2011

I feel a little bit bad because I know this was a tough year for a lot of people but I can’t help but be amazed when I look back at how awesome 2011 actually was. I hit my entire personal development goals and objectives. I quit smoking. It was a year of wedding bells (Ours were the best, no offense ,I am biased) Mexican beaches, the completion of my masters, Phoenix sunrises and sunsets, Chelsea Handler drunk on stage, Twins games, a Saints game, One of the last performances of Mike DeStefona’s life. Dog walks, peddle pubs, Arsenic and Lace. Roofers and plumbing make over’s for goodness sakes. Country car trips into the heart of Wisco, golf lessons, books and movies and probably way too many drinks. It was a year of seemingly constant celebration. Of new beginnings. Of a few mournful endings. I feel somewhat strange to be so optimistic about the future when so many harbor so much doubt but as I look to the horizon of 2012 I do so with a big smile on my face, peace in my heart and a mind that is firing on all cylinders. For my wonderful wife and those who I have had the honor of spending time with this last year I thank you and I raise a glass in your names. Cheers

Birthday

Today I celebrate my 34 birthday and begin my 35 revolution around the sun. More grey hair and pounds than I would like but wisdom gained from them has been priceless. I count my many blessings today and feel powerful momentum of moving in the direction of my choosing.

Pants

I wonder why they don’t make Khakis that stay a certain color or that won’t change color when they get wet. Nothing like running late for a meeting and quick squirting one out, forgetting to double shake and showing up with a little urine blot on your pants. I bet the person who would be able to invent these pants would be a billionaire. Especially as the senior citizen population grows….maybe a new business venture for 2012?

Saint What?

Sorry little vent had to spend some time with someone this week who would not shut up about how good it feels to help others and think a little BS has to be called. I mean how big of a saint can you be if you got paid for it? I mean I am glad have appearing to be righteous down to a science. I appreciate you have good intentions but you also get paid. You wouldn’t do it for free right? Otherwise you wouldn’t have asked to be paid. I understand that people can help each other and still make a living doing it but those people don’t tend to posture and throw how wonderful they think they are in everyone’s face. I don’t know maybe it is just me but when you put a price on it and won’t do it without a price it becomes a job and you lose the right to claim nobility about it.

These Steps

I used to sit on these steps and smoke. Staring off into the distance and thinking about everything and nothing at all. Worrying about things that would never come to pass. Waiting on something that was supposed to happen. I feel foolish when I think of that boy. How much time he squandered. How many fingers he pointed. How many excuses he made. I am not sure when I decided to stop sitting on those steps. But I am glad I did.

Thoughts Expand Exponentially

For a long time I thought that there was linear relationship to the ideas I could generate and the amount of knowledge that I consume. I see now that that is a correct statement up to a point. But at some point it starts to expand exponentially. Imagine my mind is like a refrigerator and all of the information I consume are like ingredients that fill the fridge. The quality of my ingredients is equal that which I select. Now as my fridge fills up there is a one to one relationship but at some point there is a realization that I can combine all of these items in different ways to come up with something different (idea) I realize that depending on what I purchased and put into the fridge I can make endless combinations of stuff that didn’t exist before. Learning how to combine these ingredients in ways then grows exponentially. Add to that it can also grow dimensionally once I learn about blenders, crockpots, the oven microwaves etc each one of those becomes another dimension.

Critics

Thankfully your approval is not required for my happiness

Temperance

I stand in a position to fully appreciate the power of temperance and yet something in me denies it. It is a competing vision of the future the safe path that leaves me in good health and wealthy beyond my dreams. And the part of me that knows that doesn’t really mean anything and urges me to enjoy the ride and leave your body spent at the finish line. I would like to think temperance is somewhere in the middle. It probably is I think I am just an all or nothing person.

Thoughts on Finishing Up my MBA

Final stretch is here. I am just waiting on presenting my final project and then it is complete. I can officially update my resume with those three little letters. In retrospect of completion just want to record the following thoughts. 1.)I am glad I did it and it feels good. Although I view it more as an insurance policy than any sort of intellectual achievement. 2.)It was much more generic then I thought it would be. I went into it thinking it would help me to unlock the vast sea of capital markets and instead it was mostly a bunch of stuff I already knew. 3.)I used to think people with advanced degrees were amazing people, smart, refined, now i know most of it is just BS. 4.)I learned more reading and in self directly study outside of the program then I did in it by an order of magnitude. 5.)Grade inflation is a joke.

Hebbs Rule and the Power of Thoughts

Hebbs rule states that every time a correct decision is made those neural pathways are reinforced.
Correct isn’t quite the right word but we can see its power. Every time say an addict smokes or commits a behavior that is pleasing it reinforces the pathway of the brain. Repetition of behaviors over a long time get stronger and stronger.
This leads the control of the pathways that will be reinforced in the hands of the person. It is up to that person to define what is correct and then repetitiously complete that activity.

I can reinforce whatever I view as correct behavior, absent a role model I need to choice for myself what that behavior is. Thankfully over the long haul I have become better and better at which items to reinforce and which ones to diminish.
What behavior am I reinforcing today that is needs to change for the benefit of the long run.

Moore’s Law Reaching a Breaking Point?

ok maybe not for another 20 years...

This is something I have never spent much time thinking about but in light of a few recent articles I am wondering how vast the impacts of it might be and maybe off souring the manufacture of technology to other parts of the world is a blessing in disguise. Like ticking time bomb placed picked up by your competitor.

Imagine for a moment that computers technology reaches a point where they can’t get faster or cheaper. Since next year’s model will not be any better than this year’s model there is no reason to upgrade your components. The market seizes. The high-tech manufactures producing items tank, the stores selling them tank etc.

I have always taken an optimistic view that science would find a way to keep the liner equation going but the more that I am understanding the limits of physics involved the process more I am starting to understand that there is a limit and we will hit it.

Maybe it is good that we off shore these services over the next 20 years and build more sustainable manufacturing bases here? We could be dodging a pending economic bomb and not even know it.

Blind Graffiti Artists

I wonder if there are any blind graffiti artist. Ones who throw up dots for tags and just laughs that know one gets it?

December 12th

What a difference a year makes. Last December 12th the Metro-dome collapsed under the weight of a blizzard. This year it is 40 degrees and I can still see all the grass on my lawn.

Exert from Boomerang by Michael Lewis

This was a great short read this weekend and one of the best narratives on the European debt crisis I have read to date.

"Leverage buys you a glimpse of prosperity you haven't really earned."


"Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity a right, lawlessness as freedom, abrasive speech as equality and anarchy as progress."

Mathematical Symmetry

Beautiful isn't it?

1 x 1 = 1
11 x 11 = 121
111 x 111 = 12321
1111 x 1111 = 1234321
11111 x 11111 = 123454321
111111 x 111111 = 12345654321
1111111 x 1111111 = 1234567654321
11111111 x 11111111 = 123456787654321
111111111 x 111111111=12345678987654321

English Lesson: Then and Than

I would rather cuddle then have sex...if you are good with grammar you will understand the lesson.

Classic lesson and good way to remember the difference

Link Between Teacher Salaries and Abuse Cases?

I am starting to wonder if the decline in teacher’s salary actually puts children increasing at risk of child predators?

The theory is that a teacher makes a smaller percentage of salary for their skill in the class room then they would in the real world for example a trainer with a sports team makes $150,000.00 and a gym teacher makes $30,000. (I am totally making these numbers up just as an example)

Now in order to take a job that pays less salary presumably other incentives come into play. Sure some people trade money for summers off and some people trade more money because they like children. But this is where I think this can get skewed as the wage disparity between private sector opportunities and teaching positions widens it will start to produce more cases of molestation since a partial factor of choosing to teach will increasingly be an extreme love of children and the bucket of people who demonstrate this extreme love of children over financial compensation will in my hypothesis include increasing numbers of child predators, who have an ulterior motive or derived benefit to make up for the financial disparity.

Something to think about when voting down referendums?

Barbie = Bad?

I recently read an article describing how crippled and horrific the experience would be if a real life woman had the same measurements and expectations of Barbie. How unrealistic it is to have an image that we can’t live up to as an idol?

But they might get a complex and not feel good enough about themselves….

People look up to Jesus and are never going to walk on water or turn water into wine.

Is it wrong to have an image beyond which you could realistically live up to in your life?

If I had a statue of Zeus or David in although I could never physically live up to the stereotype model would it be wrong for me to try?

This brings up and interesting concept about striving to be better than we currently are, even if it is unattainable.

What is better? Would it be better to have little obese Barbie’s? How many people die of heart disease compared to anorexia?

Why not make normal sized Barbie’s? Little plastic Venus de Milo’s it is more obtainable right? I think because deep down we want, long for and even deceive ourselves into believing in an ideal version of things. We see an idealized version of ourselves and want to play with or look up to something that is just beyond our reach. I don’t think that is bad.

And then after all this you realize it is just a fucking Barbie and if you want another idol for your kids to play with or live up take them down target and buy them something else.

Words of Wisdom

In what you say of another, apply the test of kindness, necessity and truth, and let nothing pass your lips without a 2/3 majority. ~Liz Armbruster


Give thanks for what you are now, and keep fighting for what you want to be tomorrow. ~Fernanda Miramontes-Landeros

Achieving Goals

The only way I know how to achieve any particular goal is to write it down and divide the work to achieve it into meaningful (Reasonable) pieces and manage to complete it piece by piece day by day. I manage projects for a living it is what I do.

I would rather have a plan than not have one.

I think it also makes other people around me uncomfortable. That is ok. Their reaction will not stop me from moving life forward.

Color of Your Mind?

If you are born deaf and blind what language would you think in?

Would your thoughts be in sign language or brail?

The House that Built Me

On 50th and Xerxes in South Minneapolis sits a little house. A little house where I was born. I walked to school from down the alley, played with my neighbors, through mid pies at garages. It was a small house. It was the house that I knew what family meant.
We moved out of that house into a much larger house in an upscale suburb. I watched as money worries evaporated what I knew about family. Over reaching for the American dream pulled apart the strand and dumped them like a pearl necklace snapped off a neck.
I learned something interesting

You can only help someone who is sinking in quick sand from a vantage point of not being in the quick sand yourself. In essence you have to save yourself first before you can save others.

I think self preservation gets a bad rap

Financial mismanagement can undermine the strongest bonds.

Take lots of smart small risks instead of big ones.

Chasing someone else’s dream is dangerous.

I don’t need much to be happy.

Once relationships are damaged they are really hard to repair.

Going it alone is scary, exhilarating and generally frowned upon by others.

While that house is still there it belongs to someone else now. Now is my turn to build a house that will know what family is once again.

Golden Financial Ratio

(This concept has not been fully flushed out yet, just jotting the thought down to come back to it later)

One of the greatest things that you have as a child is time. Unfortunately you are too stupid to know how valuable that it actually is. I think that there exists a gold ratio although in my mind I debate on the correct portions over time. The general principal is this if you have a $100 and are thirty it would make more sense in the long term to invest that $100 then to spend that $100 since it will work harder for you compounding over time. However you can’t just save everything you have to live your life too plus fix stuff. So my budget philosophy has become something like this.

Anything you spend above necessities has to be directly proportional to the amount of money that you for example for every dollar you save you can spend 50 cents so if your disposable income is $15,000 you save ten you can spend $5000.00 the trick I have noticed is if I set the savings goal first. Say in the year saving I have to reach X before I spend Y then I reach my savings goals much earlier and with greater accuracy then if I just spend and save as I go.

But as time winds down that ratio changes and starts to hit parity. When I am 75 I might as well just spend $100 rather than save a $100.