Sleep Beam

I've decided I'm going to invent a sleep beam. By that I mean I'm going to figure out how to send a wave of something into my brain to cause deep sleep to happen in a timely manner and for a predetermined amount of time. This will provide a reliable nights sleep to the average adult who is perhaps wishing for more.

The beam will be sent from the headboard of my bed and when I press a button on the side of the controller, the beam will shoot my head from above quickly sending me into a deep sleep. I'll put in a timer so that it turns off after 6 hours or so.  And I've decided that I'll put in a voice activated sensor that if the words mom, mommy, dad, daddy, donuts, fire or hey you are spoken the beam will disengage. Imagine a Star Trek sick bay table with the beam coming out of the overhead console. That is the idea.

I can can envision a portable system emits the beam from your iPhone or suitable smart phone for use when traveling. In the portable system, I'll add the phrase "please put away all electronic devices and raise your seat-backs and tables to their upright and locked positions" to the list of phrases that will turn off the system.

I supposed you could send the beam at someone else so I'll have to install a facial recognition system to make sure it only works on the owner.

I'll make lots of money.

No Cheese Please

Wendy's changed their menu a while back where all the hamburgers are really cheeseburgers. If you order a single with whatever, you'll get a cheeseburger. Now if you don't want that cheese, you can tell them without cheese, but they charge you that full price. It seems they've raised their prices in a sneaky way. Instead of paying an extra dime for cheeseburgers, everyone is paying the cheeseburger price whether you want it or not.

Today I'm planning a trip at work and my assistant told me that all the rental cars at a certain level have the navigation feature automatically added to the car. You can't reserve the car without navigation.

Thank you to businesses everywhere for sneaky price increases.




photo credit: thehoneybunny via photopin cc

A Siri Question

I have this question for those of you carrying around the iPhone 4S. 

Are you doing more or different things with your iPhone because of Siri?

My wife has one and she is using Reminders quite a bit and asking Siri to remind her of this or that at some location or time in the future. Before she had Siri, she was not using the Reminder feature very much but now she is using it a lot. I'm wondering if people are using the device in different manners, like more reminder usage, because they can talk to the phone. What other ways are they using their phones differently because of Siri?

I think that Apple needs to put an api in place so 3rd party applications can use Siri too. Imagine being able to add something to your grocery store but saying "Siri, add milk to my grocery store list."  Or how about asking Siri to look up something in Evernote. Related, it would be wonderful if Spotlight on the iPhone could look into 3rd party apps too like Evernote.

A lot has been written about Siri and voice recognition becoming a game changer. I'd like to hear from those of you who are on the front edge of this new capability.

A few thoughts at the end of 2011...

I finally got some peanut brittle. I was lamenting not getting or finding any all holiday season and on Christmas day I mentioned this at my parents house and suddenly I received a zip lock bag full. Life is good.

I've thinking about the interesting fact that you can tell if a person has an IOS 5.X device by the color of the text message you send to them. If sending a SMS to someone, and you are using an IOS 5.X device and the message background is blue on your phone then the other person has an iPhone running at least IOS 5.X. If the message is green, then they are getting the message as a standard text message because either 1) they don't have an iPhone or 2) for some reason it can't use the apple service. So you can tell if the person on the far end is using an up-to-date iPhone. Interesting. Don't know what to do with this, but I find it interesting. With standard text messages you have no idea what the other person is using.

It has been a busy week. Of course the holiday are part of that but we've also moved my daughter back from college as she now prepares for dental school and we've had to make a new car purchase. Someone please invent a way to make new car purchases less painful.  This time I did give all the car salesmen I talked to my Google phone number so that they wouldn't be calling my home or mobile phone all the time.  I recommend that to you.

I did get 5 different gift cards for Christmas this year. B&N, Starbucks, Amazon, Panera and iTunes. We have gift cards sitting on counters around the house.  I've got to believe many gift cards are lost and never used which is a windfall for the retailers.

Saw a great basketball game last night in OKC and tonight we have friends coming over to celebrate the new year. We are trying caviar tonight. Right.

Happy New Year to all.  May your year be filled with peace, happiness, health and prosperity.

Kindness Boomerang

Pretty cool video.




Merry Christmas to you.

It is the Waste

I've been stewing for months as I read or hear one person or another argue that more or less taxes need to be paid by this group or that group. I'd be willing to discuss more taxes if there just wasn't so much waste already in government.  Our elected leaders can't seem to cut back on anything, can't eliminate something that is no longer needed, can't resist another pork barrel project in their home state and can't seem to find a way for our country to live within its means.   We are wasting too much money!

We are in a time of crisis in Washington and our elected leaders can't even seem to agree on what to order for lunch. A super-committee is formed to figure out how to reduce our debt problems and they think it is ok to not succeed. It is not OK. You failed.  Vote them all out.

There are serious fiscal problems in this country and need serious leadership to solve. I'm tired of hearing the same old hard lines from everyone. Few seem to be able to think and compromise. Vote them all out.

Here is a recent article in Forbes that reminds us that we can push the debts around, but somebody has to eventually pay the bill. Here is another interesting one, also in Forbes, called Five Simple Ways to Fix An Out-Of-Control Washington. Or here is another one that says our elected leaders should have to live by the same rules which they apply to us. Congress exempts itself from the things that they believe should apply to us. Brilliant leadership.  And I liked Coburn's recent guest post on cnn.com entitled Ending Welfare for the Wealthy.

Look, I don't agree with every recommendation in the above posts, but we need serious leadership and statesmanship to sort through these complicated problems. I'm tried of all the failed dialog and collaboration in our elected leaders.

They don't seem to get it that they are failing.

Be Present

Watch this.

BE HERE NOW from blaine hogan on Vimeo.

which I found via here.

Changing the World

Tomb of an angelical bishop who was buried in Westminster Abbey in 1100 A.D:

When I was young and free and my imagination had no limits, I dreamed of changing the world.

As I grew older and wiser, I discovered the world would not change, so I shortened my sights somewhat and decided to change only my country. But it too seemed immovable.

As I grew into my twilight years, on one last desperate attempt, I settled for changing only my family, those closest to me, but alas, they would have none of it.

And now as I lay on my deathbed, I suddenly realize – if I had only changed myself first, then by example I might have changed my family. From their inspiration and encouragement I would then have been able to better my country and who knows, I may have changed the world.

I can't seem to find a definitive source for this to attribute to, but I can find it on several places across the internet. I just liked it and thought I'd share it.

Hope you are well and having a blessed day.

Mark

Written Notes

Why is it that handwritten notes taken in meetings or classrooms seem to feel better than notes typed on a keyboard?

Is it the ability to circle or underline things easily? Perhaps drawing arrows from one point to another? Quickly drawn pictures?

Or is it that we've done handwritten notes for all these years and we are just more comfortable with handwritten vs. typed?

I love taking notes in my moleskin. I load up Evernote with things. But I still prefer handwritten notes.

What do you prefer? Why?

Craftsmen

John D referred me to a wonderful book this past week called A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel Pink. He recommended the book while we were having breakfast and based on our conversation where I was talking about Kickstarter and Quirky and about how I'm thinking the economy is changing in a permanent direction in favor of what I was calling Craftsmen.

You see, I think the way people are going to make a living in the future is changing and it is changing in a very permanent fashion. Gone are the factory jobs that the US and other places have thrived on for decades. They are gone to the lower cost places and they will always be moving to the lower cost places. It might be Asia now, but it will be Africa later. Those kinds of jobs are not coming back to the developed countries.

It seems to me that developed economies are shifting permanently towards services and permanently towards craftsmen who have some developed niche or skill that they market. These craftsmen can use the scale of the internet to sell their product or craft or they can work locally to meet local needs. Look at Baltz which I recently found on Kickstarter as an example.

All this circles back to the book above which chases the same ideas and develops a lot of thinking around why and how to prepare for the change. In the book Pink makes the following point:

To survie in this age, individuals and organizations must examine what they're doing to earn a living and ask themselves three questions: 1. Can someone overseas do it cheaper? 2. Can a computer do it faster? 3. Is what I'm offering in demand in an age of abundance? If your answer to question 1 or 2 is yes or if your answer to question 3 is no, you're in deep trouble.

There was a great post by Seth Godin a few weeks back called Back to the (wrong) School which talks to the fact that our schools are not preparing our kids for this future. And he recently posted another article about the forever recession and the coming revolution which goes further with these same points.

Whether you are raising your children who are in school or you are restless on your current job, I urge you to read the book above and stop by Seth's posts.  There is serious, permanent change underway and it is important to be preparing for it.

I don't have my thinking on these ideas fully cooked yet. I welcome your comments.

Nothing to Envy

I recently finished the book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea and wanted to recommend it and make a few comments about it.  The book tells the tale of life in North Korea in these past few years under the rule of Kim Jong II and his father before him.

This is one of the saddest books that I've ever read.

1. The people are starving and watching loved ones, friends and neighbors starve.  One character in the book is a teacher and she tells of watching her young students starve over time.  And, she couldn't share her limited food with them because she needed it.
2. People became accustomed to stepping over dead bodies on the street.
3. The leadership was revered as heros and the people just didn't seem to know different.
4. When someone defects, their loved ones left behind are typically taken away because they must have bad blood.  Therefore, those who escape might be condemning their loved ones to prison or death.

I just read a post that included a number of pictures from inside North Korea which is very rare since the country is so closed. These pictures look like what I pictured in my head as I read the book.

In June I had the opportunity to visit South Korea and saw its vibrant, large economy in action. The contrast is enormous.

Handwritten Notes

A few days ago I came across this wonderful post called the Art of the Note which I wanted to share. We live in the era of short messages, usually of a sarcastic tone, delivered by tweets, sms or Facebook status updates. Email is used for longer messages, but email doesn't feel very personal no matter how personal the message is intended.  My own family makes fun of me because my email replies are 'yes' or 'ok' or similar short messages back to them.

A handwritten note, received in the mail is a rare joy these days. A handwritten note means someone took time with a pen, to write you a note on a notecard, put it in an envelope, address it, put a stamp on it and then get it to a mailbox. When someone sends you a handwritten note, they really invested in getting something to you. They spent significant time to connect with you.

A few years ago I bought some embossed note cards and envelops and started doing this and I've enjoyed it ever since. A few days ago I was at a University commencement where the speaker was clearly nervous as he told us that he had never done such a talk before.  I thanked him after the ceremony and then wrote him a note later that day to say thanks for being there with us. I know I'll never hear from him again, but it doesn't matter because I just wanted him to know that we appreciated him doing what he did for us that day.

Take a look at the post above and then jump to his linked site called Letters of Note which is a site that has collected many handwritten notes through the years. Most interesting.

Don't worry about your handwriting being hard to read because nobody cares.

Send somebody a handwritten note.

Passages

Last night I had the chance to visit the Passages exhibit at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. Passages is an organized collection of ancient and more recent bible texts and related documents. The Green family in Oklahoma has been collecting these manuscripts for a while and they are now on the front end of organizing the highlights into a show and ultimately into a museum somewhere in the US.

Last night a lecturer from the British Library gave an excellent talk on the creation of the original King James bible and the sources that were used for that translation. He (Scott McKendrick) reviewed the sources for the KJV and then pointed out the sources that might have been used to create a better result.  He went on to discuss multiple old manuscripts, their stories and the differences that exist between different manuscripts. The talk complete with pictures and detailed examples was fascinating.  A reply by Dr. John Harrison of OCU was also most interesting with further examples and key points. Unfortunately, these lectures are completely sold out for the remaining dates or I would try to attend some of the upcoming sessions.

A few years ago I had the chance to visit the British Museum with my friend Dan Shields and others. At the museum, I was captivated by a book called The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs, & Pictograms by Andrew Robinson. This book told the tale of writing through the ages and in particular had fascinating bits about unlocking the meaning in unknown writing systems. A similar tale was told in the Nova show called Cracking the Maya Code which I must have watched 5-6 times. I'd probably watch it again next time I see it on. In fact, I think I'll tell my tivo to look for it...  I recommend the book and the Nova show too.

I heartily recommend the Passages show while it is still in the OKC area. The show will continue till around 10/16 then it is probably heading to Atlanta.  Part of the collection goes to the Vatican next year for a visit. This is a high quality collection and well worth the visit if you are nearby.

Flawless

Stumbled across the video below this week and wanted to share it.  You might have already seen it, but I liked the message.  Take a look.






Found it on the Donald Miller blog here.  

Half price surgery with this coupon...

The GROUPON deal that I received today was for half price LASIK. I think we've crossed a line here. I can't see (no pun intended) selecting a doctor to use laser beams on my eyes based on who gives me the best coupon. I wonder if they have a double coupon day?