rob’s place

Once before a flight a flight attendant was asking for volunteers to allow someone to swap seats with someone else. A voice a few rows behind us volunteered saying, “I will! I can’t be around children.”

Another time on a flight there was an extremely overweight man sitting a few rows before me and across the aisle. The guy in front of him reclined to take a nap. The man took his forearm and angrily pushed the seat upright. He also exchanged angry words with the guy in front of him.

In the Nairobi, Kenya airport, our flight was scheduled to leave just before midnight. After several delays because of mechanical reasons, the flight was canceled around 2 in the morning. We were put up in a hotel and told we’d all be rebooked in the morning. One father complained bitterly and loudly to the messenger. She didn’t make any decisions about the flight. Finally he yelled, “Think of the children! They are sleepy! What are they supposed to do?’

One day while taking photos at Disney for people, a father wanted his tired and bashful 2-year-old daughter to smile for the picture. She didn’t want to and was a bit winy. He said to her sternly, “If you don’t smile…” then he turned his head and whispered something into her ear. After that instead of smiling, she shrieked and cried.

But the worst of them all are we who think we are better than all of these people. We’re not. A dose of humility never hurt any of us.

Something I’m pondering…

You know how people said that the rise of the big box stores (like Wal-Mart) killed the mom-and-pop stores?  They say it because all the small stores were niche stores and then the box stores came along and swept up all the niches into a one-stop store.

I have always believed that the internet mimics what happens offline.  So I’m pondering what websites are the new box stores of the online.

Amazon sells everything.

Google finds everything.

Gmail brings in all personal messages.

Google Reader brings in all web subscriptions.

Google Shared blog now lets you share anything and very fast.

FriendFeed aggregates all social media.

Facebook does about everything inside the walls.

It’s almost like all the niches are being swallowed by the box stores of the online now.  What do you think?

There are things I know.
There are things I don’t know.
There are things I need to know.
There are things I don’t want to know.
There are things I don’t want you to know.
There are things you don’t want me to know.
There are things you don’t want to know.
There are things you need to know.
There are things you don’t know.
There are things you know.

I had a real “Ah-ha” moment a few months ago about petroleum oil and our dependency on it.

Did you know that oil is non-renewable? In other words, once we use it up it is gone.  It’s temporary.

Humans have yet to create oil.  The earth is no longer creating oil (at least at a pace we need it).

This is where my “Ah-ha” moment came: Oil has ALWAYS been TEMPORARY.  So from day 1, it is logical to believe that some day we will no longer have oil.  Now “temporary” could be 500 years or 50 — it doesn’t matter.  The point is that it WILL be used up.

So if it is indeed temporary, we need alternative fuel solutions.  It’s just that simple of a concept.

The United Arab Emirates knows this to be true.  They found tons of oil making UAE and Dubai one of the richest places on earth.  But they know they will run out of oil.  So what are they doing?  Changing their focus on tourism to sustain them.

UAE is avoiding the issue by running the other way, but at least they see it.

We’ve named the planets, their moons, and other stars.

But our moon and sun are just called “the moon” and “the sun”.

Did we get lazy, pompous, or do I just not know their names?

I am a person who helps others learn about things that may be of service to them. That makes me a what?

A marketer?
or
A marketeer?

Someone told me today that I am a “marketeer”, not a “marketer”. I had no idea.

So I turned to the Google and what did it tell me?

The Free Dictionary say they are the same.
Wikipedia says there is a slight difference.
Google thinks “marketeer” is misspelled.

I think I agree more with the Pharma Marketing Blog though I am working at Disney part-time.

Since the Google couldn’t help me, I thought I’d ask you. What do you think?

It was a dozen years ago today that I asked my girlfriend to marry me.

She said yes.

That day she became my fiancee.

She became my wife eight months later.

I’ve enjoyed watching her transform from friend to girlfriend to fiancee to wife.

But the way I see it, though we’re no longer engaged to be married, we are still engaged to do live together.

A few months ago I decided to start a little home project that has turned into a fun and interesting resource for us.

I started by opening an Excel spreadsheet and made sure I had 5 sheets on it. The first one is called Timeline. The other 4 are the family names of each of my and Patricia’s grandparents (for us it’s Williams, Hayes, Santiago, and Donegan).

On each named tab I wrote in one column everyone in the family starting with grandparents and down the tree. In the next column I put their date of birth.

Then I decided to not stop there. When appropriate I created another entry for their date of death. And also when appropriate, I made another one for date of their anniversary.

So I kind of did it with this syntax:

Date Name = Date of Birth
Date [Name] = Date of Death
Date Name & Name = Date of Anniversary (both names since it’s shared!)

So each sheet had all the key dates for each family. That is a pretty cool thing in and of itself. But I wanted to take it one more step.

I took each of those lists and copied them over to the sheet called Timeline. Once all there, I sorted it by date and took out all the duplicate entries.

Now I’m left with a timeline of all the key dates of our family. It’s really cool seeing how Patricia’s family and my family dates blend. It’s also impressive to see, in ours, 4 generations of family, who was still alive for births and weddings, etc. It’s given us some pause and reflection on our family.

I encourage you to do the same. The hardest part is tracking down dates from family. Some don’t like to tell you what year they were born. Argh! Get over it! But open a spreadsheet, open as many tabs as you want saving one for the blended timeline. See what you find out!

On a related note, anyone know of a way to graphically display these dates in a timeline (that is easier than this)?

American pregame
Good anthem
Dull commercials
Interesting half
Good beer
Decent wings
Petty halftime
Vegan cookies
Great finish
Happy wife
Relieved Eli
Froggy Terry
Retiring Michael?
Celebratory NYC
Sulking Boston
Achy tummy

Monday.

Last night I was on a Wikipedia Rabbit Trail. You ever been on one of those? You look up one thing then as you read you click on something else and before you know it you’re off on all sorts of tangents.

Well I do it sometimes and it’s kinda fun. I run across all sorts of interesting things as I piece together a bigger picture.

Last night it was about Christmas. Actually it started with ‘xmas’. I was looking for confirmation of my memory that it’s actually a ‘normal’ way to do it since X is our English version of the Greek letter chi which is the first letter in the word Christ. So X-mas is really shorthand for “Christ’s Mass” or the celebration/festival/service for Christ…and xians have been writing it like that for centuries!

Then I read about Yule. It’s the ‘pagan festival’ that Christmas ‘adopted’. In the Scandinavian area after the harvest was done and the days were short, they picked a time to have a winter festival usually starting around December 25. They started by burning a huge log and when the fire burnt out, the festival stopped. Often it took 12 days. During that time they exchanged gifts, sang, danced, decorated pine trees and used other evergreens like holly and mistletoe as decorations. When Christian missionaries went to the area, instead of telling them to stop the celebrations, they instead used the traditions as illustrations to tell the story of Jesus.

Something else I found interesting is how international our western Christmas traditions are. The Christmas tree is German, Santa Claus is Turkish (well, St. Nick was a Turk), Poinsettias are Mexican, and mistletoe is Scandinavian (though I think we came up with the Grinch).

It was the German, Martin Luther who first put candles on a Christmas tree (really, what was he thinking putting fire on a dead, dry tree?!?!). But protestants at the time didn’t celebrate Christmas much. They thought it was too Catholic. The Puritans in England took it to the extreme and so when they came to the New World in the 1600’s, they banned Christmas in Boston among other places. In fact, Christmas in both the Colonies and in England started to decline in popularity and it really wasn’t until two pieces of literature published in the early to late 1800s brought Christmas up out of the doldrums: the book A Christmas Carol and the poem Twas The Night Before Christmas.

I purposefully didn’t provide any links in this post. It’s all from memory from what I learned clicking around Wikipedia.

Try out your own Wikipedia Rabbit Trail. If you do, blog what you learn and track it back here.

Wikipedia Rabbit Trails can be fun!

I got so ticked off last week when we got four (4!) huge, heavy Yellow Pages from Bell South and AT&T. It’s such a waste of energy, space, resources, and time. I took ours from the front door and took them straight to the recycle bin.

I haven’t used any of these books for years. I use google. Just search and you’ll get the phone number. Just that easy.

So I looked up on google the phone number for Bell South and called them. They transferred me three times. Finally the last guy said, “wait, you’re not one of our customers?” “No, not for a few years now. But we get your Yellow Pages every year.” “Humm. Well there’s nothing I can do about it without an account number.”

So we’ll keep getting them and putting them into our recycle bin.

Oh, then this week we got two more of these books from Embarq (formally Sprint). Sigh.

Rule Number One: Sleep Tight
Rule Number Two: Don’t let the bed bugs bite.

However, I think Rule Number One should be to sleep relaxed. Although it wouldn’t rhyme, you’d sleep better.

Either way, you just can’t fail at Rule Number Two.