowerPoint presentation to play on the iPad. My presentation has embedded video, so it is not just a bunch of static slides. This makes it much more difficult to convert. I guess I will just have to keep on searching.

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