Failure and how it factors into all of our lives is something that most people try hard to avoid. I’ve watched my boys each struggle with accepting failure. I’ve had issues with it myself as I imagine most people have. Accepting defeat is no easy task. No matter how many times I’ve tried to explain how critical failing is to growing up and becoming the person you should be; the crash and burn can be painful to watch. The temptation to scoop them up and solve their problem is always there. It is hard to resist.
The video below brought some points home for me in an eloquent if not long winded way. Adam Savage is the co-host of the show Mythbusters. He recalls two critical failures that shaped his life:
The key part of his talk occurs in chapter 10. You won’t totally grasp his thoughts unless you watch the preceding chapters but his key point really resonated with me. To summarize, he speaks how his failures were required for him to be where he is today. He then speaks of children and how they break rules, he compares them to a blind person in an unfamiliar room, when they break rules they are banging up against the boundaries they can’t see. This is why children need rules, to order their universe. Without rules and failure they grow up having no idea of how the world works.
Perhaps the knowledge that my boys current failures are helping to shape them for their distant future will comfort me and help to stop me from charging in and trying to pick up the pieces.
The federal government has been attempting to correct the massive financial issues facing the United States via a massive jolt of spending for the better part of a year now. When taking a macro view of this solution it can seem to make sense from a distance. By taking over the role of the engine of economy the government hopes to keep the wheels spinning until the normal engine (business) recovers and resumes the role it holds.
However, because the government by its very nature does not need to take into account profitability there are factors that come into play which reduce the effectiveness of the intended jolt. From my perspective, which is one of a person that deals with government agencies on a daily basis, the results would be comical if not so serious. A very good example of this happening on a micro level can be found in the following article by Andrew Malcolm of the LA Times. In the article Mr. Malcolm describes a $5 billion (that’s $5,000,000,000.00) dollars that are devoted to creating 90,000 jobs dedicated to weatherize homes. It sounds like such a great idea. We will employ people and save energy costs in the future. Indeed from a macro point of view it sounds like a wonderful investment of that huge sum of money. In fact, the initial estimate from the current administration called for over 80,000 of the jobs would be created in the first year of the program. Those new workers would in turn weather proof over half a million homes in the first year. Sounds so simple right?
The micro reality however is that the GAO (general accountability office) has found that only 9,000 homes has taken part of the program despite the fact that $522 million ($522,000,000.00) dollars from the program have already been spent. Why the hold up? Simple, the government forgot to plan for…the government. From the article:
The Energy Department is run by Steven Chu, like President Obama a Nobel Prize winner. You’ll never guess what the federal government blames for the lack of significant progress.
RED tape.
Not duct tape. Not weather stripping. But that infamous RED tape. In the form of, well, forms.
It seems that the Pelosi-Reid stimulus plan that was so quickly cobbled together and was supposed to immediately pump so much money into the sagging economy last year included an 80-year-old legal provision requiring all federally funded projects to pay a prevailing wage to workers.
But what’s a prevailing wage for weatherization, you ask?
Who knows?
So the Energy Department asked the Labor Department, which set out to calculate what a prevailing weatherization wage is in every single one of the more than 3,000 counties across these United States.
There were some other things to figure out. It seems the law also requires some kind of National Trust for Historic Preservation review for most homes before any contracts could be estimated to be negotiated to be signed to be let to be begun. And states like Michigan have two people assigned to such tasks.
So, good luck speeding up that work.
Ask any contractor that has to deal with local, state or federal government about getting anything done quickly with their involvement. Projects that would take our company six months to complete five years ago now take upwards of 14 months to finish. It is only getting worse. Every aspect of the construction process has more steps now that result in more delays. Any project that has federal funds tied to it now requires that bidding contractors contact disadvantaged businesses in their state to make them aware of the bid. This involves faxing out a form letter not once but twice to every business that appears on a web site search engine provided by the State. More paper, more steps, more time.
Whether or not there is an efficient government run program that spends the public funds wisely is open to debate. That much of our tax dollars are currently wasted is not. The solution, and what it might be is the real question. Let’s all hope the person with the solution arrives soon.
I ran across Don Hertzfeldt’s work in about 10 years ago. He has an offbeat simple method of animation that is very funny despite the stark nature of his work. He is perhaps most famous for Rejected which was nominated for an Oscar – warning not safe for work & children:
The story behind rejected is simple (from Wikipedia):
The film presents itself as a reel of rejected commercial work by a fictional version of Don Hertzfeldt. The commissioned animated vignettes grow more and more abstract and inappropriate as the animator suffers a mental breakdown, until they literally fall apart.
Although the film is of course fictional and Hertzfeldt has never done any commercial work, he did receive many offers to do television commercials after Billy’s Balloon garnered international attention and acclaim. Hertzfeldt is an artist with anti-corporate leanings and in appearances has often told the humorous story of how he was tempted to produce the worst possible cartoons he could come up with for the companies, make off with their money, and see if they would actually make it to air. Eventually this became the germ for Rejected’s theme of a collection of cartoons so bad they were rejected by advertising agencies, leading to their creator’s breakdown.
Despite his desire to stay away from commercial success I was surprised a while ago to see what clearly (in my mind at least) looked like his work for Pop Tarts?
I can’t be the only person to see the similarities. I wonder how Don feels about this. Anyone interested in supporting his work can purchase his films here. While Hertzfeldt won’t go after people posting his work to the net he does feel that you don’t get the full feel for his work unless you see a high quality version of it.
An apparent interesting side effect of shooting your face full of rat poison is the loss of the ability to decode the emotional content of sentences that are sad, depressing or filled with anger. From the Newsweek article:
This is the first study suggesting that Botox affects the ability to understand the emotional content of language. “Normally, the brain would be sending signals to the periphery to frown, and the extent of the frown would be sent back to the brain,” UW-Madison professor emeritus of psychology Arthur Glenberg (and Havas’s adviser) said in a statement. “But here, that loop is disrupted, and the intensity of the emotion and of our ability to understand it when embodied in language is disrupted.” Even though the temporal delay is less than a second, says Glenberg, who is now at Arizona State University, “in conversation, people respond to fast, subtle cues about each other’s understanding, intention, and empathy. If you are slightly slower reacting as I tell you about something that made me really angry, that could signal to me that you did not pick up my message.”
This immediately made me think of my son and others on the autistic spectrum. He and others can have issues with facial expressions being appropriate for the emotions they are feeling. Could this study be hitting on some additional wiring issues that people with AS disorders have? Certainly worth a look I would think.
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia runs an autism research center. Our family has participated in studies in the past that focused on the brains reaction time to visual and sound cues. They currently are building a study that will focus on how the brain processes facial expressions and social and nonsocial actions such as gestures and other movements. Makes you realize that facial expressions are more than just skin deep.
I removed four bolts from inside the arcade cabinet on Sunday, whacked it a couple times with a hammer to loosen up the paint that was holding it in place and the original control panel popped right out. The raw opening is larger than the new control panel (you can see into the cabinet now if you look along the backside edge of the new panel) so I will need to insert a bracket to both fill the gap and support the new wider, deeper panel.
I anticipate forming up a box that I will anchor to the insides of the cabinet. Then I will place a wooden ‘plate’ across the top and attach that to the box. Finally I will place the control panel on top of the plate then screw it into the plate from below. This should provide me with a rock solid foundation and prevent any movement even under heavy duty play. I’d like to have this finished by the end of February if at all possible.
After the panel is in place I will begin to work on integrating the PC into the cabinet, settling on a UI and finishing the outside as well.
Peggy Noonan writes about the Massachusetts Senate election in which a Republican won in what many viewed as a referendum on the Healthcare Reform that is currently being debated in congress. Both sides of the aisle are pointing to why this happened and I’ve yet to see someone that sums it up as well as Peggy does:
Speaking broadly: In the 2006 and 2008 elections, and at some point during the past decade, the ancestral war between Democrats and the Republicans began to take on a new look. If you were a normal human sitting at home having a beer and watching national politics peripherally, as normal people do until they focus on an election, chances are pretty good you came to see the two major parties not as the Dems versus the Reps, or the blue versus the red, but as the Nuts versus the Creeps. The Nuts were for high spending and taxing and the expansion of government no matter what. The Creeps were hypocrites who talked one thing and did another, who went along on the spending spree while lecturing on fiscal solvency.
In 2008, the voters went for Mr. Obama thinking he was not a Nut but a cool and sober moderate of the center-left sort. In 2009 and 2010, they looked at his general governing attitudes as reflected in his preoccupations—health care, cap and trade—and their hidden, potential and obvious costs, and thought, “Uh-oh, he’s a Nut!”
Which meant they were left with the Creeps.
But the Republican candidates in Virginia and New Jersey, and now Scott Brown in Massachusetts, did something amazing. They played the part of the Creep very badly! They put themselves forward as serious about spending, as independent, not narrowly partisan. Mr. Brown rarely mentioned he was a Republican, and didn’t even mention the party in his victory speech. Importantly, their concerns were on the same page as the voters’. They focused on the relationship between spending and taxing, worried about debt and deficits, were moderate in their approach to social issues. They didn’t have wedge issues, they had issues.
The million dollar question now is whether or not these new office holders will do what they say and follow through on their promises. Based on past behavior by Republicans, I’m betting on more Creepy behavior.
After shipping my MAME controller back to the manufacturer I was presented with a straight up replacement of the existing Plexiglas top and essentially trying it again as is. I was also given the option of anchoring the Plexiglas in place with several tiny black screws:
After mulling it over for a day I decided to go ahead with the screws. This way I know for sure that the issue is not going to occur again. My current control panel on the cabinet has these black screws on the surface and it doesn’t take away from the looks of the panel at all.
I’m hoping that I can get the panel back by the end of next week. I’m itching to tear out the old panel and begin mating up the new one to the cabinet.
I’ve always had a special love for cupcakes. I nice chunk of cake with some sweet icing on top, I think I like them better than actual cakes. Something about pulling back the wrapper appeals to me. Go here for a collection of 100 cupcakes decorated with various games, both board and video by Robin Dahlberg who apparently is a jewelry designer by trade. A few of my favorites (in no particular order):
I think it’s a shame to eat them they all look so good.
This month marks the seven year anniversary of my web log. I started it using a virtual DNS service and ran it off my home PC. It was slow and any time the service burped my ‘massive’ online presence would vanish until I returned home to reset it. Eventually I bit the bullet and bought some hosted space, used blogger for a bit, then Moveabletype and now I’m happily using Wordpress. I initially set this up to learn about the plumbing behind the internet and to prove to myself that I could in fact set up a website in the days when pretty much everything you did on the web was set by hand, no plug and play like today. My posting frequency was rather high when I first began, averaging seventeen posts a month in 2003, reflective of the fact that I was playing with a new toy I guess. You can then see when my Warcraft addiction kicked in, the majority of my energy going into the game and sucking any and all creative thoughts I had away into a vacuum. My average posts of 15 per month in 2004, 4 per month in 2005, 3 per month in 2006, Under 3 per month in 2007, under 2 per month in 2008 and 2009 started off the same until October of ‘09 when I quit and my thoughts of other things resurfaced.
In all the time I’ve posted here the sole reason has been to take ideas and thoughts that have no other home and give them that. During that time I’ve managed to reconnect with several people from various stages of my life, early childhood, young adult, college and early jobs. One of the benefits of a rather uncommon last name is that when people Google it you pop up. Many of them were nothing more than a ‘Hey! How have you been?’ but each was nice because for the most part those people had drifted out of my day to day memories despite playing a prominent part in my life at one time. Just as they surfaced they drifted away yet again.
Out of curiosity and the insistence of a fellow WoW player and friend who said something along the lines of ‘Sign up so I can see your old girlfriends’, I signed up for Facebook in the middle of last year. It’s taken me a while to formulate my thoughts on the social networking (facebook, myspace, plurk, twitter, whatever) phenomenon matter but here they are:
For someone that considers himself above average with the whole PC/tech side of things I have to say that the layout and navigation of these sites are absolutely horrible with Facebook taking the prize for the worst interface of all. I can only think that the reason they make it so obtuse is to increase the number of page views they are getting and thereby increase the perceived value of their property.
More than anything else, the creators of Facebook have managed to find a new clientele for gaming – middle aged women. The sheer volume of Farmville & Mafia Wars announcements represents a collective waste of time that may indeed put the lost productive hours spent on WoW to shame. Getting these people hooked on their free games is only the first step in monetizing their business model I’m sure. Women are a notoriously hard market to crack for the gaming industry and it looks like Facebook found the nutcracker.
It is very easy to spend a good hour jumping from one friend to the next, piggy backing off of their friend lists to see who you may or may not have missed seeing online. It is also very easy to see that some people have managed to maintain the very same friendships they had when I knew them, almost to the point where you wonder if they have changed one bit since you saw them last. Most of the people you see are mostly fatter, sometimes balder versions of the people you remember from your past. Out of all the profiles I’ve seen just one was an ‘I can’t believe it’ jaw dropper, even at this point I’m thinking the person either had radical plastic surgery or they were kidnapped by some foreign government and replaced with a poor body double.
The field has changed but the game is the same. The same people that are pros at manipulating others show their abilities by posting short, vague statements about their lives to increase their own self-importance thereby soliciting the expected ‘omg – is everything ok?’ responses from a half dozen friends followed by the two or three equally cryptic comments by people that are clearly ‘in the loop’. Virtually published semi-secret hidden drama is just as good as the real thing right?
Ancillary sites have popped up in response to what can only be described as real life stupidity saved for eternity. If you have a spare hour or two go to Facebookfails.com to laugh and further reduce your faith in the future of humanity.
For people that find Facebook to be too slow or too big and clunky to manage Twitter and Plurk come to the rescue. Post every single silly thought in your head, hell, tell everyone when your ass itches! The world wantsneeds to know all about it.
The final impact that these new social networking sites will have is yet to be seen. Time Magazine and many others are sounding the death knell for the high school reunion as well as other time tested meet ups. Now that I’ve had the chance to see how a good 70% of my high school class turned out I don’t need to see them face to face right?
