Dad's Advice

Back on April 17, my Dad's birthday, I sent email to my brother and sisters, asking them what was the best advice Dad ever gave them? I told them I would put it all together and post it on my blog as a sort of birthday present for Dad. Well, of course, it took a couple weeks to hear back from everybody..., then it was on the back burner for a bit..., then the timing didn't seem quite right when Grandma died in late May..., then I didn't have time to get it done by Father's day... on and on and here we are in late August and Dad's in the hospital from a heart attack and none of us quite knows what to expect.

We all love you, Dad and are rooting for you to pull through this and hang out with us a while longer. I want you to know that I love you and I appreciate your passion, your smile, your laughter, your music and your love. For me, the good outweighs the bad in the end, and I'm glad you are my Dad.

And now, here's what your kids have to say:

The best advice Dad ever gave me was...

When the side of the beer can says not to operate machinery, that includes snowblowers.

When it gets cold in the house, put a sweater on.

When there's not much to eat in the house, peanut butter and onion sandwiches taste like filet mignon.

Plaid flannel and wool socks are good any season.

It's always noon somewhere.

Unconditional love.

Leave the campsite (and the world) in better condition than you found it.

Don't pee into the wind.

Don't talk with your mouth full. (This story is famous, I think Dad tells and retells it...)

You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose...

...and:

I know it's not advice, but teaching me to fish was probably the best thing that Dad has given me. (That, and a roof over my head for the first 22 years of my life!) Actually, almost anything outdoors that I like to do I can thank the old man for. I appreciate the fact he took the time to teach me to enjoy nature instead of plopping me in front of a television w/ an Atari joystick! Love ya pop!

We all love you, Dad. Get better, ok?

Word for the week: parhelion (also known as a sun dog). The photo on the left is not one, but it is a "sun pillar" or "sun column." Robin and I saw it this morning on our walk. I took the picture from our driveway. I don't remember ever even hearing of this phenomenon until this past year. And now this is the second one that I've seen in the last month in real life... Just one of those things.

Seeing that shaft of light reminded me of parhelion, which I looked up last year after getting the Rosanne Raneri CD of the same name. Rosanne is a friend of ours from high school and she's a fabulous musician who plays various gigs around the Albany area. In fact you can see her at Sage college this Thursday for a live lunch!

Speaking of live music, come out on Saturday night to Northern Lights in Clifton Park to hear HourGlass and the fretboard frenetics of another musician friend, Scott Cunningham. They're a local rock band just starting out and they play/sing some pretty cool original stuff. Check them out...

Tuesday seems to be the day of the week for blogging. Work through the weekend a few times... suddenly Tuesday is the new Saturday! Ack!

Take it easy...

Discipline. Definition #2, please... Word for the day. If I had as much of it as I wanted, I would have posted this on Saturday... :-)

I admire my sweetie, who is disciplined and faithful, exercising and walking the dogs before work every day. You go, girl! I'm trying to be disciplined enough myself to get to work early every day. Log those hours even when I have to leave early to help out at home.

The ice storm presented us with several power related challenges yesterday. We drove through the dark neighborhood to the lights on the other side of the hill and brought home some Chinese food to eat by candlelight... But as we were sitting down to dig in, the lights came back on! Fortune: "Choose vegetable delight and you will be rewarded."

Peace out, dogs.

Happy Birthday, Rachel!! May your artwork always be beautiful...

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?

Where does Google lead you if you're searching for freedom? Why you might even stumble across this blog entry someday. A year from now this entry could be three clicks away from a million web pages...

I'm three friendship/acquaintance links away from a St. Louis Cardinal. A friend of mine is friends with a friend of Taguchi, their outfielder. He's actually met him - he's watching the world series this year, saying to himself, "I know that guy." Kinda cool.

Just couldn't fall asleep right away tonight. Figured it was time to simplify the old blog, change the color up a bit and add a graphic logo finally. Whew... now I can sleep. :-)

I've mentally blogged my philosophical ramblings again and again while driving to work over the last several months. Seems it's just rare I get around to typing them in. Mostly I want to talk about freedom before it's too late. While I still have some, that is. Is anybody listening?

I've been shocked many times over the last few years as our elected officials in Washington, D.C. jump on the "we must make things safer" bandwagon. Meanwhile, they're throwing our freedoms into the toilet and flushing before they think about the downstream consequences of their actions.


Freedom. Belief. Love. The most powerful forces in the human universe are not physical at all, but spiritual, ethereal, intangible, invisible. What's stronger - the gravity that holds you to the surface of the earth or the bond of love that holds you

It's alive...!



http://www.elevenmillion.com

That thing you were supposed to check back in March for... Well, it's here. March, May, you know how it goes. Last week Robin and I posted some of our latest sweat and tears to ElevenMillion.com with a little hosting help from our friend, Mr. Fahrni. Our latest online venture takes us into the world of online advertising for the masses. It's one of the waves of the future. Buy a link to your website, we'll publish it for you for a quarter, a year or a lifetime!

So... browse on over to ElevenMillion.com and buy yourself an online advertisement. It's cheaper than Google, easy to do and could just send thousands upon thousands of web surfers to your site.

Keep an eye on it to see how it grows and morphs as we get more customers. Should be one of two things: completely stagnant or quite interesting over the next year or so. Time will tell if we've wasted our time. :-)

Thanks for stopping by!

Giddyup!
(Not that Rachel will read it... but there it is. I am "The Giddyup Man.")

Did I mention it's cold out? Holy single digits Batman!

Wow. It's cold out.

Wow! Cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, COLD!

It's all the way up to 19 degrees F here today. How about where you are? Did I say wow??

Check back in March... Exciting news pending... :-)

Whoops. Missed December. (Mumble, mumble, let's post something before January is over, mumble, mumble.)

Happy New Year everybody!

I try not to get too technical here, but I'm going to today, because I keep forgetting how to do this, despite my computer hacking skills. This post might end up being a future reminder to myself for the next time I forget. I've done this several times over the last few years and keep forgetting the specifics. When you forget things, you have to derive them from scratch and/or look stuff up here, there and everywhere all over again. And the documentation's not that helpful when you are able to find it, so here it is...

Here's how to make an ActiveX control fill Internet Explorer's window via HTML and get rid of all the "ugly" blank space around it and the silly useless scroll bar:

<BODY
  BOTTOMMARGIN="0" LEFTMARGIN="0" RIGHTMARGIN="0" TOPMARGIN="0"
  SCROLL="no"
>
  <OBJECT
    ID="MyControlsHTMLID"
    CLSID="CLSID:blahblah-blah-blah-blah-blahblahblah"
    WIDTH="100%"
    HEIGHT="100%"
  >
    <PARAM
      NAME="MyPropName"
      VALUE="String value for the custom property named MyPropName."
    />
  </OBJECT>
</BODY>

Obviously, you'll have to replace the blahblah and the MyPropName with something useful.

And if you write your own ActiveX control using ATL, take this little piece of advice... Implement IPersistPropertyBag and add entries for any properties specifiable via "HTML param name/value pairs" as PROP_ENTRY lines in between BEGIN_PROP_MAP and END_PROP_MAP.

Wow. Now if I forget, I'll hopefully be able to find my own post with Google... ;)

Thanks for your patience. Less geek speak next time. That's a promise!

Are you ready?

We patiently await tomorrow... We had a 3-movie-marathon at our house last Saturday. Can you guess which 3 movies we watched all in a row from 1:00 to 9:30? Here's a hint: we'll be on our way to the Boston area tomorrow with tickets to a sold out showing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on the IMAX screen in Natick. Nothing like a dragon flying at you out of a six story screen, I'm sure.

Enjoy! I know we will.

I ran across a blog entry called "Most classroom learning sucks." How could you not read it with a headline like that? My wife home schooled our kids for four years when they were in elementary school, so I guess I have a natural bias to click on that one.

Funny how other people writing their real thoughts down and publishing to the entire world in this uncensored medium of the blog has become such a catalyst for thinking.

Thanks to my wife for encouraging me to transform this sketchbook into a place that will hopefully make some other people think, too.

More philosophizing later...

I started this blog at the insistence of my friend, Rob Fahrni, an incessant blogger, who is still, after a few years, posting, on average, many times each week to his blog. At the time, I was totally into learning how to draw and thought it would be natural to use this blog thing to share my sketches with friends, family ... the world at large.

I haven't had a lot of time for drawing since our family moved back to New York state, so my "Online Sketchbook" blog has stagnated. In the meantime, I've been reading various blogs semi-regularly and have had the itch to write about more than just my sketches. So, I've decided to transform this site into one where I can write about, well, just about anything.

Some folks label their blogs as a "spout" or a "dumping ground." I think I'm just gonna call this one "Reflections" for now...

Wow... It's been a year since I had anything worth saying about drawing; or anything I could actually scan in and share up here.

One of these days, I will get to that Harry Potter drawing.

Until then, here's my yearly post to the ole blog. Today's Thursday; don't forget to check out movie line of the week over at Rob's place.


Later

I have not been quite as active a drawer as I'd like over the past few weeks and months... There's one idea that I've had for a drawing since last summer that I hope to get to before I see someone else's sketch of it and ruin my mental picture. In the fifth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, there's a scene right near the beginning where Harry is rescued out of his room in the Dursley's house by a bunch of wizards and witches who turn out to members of the "Order of the Phoenix." J. K. Rowling brilliantly describes these wizards as Harry sees them when he comes out the door. They are standing crowded on the staircase and as you read her exquisite writing, you get an incredible mental picture of what they all must look like standing there like that. I hope to draw it from that description and then eventually see my drawing brought to life when they make the fifth movie.

There you have it: one of the goals I hope to achieve before the fifth Harry Potter movie is released. You'll see the picture posted here when I get around to it...

Au revoir pour maintenant, (ttfn)

Ah, Seattle. I've lived in the shadow of the Emerald City for nearly eight years now. Here's my sketch of what is arguably the most recognized building in the entire Pacific Northwest... the 1962 World Fair's "Space Needle."



Nothing like the smell of a good pot of coffee in the morning. Unless you work in Seattle, of course. If you do, then walking past Monorail Espresso smells just about as good. ;)

Nature is always a good source of sketch subjects. Here's a drawing obviously called Tree1:



If you rent a Vespa scooter from Jet City Scooters and ride it over the Magnolia bridge, you can find this very tree located outside a school building up in that Seattle neighborhood. Jet City Scooters will deliver the rented scooter directly to you anywhere in the greater Seattle area. Then they'll pick it up when you're done with the rental period. Finally, scooter rentals for the rest of us! Right here in Seattle.

Let me know if you need more specific directions... I could look up the address and get a MapPoint map of this tree's exact location... but I'm too lazy to do that now. Maybe next time I'll be more ambitious. More likely not.

Stay tuned!

Happy birthday Lisa! I won't tell anybody how old you are today. Let's just say I'm still older... Not old, just older. (Track #6)

Here's another gecko I drew; this one came off of a cap that I wear when we run sometimes.



Speaking of running... Robin, Nathan and I ran our first 5k road race on Sunday. The "Issaquah Rotary Run 2003" was part of our annual Salmon Days festival here in town. Results were recorded by Perfect Time Events. (Check out our results live on the web by clicking on the hyperlink and scrolling down to the 2003 Issaquah Rotary Run.) We came in right smack in the middle of the pack. I ran it in about 27 minutes and Robin and Nathan came in around 30 minutes. Woo-hoo! Go Cole fam!

TTFN

How about a Gecko? Rachie loves this one...



I drew this one based on the back of a t-shirt that I brought home from Maui last time we went. Ah, Maui... It's been more than a year since we ran along your beautiful beach and tasted the fresh papayas at our outdoor breakfast table listening to the gentle sounds of the surf. We'll be back again someday.

In the meantime, at least I have a picture of a gecko to take a gander at every once in a while...

Mahalo for listenin'...!