All posts by johncohn

Friday night – Snaps

*:30 on a friday night and I’m alone in the house. Diane is at a play, Gabe is at a dance.. so I’m just having some very welcome down time. I managed to spend part of the evening asleep in the bathtub.. Diane had left a hot bath for me when she went out. .. I got in and the next thing I know I was waking up in luke warm water.. might be a sign that I need more sleep ?
    I decided to take advantage of the quiet and do soemthing I’ve been putting off for a couple of days. Earlier in the week Diane found three packages of pictures  (remember film cameras ?) that must have turned up in one of our recent cleaning projects. One of them was labeled “Sam’s 9th Birthday” .. I wanted to take a look.. but wasn’t sure how  seeing these memories would effect me. We have pictures of Sam all over this house yet sometimes seeing a new old image can send me …literally.. to my knees.
   I took the bright glossy pictures out of the pack and looked through every one.. The photos were of late May, June and early July on 2001.. a simpler time in so many ways. There were some great shots of Sam’s 9th birthday.. and some of Richmond’s wonderful 4th of July celebration.

   It felt  really good looking through the years like this.. we all looked so happy and complete.  

I could put myself in every scene, hear the voices.. remember the smells..
I lost it a bit when I saw this picture.. So …. Sam.. look at that smile !

I loved seeing Sam surrounded by his friends.. that’s how I remember him best  !

I loved this cute one of Gabe

I sat there and went through the stack of photos a couple of times.. held each one.. then I shuffled them back together .. and put them away. It had been easier than I thought it was going to be…   but.. i can feel them pulling at my heart still an hour later…

   Next  Friday/Saturday marks the thrid anniversary of Sam’s passing…  Like thinking of that  stack of pictures, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be feeling.. I find it doeasn’t pay to try and predict… 

I feel  strong now.  . 

Gnite folks.. nite Sam
-me

Thursday night – Bionic Genius Roundtable

Big media couple of days.. last night i was interviewed for a show called DesignChat. It was live cast on on Mashable.com  and will eventually be out as a podcast.

Today I got word that an interview I did  a few weeks back for Bionic Genius Roundtable came out today . Here’s the podcast... kinda long… but I really like it.. It has some good stories about The Colony.   Even though I liked hte message, i’s so very wierd to sit and listen to yourself ramble on about stuff.. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that.. I’ll tell you this.. listening to yourself talk that much makes me want to talk less..

I wish I could be more succint

so bye. (nite all, nite Sam !)
-me

Ps. ent by Talnet last night.. saw Hannah. Phil L was there as well

Tonight Gabe and Kristen made me a surprise dinner..   a lettuce leaf, a Gummi (as in Gummi worms) hamberger and a bottle of tobasco. Yum (?) I did put the tobasco on the hotsauce which tasted just like you think it would. !

Thanks Gabe!.. it made my night !

Wednesday afternoon – Glorious Dawn

OMG…
    I’m sitting here waiting for a conference call to start , reading my email .. and trying to write  a rap song about sicene.. when I found a note from my friend David, In it was a link to a site called The Symphony of Science. It’s a project about conveying scientific though through music. On the fron  tpage is this really wonderful and inspiring remix of an episode of the show Cosmos (which I’ve never seen) , They’ve used signal processing to put the spoken words of Carl Sagan and Stephan Hawkins to music

The reason I’m sharing this is not just because I think it’s cool and wierd.. it’s because this fellsin my lap as I sit here tryign to write a rap song about sceince for a work project

How does that work ?
Sam.. any ideas ?
-jc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc

Lyrics:

Sagan
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch
You must first invent the universe

Space is filled with a network of wormholes
You might emerge somewhere else in space
Some when-else in time

The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day venture to the stars

A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way

The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature

I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this cosmos
In which we float like a mote of dust
In the morning sky

But the brain does much more than just recollect
It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes
it generates abstractions

The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning
The brain has its own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world

Hawking
For thousands of years
People have wondered about the universe
Did it stretch out forever
Or was there a limit

From the big bang to black holes
From dark matter to a possible big crunch
Our image of the universe today
Is full of strange sounding ideas

Sagan}
How lucky we are to live in this time
The first moment in human history
When we are in fact visiting other worlds

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we’ve waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting
—————————————

Monday night -Technologically challenged

Nothing at all worked today… my laptop died yesterday…. and I spent the entire day trying to unsuccessfully to get it repaired..  As a consequence.. I was late or absent to several meetings… I also lost access too (hopefully temporarily) to the presentations I needed for today and tomorrow. My cell phone became my only link to the business world…    then.. for some crazy reason it too decided to go belly up mid day.. as it decided to resynch with the IBM mothership.   It came back for a bit until it finally gave up the ghost since the resynch had exhausted it’s battery.. I was unable to recharge it since the prongs had fallen off it’s recharger. That was OK since my bluetooth headset.. the one I bought just 2 weeks ago finally fell over dead after all the plastic pieces on it broke off in my pocket. he help desk were trying to breath life into my laptop all day.. but were unable to do so.. the error seemed to be somewhere in that pergatory  between hardware and software that no one knows how to (or feels obligated to) repair… In the end they gave me an ancient clunker as a loner.. it has scotch tape where the hard drive door should be.. and guess hwat.. it happens to be my old machine from 2 years back .. I’m dooooooooooooomed I tel you… dooooooooooooooomed.

     I know it sounds bad.. but it was like a little shot of the Colony.. I was cut off from the world for a few blissful hours mid day.. I could reach the world… and the world couldn’t reach me. All I could do was to give my undivided attention to my peers.. I mean it was awful !. No really. tit was great.. I’m thinking of having a media free day every week just to let myself think….

What do you think ?

OK.. I’m getting off this old clunker before anything else goes wrong.. more tomorrow, technology allowing..

night folks night hardware, night Sam
-me

ps. Diane and I got engaged 24 years ago today.. Happy a-day diane.. I love you !