NaNoWriMo Win

My first nano and I made it thanks to many friend's encouragement. Now I do not want to write a darn thing! I'm getting tired of words. But next year...rest up for next year.

ooprint

Free blogger cards allows me to promote my blogs in real world!

I've been waiting for this opportunities for a very long time now. I'm glad some one has thought of this idea. The folks at ooprint went even further to provide customized tag clouds to focus on individual blogs. Here's the link to the freecards. Ooprint also has a group on Facebook!

THIS POST SPONSOR BY OOPRINT

Tisimi

http://www.tisimi.com/user/lexly87
is up and running again after they made improvements to it. You can vote for people like me to win the design contest or you can also sign up and submit your own design and let other people vote for it.
I like the site a lot and will use it for my architectural projects.

The Mist

The Mist by Stephen King come to theater just in time. November is a notorious month for fog in Oregon. This makes for a perfect get away from the real fog and be envelope in theater Mist. We've been watching the trailer on television and can't get enough of it. I want more! So here's the trailer on the computer: http://www.themist-movie.com/
A classic Stephen King novel 'The Shining' is so scary. I have the book and plan to read it. The 'RedRum' scene is so well filmed. The odd juxtaposition of camera angle puts things off kilter. It was filmed in a famous Oregon landmark call the Timberline Lodge. It's a very scary old building which still exist to this day. I have just recently watched 'Room 1403' with an equally clever device for story telling. King has a knack for this. He puts a character in a situation and we see what can happen. That is the basis for a novel. He has lots of imaginations. I also saw 'Sleepwalker'. I really think Alice Krieger, the actress who plays the mother to a teenage boy is very expressive in her role. It's about a supernatural un-dead who sucks and feeds on human breath for food. The new thriller from King is 'The Mist'. Check out the trailer. We will be going to this movie for sure.

15 nanowrimo excerpt

The crickets are loud. I hide the box next to my head in bed. I bring with me a flash light and sneak a peak into the paper hotel. I carefully open the lid and watch them move. The lid is full of holes and I shine the light as though I’m the stars. I imagine myself inside that box looking out into the starry sky. The creator has trapped us on earth like this box of cricket and has shined a light upon us...only we see a starry sky.
I’m terrified that the cricket will have escaped and crawl up the legs of my pants.
We are trapped like that cricket in cages being transported from one city to the next. And if we are lucky, some one will adopt us just like some kid will buy a cricket from the large cage from the man and then put him into a match box. We go from home to home, suburb to suburb, city to city, country to country.
I saw myself in the crickets. Bad karma has caught up with me. My necks will be broken and mounted on a stick by pirates of the seas.

Digital Camera

scrapbooking is a new passion of mine. I like digital cameras so much. I have two Panasonic Lumix FZ-10 and Panasonic Lumix DMC-LC1. I crave the new Panasonic Lumix L10. It has the film aspect ratio for very cinematic affects and panoramic like picture. Ritz is near by my work. I help my sister pick out the Nikon Digital SLR for her husband one Christmas. The camera came free with digital lessons. Those are very useful for making the best and brightest holiday seasons! It's fun to create only scrapbooks too. There are several out there. The smile box is good. Comcast has music features to go with it. Scrapbook.com is another good one. Plus photobucket, flickr, snapfish, Kodak Easy Share Gallery too.



THIS POST IS SPONSORED BY RITZ CAMERA.COM

NanoWriMo Exerpt

It’s the beginning of monsoon season. The cricket season. They crawl on the wire screen mesh. The symphony of sounds. There are several different kinds of crickets. One type is the brownish color. We call these fire crickets. The other is a black with a bright yellow marking on the back of the cricket’s neck. We carry them in match box and put them in shirt pockets. Later on, the crickets sleep in one large shoe box with other crickets. In the morning, I open up the box to see which one survived the night. They die in battle. The cruel things we did to them. We break the heads off of a dead cricket and put it on the end of the burnt incense stick. With this device, we use the whiskers of the cricket head on the stick to tease the live crickets into flaring their wings and enrage them to ruffle the transparent wings to make that lovely sound and music. It amazed me. The sound coming out of that peculiar vibration and the transparent wings. Especially the brown fire crickets which were a little wrinkle. The black ones were so dense yet when the wings rub, vibrate and fluff the air; such density became light and flurry.
The children, boys mostly, came gather round the bicycle which transported the screen cage of crickets. A wood frame box with mesh screen enclosed a city of crickets. Their barbed legs grip the screen while our faces gaze at the crickets. Our noses are inches away from the mesh. Sometimes, a finger would flick at the mesh to test the strength of those legs. The box is strapped to a wired bracket attached to the bicycle’s back wheel.

Happy Halloween

http://www.realestateecards.com/pumpkin/ayang

Warm in October

It's amazingly warm for October. I'm going to fright town tonight. I walk to Thai BBQ for lunch. Me.dium is fun. So is Pandora. I found old songs of New Order and Psychodelic Furs's Ghost in you. I've added a bunch of my social media in to Pownce.

Pandora's Box

I have open the Pandora's box! I am streaming the music as I type this. I like the smooth sound of acoustic guitar of Dominic Miller. I discover Dominic's music through Sting.

micro stock

http://us.fotolia.com/p/330135
It's been an interesting amount of work for perhaps a minimum return. But I'm glad that Fotolia accepted 9 out of 28 photographs that I have submitted. Back in the days before the inter-net, I was trying to break into the world of Stock photography. In the early days of Tony Stone, before it was sold to Getty's image, submission process was cumbersome. This was in the early nineties. Photographers send in slides, then it was upgraded to high quality jpg files. Now many people are submitting there works.

Shutterstock is also another good source for micro stock: Submit Photos to Shutterstock and make $$$!

See chadmcdermott.blogspot.com for more info about micro stock.

amazon store

http://astore.amazon.com/dnl-20

Squidoo lens

http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/referral/duc

Interim post

5.5 POSTING REGULATIONS.

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1. Frequency of Posts. You may post a maximum of two (2) PayPerPost Marketplace Opportunity-related posts per blog in any given day. Sponsored posts may not appear consecutively on your Blog. Each Sponsored post must be separated by at least one non-sponsored, original content, post. 'Sponsored' posts apply to both PayPerPost Direct and Marketplace Opportunities, as well as other sponsored posts from competitive services.
2. Interim Posts. Your last non Opportunity-related post must have been within the 7 days immediately preceding your Opportunity-related post. After any break in blog activity of 7+ days, interim posts, that is, posts between Opportunity-related posts, submitted on the same day as your paid Opportunity-related posts will not count towards this requirement.

Shutterstock

 Submit Photos to Shutterstock and make $$$!

Mindfulness

I've been listening to this book on tape but you can also read it. I feel very relaxed. This is not some new age thing. It is written by a Zen master. I like his methods and metaphors. One metaphor which have stuck with me is of a stone thrown into the body of water. It accepts and sinks to the bottom. This is the position for meditation. He discusses the Sutra in layman's terms. These ancient philosophy and methods illuminates. Another metaphor is of the breath. He describes each breath as a climb on the rope to get to the top. He talks about the concept of the five aggregates. This is Dharma. This book seems to touch up on a lot of smaller detail items that I've read in the life remix, life hacks, and life improvement tip blogs. When I eat, I slow down and respect the food, I'm mindful and thankful. When I write, I'm mindful and thankful for the paper, computer, and typewriter etc. Hand writing has now become a form of meditation. An example of mindfulness image which the author gives is when one breathes, focus as though it was the axis on which the planet rotated.

'The Dead Fish Museum'

I read 'High Divide' and 'Drummond & Son'. These two stores are about a father's relationship to his son. 'High Divide' is about a father and son who take a camping trip to Olympia Washington. The hike culminate in one night when at the very peak of the mountain, the father asked his son to move to California after the divorce. Indeed the title suggests that there is going to be a divide. It is also a fork in the road which hikers often confront. Midway, there's a sign post which ask lets you choose the difficulties of continuing further.

I want to compare these with similar stories by Michael Chabon collected in 'A Model World'. They deal with the confusion which boys feel in their father's divorces.

'Drummond & Son' is a story about a typewriter mechanic and is son. If you like typewriters like I do, then this story is for you. There are several reference to communication. The typewriter is a machine for communicating. It's ironic that the mechanic spends more time fixing the machine then trying to fix the communication between him and his son. There is a lack of a motherly figure in both 'High Divide' and 'Drummond & Son'. And it is this lack of the wife and mother which seems to have broken up the wholeness of the family structure and leave the men lost and estranged.

Snow Crash

‘The Art of Innovation’ led me to ‘Snow Crash‘. I started reading it over the weekend and didn’t want to put it down. It’s very funny. For some reason, I latched onto this book. Maybe it’s because it talks about the Metaverse. Recently, I got into Second Life (SL). I need to do a little bit of research to find out which came first. It talks about people building houses in the virtual world. I can see some similarities between the Metaverse that Neal Stephenson renders and the world of SL. I think this book has influenced a lot of people and companies. For example, the book talks about goggled into the virtual world through the vision apparatus, a goggle. Hm…Google sounds a lot like goggle. Was the book the source?

update: “The Metaverse is a fictional structure written in code” - Neal Stephenson

meta-mater

I’m not a big fan of Sc-fi books, but once in a while a book like ‘Snow Crash’ proves to be readable. I’ve try William Gibson’s ‘Neomancer’. I didn’t make the leap into it yet. Maybe it’s too far out there for me to grasp. ‘Snow Crash’ seems very plausible. I remember, in my younger days, buying David Brin’s ‘Startide Rising’ because it had a cool cover of the man and dolphin. Uplift series

Art of Innovation

Earlier I happen upon ‘Ten Faces of Innovation‘ on Levenger’s website. My local library didn’t have this particular book yet. So I decided to check out it’s predecessor: ‘The Art of Innovation’. This book opened my eyes to things, my work place, my everyday experience and interactions with products. I read this yesterday and Saturday and couldn’t put it down. I took lots of notes on my CircaToma notebook of course and began making lists of things that bug me. IDEO call it a ‘Bug List’. I called my brother Andy and talk to him about it because he has read this and is reading ‘Ten Faces of Innovation’. I remember interviewing at an Architectural firm in Portland. Their studio practice imitated IDEO. I have a whole new respect for design. What we do with products, hacking it and modifying it are our ways of influencing and adjusting the product to our needs. I wasn’t aware that what we were doing is quick prototyping. Now I look at Judy of the Wood’s, NayNay, Mlle_Bleue, Shris, ArtisticSara,R.Rassemusen, Chet, and many other’s work (and even my own) with new eyes. I see DIY communities are like Hot teams working together to strife for better products.

The book is entertaining and the way Thomas and His co author wrote put complex projects into readable terms. It made me think back to reading about Jason’s story of how he started his business. He was looking with his eyes observe his friend with a problem in organization. What can be done better? His quick thinking and prototyping lead to a new line of product that are useful. IDEO encourages looking across the sea for ideas. Jason has done that as well as others. I used to work with the father of the founder of Oregon Chai. He told me a story of how his daughter’s travel to India lead to her idea of making the India version of tea call Chai in their home kitchen. It was very popular drink among friends. She shopped it around to different grocery stores. Eventually the demand for it out grew the kitchen area. Her father, the architect, built her the building for the start of her company.

http://diysara.wordpress.com/2007/06/08/diy-2-in-1-combo-rollacirca-notebook/

http://hdbizblog.com/blog/2007/06/06/using-a-capture-notebook/

Ready for organization philosophy

Chicken or the Egg

I received ‘Ready for Anything’ (RfA) as a belated birthday present from my sister. She saw it on my Amazon wish list. It proves that once it’s on a list, the mind can forget about it and go on to the next thing. This came as a surprise. I don’t remember putting it on the list. Earlier, I dismissed this book in a conversation with Jennifer George, who thoroughly analyzed the text. I’ve been wondering several points about this slim book. I want to make comparisons to it as investigations into the organization philosophy. This book was born after ‘Getting Things Done’. In the order of thing, ‘Ready for Anything’ is the egg. If I compare the two, Ready for Anything is the philosophy in which GTD is the systematic execution, a methodology. There are some 52 short sections, which can be read as or compare to Koan. At times they are like Koan, because of they are mysterious in nature. At times, it’s hard to understand without a through understanding, and systematic practice of GTD. At times, RfA is a ‘Cliffnote’, a synopsis for the real text. Even though it is written after GTD, I wonder if this could have been a prequel, a predecessor, a subconsciousness lurking underneath GTD. It acts as if an introduction to the systematic execution of a process. In some ways, I prefer RfA, as it is not as dogmatic as GTD nor is it as instructional. It is rather a pondering about a methodology, a pretense for the rigor which is spelled out in GTD. The marvel of it is that, as systematic as GTD is, people who have read it devised their own system. GTD methodology is flexible. Another book by David Allen could not have conjure up a better scheme. It is better to revisit the existing scheme with new eyes and perspectives. I think that this is what RfA does best.

Eastern Philosophy or emptiness….

Interestingly, the majority of the book is spent defending his theory against the ‘Priority Based’. This was and may still be the pervasive thinking. When I was a ‘Franklin Covey’ (FC) guy, I didn’t prioritize my tasks either. In Eastern Philosophy, we are taught not to look at the duality of good or evil. Thus, prioritizing seems to pass on a judgment. I struggle with the goals and mission statements. Because at the time, I concentrate on the moment, the present. Again, this is a Zen philosophy. The other is the notion of Emptiness, which relates to Feng Shui. It is an idea that if your mind is empty it can receive insights. If your channels of energy is clear, more energy will flow. I would say that the majority of GTD philosophy is based on Easter Philosophy. David’s analogue to the ‘Mind like water’ is a zen practice. Stephen Smith has caught on to this and have found quotations from ‘The Book of Five Rings’ which matches David’s thinking. In RfA, much of the quotations are peppered along the margin. I find these quotes match well with the text and marvel at how David has found them to seamlessly illustrate his point.

52 card pick up

Strangely enough, the number 52 made me think of Decks of Cards. Because GTD has been adapted into the Hpda, index size, I wonder if the whole book can be squeezed down into this playing card version. Each sections can be on a card, maybe in a form of a Haiku: Collect, Process, Organize,/Review, Do (it). I think Jenifer George is right in saying that the chapters don’t relate or appear to be in any particular order. True to the form of non- prioritization, this book can function well as a shuffle deck of card. There is a theory of randomness and chance and organized chaos. This is where we step into the new age territory.

digg story

thesimpledollar.com/2007/06/03/review-ready-for-anything/