Video
For my 30th birthday, my mom asked my brothers to make a slideshow of some childhood pics with a song from the CD that we made her for a Christmas present years ago… Apologies about my voice.
Nov 16 2010
Nov 16 2010
The Morals of Chess
The game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement. Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened by it, so as to become habits, ready on all occasions.
1. Foresight, which looks a little into futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action; for it is continually occuring to the player, ‘If I move this piece, what will be the advantages or disadvantages of my new situation? What use can my adversary make of it to annoy me? What other moves can I make to support it, and to defend myself from his attacks?
2. Circumspection, which surveys the whole chessboard, or scene of action; the relations of the several pieces and situations, the dangers they are respectively exposed to, the several possibilities of their aiding each other, the probabilities that the adversary may make this or that move, and attack this or the other piece, and what different means can be used to avoid his stroke, or turn its consequences against him.
Nov 08 2010
Photoset
Melissa and I took advantage of Docudesk’s ‘vacation day on your birthday’ policy with a trip to the Valley House art gallery and sculpture garden. Currently featured is “Classical Plastique” by artist Vera Barnett, who has re-envisioned famous paintings as blow up dolls. An interesting fact about this series is that she actually sews the models and re-creates the surroundings of the original work before even beginning painting.
The detailed models (some of which were also on display) create very realistic paintings, which create a disquieting effect when viewed in person. There is something about seeing these human-ish creatures going through human experiences, and experiencing human emotion that just draws you in.
Sometimes, when searching for a resolution for a problem, there is benefit in taking a step back, or taking yourself out of the equation entirely for a completely different perspective.
Perhaps the artist is offering up a reflection of humanity by taking us out of it.
Nov 01 2010
Gifted & Talented?
Recently on a trip to “the most haunted room” in “the most haunted hotel”, Melissa and I were enjoying the east Texas scenery and listening to Radiolab podcasts. One episode featured a dialogue with author Malcolm Gladwell on the secrets of success and discussing his book “Outliers”. Our attention was grabbed with Mr. Gladwell’s flippant remarks about his disdain for Gifted & Talented programs. Unfortunately they didn’t delve into his reasoning on this, and instead focused on what sounds like are the primary arguments in the book - that over the top, runaway success stories are due to being in the right place at the right time, coupled with extraordinary love & passion for an activity. Be it programming for Bill Gates, hockey for Wayne Gretsky, or music for The Beatles. Gladwell cites the 10,000 hour rule readily and with a fair amount of facts makes his case pretty well. What was most interesting to us, and what they unfortunately failed to address, is why Gifted and Talented programs are detrimental in this equation?
Melissa and I both consider ourselves lucky to have been in a district that had such a program available - ours was called ALPS, (Alternative Learning Program for gifted Students) and is where we first met. You don’t hear many arguments against this type of program, so we were both a little surprised at this opinion.
I’m not sure what all the entry requirements were, but I do remember taking an IQ test when I entered public school which it was probably based on. In home school I was used to going at my own pace, often teaching myself from the books, finishing early and going to play outside, or just continuing on and getting ahead. If the weather was nice my mom would sometimes have class for my brother and I in the park, and I remember going on many random, interesting field trips with the local home school group. Going from that environment to one in which you have to sit in a desk and wait for the slowest person in the group to catch up was excruciating. The ALPS program was a fantastic return to the exciting elements of learning and a truly invaluable experience to me.
By simply challenging the convention of the classroom, learning was made exciting again. ALPS challenged us to be creative. By offering different projects each student was able to explore areas they were interested in, & actually discover topics we didn’t know we would be interested in. The projects were broad and varied, and ranged from mock trials to developing advertising campaigns. We wrote computer programs in elementary school… (ok it was just BASIC) but we had the opportunity to find something in everything that was interesting to us. (I was the Doug Llewellyn of the mock trial).
Another great thing about it was that you were no longer waiting on the slowest one. As Randy Couture says “iron sharpens iron”, and whether you are looking for sparring partners or peers it rings true. Without the ALPS program I’m sure many of the students would have found it exceedingly easy to coast through school feeling like the smartest kid in every class, without the opportunity to be challenged or find peers. It provided an opportunity to have conversations that you couldn’t necessarily have normally, which I believe was one of the foundational goals of the TED talks as well as Mensa. We were able to delve into topics and have conversations that most students simply would not have been ready for, or cared to have.
Alternatively, those of us who weren’t necessarily the greatest students grade-wise (there were likely more than a handful of learning disorders in the group) had the opportunity to be creative, and understand that grades weren’t the end-all be-all of education. In ALPS the highest of the class could be on the same playing field as C or D students, as grades were not part of the equation. For everyone, complacency was simply not a factor.
One thing Gladwell honed in on regarding his success stories: they were all given opportunities that were crucial to their success. So why not give as many kids as possible that opportunity? I don’t want to imply that I think all students should be separated by their IQ or their preferred method of learning, interaction itself is one of the most important lessons in school. (As well as one of the biggest shortfalls of homeschooling). However, is it possible this would simply mirror our social circles? I remember the CEO of my company noting once when discussing the benefits of hiring referrals: smart people tend to have smart friends.
I do understand the elitism connotation, and I had many friends who would have done great in the program, but weren’t in it for whatever reason. However, I see no reason why supporting one form of alternative education means that you have to discount all others. I think everyone should be given the opportunity to learn in the way that is best suited for them, and I don’t see why this would be at odds with any of Gladwell’s tenets of success.
I wrote a bit more than I expected to, I suppose I am beginning to see the benefit of clearing some brain space and getting it on ‘paper’. Some of this just happened to be fresh in my head after the podcast, as well as a dinner a little while back with our friend Henry and his wife when we reminisced a little about ALPS.
By the way that “most haunted room” in the “most haunted hotel”? As of right now I think it was probably some gifted and talented marketing.
Oct 19 2010
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Docudesk Solutions Blog: High Quality PDF Creation Without the High PriceUse Case - Creative Professional
As the owner & editor of the über-chic Escapism Magazine, Nic Havers required a method to create pre-press quality PDF’s to send to the publisher for printing the physical copies of the elegant, but graphically intense magazine.
As a…
Sep 20 2010
My Mind On My Mint & My Mint On My Mind
I thought I would start sharing some of the sites, apps, & lifehacks that I have started using recently which save me time, or have just made my life easier in some way. First up:
Mint.com
What it is: A site which lets you link all the financial date in your life.
Verdict: Awesome.
I have to admit, I’ve known about Mint for a few years. I read great reviews about it, and had friends whose opinions I trust who were using it. It sounds like something that would be up my alley, so what was the drawback? I couldn’t believe that linking up all of my accounts could be easy, and I couldn’t imagine how much benefit there would be to doing so.
I believe it took me no longer than 10-15 minutes to link up all my data from multiple bank accounts, mortgage, credit cards, and even investment accounts. It was really as brain dead simple and even as “fun” as it possibly could have been. The caveat is that you have to already have the accounts setup to manage online. I only had one that I had never bothered to setup the online banking for, and it was an old school credit union so I had to go down there and raise my right hand, give my fingerprints, turn my head and cough, etc… (this is still normal for credit unions right?) However after I did that I was able to link it to Mint with no problem.
Ok so its easy to link the accounts, so what? Well for one, I now have one place that I can check all my accounts, instead of nine. You can track all purchases, and know immediately if something is wrong. You can set any kind of notification you want to, so you can track large purchases or abnormal spending. This would be really handy if a card was stolen for instance - you would know right away. It also automatically categories purchases and will show you spending habits / trends. You can set budgets and customize the categories as well, which I haven’t had too much of a need for. The automatic budgets and categorization is enough for me for now, and is usually pretty accurate. There are a few hiccups though, for instance our recent stay at ‘The Standard NYC’ hotel showed up as just “Standard” in the credit card statement, which Mint categorized as shipping, and also kindly let me know that I was now over my shipping budget for approximately the rest of my life.
You can also add other assets & property, and it can show you a bottom line net worth of everything. Useful if you are playing the Gordon Gekko version of life, or if you just like to know these things.
Other things I like - the mobile apps. From my phone I have access to every single account! I actually use the mobile app much more than I go to the website. I had already pretty much gone paperless on most of my accounts, but after using this app for a couple of months I have now made sure that paperless billing was setup for everything. I have absolutely no need for a paper printout with 1 month of data when I can get all the data from all time from my phone.
Mint is totally free, but it definitely has the feel of a paid app, or something which you are paying for as a monthly service. I believe they make money from partnerships… I turned off some of the default notifications for stuff like saving money on credit card rates. A fairly small price to pay for the amount of benefit, and what can I say, I can’t knock the hustle. They were bought recently by Intuit, so there may be more of these tie-ins to come.
I watched a documentary recently on credit cards and banking in America, and I can’t imagine anyone being able to get too far into debt if they actually used this app, utilized the warning notifications, and had an actual bar graph of real time net worth profit / loss. Its like having Dave Ramsey as your financial advisor, no BS just bottom line data.
The take-away: I think everybody should use this.
© Nicholas Thomas 2006-2011