A Christmas Story

Yusef ben Ya'akov was a carpenter in Natz'rat near the sea of Galilee.  He was a good man and a fine carpenter.  He was working when he first heard the decree from Rome that all citizens were to return to their family home to be counted.  For Yusef, that meant traveling to Bet Leḥem, the ancestral city of David.  It meant leaving his home in Natz'rat with his betrothed wife Miriam and walking to the city he had left a few years earlier far to the south.  Miriam, at the time was quite heavy with child and due to deliver in only a few weeks.

Miriam, daughter of Joachim left her home in Natz'rat with her betrothed husband shortly after the degree. Emperor Augustus required all citizens to return to their traditional family homes and since Miriam and Yusef were both of the house of David, they both needed to return to Bet Leḥem in Judea.  Traveling at this time would prove difficult as she was only weeks away from giving birth.

Yusef and Miriam could not make the long journey on foot so Yusef enlisted the donkey he had used for work to carry Miriam.  It was near the end of harvest now and in a few more weeks the weather would grow colder, so now was the best time to move. There was hostile land on the direct path, so they chose to take a safer route to the east, but that also took longer, even with one of them on the back of the donkey. It took a good 10 days of travel to reach Bet Leḥem, and they were glad to be done with the travel.

On their arrival, Yusef was able to locate a very small room to stay in.  It was tiny, and adjacent to the stable, where some shepherds had been staying at night. He was also able to find work to keep them fed while they waited for the census counters to mark them counted.  In the time that followed, Miriam gave birth to a son and they named him Yeshua as they had both been instructed in dreams.

One clear night several days after the Miriam gave birth, Yusef picked up the child from his bed of straw.  The days were getting colder and the stars we shining with a crisper edge.  He looked deep into Yeshua's eyes and whispered "You will be a strong boy and I will teach you to be a fine carpenter. You will build and mend, and you will be kind to all you meet."

How could he know, looking down at this tiny child, that hundreds of generations from now, in a land he had never heard of, people would call this child not Yeshua ben Yusef but  King of Kings, Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ.


Merry Christmas.

Kickstart a Revolution

My love affair with KickStarter [http://www.kickstarter.com] began in early 2012 and was followed closely by a dive into IndieGoGo [http://www.indiegogo.com].  Both are revolutionary crowd funding resources with slightly different models and both are changing the world in ways you may not be aware of if you have not been following along.

Kickstarter is a business resource that is fantastic for new startups that would otherwise not have a chance at survival.  If you have an interesting idea that has an actual business plan and a solid product idea, but want to avoid venture capital, then Kickstarter nay be a good option.  Unlike traditional investment, funders do not normally get any ownership rights in the company or project.  Instead a kickstarter funder may get a t-shirt, or a special edition of the finished product and the satisfaction of knowing they helped get a new company off the ground.  In the past eighteen months, I have helped kickstart several projects including the following.

HackEDA
Unfortunately this project was one of the few that was not funded.  This would have been great for inventors and hardware hackers who need a circuit but don't want to deal with original design.  The core of the project is still located here [http://www.hackeda.com].

The ARKYD space telescope
This is one of my favourites.  Funders raised 50% more than the required amount to place a publicly accessible telescope in orbit.  Since I would not have a clue what to do with the time I paid for, I donated it all to the University of Calgary to assist the Astrophysics program.

Game Stick
Love my GameStick.  Yes this was funded and yes I got one of the Funder Edition models.  This may change gaming in big ways if it gets traction.  More than fifty six hundred funders raised over SIX TIMES the required $100,000 needed to launch the project.  Seriously, you have to go look at the Kickstarter page for this one [HERE].  A very powerful game console with cloud storage, online sales and it all fits in your pocket for about $80. Yes you heard correctly.  Go buy one.  [https://www.gamestick.tv]

Mine Kafon
Countries like Afghanistan are dotted with hidden minefields that have been left behind and pose a serious risk to people trying to reclaim the land.  The Mine Kafton saves lives as it blows around on wind power looking for old mines to explode.

PRONG - (AKA JuiceTank)
The JuiceTank combines an iPhone charger and a rugged case into one very handy accessory for your iPhone.  Got one and love it.

IndieGoGO is a little different.  If you have an idea, or some great cause, or generally anything you want to raise money for, IndieGoGo can help you get there.  Unlike Kickstarter, there are not the same strict rules or timelines on funding.  You can assist with typhoon relief, or help support an author writing a book.

One of my favourites, one I helped to fund, and the largest ever Indiegogo project is the Tesla Museum at Wardenclyffe.  In this project, Matthew Inman of "The Oatmeal" fame, raised nearly double the $850,000 goal to fund this project to build a museum dedicated to Nikola Tesla's life and work at the location of the Tesla Tower at Wardenclyffe.

Both of these crowdfund sources and the numerous lesser known ones, are fueling a revolution. Crowdfunding allows individuals with little personal power or political weight to raise awareness, get funding, and generate tremendous support for new ideas that would otherwise have been buried or forgotten.  Without Matthew Inman and the Indiegogo vehicle, the Wardenclyffe property may have fallen into the hands of developers and been turned into a mini-mall.  Without Massoud Hassani and Kickstarter, the Mine Kafton may have never been built.

Got an idea?  Maybe you don't need the massive investment capital you thought you needed.  Maybe crowdfunding can help fuel your revolution.

A boy and his dog

I picked up our dog's ashes from the cremation service today.  Just another chore on my Saturday "to-do" list.  A matter of process and procedure, right?  It's just a dog, right?

Asking for the box at the front counter was easy.  Filling out the paperwork was a piece of cake.  It's all just standard process, paperwork, payment.  Just another chore.  I carried her box of ashes out to my truck and put her on the back seat - and then it hit me.  I was putting her in the back seat of the truck for the last time ever.  It took at least 10 minutes to regain my composure so I could actually drive.

What's the big deal you say?  Why shell out another $200 for a cremation services after spending thousands in vet bills for years already?  It's just a dog right?  We can always get another one, right?

Lets put this into perspective for a minute, and there will be many people who can relate closely to this, I know I am not alone here.  Our Jersey Girl, this dog who was now ashes in a box in the back seat, had been part of our family for fourteen and a half years.  She was an old girl, and it was her time, and she went peacefully, but none of that rationale makes this any easier.  My wife and I have been married for nearly 30 years, and we have spent literally half that time with her in our family.  She spent more time sleeping in our bed than we did.  She helped care for a half dozen children who at one time or another called our house "home".  When a new puppy came into our lives a few years ago, she instantly adopted him and taught him how to be a good dog.  She was a teacher, a companion, a protector, and a friend.

Jersey was really my son's dog, and they both knew it to the end.  I cannot tell you how many times I walked out of the house and just before I closed the door, said to her, "Good dog, guard the house, protect the boy", and she did it so very well.  When he would go away for too long, she would curl up at his door or on his bed to make sure he was ok when he came home.

Protector, friend, companion, confidant, helper, and travel mate.  Pay $200 for cremation service to respectfully send her off?  Absolutely - without question.  So I put the box of ashes in the back seat and our Jersey Girl got to take one last ride in the truck - one of her favourite things to do.  

I will miss those truck rides.

Lean into fear

We all tend to avoid doing things because they seem too hard or too scary or too big.  In order to get anywhere, you need to lean into the fear and just start doing.  Toddlers learn to walk by first falling, they catch themselves falling and find they move forward.  Before you know it they are walking all over the place, one saved fall at a time.  They learn quickly to lean into the fear of falling, realizing they can catch themselves and turn it into a forward walk.  They turn failure into progress natively.  

That natural ability to lean into fear is beaten out of us through successive levels of schooling.  We are taught to follow the established rules for fear of punishment.  We are taught to draw inside the lines for fear of ridicule.  The society we have built is so entangled in the process of blindly accepting what we are taught that by the time we are old enough to venture out and become creative adult contributors, most of that unbound exploratory behaviour is deeply buried under rules, structure and fear.

The power entrepreneurs we adore all know this.  Gates and Jobs and Wozniak, Branson and Musk and Bezos and Benioff - these familiar names are in our homes and our lives because they ignored the commonly held paradigms around them and created something unusual and controversial - things that everyone said were crazy and would fail.  But not only they did not fail, their creations became the new norm.  These great thinkers were brave enough to lean into their fear, swim against the flow and power through with what they believed to be the right path regardless of what others said was "right" or "accepted".

The next time someone tells you your idea is too crazy or too unusual to succeed, lean into the fear and just do it.  You may possibly fail, but at least you will do so on your own terms and odds are that if you truly believe in something, it will succeed no matter how crazy everyone else says it is.

  

XKCD and the Dictionary of Numbers

There are probably a few poor lost souls out there who have never heard of xkcd, so I am reposting a link to the most recent blag here as I found it simply awesome and wanted to share.  XKCD is full of humour and interesting useful things including one of my favourites, the "What If?" and in particular, "Relativistic Baseball".  Science can be fun.

This post discusses a fantastic little Chrome extension written by Glen Chiacchieri, that helps put some context to the numbers you read on the web.  I agree with the author who said "I don’t like large numbers without context. Phrases like “they called for a $21 billion budget cut” or “the probe will travel 60 billion miles” or “a 150,000-ton ship ran aground” don’t mean very much to me on their own.".  It is true and annoying and this little extension solves the problem nicely.  This morning as I was reading through the daily news updates, I came across this: "…employing 1,500 people [≈ population of Christmas Island (nation)].".  That part I highlighted in red is the added clarification from the Dictionary of Numbers and it is very helpful.

While 1500 is not a hard number to visualize, 17Billion is.  So is $12 Trillion, the current approximation of the US Public debt.  Isn't it helpful to know that $12 Trillion is also roughly equivalent to all the Fortune 500 revenues for 2011, but that is a whole other blog and conversation.

Anyway, if you are a Chrome user, I recommend heading to the Chrome store and installing this extension.  I found it useful.  Here is a convenient link to take you right there. CLICK ME
I also highly recommend making XKCD one of your common bookmarks because, well, science should be fun.


Be awesome - Change the world.

Because Chickens Don't Drive Tractors

Have you ever witnessed (or been) a parent trying to explain to a 4 year old that cowboys don't wear tiaras or that chickens don't drive tractors?  Why interfere with that creative play in the first place?  Children learn through play and as we get older, we should continue to learn through play because it is the most efficient way to sync all your senses to one thought or concept.  Yet at some point we arbitrarily decide to tell our children that animals can not really talk, dragons only live in fairy tales and only farmers drive tractors.

Why?

Why is it so important for us to conform to a societal view of reality and shun any creative thought that conflicts with that? Why do we force our children to play and dream and be creative within hard boundaries?

We want our children to be creative as long as it is within the norm.  

     "You can colour the picture but stay in the lines."

     "You can paint the landscape, but make sure the sky is blue."  

     "You can play cowboy, but cowboys don't wear tiaras."

      But… Constrain… Shackle… Contain...

As someone who is currently sifting trough resumes trying to hire creative engineers, I am saddened by the alarming number of adults who are afraid to colour outside the lines.  I want dragon slayers and ninjas.  I want radical thinkers who are ok with chickens driving tractors.  Where are all the WIlly Wonkas?

In business  the common mantra is "think outside the box", yet most companies really do not want that.  They want employees who will find creative ways of doing business and making money that are not the standard, but they draw the line at radical thought.  If someone who worked for you said " hey, lets just give our product away to a bunch of people in order to drive sales revenue" you would likely think they were insane.  

Yet that is exactly what Apple did in the early 1980's and it was brilliant.  I lived through it and even as a teenager I saw what they were doing and thought it was brilliant then too.  Give schools free computers and outfit them with computer labs.  Schools never have any money and at that time they were screaming for this new technology, yet no one was willing to provide the tools. Apple saw an opportunity to create a market and took the radical move to provide schools with computer labs at zero cost or heavily discounted rates.  IBM had a fit, but they could have never been able to make that decision to colour outside the lines the way Jobs and Wozniak did.  The result was a whole generation of children who fell in love with computers, learned how to use them and went home asking their parents to buy one. Instant market place.

Nintendo threw out the rule book with the Wii when they said "why not just make the player the controller?".  Salesforce took on the entire software universe when they said (and I paraphrase)  "people should never have to buy software in order to use its functions".  Netflix upset the whole movie rental industry by offering on-demand services to a central library of entertainment for the price of a single movie rental.

So there are definitely collections of dreamers and dragon slayers out there, but they are rare and I think that is because we keep telling our children that dragons only live in fairy tales.  We passively crush their creative spirit into a neat package we can cope with in our busy, professional, reality-driven lives.  Blue sky we can deal with, but pink oceans don't make sense.  Green grass is okay, but cows with six legs are not. 

Someday some little girl or boy will grow up to become an engineer working for a company developing safety equipment for farm vehicles.  They will examine all the possible dangers but miss the fact that a chicken could possibly get into the cab and accidentally press important buttons.  He or she will miss the possibility because they they were told as a toddler playing with farm toys that chickens don't drive tractors.

Dream, Believe, Dare, Do!