DaKid’s™ Big Adventure

Yesterday, DaKid™ left on his biggest adventure to date. I’m just marking the date.

When I was 13 and did something similar, it was a different world. I had to use a pay phone to call home. Entertainment was reading a book (the school did not permit students going to the movies), or playing sports, etc. (No game consoles, laptops, cell phones, internet…)

So we’re eager to see how that ability to reach out (or back) or continue to live on line impacts their experience. Also, he’s not 13…

Anyway, noted for the future Monday the 28th of August was the Big Day.

Don’t Look Away | NextDraft

Don’t Look Away | NextDraft:

The recent acts of public antisemitism and antidemocratic leanings are examples of how this stuff spreads and movements go from the edges to the mainstream. For a great review, watch Ken Burns latest series, America and the Holocaust. Parts of it will feel remarkably familiar. And here’s a take from Michelle Goldberg in the NYT (Gift Article): Antisemitism’s March Into the Mainstream. “For most of my adult life, antisemites — with exceptions like Pat Buchanan and Mel Gibson — have lacked status in America. The most virulent antisemites tended to hate Jews from below, blaming them for their own failures and disappointments. Now, however, anti-Jewish bigotry, or at least tacit approval of anti-Jewish bigotry, is coming from people with serious power: the leader of a major political party, a famous pop star, and the world’s richest man.”

[Thee are not simple times. More than don’t look away. Be an advocate for love, tolerance, and peace.]

The Steve Jobs Archive

The Steve Jobs Archive:

When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.

I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.

I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.

[This is great!]

Binaries over priorities

Binaries over priorities:

Be definitive, know what you’re getting yourself into, control scope by deciding yes or no. Maybe is a scope expander, a deadline wrecker, and an appeaser that ends up being a displeaser in the end.

[My wife and I use a binary system about all household spending (which for us is pretty broad category of purchases). We decided early on that only one no “wins”. The revisit period is indeterminate, but any agenda item can be brought up again if circumstances change. There are certain revisitation exceptions like fabric patterns. It’s easy to get talked into something, but you’re never really going to like it. It’s not as formal as it sounds and it works for us. YMMV]

A Tale of Two Pools

A Tale of Two Pools – Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design:

we’d have returned to the hotel for a long day’s lounging in and around the pool. We made up imaginary and ridiculous Disney movies, describing the trailers to each other. (In “The Dog Who Shit Nickels,” when the suburban neighbor, pointing to a pile of coins, complains to dog owner Arnold Schwarzenegger, “Look what your dog did on my lawn!”, Arnold says, “Keep ze change.”) We splashed, we swam, we paddled.

[Excellence in summer vaca.]

My mother loves me

The disclaimer, my mother loves me, above, is something I came up with as far as I know. Here’s how you should parse it. Anticipating that you hate me for saying what I just said, or that god is going to goof on me for daring to think something will come out well, I want you to know that even though you hate me so vociferously, my mother loves me.

[A good thing to remember. And please if you had a less than a loving mother… I’m sorry. But please don’t @ me.]

Source: Scripting News

I am for being for things (Part 2)

Part 1 is here.

##For thoughts

So this year I will continue to be for things. I’m completely for being for things. I am simply and expansively for.

I’m for the team and it, in turn, is for me.

I am for the parts that are not great because they are large and coupled and ignoble and insufferable and wish to be better and I with them.

I am for building into it and building through it because inside there is where I find out (or remember) that after all the inhumanity (oh!) of it all, it all turns out to be endurable and worthy of my efforts.

I am for that which does not endure, too. I am for forgetting and moving beyond and above and between and forgiving my past failures.

I am for working when it is just work and also when everything is riding on the work.

I am for caring too much about the work and nothing at all about the work, either way and sometimes both ways and sometimes any and all ways in between, part of the way sometimes, sometimes all the way, on and on until I know I can never know really what I am working for and, not caring, I work, and I work and work and work, for no reason other than to work and better myself.

I am for that—all of that, and also you and my teammates, and all of yours.

When I acknowledge that there is no such thing as perfect code or a perfect team or a perfect project, that only the idea of it exists… then the real purpose of striving toward perfection becomes clear:

To make me/we/us happy!

That is what it is all about. And I am all for that all the time. No one has more fun than we!

Happy New Year!

Shamelessly stolen from Bill Strickland

I am for being for things (Part 1)

##Joy

We talk about how hard it was, the work, some awful sprint, whatever. Dang, it was hard. Can you believe how hard? That was hard. It’s the easiest thing to talk about, something you can look a friend in the eyes and admit to feeling, the simplest aspect of it all to explain to our families. Oh, heavens, it was hard.

And when the work is hard, we rarely talk about the colors and images that at some point flooded our perception. We don’t talk about the sounds that for some mysterious stretch we lived in like fish in water. Or the choice of music. Or the feel of the keys beneath our fingers. Or the trust in our partners and team members. And almost never about the joy. Joy especially is a silly word, an embarrassing one. Better that we have a rush, that we’re pumped, or psyched or jacked or couldn’t even freaking believe how much we killed it and crushed it. I mean, seriously: Gosh, fellow participants, wasn’t that joyous? No way. Maybe? Nah.

But go out and throw a Frisbee to the end of the reach of a great dog and tell me how that moment of pure ecstatic canine joy when the jaws rip the disc out of the air is any different from what we feel as we improve our work, have a breakthrough, find just the right chord.

##Abundance

Our work is so full of so much that we take the abundance for granted. We forget that most people don’t live the way we do — that, for them, being aware of and awash in the code and design is an oddity. Our exalted state — the equivalent to the rare condition of intensified being that all these businesses are trying to implant into their employees, and that all these books are trying to instruct people to do, and that all these gurus are suddenly yammering on about — we live there.

So where is this all going? Part 2 awaits.