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The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
-- Mark Twain
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What follows is a screenshot of the administrative interface for ArtByBrett. I've been up since about 2 AM. I'm getting into that mode of my life where sleep is not really essential. I go through rhythms this way. I've been hibernating through late November and most of December, needing about 8 hours of sleep a day. Not now though... energy is restless and I'm getting antsy if I'm not moving the dream forward. "Fervent" is a good word to describe me at the moment. I'm in hyper-productive mode. I also took those two months away from my diet and exercise regimen. As some of you know, I lost 40 pounds last year, mostly from just dropping refined sugar from my diet. Around the holidays, I allowed myself to indulge in a few slices of apple pie, but for the most part I've been good. I don't if it was the great weather last week or what, but I took the bike to work on Friday and it was great. Still go for a walk through the building each day, but swimming has fallen off... maybe with my new lack of sleep schedule, I'll pick it up. I hope to continue to lose the weight and get to around 250 by year's end. Slow and steady :) I ordered my first display rack for the cards. I plan to erect it in my bedroom - a daily reminder of the dream and where I'm headed and to keep my ass moving on this. As I paint card designs through February, I'll fill the rack. 20 slots for 20 cards... more motivation. Fervent! A few years back, I stumbled across something in a book (don't recall which) but I revised it a bit. It talked of four roles. Maybe that played into my concept of four adjectives, but the four roles at which I arrived were these: - Laborer
- Explorer
- Artisan
- Conductor
These four roles are what each of us do in our lives. At our most existential and basic, we labor - to feed ourselves and have some worth to our lives. But better if we move beyond that to explore. To see what there is to see. As we do, we find things that we're good at doing and we find our passions. Here, we finesse our craftsmanship and become an artisan in our talent. And then finally, we are conductors - we work to orchestrate the network in which we operate. Socially and commercially minded, the conductor keeps a look out for opportunity and for synergy.I bring that up because on my wall in front of my desk are index cards with those words printed on them. I am to work and discover and refine and orchestrate. Hyper-productive is good. The dream is worth it.  |
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Jacob has discovered the greatness of creating his own home movies. Every time I watch this, I crack up.  With entertainment like this 24/7, who needs Hollywood? |
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For Christmas, my mom gave me what I'll call a "paint pouch." It was intended to hold brushes, but I've torn out some of the stitching to make room for my tubes of acrylic. I hung it on the wall with two nails - totally not what the designer intended, but it works for my purposes. Certainly better than having all my shit laying around my desk. (Speaking of which, I still can't find my glasses...)  That's a lot of paint... I miss 'em. As soon as the development on ArtByBrett is done, I'll get back to it. |
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I've been building the retail web site, going along and thinking it through. As I've been noodling it through, I've grown increasingly uneasy with my original database schema. Started to look more like spaghetti than intelligent design. One of my favorite development tools is Microsoft Word's outline view. You can access it by going to "View/Outline" in the menu. Here, you can create a quick and easily editable outline for your thoughts. There's a custom toolbar that comes with this view. Be sure to toggle off "Show Formatting" in the toolbar. The default is a bunch of funky text and frankly it boggles my mind why those font choices are the default... Databases work best when they model real life relationships and attributes. Which seems obvious on its face, but here's where it becomes a matter of how you view things. Where do you associate, for example, the discount? Obviously, it's associated at the time of ordering. But is it on an item level or on the order level? After a lot of twisting and turning about it, here's my outline: 
And so with that, I'll be undoing and redoing some of my work on the web site. Interesting puzzles, these are... |
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 | Time |  |
Time is the most valuable asset that you have. Nothing else holds a candle. I come to this conclusion after dealing with more Firefox issues this morning. My sons are all playing in the living room and outside, so I decided to work on the web site for a while. I learned that Firefox doesn't support VBScript. I don't use VBScript much except for one function, a check date function, which is great in VBScript because Microsoft has produced a superlative date validation function, IsDate(). This function will read "Jan 1, 2006" "January 1" "1-1-06" all as valid date formats. And they are. Firefox's enforces Javascript verification, which is much weaker for its strict reliance on the use of regular expressions, which can only validate a single date format. Why did Firefox do this? Because of Microsoft's arrogance in releasing a browser and operating system that didn't take security seriously. Microsoft's is an optimistic world where hackers and terrorists don't exist. Hackers exploit VBScript's openness and powerful function library to hijack PC's. Firefox simply decided to ignore VBScript in releasing their browser. That's a lotta balls to stiffarm Microsoft. I kind of respect them for that. Pretty gutsy. But security had become such an issue that when people found a web site that relied on VBScript for part of its functionality, Firefox only had to respond that "The web site uses VBScript, which is a security risk to you," and the customer would knowingly nod in agreement and actually thank Firefox for not allowing the web site to do its thing. And the company who owned the web site would have to invest in a rewrite in Javascript. And all of this came about because some mobster or teenage punk decided that he would write a malicious piece of code. The code might have wiped data from a computer; it might have stolen bank accounts numbers; it might have fired endless popups at the user. But I can boil all of these down to a simple and priceless commodity: time. My computer's data files are the summation of my effort in creating them. Typically, if they're wiped, I have to recreate them, if I can. My bank accounts, if stolen, require that I take the time to close the accounts and create new ones and trace any money confiscated from me to get it back. My money is, after all, the payment for my invested time in a service/product that someone else deemed worthy of money. And getting rid of the popups takes time, of course. Ultimately, they're stealing my time without my consent. True freedom is my choice in how to spend my time, be that in speaking or writing or conducting my affairs in the way that I deem important to me. Anytime that someone pulls my time from me, without my consent or choice in engaging them, and decides how I must spend my time, I am not free. Terrorists also steal my time, but on a far larger scale. If they're successful, it's a permanent erasure of my life. Every day is ripped from me. It's all about time. That's truly all that we have. How do we spend each wild and precious moment? So in search of a good validation library for Javascript, I can pony up $75 for version 9.7.2 of something and save myself time. Or I can continue to scour the web for something free. But is that worth my time? Any business needs to have t-i-m-e as its base selling point for existence. A business must free up time for the consumer. Or provide quality of time for the consumer. But it's all about time. |
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Running Circles Around Me |
You would think that as a web developer and blogger, I get it. Today I learned that I'm not thinking big enough. This morning, Mike Sansone taught me the definition of a blog. A blog is not a web log. It is not a journal. It is not a series of posts or articles. A blog is a web page that has any manner of dynamic, changing content. Then he went further to show me that any successful home page should be a blog, whether for a business or personal use or whatever. If it's static, no one will return. Mike, you have no idea what you've unleashed. But man, do I owe you for the education. The curriculum's fine; it's the student who was slow. |
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When I was 16 years old, I remember that my world was hanging out with my best buddy, Jim, and we would play Atari games on occasion and draw huge pixelated stick figures on his TV. His older brother, Tom, had a ham radio in the basement and occasionally, we would hear Tom CQ'ing for other parts of the world with rare success. Remember this?  Fast forward to today, 25 years later. My son, Nick, is 16. He and I frequently play HALO together on XBox Live. Recently, one of the people in his group, Psychopath, went to my web site and then sent me some of his computer art. Psychopath is actually Paul, who also is 16. And he's Australian.  He did this with a program called Bryce 5. As you can see, it allows him to create complex renderings. Look at this close-up:  See the reflection on the water? It is utterly remarkable that my children regularly interact with people from all over the world through XBox Live. Paul, a high schooler in Australia, is doing things far beyond my grasp when I was his age. It gets my head to spinning when I think of the achievements they will make in this accelerated curve of technology and connectedness. As I watch both Aaron and Nick do this, I've noticed something. They've found their groups (Aaron's are more British and Irish, and Nick's are American and Australian) and with more frequency they'll just talk in these groups, and not just play. XBox Live allows for voice-over-IP (VOIP) and it's often as clear as the telephone. The acceleration of change in our world today escapes most of us. 25 years is not that long a time span. While Atari was not available for my mother's generation, ham radios were, and the technology was pretty much the same from her generation to mine. But the changes are lightning fast now. I can't imagine what my son will enjoy as he enters his 40's, 25 years from now. It's bewildering to try and guess what his 16-year-old will be able to do. What a great time to be alive, this is! |
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The smart farmers in Iowa where I live don't rely on just one crop; they typically have not just corn or soybeans, but cattle, sheep, maybe some exotic horses and some type of equipment they can loan out or use, like a road grater, to help them make money. That way if one peters out, something else has them covered. A few years back I started a company that was into the email newsletter business. It's coasting along at breakeven and has been for the past two years, but we brought in a developer (thankfully not me) last fall who is revamping the product and we will relaunch that this spring. I own a third of the company, so if it does well, fantastic. If not, it's not hurting me today. But things are looking good. Then an idea that I started developing about two years ago (an events search engine) has recently revived and gotten some traction thanks to Mike Sansone (an awesome guy by any measure) and my daughter, Bari. They know each other through the place where she works, and Mike connected some dots and is helping to move this football forward. If this continues as it seems like it will, then I'll end up with a partial ownership stake, as would Mike, and here again, a former project looks promising. Over the summer, I blogged about the big project at work that I had undertaken and for which I have received some notice since we released it in August. Yesterday, we revealed our development on a resource management module that allows managers to estimate their employees' allocation on projects/tasks/PTO and that too was well-received. There's a possibility, and some VP buzz, that the web site I wrote could go corporate, meaning that all of Wells would use it in tracking/managing projects. Woo hoo! And of course, lately I've been writing of the progress on my greeting card venture. None of these things is a shoe-in. The company of which I own a part could tank or continue to limp along. The revision of the events web site could fizzle. My greeting cards might be wanted by no one, or few anyway. And Wells could adopt some other tool than the one I wrote. But like a farmer, I have the benefit of having four possibilities out there. Could 2006 bring me a good harvest? I've been watching my friend, Kris, move ahead with her artwork and sell it to get to her dream of being a musician/artist full-time. My friend, Lisa, is not a blogger, but she left her underwriting job to work in a retail setting to learn the retail business and get closer to her dream of someday owning her own store. I recently re-acquainted with my old guitarist, Kelly, who is building his own home studio. Shantyl nears the end of her degree and she's working on her writing. Erin, too, is fanning the flames of her desire to write and do what she was born to do. A lot of bloom going on... and it ain't even spring! Here's my point... I could have said "No" to any of these extra hours projects and simply coasted along in a cushy job. But I took the risk and now the possibility exists that I could hit a home run. At least my chances are magnified by the number of efforts out there. My friends are also taking some risks and moving ahead on their passions to evolve into the dreams of their lives. We could all simply put up with "good enough," but we know that there is more. We do it because we can. And quite frankly, because I don't think we have a choice. To do otherwise is to deny our very nature. We live in the best country on earth, where dreams like these are possible. We live in a time when it's not quite so difficult to get noticed for what we can do. We can move into "tribes" of like interests through the communication tools at our disposal and we have relatively easy-to-use technology to aid our pursuits. Bloom is, well, inevitable. The only thing that can hold us back is our personal refusal to step out on the faith that we can achieve what we dream. Lucky for me, my friends and I step ahead fearlessly. I get to watch this incredible and talented bunch launch into the future. I'm tellin' ya - so far, I love 2006. |
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"Yes" is the Key to Adventure |
"Those who say 'Yes' are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those who say 'No' are rewarded by the safety they attain." - Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up (Patricia Ryan Madson) |
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