Category: Random Thoughts

I don’t care if you ask or not, I’m giving my opinion anyway.

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I’m feeling [insert adjective]

As autumn begins its merry dance and trees across the still green lawn shake gold hues into their leaf tips, the wind changes shape. The sky changes its face. The rift between the livelihood of summer and the dead of winter reveals itself as an inevitable change and plasters in colorful cracking coats, exciting thoughts and refreshing the imagination.

I noticed that when people ask me how I’m doing, if I state a mere “I’m feeling O.K.” then the day feels dull and feelings of inability shoot through my core. But when I reply “I’m doing Fantastic!”, “I’m feeling Great!” something changes. And like the autumn blaze in the season before us a feeling of capability and creativity begin its constructive work.

Last week my wife and I had a discussion about change. About changes that lie before us and the changes we’ve been through. About the habits of millionaires and the activities of people who lead happy lives. Through that conversation two immediate changes came up.

1. Drop the TV.
A good amount of what we watch is educational, but still entertaining. Shows like Good Eats and Mythbusters are peppered with documentaries on health, finances and history. There’s still some mindless entertainment, though. Last night I took some down-time watching a couple of three-stooges episodes. And though I only watch 10 hours of non-scheduled programs a week, opposed to the national average of 19 hours, that’s still 10 hours that could be pared down to 2 (for Family Movie Night).

2. Spend that extra time reading.
My personal take on reading has been to find something that excites the imagination. But reading books to hone and create skills, to challenge and build faith and to encourage thought and creativity need to be more prevalent. The idea is that if I can inspire my desires into action then I’d be more successful in life. For example, I could be a better photographer, a better Dad, a better Husband, a better thinker, a more creative programmer, and overall enjoy life more with a change in attitude and thought that comes through reading and applying.

So those are my two major lifestyle changes that have come up recently. I hate it when people say “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” or “you’re too old to change”. Bah! That negative attitude didn’t bring them any success. Statements like that are insulting. They’re saying “you’re incapable, unintelligent, too complacent, unmotivated, uncreative…” At the heart of the matter is a lack of faith in God. The Bible is loaded with examples of men, young and old alike, changing. Anything I create I can change. Similarly, anything God creates He can change.

So what am I feeling? I’m feeling change!

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Web 2.0 Culture and the Curse of the Turing Machine

Back at the beginning of 1995 I created a website named “Romantic Gestures”. The purpose was to draw people into a virtual community who wanted to share experiences and ideas with others about all things romantic. In that time I noticed that people are more open about giving personal details on the internet than they were in real life.

People who were only five years old around that time are now 18, and the internet isn’t the primarily-academic-coddle-baby it was back then. It stemmed beyond being a tool into being a full-blown culture. The Web 2.0 craze that took off about four years ago and introduced a level of creativity, open structure and more importantly, virtualized community-style culture. It’s this culture that changed the upcoming generation into something almost unnatural. People began to do everything online. It lacked physical, personal interaction.

Babies require a good deal of coddling. That touch builds a naturally emotional bond to others and forms as a sort of grafting into the world. Without touch, a baby’s will to live wanes and (s)he becomes failure to thrive.

Although online communities and groups are amazing and wonderful, I think they’ve become the backwash of their physical counterparts. People need physical interaction as much as the emotional and intellectual stimulus provided by the internet’s vast array of discussion groups and communities.

The future is in merging the two. Use Flickr to identify people in your area to meet with. Use Blogger to locate others nearby that you can karaoke with. There’s already a somewhat successful meetup.com model that allows people to interact with one another – but their interface and navigation feels stale and cumbersome.

At least the frequent emails from meetup keep me abreast that there is a world out there where people meet – they have faces and feelings and can do amazing things without the internet. There is a sort of sick comfort in doing things alone, though. It’s selfish in a way. But having a spouse and children provides a life-giving feedback that my life is bigger than me and even bigger than the internet.

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Two photos and something learned

Last week I had the honor to join with my company headquarters in D.C. for business and pleasure. They usually give me one free day to wander around the Nation’s Capitol. During this trip, I ventured into the Arlington National Cemetery.

I had expected a few things about the cemetery, all which were disproved while there. First, it’s not just soldiers that are buried there. Wives, infants and civilians are there, too. Some famous but there are plenty obscure and unknown. Second, as you move closer to the present there are fewer tombstones marked “unknown”.

I had expected there to be no “unknown” tombstones and just one “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier” monument. Instead I found many tombstones marked “unknown soldier” – a whole field of them – and two tombs of unknown soldiers. One is the more famous with paths marked to get there. It’s huge with a single, large, uncomfortable marble chair on a stage facing rows of marble pews below. The other is a tomb marking the remains of 2111 unknown Civil War soldiers.

There are no unknown tombs in the Viet Nam plots and only a few in the Korean or World War II plots. World War I has more and Civil War has an entire field of unknown soldiers that were given little more than a number to their name. I suppose there was an absence of dog-tags then. But thought it was worth asking into. The woman at the center desk in the visitors center shed some light into this.

She said that at one time there were a few unknown soldiers in the Viet Nam plots, but that they had since been identified through DNA tests. All soldiers that die this point forward will not be unknown because of that biological technology. If I heard correctly, there are rare cases where bodies are exhumed for this purpose, which is how the last unknowns in the Viet Nam plot were identified.

It’s macabre, but comforting that we are able to identify the dead, but really – what is our identity? It’s certainly more than a chisel mark on a tombstone or a series of amino acids along a protein chain. Our souls are here on earth for a purpose, and like a green leaf on a tree or a single line of code, we’re here to play a small part in something much bigger than any one of us. And though we get lost in the billions of others that have come before us, live around us, and will come after us we are each significant… even if we’re “unknown”.