Braglio.com

Son #3 turns 9YO

Matthew Braglio — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 19:14:04 +0000

Just one year away from double digits! After almost 14 months we broke down and cut your hair to a more manageable length. You told me right after your cut that you would begin growing it back out again.

Hope your day was great – love you buddy!

#1 strikes 12

Matthew Braglio — Wed, 19 May 2010 15:05:13 +0000

Just one year left until you are officially a teenager. Watching you grow up over the past year has been a pleasure. Highlights of the year:

Riding coasters with me at Hershey – a huge leap.

Dealing with braces like a pro. I’ve been very impressed with your dedication to following the instructions faithfully.

Making First Class before your one year anniversary in scouts.

Hanging out with buddies at the house, doing guy things.

Watching you enjoy WoW as much as I did.

Happy Birthday buddy, I hope you have a great day. I love you.

The recital

Matthew Braglio — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 18:40:07 +0000

On Sunday we went to Son #2 music recital. He performed along with 50 other students of varying ability. At no point did he seem anxious as this would be the first time he would perform in front of a crowd. Without further ado here is his performance in front of 200+ people:

The lighting washed out his face so it is hard to see his expression between songs. I mentioned to him several times prior to going on stage that he needs to remember to smile between songs. He did just that with the smile remaining on his face for approximately 3/10ths of a second.

We were all so proud of him, just one year into beginning lessons he sounded really good.

11 Months In

Matthew Braglio — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:46:29 +0000

Last April Son #2 began taking piano lessons. He has really enjoyed them and has made steady progress, he will now tell you proudly that he is in ‘Book Three out of Six’. He is working on selecting the pieces he will play for his first recital. Here he is from a month ago. Note the concentration when Son #4 starts yelling at him in the background:

Here is another clip of him playing a piece that has a lot of rests in it. This was the ‘test’ piece to move into book 3.

I’m so glad he’s found music and I hope this new found love will last a lifetime.

The Shape of the World

Matthew Braglio — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:50:12 +0000

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 micro view of macro solutions

Matthew Braglio — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:59:10 +0000

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.

Commercial Takeover

Matthew Braglio — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:51:21 +0000

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.

Facial Disconnect

Matthew Braglio — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:44:06 +0000

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.

Heading for the finish line

Matthew Braglio — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:26:50 +0000

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.

Turning 10

Matthew Braglio — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:20:54 +0000

Double digits for you today my friend. Things I will remember of the past year:

Your career decision making process, reading the Careers for kids who love Math from cover to cover and settling on Mathematician.

Making huge strides in the classroom.

Listening to you practice and playing piano for what seems like hours each day.

Switching your music at night from classical to 70′s country rock (go figure).

Hope you have a great day today buddy. Congrats on hitting double digits.