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Archive for December, 2004

Dec 25

Christian Children’s Fund

For Christmas, I sponsored a child for my Nana. It’s not much money to sponsor a kid and the money is leveraged in ways that would be impossible here in the U.S. Here’s a summary that CCF send me. Jannapa Somnukton’s parents plant rice on their land for a living. They have to face the problems of drought, flood and infertile soils and can never get a good harvest. When free from farming, they work as hired hands and receive low daily wages. Their earnings are very small and below the poverty line. Read more

Dec 22

The Five People You Meet in Heaven

7398908.jpgI just finished Mitch Albom’s latest novel, The Five People You Meet in Heaven. It’s small book and took me only a day to read. It follows in a long line of novels and psychological pop writings that serve to re-assure people that their ordinary lives are, in fact, pretty extraordinary. These writings tend to follow some basic premises: 1) God works in mysterious ways; 2) There are no accidents; and 3) We are all connected. Read more

Dec 22

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What is Nautis?

A few people have asked me what exactly “nautis” means. Here’s the answer:

First of all, it’s Latin. You may have guessed that already if you scored over 1000 on the SAT. The rest of the translation requires at least a course in Latin 101. If you’ve gone to college or even high school in the last 50 years, you’ve most likely taken a course in some language other than English. Americans are most likely to have taken a romance language or German. Read more

Dec 22

Give Me a Happy Ending

My friends have always regarded my movie selections as somewhat dubious. I’m sure they feel that they’ve sat through several miserable hours (that they’ll never get back) watching some of the silliest movies every made. Some people call these “B Movies” – I prefer to call them classics.

Among the best of the best are: The Pirate Movie, Electric Dreams, Grease 2, The Groove Tube, and Fletch Lives. In the case of Grease 2 and Fletch Lives, the sequels were truly better than the originals. So, what do all of these movies have in a common? A happy ending. These endings are not just happy, they’ve taken happy endings to a whole new level.

Dec 22

Web Standards Circa 1995

I guess it’s true that things do come around again. If you’re as old as me, you may remember the very early days of the web. The web was built around individual webmasters with single HTML pages with massive amounts of information on an endless page that scrolled on forever. There was usually a long list of links on the side that linked to the author’s favorite websites. To go along with this was usually a cool background image. This was all done away with in favor of more compact and usable web designs. Or, was it?

I recently read an article by François Briatte at phnk.com. It’s an in depth analysis of the current state of web design with some amazing insights into sociological and organizational motivations of web design. Her conclusions were as surprising as they were obvious – Briatte concludes that web design is driven by some of the very same market forces that drive design in other mediums such as fashion and print media.

I found myself thinking about her article over the last couple of weeks trying to make sense of it. I guess for some reason I thought that this medium was somehow immune to the influence of single individuals – no matter how charismatic. Of course this doesn’t explain the return to web standards circa 1995. The only thing I can figure is that we’ve returned to the basics or design while adopting a more aesthetic approach that just wasn’t available before CSS.

In the final analysis, web design and accessibility is much better today. Designers are finally taking note that simple design trumps cool any day. Now, if we could just teach the charismatic leaders how to practice what they preach.

Dec 21

Human Experimentation and Catholic Priests

Today I slept in until 4:30pm. By the time I woke up, It was dark again. Faced with an odd dilemma I couldn’t decide whether I was supposed to take a shower, or not. I’ve been washing my hands with this new soap with Tea Tree Oil. It smells good, but my hands have been tingling during the day.

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Dec 16

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Our Deepest Fear

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” – Marianne Williamson

Dec 13

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Looking Back On My Life

Looking back on my life, what am I most proud of?

There are moments in our lives when we make a very important decision that will impact the rest of our lives. The amazing thing is that these major decisions are usually disguised as something small. Deciding to attend a seminar, go to lunch with a parent or sibling, or just making a decision rather than not. When I look back over my life so far I see so many of those moments – and so many times I seem to have made a good decision. Read more

Dec 13

Stealing Home

Stealing HomeSometimes a movie becomes special and meaningful to us because we can identify with it and somehow find ourselves in it. The movie Stealing Home is one of those for me. The acting is not always good but the underlying coming of age story is so simple and human that it just pulls you in: young love, baseball, tragedy, and friendship. Read more

Dec 12

Robert Bly’s Sibling Society

I found Mr. Bly yanking the shadow out of me. In fact, I thought about throwing the book across the room a few times. However, such is often the case when a powerful author makes their point. To Bly the medium is the message. So, I suspect we won’t find the dapper psychology popularizer lurking around this website. Or much less, participating in anything remotely electronic, or innovative.

His criticism of modern society seemed like garlic to me. I know it was good for me, but I just can’t stand the smell. At some points in the book the smell became unbearable. For example, in Bly’s criticism of modernity and things such as the internet and big business, I noticed the nice glossy cover of Mr. Bly’s hardback book and also saw it in the front of every bookstore/coffee house I went to over Christmas break. Was he on Oprah as well? Read more

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