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:
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.
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 …
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.
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 ….
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.
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 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.)
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.
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.
I learned a new word last Friday.
Mike Suto, one of our company’s trainers, left a great job a few years before coming to our company. It was a high-paying, high-profile, high prestige job that was also a high-stress job. Mike had cancer, his personal life was not where he wanted it to be, and he felt like he was living to work instead of working to live.
So he quit.
He had nothing else in mind. No other job to go to. He figured the worst that could happen was that he would lose his house, go on welfare, and go live with his sister. He wouldn’t die. He wouldn’t go to jail. He would just go live with his sister.
Later, he found a job with us that fit his schedule, fit the amount of work that he wanted to do, and fit his vision of what he wanted to do with his life.
In any case, on Friday, he and a team from the company finished a week-long seminar, and I was one of the group of people that they presented their results to. And one of the things that Mike brought up was karoshi. (Mike happens to be Japanese, and uses a lot of Japanese idioms and expressions in his conversation.)
Karoshi is “death by overwork.”
It’s something that Japan knows something about … another aquaintance of mine, Mark Kaufman, lived in Japan for years, and said it was not unusual for white-collar workers to stay in the office until 9:00 at night.
Well, we have some of that here in North America too. I’ve certainly known more than my share of it, and several of my colleaugues are going through it right now.
Let’s say this all together really slowly: we don’t live to work. We work to live.
Working really long hours is fine for short stretches when major projects that are critically important to you need to get done. But habitually working hours that are just insane is a good way to waste your life … and very likely shorten it as well.
Most days when I get back from the office, my 2-year old son Aidan greets me in the hall or kitchen. I’ll walk in, and sometimes he’ll run to meet me, his little feet pounding the floor eagerly.
“Daddy, are you home?” he says without a trace of irony as I sweep him off the floor, high up towards the ceiling.
“Yes I am,” I answer. “Are you home?”
“Yup!”
I just saw this tease of an intro at MacDevCenter.com:
Editor’s note: When I recently saw the new iMac with the iSight built in, it reminded me of a project we’ve been working on. In a nutshell, Matthew Russell and I have been talking about using the iSight to take and classify images, such as those of a user sitting at the iMac, so it knows who’s using it. (Face-sensing engines have been in the news lately.) Aside from being a cool hack, this possibly could used be in addition to your user password for authentication.
What a cool idea! Built-in face recognition used as part of a password/security approach to your computer.
I expect some hacker to come out with something like this some time after the intro of the new iMac, and some commercial company somewhere to build something similar shortly thereafter.
It should be fairly easy to tap into the built-in camera … hopefully Apple has already exposed some APIs. Then it’s a matter of running some pattern recognition (don’t you dare get a haircut or shave off your moustache or wear too much makeup) to make an intelligent estimate of whether or not the person sitting at the camera is an approved user or not.
That’s probably the hardest part of the app. But it is doable, has been done, and now that a camera is built right into the box, would seem to be a very cool way of securing a computer.
You know, aside from all the standard idiocy you can find in GM and other North American car makers (note that their home page is currently promoting the Yukon, a massive, heavy, gas-guzzling monster), there is always room to be surprised by fresh instances of complete cluelessness.
Case in point:
Note the little icon in the address bar. Remember that from way back when in the mists of early internet time?
Let me give you a clue: it’s not a GM logo. Second clue: someone at gmc.com is seriously “challenged,” to put it delicately.
To the woman in the white GMC Envoy on Marshall Road, near the McMillan turn-off, who did not like it when I passed her …
The reason I passed your air-choking earth-killing SUV is because it was big and fat and slow. Plus I didn’t want to breathe your fumes.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
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