'Twas the (Charitable Giving) Season

It's that time of year again. A chill wind blowing, long, dark nights, ... balanced by warm fireplaces and Christmas tree lights.

And time to figure out how to spread some Christmas cheer without filling the world with more "stuff."

As with recent years, we are continuing our tradition of donating to charities in honor of our loved ones instead of spending money on "too many" gifts. I encourage you to consider doing the same, and helping those who are less fortunate than we are.

We've donated to the following charities this Christmas season. We would encourage you to do so too, with the charitable organizations that are closest to your hearts. Write up a blog post, or put it on Facebook, or send us a note. We'd love to hear about what charities you love to support.

• Agros, http://oneseed.agros.org, helping the rural poor lift themselves out of poverty (give a goat, a flock of chicks or a can of worms to a family where it will make a real difference in the quality of their daily lives)
• Beads of Courage, helping sick kids and their families
• Big Brothers / Big Sisters, helping kids with mentors and role models
• City Mission of Schenectady, feeding hungry people
• The MAGIC Foundation, helping kids with growth disorders
• Starlight Children's Foundation, helping seriously ill children cope through entertainment, education and family activities

Give generously!

Here's wishing you and yours a Merry Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous New Year!

All is Quiet

Happy New Year!

2011 is over. Welcome, 2012.

2011 was ok. It wasn't the worst year ever.

It was my bloggingest year ever: 35 posts. Not quite once a week. I'm going to aim for at least once a week this coming year... It helps that I had something I wanted to talk about publicly this year: Sgt Fitness.

Sgt Fitness. The first app I've done that I would consider "potentially useful to lots of people" up on the iPhone app store. Only dozens have bought it and downloaded it so far, but there's still more to come. Still hoping for an audience of thousands and more eventually. Turns out the hard part about selling an app is communicating about it, promoting it, marketing it, and actually getting the word out to the people who'd be interested in it. Building it and putting it up there is easy.

Looking forward to doing some updates to those apps in the coming days and weeks.

Make a resolution to get more fit this year. And, oh yeah: buy Sgt Fitness and let him help you keep your resolution.

So: Cheers to your health! And crank the U2 today, on New Year's Day.

First off, Happy New Year! Hola 2007, hasta ayer 2006.

And now... time for some reflection. I renamed this blog in preparation for philosophical ramblings like this one. Usually my brain rambles like this internally while I'm driving to work, washing my hair in the shower or trying to fall asleep at night.

Belief. It's a fundamental force in the universe. I'm thinking it's right up there with gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Us human beings are strange and wonderful creatures. Our beliefs can cause us to act or to avoid acting. And our actions affect those around us and the universe we live in.

The weird thing is that our beliefs aren't necessarily based on reality. By reality, I mean the things that are objectively true for everybody regardless of any one person's beliefs. We develop our beliefs over time based on things that happen to us, on things that other people say or do, on things that we think, on our intuition, on our emotions, on our desires. And sometimes we even modify our beliefs.

We choose to believe the things that we do. That's why some people can live in denial about things that are clearly true. One can choose not to believe something even though it is apparently objectively true. One can also believe complete bunk that's not even close to true.

If I believe something passionately, then it's true for me. If you believe something passionately, then it's true for you. It doesn't matter if the things we believe are objectively true or not, or if others believe them. We act based on our beliefs. If you believe in something, you'll fight for it. You might even be willing to die fighting for it. But if you don't believe in something... forget about it.

Belief can trigger a positive feedback cycle that actually causes the thing believed in to become more true... do you believe that? I believe that 2007 is going to be a good year for me and my family. Simply because I have that belief, it is now more likely to become reality for us compared to if I did not have that belief. This is some powerful stuff. It's what faith is based on. Also reminds me of one of the best DVDs we watched back in 2005: What the Bleep do we Know? Get it from Netflix. Definitely worthwhile.

I think about freedom and belief a lot lately. Stories about the war in Iraq make me think along these lines. Seems like some folks in positions of power might be believing some things that aren't necessarily based on objective reality... Not to name any names, but I bet reading that last sentence brought a couple of names into your mind.

Listening to the new John Mayer song Belief, from his latest album, Continuum, also gets me thinking about this stuff. (If you've got iTunes installed on your computer, this link takes you to that song: Belief by John Mayer. Check it out.) There are a couple of great lines from that tune:

Belief is a beautiful armor
But makes for the heaviest sword
...
It's the chemical weapon
For the war that's raging on inside
...
What puts a hundred thousand children in the sand?
Belief can. Belief can.
What puts the folded flag inside his mother's hand?
Belief can. Belief can.

Happy new year, everybody. Let's make it a good one.

What do you believe?