Yearly Archives: 2010

Tuesday night – commercial !

 Today I got the first look at the new IBM Smarter Planet commercials that my friends Jeff, Julia and I helped make. I really like them ! It was an amazing process to watch.. tons of work in the writing, filming, recording, editing, re-recording .. all for 30 tightly packed seconds. One cool extra is that Phillip Glass scored the commercials . I love Glass’s music whenever I’m working.. puts me in a very good zone for thinking.. I loved all the people in the process, too.

Take a look.. Mine is about sensing data .. ..

Julia is a researcher in our social media group. Her piece is about doing historical data analysis

Jeff is in our data analytics group. he does data forensics.. His commercial is about the timeliness of data analytics.

I’d really love to know what you think.. because I really. really believe in this stuff !  If you like them, send them around.. We’d love to get feedback from as mnay folks as possible. Thanks !

All for now, Nite folks.. nite Sam..
-me

Monday night – Taxing day

Another long day at work.. back to back meetings from  till 6 with only a single 15 min break.. As I sat down to do our taxes tonight I realized that as taxing (ugh) as the day had been.. it was noting compared to the day I had 365 days ago.. On Mar 1 2009.  6 of us were kept awake for 36 hours then dropped in an abandoned Montgomery Wards.. until  we were chased out  by baseball bat wielding thugs  on motorcycles.   .. and so began The Colony.  

Here’s an excerpt from that day exactly one yer ago..

I guess my day today wasn’t so taxing 🙂

What an amazing experience that was.. and what an amazing year it’s been since .

I want to shout out to all my fellow colonists that I still think of you every day.. and miss you .. at least most days 🙂

Gotta go to bed now..
Night all.. night Sam
-me

Sunday night – forging ahead

Had lots of stuff to do today.. and it was making me a little ‘Mondayish’ on a Sunday.. no fair. I .. went for a longest run this morning to clear my head and downshift.. worked pretty well. I reframed my day to lower my expectations I ran up Dugway road and marveled at the springlike weather and the sound of spring birds.. Tomorrow is March.. wow.. 

Later in the morning, diane and I went in to buy our first mattress in nearly 20 years.
We had fun testing on all the beds Then on to home depot for some scrounging.

Gabe and I had wanted to build a forge for the last three months and this was the day to build it.   Gabe and I went scrounging through the garage for parts.. our only constraint was that the forge had to cost less than 10 bucks (I’d seen one that cost 10 bucks online.. had to do better than that)

We used an old steel wheel rim that phil had given me .. and an old brake disk from the Subaru… .. We took an old pumpkin can  through the hole between the two  and bent them back..

We stuck some hardware cloth over the can to hold the colas up..

We stuck an aluminum piece of duct work and a a dryer hose..

Gabe stuck the hair dryer into the other end of the hose.

We loaded up the charcoal and gabe torched it..

Pretty soon we had a white hot blast furnace.

We got a piece of stell yellow hot pretty quick.. Gabe pulled it out of the fire and started wailing on it with a hammer

Then.. back in the fire ! .. heat, beat and repeat..

We went through a half a bag of  of charcol shaping, bending and twisting stell. it was awesome.. and .. only about $9.20 .

Next project.. was to install our new energy monitor. It’s a TED5000 .. Gabe and I installed it in the junction box.. When I turned off power to the house, I managed to scramble the memory in our DSL modem. That took an hour to fix.. but soon.. we were back online and had a real time measure of every watt being used in our house.

We’ve been goign around turnign stuff on an d off for the last hour to see what takes what..

Now.. watching Zombieland with the ones I love..   life doesn’t get much better…

Ewwwwwww.. you gotta see this movie…
nite folks.. nite sam
-me

Saturday night – main event

The main event today was the Main Event, another snowboarding competition for Gabe at Stowe. We got to stowe around 7:45  The morning started with a little impromptu yoga stretching encouraged by Diane..

While Gabe and the team practiced, Diane, the dogs and I went for an hour and a half snowshoe through the thick snow. It was thigh deep in many places.. Slow going for the dogs, but beautiful

Gabe had a really good day.. three good runs, made the finals.. I’m so proud of the progress hes made this year. I like the other kids on the team too.. here they are wolfing down luch between the heats.

It was about 5:00 when we finally left Stowe.. we got home in time to clean up in time for a dinner invite to Tim and Jens.. I, jen and Jim L , Peggy and Martha were also there. It was a great night.. lots of laughter/ The general theme of the evening was .. outrageous things happening in the world.    We decided we should make a summer camp for grown-ups where people could come and just rant about anything they wanted.. world politics, kids, food, etc..
It was really fun just hanging out with other grownups.. we agreed to do it again next month.. but this time. someone was going to bring Twister !

While we laughed.. I constructed a burning man for the table..

.. and caught myself staring at my knife..
 

I love this picture of Sam that Tim and Jen have on their ‘fridge.. this si the basis for Jen’s sister Coco’s wonderful painting of Sam as ‘Wonderboy’ at Camp Abenaki in 2006.

Not much else new to report..  As always. . I love these very quiet days stuck in the middle of  my normal ‘way too busy’

Gotta sleep now.. more tomorrow..
nite all, nite Sam
-me