Ghost Light

One of my youngest son's favorite movie is Disney's Cars. He's watched it so many times, he now knows it all and so we actually use it to help him fall asleep (he doesn't have to concentrate on what's next - he already knows, so his brain allows him to shut down). On the extras on the DVD is a movie short about a Ghost Light. Tow-Mater is afraid of and chased by the "Ghost Light" in a prank played on him by the rest of the residents of Radiator Springs.

My Mother-in-law mentioned a southern phenomenon that she apparently missed when she was up visiting us this summer -- Blue Ghost Fireflies. As she described the always-on, blue glowing flies that descend the mountains in a wavy procession, hover at the bottom in a lush carpet, then just as mysteriously ascend back up the mountain only once a year, I thought of the "mystery" of the Ghost light in Cars. I wrote it off as mountain folklore, but I guess I was wrong. Seems strange things really do happen in the mountains...

BOOM...1...2...3...4...5...FLASH!

One thing that we saw a lot of on the trip was lightning. It's rained at some point almost every day so far. I learned as a kid that you can count the time between a boom of thunder and the associated flash of lightning to determine how far away the bolt struck. I couldn't remember the timing, though. Back to the Web for an answer. Apparently it's a count of five. I could have done the math (186,000 feet per second, or was that miles? Now was that the speed of light or of sound?), but I already admitted that I'm not smarter than a fifth grader. (Have you been playing my trivia contest?)

Southern Living

Southern living is a lot different from the northern life I'm used to. I've grown up in the Midwest all my life. Not to disparage that life, it's just a lot different.

Place names for some reason struck me as funny. Places like "Greesy Creek," "Seldom Seen Lake Road," "Betsy Mountain," "Grits Restaurant," "Butts on the Creek BBQ," "City of Joe," "City of Trust," "City of Luck," and "Piggly Wiggly Grocery Store" are a few that come to mind. Those are just not names I can imaging seeing on a sign in my state. And I'm not sure I want to know what "Rat Cheese" is. :-}

Carolina Colors

I'm sure that there is a color scheme for the colleges in North Carolina (I'm not much of a sports fan), but the colors that stick in my mind are red and green.

The dirt down there not brown, or fertile black like I'm used to -- it's RED. Actually it's red-orange. And it seems to stick to clothes more than the brown dirt I'm used to. I associate the red dirt with clay up by me, so I'm still amazed that vegetation grows in the stuff, but it does. And that brings me to my other color memory -- Green. Lots of green. There is so much green in the trees, the kudzu, even the grass. It's hard to tell that most of the counties we pass through have received not even half of their normal rainfall year-to-date. Some are even in serious risk of wildfires. Couldn't tell by the plant life we saw on our trip.

NC or Bust

Every year or two we take a trip to North Carolina. My mother-in-law owns a rental log cabin there about 3500 feet up in the mountains, a mile and a half off the Appalachian Trail. It's a long trip, but worth it.

Living in the mountains poses certain restrictions on road building -- mainly, there's only so much that you can economically alter Mother Nature. This means that the road bend to her whim, not the other way around. It's a kind of game driving with so many S-curves for the last hour or so as we approach her property. Last hour of driving, but that only equates to about 15 miles because it's soooo curvy. I thought about counting the S curve signs from the time we enter North Carolina to her cabin, but not in time to do it this trip. Maybe next trip.

The other thing that comes with driving in the mountains is height -- something I'm afraid of - especially when you're only a few feet from a couple-of-hundred-foot drop off. I guess to be fair, half the time I was on the inside of the curves hugging the mountains, but the other half I was hugging the door handle.

Did I mention it's a long trip? It's about 10-11 hours if you drive straight through. With three kids, we break it into two days for all of our sake. We also try to keep the kids occupied as best we can. The week before we left, we hit the bookstore and happened upon some Tamagotchi toys. They are those little key chain pets that with constant attention metamorphose from tiny "babies" to adult LCD characters that mate and produce offspring. The "owners" need to feed, play with and clean up after, and train (via praise and timeout sessions) the pets in similar fashion to the baby dolls that the high school Parenting classes use. These little buggers come with a voice too -- a little multi-variable chirpy tone. I decided to name the sound the "Tamagotchi Crickets." I admit to helping parent the little creatures occasionally (one of the games you play with them is kinda addictive). My wife actually had one several years ago (before kids) and managed to keep him alive for a couple of weeks.

More vacation blog posts soon...

Small steps, big rewards

I once read a story about a salesman. Vacuum cleaners I think. He was a new salesman learning the ropes of door-to-door sales. He'd practiced his spiel over and over again in front of the mirror. He had all the product specs down cold, and was very personable. He knew that this was the way to make his fortune.

He spent the first several weeks under the tutelage of a more senior salesman. He listened intently as his senior extolled the virtues of the products -- more power, quieter than the competitors, etc. As he listened, he would pick up bits and tips that he could use when he was on his own. He grew more confident with every visit the pair made.

Finally it was time for him to strike out on his own. He approached the first house on the first day. He knocked on the door and greeted the homeowner pleasantly. After a very brief dialog, the homeowner stated that they were not in the market for a new vacuum and he went on his way. The next several houses ended the same way -- "Thank you, but no thanks." He made several more stops that day, and he did finally make a few sales.

This pattern repeated itself several times over the next few days. On occasion he'd get the chance to deliver his pitch, but more often than not, he'd be rebuffed at the door. Maybe this wasn't the job for him, he began to think. In short time, his anticipation of rejection began to show as he approached the doors of his potential clients and his highly polished pitch, soon became just another solicitor interrupting the chores of a busy housewife.

One day, between rejections, he decided to take a break at a local coffee house to try to collect his thoughts and try to figure out what he had gotten himself into. Chance placed his mentor at the same shop that day and the two began to chat about business. The Senior was in jolly spirits and cracking jokes with the waitresses as they walked by. The Junior was complaining about all the rejections and how hard he really had to work to earn his commission for a sale. It would often times take him ten houses just to make one sale. 'That's nine houses where I just waste my time," he complained. He continued for several more minutes while the Senior just sat back and absorbed with a slight hint of a grin.

The Junior finally took notice of the grin and asked the Elder, "How do you do it? I didn't see you making sales at every stop. Doesn't it bother you that you spend all that time for nothing?!"

"You're looking at it all wrong, son," he said. "You're only looking at the final sale as when you get paid. You're only making your $100 commission at one house. That's why you see the other houses as a waste of your time. Me? I see that each of those other nine houses are earning me commission as well -- $10 at a time; I just don't collect until the last house. Even if those nine reject the sale, I'm still making money from them. It's a different way of thinking."

The two finished their coffee, mostly in silence, and went on their way.

As the Junior returned to his territory, he was still thinking about what he had heard. He wasn't sure that he had bought into that philosophy yet. He approached the first house somewhat gloomy. As he began his speech, the homeowner waved him off. Instead of turning in defeat though, he reached out his hand and shook the woman's hand and thanked her. In his mind, he had just made a sale -- one that earned him his $10 commission.

How often do you look only for the big reward? How often do you ignore the deferred benefit, only looking for the immediate and tangible reward? Would your attitude be improved if you took the small gains as a reward in and of themselves? Give it a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.

A New Career

According to a co-worker this Money magazine article about new new careers sounds a lot like my job. My job may not be as full of perks as one at some profiled, but I kinda like it. I think I'll keep it for a while :-}

LinkedIn change

While perusing my Linked in account this evening, I noticed two things. First, someone wanted to add me to their network! (Thanks and you're welcome Dave. Good luck!) Second, There is now a new beta service that shows you "who" has looked at your profile in the last month and how many times your account shows up in search results in the past week. They have set the viewer/searcher display setting to "generic" by default so I can't tell who's actually looking at my profile, but it currently says someone at my company, someone at a supplier, someone in the "Entertainment Industry", someone else at another supplier, and a "Sr Account Manager" in my industry.

I know that several of the other "social networks" have added this feature a while ago (and taken some heat for it, if I recall), but to me, this is pretty cool. Everything is pretty generic so I can't trace back to a particular person, but it's nice to see that people are looking. A little bit of an ego boost.

I'm up to over 320,000 people within the friends of friends of friends circle!

I know you

Well, not you personally (though I might), but I know about you. As a visitor to my site (and almost every other site on the Web these days), certain details about your visit are being tracked so that I can improve the site for you, my readers.

I actually have multiple stats/counters on my site and get a slightly different view from each. That's the nature of statistics. What the collectively tell me about "you" is that...

• You most likely have Comcast business as your ISP provider.
• You may very well have found my site via the Blogger Nav Bar (A GREAT way to discover new blogs I might add!)
• You may have been using Google's Personalized HomePage (now re-branded iGoogle) to monitor this blog for changes.
• You've got something in common with people all over the world -- you've read my blog! (I've got stats to support visits from United States, Canada, Indonesia, Malaysia, Israel, Germany, Australia, Ireland, France, and the Republic of Korea but I know that I had visits from other countries before I got the stats counters installed).
• More than 1/2 of you go right to the home page at aworlddiscovered.blogger.com as opposed to linking in to an article directly.
• The vast majority of you (over 85%) are using Windows XP, with Max OS X pulling in about 13% of visitors.
• IE 6.x is the browser of choice for you, though IE 7 and Firefox also appear regularly
• More than 4 out of 5 of you have been here before. Welcome back. That means that 1 of you is a newcomer. Welcome!
• Most of you have DSL, though others are slipping through from work on T1s and T3s -- I won't tell
• Most of you only spend a couple of minutes on the site each visit, but that's OK, because you stop by almost every day.

I'll be looking at these a bit more in depth shortly, looking for interesting nuggets of value. Tonight was just a surface scratch. :-p

More Email..addresses

Well, this is actually a way to manage your email better -- if you're using Gmail, that is.

Google is a powerful beast. So powerful, that there are all sorts of features that they simply never publicize because you'd complain of information overload. This feature was describes quite a while ago by a number of Google watching sites, but I think it's worth mentioning again.

I've mentioned using anyone@mailinator.com email addresses before as a way to prevent spammers from getting your real email address and to allow you access to a doc link or some other one-time bit of information that you need to receive via email. You can make up those addresses on the fly and then use them and forget about them. But what if you just want to be able to manage the mail you want to receive a little better? True, Gmail has some pretty powerful filtering options, but did you know about these gems...?

If your email address is BobbyRoberts@gmail.com....... It's also Bobby.Roberts@gmail.com. And B.o.b.b.y.R.o.b.e.r.t.s@gmail.com and BobbyRoberts+TraceMe@gmail.com and may more combinations you probably never thought of. All of these will send mail to the same email account (but don't use these for testing. Bobby might get mad.)

Basically Gmail strips the period out of any email addresses when it determines where to deliver the mail. I had a friend at work complain that he kept getting mail for someone other than himself in his Gmail account. It was mail intended for another person with the same name. This was a very brief glitch in the way that Gmail was handing out email addresses initially that brought to light their parsing of periods. The intended recipient was xxx.yyy@gmail.com, but my friend's address was xxxyyy@gmail.com. That pesky period was stripped out for delivery and xxxyyy@gmail.com received xxx.yyy@gmail.com's mail.

So what do you do with this knowledge? Gmail doesn't differentiate email addresses that differ by only a period, but most other sites that require your email address do. So you can use this as a way to separate out mail from one source from another. Give xxx.yyy to your friends, and xxxyyy to the websites. Then set up filters in Gmail to categorize them or apply labels, or any other action.

The "plus-addressing works similarly. You can append a plus sign and another combination of valid characters after your real GMail address before the @ sign and the mail will still be delivered to you. Use xxxyyy+shopping@gmail.com for on-line purchases or xxxyyy+Amazon@gmail.com and xxxyyy@BestBuy@gmail.com to keep track of mail received about your accounts. Another neat trick using the plus-addressing is that if you give out unique "plus-addresses" to sites you think might sell your information, you can watch the email address spread. Say you use xxxyyy+website1@gmail.com and you start receiving mail from website2 at your website1 address... Bingo! Your email address has been sold (or traded, bartered, freely passed on, whatever). But since you never gave your real email address, you can simply change the filter you setup and delete that mail right away and never deal with it (or the company who sold your email address) again!

There are no winners

You don't need to know Russian to understand this one...

Matchstick video

My Father's Day gift

The ability to celebrate Father's Day is a great gift - to celebrate being a son, and to celebrate being a dad. Each year, in addition to that gift, my kids and wife create a t-shirt with the kids' hand prints on it. I can look back several years and see how their hand prints have grown in size and think about how each of the kids have grown both in body and mind over that span.

I'm at the point where when people joke about all that lies ahead for me and my children (dating, cars, peer-pressure, etc) it's not so funny anymore... It's starting to feel too real. While searching for books yesterday at a bookstore, my daughter sated that she couldn't find any books to buy to take on our vacation. Well, that wasn't entirely true. She could find books she wanted to read, but she said "they weren't the kind of books you like me to read." When questioned further, she replied "You know...Romance ones." Ah, the joys of an 9 year old. Jokes, eh. Maybe after I get through the next 10-40 years!

Happy Father's day all...

Thanks Dad!

Are you insane?

So often, when someone thinks outside of the societal norm, they are labeled "difficult," "troubled," or even in extreme cases, "insane." In the business world, these people are labeled as "risky." When someone thinks outside of the box, it's often though of the same way... Until they convince people to see their side of things. And then they're thought of as "revolutionary," "ahead of their time," and "visionary."

I once saw an ad, or clip of some kind about a young boy whose class was coloring pictures. His teacher walked up to each student and nodded in approval as she saw each student with the obligatory green-leaves tree, blue sky, green grass and yellow sun drawing. Then she came to another student who had chosen colors of his own liking to paint his picture. Pink sky, purple leaves, blue sun, and other non-traditional colors made up his palette. I don't remember his rationale as he explained it to his disapproving teacher, but I remember it being pretty profound for a 5ish-year-old. This video reminded me of the same...

Another voyeur site!

There is a new feature in Google Maps now (similar to something I saw via A9 a while ago), that allows you to see actual street level views of locations instead of just satellite views. They've only rolled out a few cities so far, but just like when Google Earth came out, there's been a slew of people looking for the interesting locations. Google Blogoscoped has a couple initial captures that are interesting, but Street Viewr is one site that people are submitting locations to. I just keep telling myself that these are fun to look at and push to the back of my mind any thoughts of the book 1984 (you can even see faces close up). It really is cool technology. Be sure to use the zoom and navigation once you get to a location. I've even seen a site where someone used Flickr to create a little drive by movie. Maybe Google will incorporate that soon too...

Know your neighbors

I happen to live between two retired couples. At least in the physical world. In the cyberworld, I live next to (actually in the same house it seems) admashup.blogspot.com, and akworks.blogspot.com , and batchgeocode.blogspot.com, and hundreds of other sites that share the same IP address according to the My IP Neighbors site. I'm gonna need a bigger breakfast table.

Have a site? See who else is living in the same cyber-residence...

And I had trouble with stick figures...

glumbert.com - Genius 3-year-old finger painter

Look around you...

How much do you know about the city you live in? Is is pretty balanced male to female? What's the average income? The racial mix? What's the housing market like? Is it safe? How warm is it? All this and MUCH more is available at the City Data site. Check it out for your city and learn something new, or browse the thousands of other cities listed...