Failure: The Secret to Success

From Honda Motor Company

Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice

This is another very important and favorite of mine. Rus I thought of you around 9:40.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.

A Few Ted Talk Videos

If you have never watched any of the presentations at the TED Talks before, I highly recomend you do.

Here is their Youtube channel

House watching

Scotch and I are here holding down the fort at the lentz house while they are in England. I will be here all next week. More later.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

New glasses, getting the shop buttoned up

I decided to try a new look when getting a new pair of specs a few weeks back. I was a little unsure of them at first but they have grown on me. Other than that I am just finishing up the compressed air system in the garage. I had problems with wiring and smoked a motor on a compressor so ended up piggybacking 2 together and them piped them both into a dryer to remove any moisture and oil that made its way from the pump. Auto paint is urethane based and cannot mix with oil or water. So basically it ruins a paintjob if any gets through. Hope this setup works. More later.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

WOah, where has time gone!?

Isnt is funny how time slips away sometimes. Forgot to update this recently. Not a whole lot new. I am still getting the finishing touches setup in the workshop. Right now Im getting my compressed air system setup. Other than that, I have been trying to get out a few times a week metal detecting. I enjoy it a lot, I go to new places, and it does a swell job trying to clear my head. I recently figured out how to import an image into goggle earth. I can take a historical map and lay it directly over the current view of the area. I can then plot out points of interest and see that area might be a good spot to start detecting around. Pretty fun.

Other than that, I have been kicking around the idea of a small web based business that I would run in my spare time. I have a few ideas. But send along a few if you have any. More later~

The Shop Project -

Life with a Smart Phone

Its pretty darn cool.

Growing up with technology around me basically since I can remember (all the way back a Commodore 64) it takes a lot to impress a gen x'r as myself.  I recently got a Blackberry Pearl 8130 FREE through a promotional deal my cell carrier had.  What these smart phones can do in pretty amazing, but what is better is the ease at which they do it.  

There is a learning curve to these smart phones, the keyboard, the ways to access menus, etc.  But in the next few years I think phones are going to definately going to be cropping closer to complete pocket versions of our home pc than a traditional phone.  I mean, this Blackberry is basically last years model, and I can send a recieve email, text, get news, weather, use facebook, myspace, take 2mp pictures and post them anywhere, listen to any internet radio streams, watch youtube, get gps navigation, have preset searches on craigslist constantly updated and forwarded to RSS feeds, just about anything.  The only limit is the software developers imagination.

This thing makes life, easier.  And that is worth the price alone.  HOWEVER - 

I can see a down side.  After having that kind of information in your pocket at all times, getting along without it would feel like someone just ran off with your pants.  It takes away a sense of adventure a bit, the kind where you want lunch or a coffee so you just drive down the street not knowing where you might end up.  You can never get lost with this technology, and that might not be such a great thing.  Maybe somone should write a "Get Lost" program for them, so a computer could do that for us too.

The Last of a Dying Breed - A Favorite Article

The Last of a Dying Breed

Tony Long  12.07.06

An old friend of mine died recently. Well, I mean he wasn't an "old friend." He was in his late 70s (which I think still qualifies as "old") and he was a friend, even though I was privileged to know him for only five or six years. Still, his passing leaves a pretty big gap in my life, and I think I know why.

John was a dabbler, a sort of Renaissance man, if you will. And you just don't see a whole lot those around anymore, not in this age of narrowly defined interests. He was a courtly man, a retired cab driver who thought of himself as an artist. He was an accomplished painter. He could sculpt. He wrote poetry, which wasn't very good, and prose, which was top notch. He played some classical guitar and fooled around with the piano. He was a lifelong scuba diver who hunted abalone up the coast and had once been a competitive swimmer. He traveled the world several times over. He spoke a couple of languages. He was married three or four times. (He never got the hang of domesticity apparently, but he always spoke fondly of his exes.)

He was one of those larger-than-life guys who always made you smile when he hove into view.

But he never learned how to use a computer. What's more, he never had any interest in learning. For John, life existed "out there," not on a screen. He never owned a cell phone, or any phone, for that matter. Didn't have a TV. Probably never heard of an iPod. But he was one of the most interesting people I've ever known.

I think what made John so interesting, beyond the adventures he had and the great stories he loved to tell, was that there was always momentum to his life. He could make a lot out of a little. His days were full and I'll wager that, after Viagra came along, his nights were pretty busy, too. He personified the active over the passive. He was a doer, not a watcher.

Which is probably the biggest reason John didn't care about computers. Yes, they're efficient and good for business, if business is what you care about. But sitting at a computer when you don't have to is to be cripplingly passive, even if you're playing the bloodiest, most maniacal shooter game ever. Sorry, podnah, but that doesn't make you Billy the Kid. You're just a couch potato with twitchy fingers.

Computers have changed the nature of the workplace, the nature of work itself. This is the information age so a lot of us are cubicle-bound and tethered to the screen, whether we like it or not. It's also the age of specialization. You gotta work to live so unless you've cultivated a rare skill -- like you can really hit a curveball or something -- there's a good chance you'll wind up behind a desk. And on that desk, inevitably, will be a computer.

Which makes it really important for your balance and well-being to get out into the world in your free time and do something -- anything -- that doesn't involve some kind of software.

The physical toll of computer overuse is well documented. And while I'm unaware of any statistical data supporting my thesis that sitting in front of a computer for more than a few hours a day is spiritually draining, anecdotal evidence abounds. You just have to look around you, at a society growing more dysfunctional, discourteous and disconnected every day. There are a lot of reasons for this, of course, but technology that discourages real human contact is certainly a prime contributor.

We are social animals. We are meant to see each other, speak with each other, touch each other, smell each other. "Connecting" online with people you never actually see face-to-face doesn't count. If that's what passes for "community" in the 21st century, well, poor us.

Should we be more like John? Sure, if you can swing it. If you're resourceful enough and not materialistic you might have a shot, but the world has changed since John was young. It's hard to poke around in the interesting corners of life when you're under the gun to make as much money as possible just to stay afloat.

Pity. We'd be so much better off.

Tony Long is copy chief at Wired News.

A break for my mind in the depth of the cold dark winter. Motorcycling Truth

I found this and unfortunately cannot provide a reference as the author is unknown, but very much the truth and how I feel.

A motorycle is not just a two-wheeled car. 

The difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes, and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time, entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets. 

On a motorcycle, I know I am alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it, and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of sun that fall through them. 

I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than Pan-A-Vision and IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard. Sometimes I even hear music. It's like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind's roar. But on a motorcycle, I hear whole songs: rock 'n roll, dark orchestras, women's voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed. At 30 miles per hour and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree-smells and 
flower-smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant symphony. Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it's as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it. A ride on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul. It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane. 

Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It's a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It's light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it's a conduit of grace, it's a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy. I still think of myself as a motorcycle amateur, but by now I've had a handful of bikes over half a dozen years and slept under my share of bridges. I wouldn't trade one second of either the good times or the misery. Learning to ride is one of the best things I've done. 

Cars lie to us and tell us we're safe, powerful, and in control. The air-conditioning fans murmur empty assurances and whisper, "Sleep, sleep." Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed, and probably moving too fast for our own good, but that's no reason not to enjoy every minute of the ride. 

Author unknown... 

Weekend Finds

This weekend Jared and I went to a local park and searched , mostly hunting for coins and jewelry. (This park is 150 years old, but we never made it over near the old part with the largest trees around, there was too many targets!!!)

Total Finds for the cold weekend!!!!!!!

163 coins (none old)

Game Token, Toy Car, Dogs Choker Chain

10k Ruby ring :)

Pulling the Ring out!

Good ol Lucky

I decided to hop on my motorbike (fondly nicknamed Lucky) this evening to go for a ride. She has been neglected in not being ridden for a few weeks due to the weather and lack of time. I rode around the area on some country roads for about 45 minutes. The sun was getting low in the west, and only the roar of the four 30 year old Asian pistons was in my ears. As I got within a few miles of town I had the thought that I smelled gas. I trudged onward. As I slowed coming into town she almost died, stuttered a few times and I limped her to the closest gas station where as I slowed to turn in, she died. I pulled in the clutch and coasted to a stop in a parking space. Well, upon investigation I had a leak from a secondary gas tank line and it had leaked out all my fuel. I asked the attendant for a pair of scissors, and bought a sharpie marker. As I walked out the door I opened and threw away the package and the sharpie, leaving only the cap and scissors. I cut the line, stuffed the cap in, and brought back the scissors. I put in a gallon of gas (which unbelievably was under $2) I made my was home and it was only then did I realize that I had not gotten upset, angry, worried, frustrated, or anxious. I had a problem, and I calmly solved it the best way I had available to me. This little experience and the way I reacted really showed me the bond of man and machine.

Some neat stuff

Click for bigger views.

1941 Silver Mercury dime 1902 Indian Head Penny

Some Wheat Pennys with mentioned

More What pennys back to 1916

Watch Fob Souvenir from a Tax Professional Convention, 1924

Gold Find Today!

Went to a local park for a few minutes today before Survivor came on and found a nice little gold necklace and some modern coins. Its fun finding stuff! Also some pics of the faux book I keep my neater finds in. Hundreds of modern coins worth only face value are kept seperate in a little mini treasure chest box.

Its getting a little chilly!!!

Getting some last few Fall weather activities in before the cold is here to stay. Have been taking the motorbike out a few times a week and metal detecting regularly with a friend. Some of the good finds lately have been a 14k Jesus Fish ring, antique sterling pillbox, and a 1939 wheat penny.