Yearly Archives: 2008

Friday evening – words

OK… so this may seem either inspired or pointless to you.. but let me tell you what I did last night instead of sleeping.   At work yesterday, I had been experimenting with a new data visualization tool that IBM is making available to anyone. It’s called ManyEyes.. and it’s a pretty cool concept. Anyone can upload their own data to the site..  there are a ton of very interesting pre-created visualization tools which you can use to explore the data. You can also create your own visualizations  and upload them. The idea is to allow folks to share data and share in it’s analysis, If that doesn’t sound like fun to you… then… you probably shouldn’t read any further…
     Anyway.. I was exploring the site looking at some of the very cool ways that folks had created to crunch and display data.. Many of the visualizations are dynamic.. that is you can explore them interactively..  many of them are beautiful, too. While most of the analysis and stuff was for processing numerical data, I found a few visualization for text analytics.  When I saw that,  I did what any red blooded geek would do at 12:30 in the morning, .. I thought of sources of large amounts of text data that I could analyze..   Of course !.. My blog.. I decided to run these analytics on the a years worth of my log entries starting from the first day, 3 days after Sam died. . I found one of my blog archives which had each of the first years 365 entries in web page format (HTML).then I figured out some processing on how to remove the  the pictures, the headers and the rest of the HTML formatting.. Then I concatenated it all into a singe dataset and uploaded it to ManyEyes. 

I then started looking at the data.. what would it tell me ?   I’m not even sure what I was looking for.. I felt like one of those kabalah mystics who looked through old religious texts looking for secrets in the patterns of letters and words.  The first thing I learned was that In that first year, I had written exactly 708,576 words (including punctuation).. Now.. that alone was pretty interesting .  I then started looking at word frequency…  One tool shows you a ’tag cloud’ of word frequency. The larger the word, the more it occurred.. ’Sam’ was the word I typed most frequently last year… I wrote Sam’s name in my blog 3,394 times in 365 days.. and said his name to myself 1000 times that as I wrote . That  makes sense… and is somehow .. i don’t know.. comforting ?   What else did I say frequently ?

Diane. Max, Gabe, 
Love,  Great Friends,
House, Cool. Work,
Night, Today…

Sounds like Haiku.

Then I looked at the frequency of 2 word phrases..   Sam’s death, Sam died, Sam’s passing.. all hard things to say.. but I said them often.. Good friend, felt good, cell phone… happy birthday also had high counts..  I know it’s funny.. but the deeper I looked at this the more I could see how it captured my year.. I can’t explain it.. but if you’re interested, You can look at the data yourself here  ( Never mind the MySpace anti phishing warning ) , Try entering any word or 2 word phrase and look at it’s frequency . It’s kinda fun.

There’s also a word-tree analytics tool that I tried.. It generates a concordance tree…  .. kinda like you’d find in a bible reference or quotations book. The idea is , you type in a word.. then it groups all the next words that occur after that word in your text .. and it groups all the next words that occur after that, etc.. for all the text.. The net is, you can look up any word or  phrase.. and understand its context going forward or backward.. In some way, it’s a way of looking at all the stories I’ve told  over the last year and seeing how they are threaded  together .  Maybe an illustration would help.. Say I type in ’Max; it shows me all the possible words that follow the word ’Max’ in my entire blog..

Let’s say I chose the word ’And’  .. I then see all the phrases that can come after ’Max and… ;

Now I select Gabe and see all the things that Max and Gabe did together in my blog.

You can follow this all the way down to a single sentence.. .. At any point you can ’shift click; to start the tree search over at your current word..

You can run the process in reverse and look at all the stories that end with a  word or phrase.. like ’Friends of Sam’..   You can try this process yourself by clicking  here.

So… I find this  amazing.. if your brain works like mine..   If you’re brain is wired  differently, you might be asking ’what’s the point’ ? What did it tell me ? That that first year without Sam was unimaginably hard ? That we had wonderful friends and family ? That stuff I already knew .  What I    know is that I got a great sense of peace thumbing through all this stuff.. I felt somehow that I’d captured an important and heartbreaking part of my life in day to day stories.. and that somehow woven into  those stories were a deeper story about grieving, healing, growing, aging, loving, crying.. all that..   I’m sure this means alot more to me than it will to anyone else .. but then.. who’s blog is this anyway 🙂

Gotta run.. love to you all (the word ’love’ appears 1396 times !) Gnite Sam
-me ( which occurs 3688 times)

ps.. The word ’I’ occurs 16,710 times !!!!!!!  .. whoa.. what an ego !)

Wednesday night – night riders

Tonight was the final Night Riders skiing and riding competition up at Bolton. We really have come to love these Wednesday night’s up on the mountain.. freezing our tails.. then sitting in the bar talking with friends. We’ve been doing them for years.. Since Sam’s passing they’ve been a really important link between us and the mountain,

Because of the time change it was light at the start of the competition fort he first time. It was cool being able to see the kids doing the rails in the light. First guy we ran into was Alex in his homemade Sam shirt.

Gabe’s competition tonight was  a three part jam.. first on the ’A’ rail, second  on the down-flat-down.. or ’Sam Rail’ as the call it.. and third on the big jump higher up the mountain.

Here is Gabe and crew getting ready for the first jam on the ’A’ rail.

Here come ’da judges

Diane grabbed this shot of  Gabe getting some big air on the ’A’ rail . He looked good !

As soon as the sun went down the wind whipped up like crazy. t was snowing and blowing a full blizzard.. at one pint is was over 30 mph winds.. Even though it must have been about 20 degrees, the wind chill was something fierce.. it felt like it was below zero !  The blowing snow made it look like some sort of movie set out there.

The second the last jump was done we all ran and slid down the mountain for the warmth of the bar.   While I was sliding down one of the hills, I  think I lost one of the glass SamStones I’d brought up as part of the Sam Cohn award we were giving tonight. If I really did lose it on the mountain, that’s pretty cool !

When we got to the bar, Ann Marie presented me with a bag of her very yummy guacamole.. 2 weeks ago I’d commented on how much I’d liked the ’guac’ she’d made once at her house.. so she brought me one.. Note .. the halo around Ann Marie is not just because she’s an angel.. it’s because my camera was still frozen.

It was great hanging out with friends tonight. It’a bit strange being in a bar for me right now.. I’m trying this ayurvedic diet for a month.. and that calls for no spicy food and no alcohol.  .. two of the things you generally consume in a bar..It’s also a little sad knowing that this was the last of our Wednesday night  gatherings for the season.. Still, we’ll see our friends through the year..  

At about 8:30 all the kids gathered in the lunge for the final prizes..   Zach started the whole night out with a short tribute to Sam.. it was really nice.. . He talked about Sam.. and asked the group to give it up for Sam’s memory.. They all cheered. It brought tears to my eyes.

Zach went through the evening results and the season results..im Ferrel’s Chiropractic practice donated prize money for the top three finishers in all categories. That is mighty generous !!! It was great seeing all these kids recognized for their performance. . It was tough getting pictures from where I was.. I did capture some of the prize winners..   Like Brit placed 3rd in women’s boarders.

And Caroline placed 2nd in women boarders.

Gabe got first (!)   in 12 and under boarders..  He won a new board !. I couldn’t get a good picture of him picking it up..

.. but grabbed a shot of him with it at home a bit later.   We’re so proud of that boy !!!!

Luke won 1st in 13-17 boarders…

The last award for the night was the new annual Sam Cohn award for the skier or boarder  with the most spirit. Zach took nominations then used the ’applause-o-meter’ approach for picking the winner. This year’s winner was Ellis !!!  He took home $250 bucks for that..

After the awards, the fray headed out to the balcony for the booty toss.. It was mayhem as usual.. I went and grabbed the car. On the way out I noticed that someone had slapped a Sam Forever sticker on Bolton’s bus.. I don’t approve of vandalism.. but I thought that was pretty cool !

I could feel Sam so strongly up on the mountain tonight. I know he would have liked how everything played out up there. he’d be so proud of Gabe.. …
Ride free my son
-me

P.s. When I was grabbing a picture off Gabe’s camera I came across this picture he’d taken of Satori the other night. I love this picture.

Tuesday night – dark

Oy… a suprisingly tough day for no particular reason. Sometimes a saddness just sweeps over me and I’m almost paralyzed. I know I just need to be with it.. that it will pass.. I know it’s just part of the greiving process… but.. it still sucks.  

While I was trying to find something to read to help me shake this mood.. I stumbled across this animated poetry by lily Collins.  I like reading his stuff sometimes when I’m blue. Evidently he must have asked folks to animate some of his works.. There are a bunch of them on YouTube.. like this one

Or this one

Or this one

I find these things pretty cool… because it’s using animatied YouTube clips to promote poetry. in much the same way that I’d like to  use short animated sequences to promote science..   Maybe I should get going on that…

What do you think Sam ?
-me

Monday evening – puppy love

Today was busy.. jam packed with meetings from 8-6. It felt good being back in the office after being overseas last week.. Not much to report for the work day..   I did manage to make it home in time for Diane’s 6PM yoga class. The time change meant that it was still bright sunshine during the class.. You can feel spring !. In the middle of the class we heard Chai barking her head off. Suddenly someone in the class yelled “Fox !”.. We all jumped to the window in time to see a beautiful fox run up the hill behind our house.. He/she stood up there looking down at us and Chai.. Maybe there’s a den up there.. Chai’s always barking in that direction..

We came in from Yoga to find several kids there.. Jeff D and his new band. (Pucket and two new nice kids…they sound awesome) Caroline was there too. She hadn’t seen Satori the puppy… This puppy is like a friend magnet.. so many folks have come by to meet her.. Things are never quiet when the puupy’s ‘s awake. .. Gabe is like her litter mate…

She really is  a great ray of life in our house..

After dinner , we helped Gabe with his homework, then settled down to watch part 10 of the 9 week online webcast of Echkhardt Tolle and Oprah Winfrey discussing Tolle’s book ‘A new Earth’. I’m interested in the material from the book.. I’m also interested in the phenomenon around the book and this webcast event. By way of Oprah’s media savy and draw, there are more than 800,000 folks watching this webcast live..   and more than 1.4 million folks downloading it.  The thing that makes this interesting as compared to a standard multicast event like, say, CNN.. is the interactivity.. Tolle takes video and audio phone calls from Skype and emails fro all over the world during these talks. I’m thinking it must be the single biggest interactive media event ever held.. I’m so interested in how mass media can influence and participate in the shaping our culture. This is a very cool experiment just on that plane.. Wat’s even cooler is that it’s being done on a book about the evolution of consciousness.

I must confess that I attempted to start blogging about 3/4 the way through the broadcast tonight.. just as Tolle was talking about our mass compulsion to multitask.. How we’re always trying to get to the next thing.. rather than being here now (sound like Ram Das) .. I stopped and listend to teh rest of the broadcast.. then sat down to write.. Maybe I can be trained 🙂

OK.. I’m still jetlagged.. I’m going to go be in the sleep moment… Gnite all. Gnite Sam
-me