Author: cosmo

I read an interesting article yesterday about a guy who decided to accept a challenge to go for 21 days without complaining.

I suspect most of us don’t even realize how much we complain in our everyday lives. There’s always something that bothers us, something that didn’t go right, or someone who’s getting on our nerves. And we almost can’t help but say something about it. But I think in doing so– in giving in to the temptation to gripe– we become just that much more negative.

So I’ve decided to follow this guy’s example, and work to not complain at all for the next 21 days.

Note that constructive criticism is okay. For example, the following would be a complaint:

But making it constructive or positive would be okay:

Hopefully the result of this “experiment” will be a more positive outlook on… well, everything.

My friend Michael is on a volleyball league team and they needed a sub, so he asked me to join them for their games tonight. It’s been about two years since I even touched a volleyball, but I guess it’s somewhat like riding a bike because I jumped in and actually did a decent job. My serves could use a little work, and a few of my bump passes were more like shanks, but overall I can’t complain. Hopefully they’ll need a sub again soon– I miss playing.

Mmm… five terabytes of storage sitting on my desk.

Just a few years ago that kind of data required a refrigerator-sized rack of hard drives with massive cooling and cables everywhere. Now it fits into a box smaller than a six-pack. Amazing.

I’ve always thought that “reality shows” were inane drivel (sorry, all you Survivor fans) but I think we’ve hit a new low:

Wow. It’s dumb, tasteless, and mean all rolled into one big ball.

An interesting thought from Seth Godin:

I’m hoping to do just that. In these “difficult economic times” (a term that’s about as overused as “war on terror”) I figure my business can offer other companies some pretty nifty things for a pretty nifty prices. Don’t pay ten thousand dollars a month for Salesforce when you can pay us a tiny fraction of that for a customer database system tailored just for you!

If only I can find the time to actually build these things…

Since finding the thought monkeys magnets all those years ago, I’ve never failed to find humor in the phrase “thought monkeys”.

I even owned the domain for a while, but finally let it lapse because I honestly couldn’t think of what to put there.

I toyed with the idea of making that my official business title, but printing business cards with that just didn’t seem quite right.

But anyway, a few months ago I found a little fuzzy monkey head in the house.

It’s anyone’s guess what this head came from– it’s only about an inch across, apparently from some little doll. But I’ve had it on my desk ever since, and it keeps me amused and inspired when I’m working late at night (like tonight)…

A few weeks ago Alex attended a Longmont City Council meeting as part of a Boy Scout merit badge he was working on (Citizenship in the Community). I found this drawing that he did while listening to the council members do their business.

Apparently those meetings aren’t all that exciting.

At the bottom of our stairs we have a big blank wall. We used to have a copy of the Declaration of Independence there– mostly because we bought it on a trip to Washington, D.C. years ago and didn’t really have a place to put it, and the big blank wall suggested itself. But in a tragic accident yesterday, the Declaration was destroyed and now we’re left with a big blank wall again.

So we’ve been talking about what to put there, and at dinner the idea came: create a huge photo montage of thousands of our family pictures, arranged to make up a larger image. I think these are called “photomosaics”.

Anyway, a few minutes of hunting around and a bit of configuration work on my laptop, and I have the software I need to generate these cool pictures.

First, scan and index all 14,000 digital photos in our archive. Unfortunately not all of them are family shots: there are pictures of house projects, computer parts, random photos the kids took, and so on. But I’ll worry about cleaning that up later.

Second, pick a good candidate photo. I grabbed one at random from our album:

Third, run the software against the photo using the index data. The result is pretty sweet:

Although it’s hard to see at this resolution, the end result is a huge image made up of thousands of smaller photos. Here’s a zoom on one area of the mosaic (the bottom of the cookie, to be precise):

All of this in about thirty minutes. Now I can get serious and do some better indexing, and find a master photo that would be really fun.

Today’s my anniversary. Thirteen years, wow.

Being married is awesome.

Remember that scene in Return of the Jedi where Han Solo gets thawed out of the carbonite after being locked up in there for a couple of years, and he falls to the ground and as he slowly sits up he says with a groan, “I feel terrible”?

Well, that’s pretty much been the past four days for me. I laid in bed all day Friday, only moving to lurch to the bathroom now and again. Saturday was another day in bed– man, I got sick of that bed. Sunday I was feeling a little better so I moved to the family room couch for a change of scenery. And now it’s Monday, and I thought I’d be better and the week would start all happy, and instead I’m doing my best to get some work done in between a few naps because I feel so lousy.

And I’m eating a bowl of chicken soup, longing for a big slice of greasy pepperoni pizza. Sigh.

Maybe tomorrow.