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As a Multi-Millionaire…

Olaf — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:49:11 +0000

My wife and I like to think strategically about our future. Planning and foresight can save you a lot of grief and work in earnest.

In the event that we should become multi-millionaires in the future, we want to make sure we know what we’re going to do with the money. The following is an ongoing list of major things on our list:

Establish a Commune

And by commune, you have to understand my interpretation of the word. The usual ideas just don’t cut it – my idea of a modern commune is little more than a community of friends living in close proximity, each generally having some arcane talent. Other than that, everybody maintains their own job. The added benefit is that you have a community of actual friends in close proximity to help with things. Think about some of these nicer neighborhoods going up that include parks and community facilities like a club house or picnic area. That’s where the millions of dollars come in – someone has to pony up the money to put it together.

Establish an Olde World Arts and Crafts Guild

Look into America’s early years after the Declaration of Independence. As was popular in Europe, guilds popped up all over the place. Funny thing was, they never seemed to last. The guilds cranked out some epic-level work, but rarely made the profit needed to keep the their doors open. The Industrial Revolution was what put them out completely. Mechanized art, while not for the purists, was the way of the future and a clear winner in the end. Revival after revival, it was only when the the passion was washed out by insufficient funds that the guilds closed their doors. An arts and crafts guild would work today, but only if I could poor money into it endlessly.

Create an Elderly Care Facility that Cares

Most elderly care facilities – the ones that the average senior citizen could afford – are clever facades on the same old song and dance. There are too many horror stories to count as you look across the gamut and research their “customer appreciation.” A big reason for this is funding. The hired help is majority volunteer, public service workers, or minimum wage. When you’re not paying well, it’s hard to attract good help, but that’s just what you need.

My wife is the one with real passion for this one. She would love to pour many into a retirement home that is treated more like a spa than assisted living. It would have to be a non-profit venture with backing. The key is to rally support within the area communities, government, and of course, mad money.

Build the Lake Lanier Boardwalk District

How cool would it be to have a boardwalk district on Lake Lanier? I envision long wooden decking, boat slips, a beach, and fantastic night life and retail shopping. There should be bars with karaoke, an outdoor stage, a gallery, and much more. Normally, this kind of thing wouldn’t need so much money to keep it up, but I think I’d have to pay off the Corps. of Engineers a hefty sum to allow it!

Create a Seafood/Freshwater Fish Restaurant on the Lake

Along with that whole boardwalk idea, you have to have some big foundations. I purpose a fish restaurant out on the water. It would be awesome to have its center piece being a large circle of the lake with underwater lights and sub-level glass for viewing. Above that, have two to three stories encircling the “aquarium” for diners to look down upon. There is some real opportunity to make a case for the environmental concerns surrounding the lake in a venue like this.

Build an Irish Pub

Another permanent resident of the boardwalk should be a good old-fashioned Irish pub. If you know of McGuire’s in Pensacola, then your thinking along the same lines. Good food (or bad, but traditional!) and drinks. These relics of America’s past have always been places of fun and festivity.

What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?

Olaf — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:20:06 +0000

Frequency is probably a term more commonly associated with 80′s synth-pop artists and electrical sound engineers. However, it’s not to be underestimated or underutilized as a viable word in other situations.

I worked with one of the more difficult teaching challenges in my experience yesterday at my drum circle. A gentleman joined us with a peculiar short-coming – he had no current musical interest and an unclear memory of the interests from 30+ years ago when he called it (music) quits. I see many people that claim to have “no rhythm.” At face value, it’s true. However, everyone has rhythm whether they recognize it or not. Your heart beat has kept a rhythm for your entire life; surely one can learn to keep one externally for a few minutes. As it turns out, there are some people that this may seem even less possible for. This guy that I worked with seemed to have a real mental block to rhythm, or to something even more fundamental – frequency. In his words, he had trouble with numbers in that they held no relevance. I believe the problem was actually that he assigned no frequency to numbers. In order for counting to assist you in musical timing, one must use a consistent spacing between the numbers. Without it, counting does us no good. I attempted to teach this concept in many styles; visual, tactile, and aural. Each of them seemed to provide a glimpse of what he was missing, but none of them resonated completely. Having thought about it more sense the drum circle, I have some additional ideas of how to get this message across.

For one, utilizing the old method of counting seconds may be helpful (e.g. one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, etc.). Forcing yourself to say one thousand between every second counted manages to keep many of us attuned to a consistent frequency. There is also the issue of matching patterns, which I think people can more easily grasp than timing. My five-year-old is learning about patterns in kindergarten as an introduction to math. Following this course, I may be able to explain frequency in terms that a potential drummer can understand. In the end, I want this guy to grasp the concept of the wave. Hear the noise of each crest. Feel the silence at each trough. Of course, the goal is anticipation. Without that – and this is something that he struggles with – one can never ride the wave!

Threadless (Critique): Everybody Loves Eye Scream

Olaf — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 04:01:34 +0000

This design has been sitting around on a couple of drawing pads for a while now. I finally got it finished up to a point that it’s ready for some critique. I think I may still be an image off from original goal of one submission per month. However, I still have several ideas to put to paper, as it were.

Also, this is a pretty big departure from my most recent submissions. It had started looking like I was going to be a one-trick pony with only bones in the repertoire. I decided to get this one out before submitting another anatomical piece.

Twitter Updates for 2008-08-20

Olaf — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 04:59:59 +0000

My ping pong game was good today, but I hear the Olympic players are legendary! #
I want a hydration pack that holds 1.5L or less and has a water-resistant/proof MP3 pocket w/headphone port. Ideas? #
@HamWithCam Don’t hit the silver lining – some of us are banking on that! #
Damn near wrecked on the bicycle. Just missed an end-o at a stop sign. #

Afghanistan Remembers Music

Olaf — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 03:40:46 +0000

I listened to a piece from WNYC’s Radio Lab recently only to form a more concrete relationship with the loss that victims suffer under Taliban rule.

From the outside, looking in, the culture seems muddied with the intermingling of past and present times. Between incomplete reports from the news agencies, history, and modern documentaries, it is difficult at best to discern the true sociology for a given place and time. My interpretation of the events that have transpired in the Middle East, especially those concerning the Taliban, were that I was getting a one-sided story and that the culture in general seemed very foreign – even hostile – to my Western upbringing. I didn’t have a real appreciation for the victims, primarily because I felt as though the victims were only really victims because the U.S. government told them they were. Because I didn’t have the contacts to speak to in the Middle East and I’ve never been to evaluate the situation for myself, I could only trust what I’m told for so far.

The Radio Lab podcast, Pop Music, went into a segment regarding one man’s experience in Afghanistan with his accordion. The piece is really quite good and I encourage you to listen to it for my post to have it’s full impact. At any rate, this novice accordion player discovers that some forms of music cross the boundaries – or preconceived boundaries – of our world’s cultures. There are ideas that translate to sounds in music that are echoed through every civilization and tell the same story. Afghanistan had just crawled out of very long period of silence during its war with Russia, then Taliban rule. Music is one of those mediums that can insight such raw emotions in people and the Afghans were no exception. After the cultural bans experienced through the previous years, this accordion player steps timidly onto a bar stage where prompted by his new audience and supported by his translator, performs Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire to “the best audience [ever].” It wasn’t particularly well done, but the crowd goes wild. At a certain point during the program, I was awashed with a feeling of joy, triumph, grief, and camaraderie. There’s probably a more succinct way of stating that, but it isn’t anything that’s happened to me often enough to find the proper word for.

It was this last bit that really stuck with me. I finally understood what it must have been like to live in such a stifled society as to be allowed no cultural displays; no music, no dancing, no art. It’s an incredible feeling of sadness and hopelessness that I feel when I try to imagine it.

The Taliban were not the first to run a people in this way, and it’s doubtful they’ll be the last. I just hope that I’m always in a place where I am free to explore my culture, or anybody else’s for that matter. I really hope that people being oppressed in the world today find liberation and the strength to reunite with their forgotten past.

Further Reading: Afghanistan, Ahmad Zahir, Taliban

The Guerrilla Tipster

Olaf — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 11:21:36 +0000

The Guerrilla Tipster invokes his mighty right, passed down by the hands of the gods, to assert wisdom upon the unwitting.

Today I find the signature of the Guerrilla Tipster upon the windshield of a car in the Barnes and Noble parking lot of Duluth:

LEARN HOW TO PARK DUMB SHIT!!

The words are poignant. I only wish I could have been present when the recipient benefited from this sharing of wisdom. I’ll bet it was truly inspirational.

I’m considering having some custom stock made up with these choice words to continue the work of this Guerrilla Tipster. Perhaps with only slight grammatical adjustment:

Learn how to park, dumb shit!

…I don’t know, does a fully capitalized sentence give a sense of urgency? It certainly emotes well.

And to take the words of Ben Harper to heart, “What good is a cynic with no better plan,” some reeducation is in order. I’ve got some really brilliant ideas around this, but I should brainstorm on this to fully realize the genius. I’ll bring you more as this materializes.

Tips for Blogging, Puddin’ Brain

Olaf — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 21:03:21 +0000

I was just reading “16 Tips for Blog Idea Brainstorming” to try and kick myself out of my latest dose of writer’s block. I’m slowly coming to the realization that it’s not writer’s block that I’m experiencing, but rather “pudding brain” (or some scientific explanation therein). Pudding is a wonderful substance. It has great things mysteriously captured within it and converted into the silky, sweet bliss that is puddin’. It’s worthless really, but wonderful in the moment. At some point though, you may realize that you’ve eaten 13lbs of pudding and now you’re having trouble getting up from the couch…let alone back to solid foods. So pudding brain is something like that. Others may refer to it as a sort of mental hiatus. But when you’re on a mental hiatus, you can only come up with puddin’ brain.

Tangents aside, the 16 tips that John Pozadzides offers are decent enough, if not mostly well known. I did find one real error in John’s ideas. It doesn’t take into consideration those afflicted with Pudding Brain. I hit Thoof on his list of aggregators to read – one I hadn’t seen before – and got really stuck. It’s one of those new-fangled aggregators that automatically load more items as you get closer to the end of the scrolling page. You can waste a lot of time there!

There’s something to be said for focus. Hitting the hot spots on the web for news is well and good, but it’s probably more productive to focus on those places that can offer you something to comment on, rather than simply steal your attention away from what you came there to do. Sites like YouTube, Thoof, and even Digg (though less so for me) are real time sinks. When it comes to blog idea hunting, I have more success trusting my own RSS aggregation. It may have a lot of the same stuff, but it’s interspersed with other sources and is slightly less accessible because RSS is abstracted from the website. I also like the idea of hitting the unpopular sites our there with very specific information to get ideas. It’s more likely to be original and it’s probably something you’re very specifically interested in.

Now, that said; I haven’t been inspired to write about much lately. But it’s not so much about my sources as it is my own intentions. The number one tip for blog idea brainstorming is this:

Take an interest in what you have to say.

If you have no interest, you have no story. You can see right through a post that is paying lip service to its readers by reposting content someone else has written. John mentions in his tips that he goes the extra mile to do some research on topics he is reposting. That’s exactly the right idea in my mind. He’s taken an interest and is providing original commentary on a popular topic.

So in between original content I fill in with interesting things I find elsewhere, or current news events. But I don’t just re-post other people’s content.

Geeked Out at 1:00am

Olaf — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 07:39:03 +0000

It’s now 2:30am Saturday morning and I’m finally getting home to get some sleep. Soon, anyway. I was with Jeff McClure working on a Ghostbusters Proton Pack replica. He got some new parts for it and had since lost the sound and light synchronization. I wasn’t sure what I was in for, but Jeff pulled out a wad of wires, circuit boards, and LED’s tangled into a complex piece of machinery that was the Proton Pack. Using a multimeter and some cryptic diagrams from Hyperdyne Labs, the maker of the electronics for this prop, I slowly began figuring out how everything was supposed to be powered. After two days of working with this thing and one very long night, we finally got it working and we were able to start blasting various appliances in the kitchen. The whole kit is really impressive. When I get some pictures and video, I’ll post them. As it is, the pack is still in many pieces and only temporarily wired. I have a few questions left before we seal it back up. We should have the pack together by DragonCon in a couple of weeks.

Playing around with this high tech toy was really a lot of fun. It has been a long time since I was playing with circuit boards and the soldering iron. It really got my brain churning on some ideas, though I tend to be more interested in creating unique costume props rather than screen-accurate ones. Unfortunately, the market for such things are more interested in screen-accuracy; you can’t sell custom stuff until you make a name for yourself as a replica designer. Bleh. Oh well, I’m all geeked out this weekend.

Innovating the Search Engine

Olaf — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 06:17:34 +0000

Listen up, Google! I have had a vision and I know what the next step in search engine technology is. It came to me as a spark of sudden hope during a frustrating journey down search engine back roads.

You see, the folks at Read/Write Web are right. The Search is “game-over.” Google has won. But there is still a search for the Google-killer. Problem is, everybody is going after the wrong features. from Read/Write Web: From Search to (Re)Search…

Cool new features – user interface, alerts, visualization or whatever. The problem is that no single feature is enough for users to switch from Google and most people don’t have the time or motivation to use multiple search engines.

Natural Language. There is big money riding on this one. It feels wrong to me. This is too much heavy science to crack problems that are totally simple for humans; and Web 2.0 is getting pretty good at aggregating the expanding global pool of knowledge workers.

Vertical Search and Human Search. I put the two together. Human Search works best in well-defined domains. There are lots of Vertical Search engines that already work well and plenty more will come.

The article cites some good ideas for what this mythical Web 2.0 app should be, but that’s where my idea diverges.

I’ve been mulling over the idea of “concept searching” in my mind as of late. The problem with today’s search engines is that they’re still related strictly to my search terms. The problem is exposed when I need to do a search for terms that may not appear exactly as I type them, but together form more of a characteristic or conceptual pattern of something else. For instance, if I search for red, orange, and yellow, I will get a wide diversity of sites which have these words prominently displayed in HTML content. But maybe what I’m really after is artistic impressions of warm color use. Or perhaps I’m looking for images of fire…

The point is, the terms I specified are related in ways beyond just their placement on a web site. Flickr does a very nice job of demonstrating the power of tagging, categorizing, and respectively searching. By combining definitions of the words we’re searching for, they’re able to build what are called “clusters.” Clusters are groups of tags that seem related and Flickr allows you to pick a cluster to further identify the concept you’re searching on. It’s not perfect yet, but it demonstrates my point very well.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/red/clusters/:

This is the next revolution in search engines. It’s a combination of Natural Language and research search types. By analyzing the words’ meanings and allowing the user to refine their particular definition, Conceptual Searching can be made possible.

*UPDATE:
I haven’t read into this much yet, but it looks like Microsoft is already entering into discussions based upon what I’ve said. I like to think they’re reading my blog and getting their best innovations here!

Microsoft Research

TED – Ideas Worth Spreading

Olaf — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 14:46:16 +0000

Technology, Entertainment, and Design. TED, for short. Where the most innovative, brilliant people of our time talk on issues that are important to the world. TED began back in 1984 and represented those three concepts; technology, entertainment, and design. Since then, the genres have expanded, but the goal remains the same.

Once a year…1,000 remarkable people gather in Monterey, California to exchange something of incalculable value. Their ideas. What happens there has never been shared…until now.

I’ve taken a serious interest in TED and what it stands for. If I ever get the opportunity to go, you can bet I will make it a priority to do so. Until then, I will continue the theme and post the talks here that I find particularly interesting or insightful. To see my comments on TED talks, filter posts by the TED category.

But don’t take my word for it, see what others are saying about it:
TED | About TED | What people say