Breakfast wif Daddy
Aidan and I sat on the same side of the table - a rare occasion - usually that’s Gabrielle’s spot. But she was gone at Gems camp, and Aidan, sitting there, decided to loop his little arm over mine while having breakfast.
Teresa captured the moment:
Hallowed evening
OK, so it’s Hallowed ‘een, or more modernly, Halloween, but that’s just a recent invention of the last 100 years or so. As Chaucer said, “men evere seeke newfangle.”
In any case, here are the artistic efforts of the Koetsier household this trick-or-treat season. (More accurately, that would be the art of one Teresa Koetsier ….)
[ update Nov 1 ]
Teresa tells me that the art was NOT all hers. While she did do the carving, she did it (more or less) according to the kids’ own drawings … so Aidan, Ethan, and Gabrielle all had a hand in their pumpkins.
Mars
I hadn’t been keeping up too intensely on matters astronomical the past month or so, so late last week when I went for a night run and saw an unusually bright “star” in an odd location, I assumed it was Venus.
It was intensely bright and yellowish-hued - I could barely help seeing it even during my run. As soon as I got home, I quickly got out my Sony DSC W1 and a tripod and snapped a couple of pix. None turned out too well, but I was happy to capture the sight.
And, of course, when I checked up on it, I realized that Mars is now very, very close to Earth and hence very visible. Without further ado, the ‘god’ of war:
And here’s another, with some post-processing to make it ugly. I was trying to capture the trees in the foreground as I shot east and up towards the top of Glen Mountain. But they were so dark I had to resort to some extreme Photoshop tricks to bring them out … hence the massive amount of noise in the shot. There are probably ways to reduce that noise selectively, but I’m neither a Photoshop expert nor in possession of vast amounts of unencumbered time …
Ummm … Mars is the bright speck near the trees …
The decline and fall of the American empire
This article on the Online Asian Times by a European financial analyst (who also has posted the article on his blog) summarizes many of my fears about the United State’s current direction.
Ill-advised wars without clear endpoints, money flowing out the door like a river of cheap paper, a focus on the short-term benefits of outsourcing at the expense of the long-term benefits of retaining “in-house” production capacity, and an attitude of arrogance at the top are combining to isolate and simultaneously impoverish America.
That’s probably a premature statement at this point, and there are caveats.
But a country cannot continue to spend more than it makes, just as a family cannot continue to spend more than it makes. And making more enemies than friends is never a good plan. And there is a whole world out there of young, hungry economies snapping at the heels of the erstwhile economic giant.
I find this sad, because though much maligned and often, with justification, criticized, overall the US “empire” has been a force for good in the world … from helping to win WWI and WWII, to restraining totalitarianism in Communisitic guise during the post-war period, to spreading the freedom meme across the globe.
And I’m disappointed that this decline is being presided over a by a president who appears to be a Christian, but makes too many backroom deals, has too many strings tying him to niche lobbies that do not have the overall public interest at heart, and, most importantly, has extreme difficulty saying those simple words: “I was wrong.”
How will America turn this around?
Well, it’s a big ship. And big ships take a long time to reverse course. It won’t happen overnight, and it will be painful. America needs a party that is not in bed with lobby groups. One that will get back to basics: pay the bills, don’t over-reach its financial means, and focus on developing and sustaining the talents, capabilities, and health of its people. And engage its armed forces a little more judiciously than we’ve seen in the past few years.
The only problem is that this party does not exist.
Jobsian quote
I like this Steve Jobs quote: “a technology in search of a problem.” Saw it here, and doesn’t it ring a bell when you look at some of the consumer electronics products available today ….
Just ducky
Teresa took this wonderful shot of a wading duck about a week ago, near a Langley farm.
It’s not really visible in this small pic, but the whole image is razor sharp, and the contrast of the orange beak and feet with the rest of the photo’s rather monochromatic tone really appeals to me.
Stick in the face; blood on the ice
Most Wednesdays I like to play noon-hour drop-in hockey. There’s a rink only minutes away from our Bellingham office, and a good bunch of guys who play there …
Today was a great game, lots of people, a couple of shifters, and a high tempo. No goalies, unfortunately.
I was just starting to think about leaving the ice and getting back to work when I and a winger on the other team both went for a puck along the boards. He tried to lift my stick and missed it. But his stick continued its upward trajectory … at least until it intersected my face.
More specifically, my mouth.
Well. That turned out to be my last shift. Blood on my face, blood in my mouth, blood on my jersey, blood on the ice. Yum.
After getting off the ice, I got some gauze, bandages, and ice from the office. Managed to stop the bleeding enough to have a real quick shower, which started it up again, and then stopped it again so I could get dressed and out the door.
I needed to go up to our Langley office, so I thought I’d drop into an Aldergrove medical clinic on my way. Unfortunately, they don’t do stitches, so I had to go to MSA hospital in Abbotsford instead.
Two hours in emergency and 4 stiches later, I was at home with a fat - but no longer split - lip and 2 slightly loose teeth.
Ah well. As the guy who I passed by on my way out of the rink said: “war wounds.”
It’s Alive! Premier Family Matters calendar
It’s a big day … we’ve recently launched our new calendar-creation site, and today we had our first orders!
The site is an incredibly simple way to create a quality wall calendar with your own photos … and benefit schools as well. (Each calendar bought means $5 goes to a school of your choice.) You also get to put your own events, birthdays, and custom notes into the calendar.
The US site is here, and the Canadian site is here.
One of the really cool things is that we’ve made heavy use of AJAX technologies to make the experience fast, rich, and simple.
Check it out … and if you’d be willing to test it and maybe even blog it, I’d be happy to send you a code to do one for free. (We’re especially looking for testers on various flavors of Windows and Internet Explorer.)
Google master plan … not!
All the speculation and rumors about Google base is hitting the web right now, and I’m as intrigued about this as most.
But lots of people are looking at this and ‘finding’ evidence of a master plan … that Google is going to marry this with Froogle and start competing with Craigslist and eBay etc. etc.
Well, that may be, down the road, but I think strategically that’s a fundamental misreading of the company.
Sure, Google has plans. But I think they’re much more about doing cool stuff and seeing what sticks than generating some incredible master plan for world domination and following it to its conclusion.
I think that letting lots of smart cool people do lots of smart cool stuff (the famous one day a week at Google you work on some personal project) results in lots of smart cool projects.
And I think that we see these start to launch when their stock (literally) gets high enough within Google.
Vancouver Enterprise Forum
Went to the Vancouver Enterprise Forum tonight.
There were a couple of great presentations … Dick Hardt’s on Identity 2.0 was very cool. What is identity, who are you, and how the heck other people, sites, and processes know who you are. He’s the founder of Sxore and Sxip, building various identity services for solutions from blog commenting to digital wallet-type stuff.
Check this out to get a sense of it … and it’s worth listening to while you’re there. Very cool presentation style: you don’t even look at the speaker, half the time.
The other really good one was Paul Kedrosky’s riff about web 2.0 and lots of geeky monkeys pounding on lots of high-tech typewriters creating lots of cool stuff a lot cheaper than just a few years ago. That was his big theme: it’s never been easier and cheaper to do a web software start-up. Dynamic speaker - very easy to listen to.
-
-
About
Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
Welcome, enjoy, buy the T-shirt, take a picture, tell your friends. -
Virtual me
-
Blogroll