Posts

Posted on

Life Advice

I follow the Tested.com crew and Adam Savage on their web site and on YouTube with reasonable regularity.  This week has been focused on the San Diego ComicCon which, while interesting in its own way, has shown me that I really have little desire to go to a ComicCon.  That said I was watching Adam and friends in their panel discussion today.  As expected most questions were around Adam’s Myth Busters experiences.  At the very end though, 44 minutes into the 52 minute segment, the panel all take a turn offering advice to a young woman looking to start a new vocation.  Adam Savage, Alton Brown, Chris Hadfield, Andy Weir, and Phil Plait offer their takes on what life is and how one lives it.  I couldn’t agree with them more.  Girls, pay attention…

Posted on

Guess what, you’re going to die

I recently read an article called You are going to die on the website Evidence Based Fitness.  This article is a couple of years old already but I just became aware of it. It totally reflects my own philosophy.

My wife and I have been rolling our eyes at food studies for years already, ever since the saccharine studies.  For those unaware of these, the studies “proved” saccharine caused cancer. In reality, to consume as much saccharine as they pumped into the lab rats to cause cancer you would have to drink a diet soda every six minute for the rest of your life.  Now decades later saccharine is back. I have looked sideways at these studies ever since.

I am a proponent of eating naturally. Evolution got us here, so eat like your body was built to.  We are omnivores. Eggs would have been a valuable foodstuff to Caveman Mel. No, he wouldn’t have eaten 6 a day, every day.  He could never have gathered that many.  Simple.

Same with meat.  Meat has been a major component in Hunter Gatherer Mel’s diet.  Sorry to hurt anyone’s vegan, veggie, PETA feelings but that is the reality.  Humans eat meat.  Your body was built to process meat. It’s not a bad thing and removing meat from your diet is unnatural.  Yes, you can do it, but you are not eating the way you were constructed to.  Luckily for you humans are adaptable omnivores.  

I also relate to the comments the author makes about life length and life style.  Length of life is unimportant for me.  I can’t control it, it is a complete unknown, and the even someone with the “healthiest” lifestyle could be hit by a bus tomorrow.  What IS important is quality of life.  You like hiking in the outdoors? Then getting in shape is a natural part of your quality lifestyle. You’ll be happier when you can get to the top of that hill.  

The message I most appreciated is stop fretting.  If nothing else your physical health will be better as a result of your better mental health. 

You’re going to die, get over it already.

Posted on

Economics of buying versus renting music

If you could go through my listening history for the past few days you would see this

Daytime working music:

  • Opera (Songza)
  • Marathon Dire Straits session (Deezer)
  • Vallenato and grupero (Deezer)
  • 50’s UK  (iTunes radio)
  • Kraftwerk and Jean Michel Jare (Rdio)

Evening vegging tunes:

  • Standup routines (Sirius Radio)
  • Guitar covers (YouTube)
  • Folk roots (Songza)
  • Radio plays (Sirius Radio)

Conspicuously absent is any music played from my actual owned collection.  All of my listening has been streaming service based.  Hmm.  So I have several hundred albums in a shelf on the wall or stored in media players and I listen to none of it.  

My brother and I are both using subscription based services.  He is an Rdio user and I am trying Deezer.  It’s a tough call between them.  Very similar user interfaces, almost identical libraries.  It may come down to pricing, in which case Rdio has an edge with their family plan.

I’ve always shied away from these services  in the past because I hated having nothing when you end your subscription. Let’s do some math.

Say I have 300 CDs and I paid an average of $20 for each. I have made a $6000 investment in music.  Average monthly subscription fee in Canada is $10. If I had spent my money on subscriptions I would be able to be a member for 600 months for the same money.  That’s 50 years!  That’s essentially a lifetime.  And my library is 25 million songs, not 1200 like it is on CD. 

Pretty compelling I think.  Especially when I look at what I actually do when I listen.  It’s not pulling out a disc, it’s not even firing up iTunes to play a song out of my library.  

Now I just need to decide which one. I have a grandfathered lifetime Sirius subscription but Sirius has its place, and it’s not for everything.  It needs to be something I can call up an artist on demand, not just curated playlists.  Same issue with Songza; useful and I use it too but again, it has its place.  Actually, Songza place seems to be my woodshop.  Not sure why that is…

Spotify is the favorite of many but I’ve tried it and sorry, can’t stand the interface.  Soundcloud is just the new MySpace.  Good to go there to look for new non commercial artists but it can’t be the main option.  At the moment it’s either Deezer and Rdio.

Posted on

Connected Paper

Gotta love those Swedes.  From the country that brought us Celsius, the safety match, dynamite, the cream separator, and the internal pacemaker we now get connected paper.  The smarty pants at Ericsson have developed a paper label capable of communicating a variety of bits of data using you own body as the network.

Check it out, very cool.

 

Posted on

I see you…and hear you…and smell you…and…

Do a search for open office floor plans and you will get back a long list of articles and studies on how these concepts are doomed to failure.  Distractions both auditory and visual are the main problems identified, but personality and work styles are equally important reasons. They are acknowledged productivity killers.  Yet despite all the press around how it doesn’t work companies continue to adopt open offices.

Mine too I’m afraid.  I lose my office in two weeks.  I lose my walls.  I lose my view over the river valley.  I lose my discussion side table and guest chair.  I lose most of my office furniture.  I get instead six feet of work surface, a chair, and 42″ walls.  With a moderate lean I sit within handshaking distance of five other people.  It would be six, but one workspace is vacant.

Marvy.

There is no complaining about it. There is no changing the decision.  This train has left the station.  My colleagues and I are resigned to trying to make the best of it.

I can take some solice in the fact that over my 30 odd years on the job I have had some of the best office space in the company for at least half of the time.  I would argue at times I had the best office in the company, including the president’s.  A bit smaller maybe but when you considered the location, the views, the amenities, I definitely had some great offices.  Even the president never had a pool table just down the hall like I did for a few years.  A little yin for the yang maybe.

https://soundcloud.com/rockonguy/good-time-charlies-got-the-blues-danny-okeefe

Posted on

Invest an hour into your psyche

I just finished reading the graphic novel Daytripper after seeing it on one of those “top 25 you must” lists a friend sent me.  I will not repeat what everyone else has already said.  There are far better reviews in the interwebs than I could do.  I will say I agree with them.

Awesome.

I hope to discuss it in more detail with this friend, and I am curious to see if he took the same thing from it I did.  I need to read it again before we have that talk.  I have so many thoughts I can’t yet put into words.  My response to the book was more emotional than intellectual. I felt it rather than understood it. Not sure if that makes sense or if it just makes me sound like a loon.

I guess what I mean is I know what I took away from the book but I could not say if it is the same thing the authors intended or the same as most others.  The description that keeps coming to mind is second derivative –  I am reacting not to the obvious message but to the implications of the message.

Yeah, I know, this is making no sense.  Go read the book.  After you read it play this tune and reflect on what you read and what you take from it.  Trust me, it will be worth it.

https://soundcloud.com/jessedanielsmith/first-day-of-my-life-acoustic

Posted on

Hey, it’s raining (again)

Wow, right on the heels of the report that globally May was the warmest on record, June at home has been been recorded as the second wettest on record, with over 3 times the average rainfall.  Last Sunday alone we received as much in one day as we normally do in month.  The record was in 1942, not long after the Dirty 30’s ended.  No surprise to me we are now getting another very wet year, perhaps our third in a row by my memory, right after coming out of a 20 year dry spell.

I’m certainly no meteorologist and know next to nothing about weather predictions, or historical trends, or anything scientific.  I do however subscribe to the cyclical nature of weather that comes out of folk lore.  Our ancestor’s understanding of weather patterns came from generations of casual observation, not decades of instrumented measurements.  There is much ado about global warming – or not, man’s influence on the atmosphere – or not, and the impending doom we have wrought upon ourselves – or not depending on who you listen to.

I believe that the earth has had many different stages and environments, and that cause and effect play a huge role in how it changes.  I also believe that the earth balances itself out in the long term.  By long term, I mean loooong term.  Hundreds of thousands of years.  It has a huge feedback loop.

The issue with environment change it not whether man has broken the earth, only whether we have crapped in our own backyard enough to make it no fun to live here anymore.  The earth will be fine.  You however may be really uncomfortable.

Posted on

Thanks Petula

Way back when I was a kid my dad had a 1960 Dodge Dart Pioneer.  A big, brown, rusting, beautiful thing that sat unmoved on the driveway for several years.  It was one of our favorite places to play.  When it wasn’t a car it was a rocket ship, a pirate ship,  and an awesome make shift sauna for a ten year old on a hot summer day.

When my older brother got his driver’s license he convinced my dad to get the beast working again.  I remember dad sitting at the kitchen table sewing a new headliner.  I also remember the desiccated mice we found removing the old one.  I watched as my dad tried his hand at fiber glassing as he attempted to repair the rusting fenders with a bit of resin and cloth.

After they finally got it running it became my brother’s regular ride.  His contribution to the effort was to install a state of the art…8 track.  I can’t remember how many times I got a ride in that car and the same Petula Clark tape was sticking out of the deck.  I loved her then and I love her now.  A Petula song suddenly appearing in my music stream can brighten up a day like almost nothing else.

The old Dodge was the first in a series of beaters my dad had in a fleet that ultimately grew to four vehicles.  As the father of five boys he was smart enough to not own one worth more than $3000 until after the last of us had moved out.  Each of those cars have their own memories.  No doubt each have stories still secret about something my brothers or I did in and with each of them.  In my turn I had lots of great times in the 1971 Impala.  The body repairs we had to do to it only hinted at how much fun I had in that car. At 95 mph it just floated down the highway, windows down, heading to the lake.   Most of my best stories are still untold, known only to the few involved in each particular antic.

So as I watched my own kids wrecking my cars and backyard modding their own first cars I smile.  I put on the mad dad face when they bang up my car, or get another ticket but that part of the dad job.  Inside, after I get over the fact the my brand new truck has a door that won’t close anymore, I am laughing inside.  Been there done that.  One day my kids will think back to their own stories and smile too.