A Verse for the Days…

Sorry for the long delay im about to enter finals week and things have been crazy and I havent been able to post as often as I would like. Here is a verse that I wrote a while ago it captures some interesting observations. Enjoy!

Let there be a rose, for every froze, rose gold drapped and shaped, for misaligned priorities left society gapped, slapped, and stuttered, every verse I uttered, spit game whenever you muttered, people cold as ever when there hearts fall fluttered, flow with purpose grown nourishment, if your job don’t pay the bills then nourish it, back handed compliments, fake smiles and made up styles, the track rolls cyclic but they convince you it goes on for miles, piles of unattended files, while the youth get splashed with the worst like bathroom tiles, we look beyond our gate, to mitigate and resolve when there are problems within bounds, grounds that we paved, but we never second guess, never check the balances we connect, its only more money more problems when the money propogate more mal-effect, Lemmie ask if I’m correct, blame the economy, the gov, or a sect, cause assuming responsibility is always harder then you expect.

 

Wisdom as I flow…leads to wisdom as I go…

A light powered by gravity?

I wanted to share a video regarding a light that is intended to replace kerosene lamps in areas of the world where power sources are scarce and hard to come by. Enjoy the video above, and leave a comment if you would like to share an idea or reflection about the video or about another technology that is related, I would love to hear it.

Oh and before I forget I have a project Ive been working on for almost a year coming up on my blog, there will be pictures, videos, and some brief descriptions :))))))

Gravity pulls, and the lights glow, and the wisdom continues as I go…

10,000 Hours To Become A Master…only 9,999 to go

I have been reading a book by Malcolm Gladwell called The Outliers. This novel outlines the misconceptions on how society perceives success. The basic principle that Gladwell argues is that we (as a society) always view the successful, as the people who have struggled hard and were branded with an innate gift from birth. Now every chapter in the book is dedicated to argue a different perspective of how this view of the success may not be as simple as it seems. Now please feel free to read the novel as it is very interesting and filled with stories and statistics that really help drive Gladwell’s arguments but what I would like to hone in on in this post is what is called the “10,000 hour rule”.

To make things extremely clear this rule is simply a repeated observation with examples that back it up from a variety of different fields. The rule boils down to this: In order for an individual to master a certain skill, talent, or career, they must work at this specific task for a minimum of 10,000 hours. Now many of you reading are probably thinking this is a very arbitrary number but from the examples given it is a very understandable figure. The first example we can look at was The Beatles. their “opportunity” to perform for this amount of time came in the form of their invitation to play in Hamburg, Germany. This set the stage to allow them to perform for absolutely ridiculous chunks of time. Every night with a crowd that didn’t speak their language, for hours upon hours on end. If they didn’t get this break they would have never hit that 10,000 hour mark, they would have been playing one hour gigs as opposed to concerts that never seem to end. Another example that is worth mentioning is the story of Bill Joy a programmer who not only rewrote the Java language, and the UNIX language (which is the basis of windows/macs/etc.) but he also was one of the original founders of Sun Microsystems. This mans’ “opportunity” was the fact that he had access to a Computer Center that allowed for time-sharing (as opposed to the deathly slow punch cards) and 24 hour access throughout college. This served as the perfect working grounds to begin his mastery of programming.

What I am saying here and what Gladwell makes clearer is that it isn’t just their will to succeed but it is also their surroundings and opportunities that allowed them to make their impact on society. The novel views many other factors in the making of an “outlier” but what is very interesting is a conversation I had with a friend who read the book and subsequently was the one who recommended it in the first place. We were discussing this very topic of the time it takes to become amazing at something, and he brought up a point that opened up my eyes a social pattern I over looked when reading. He proposed the argument that because of the nature of the time that is needed to become so great at a task, many people in our society are crippled by their socioeconomic status from a young age, and because of that limitation they can not meet this criteria of proficiency (the 10,000 hours) in the long run. For example a child who has to work part time from the age of 15 until he graduates from college does not have the same time to “practice” a given task that he/she is fond of. All while another child that does not have to worry about that type of responsibility and can hone his/her efforts into said task. This can be seen in minority groups and poorer communities around the world. We are not saying that it is impossible to become successful under these conditions but it becomes more difficult, and there is more to overcome.

To become a master at a task you have to dedicate time, my only question now is, what should I be a master at  :) Please share your views and stories in the comments I would love to hear from you all, and will reply diligently. Thank you all for reading.

As I start my first of 10,000 hours slow, Im sure to find some wisdom as I go…

 

I love It!!!!

 

Humbled by a Compass

CIRCLES!!!!!

Electromagnetics…I left this class for my second to last semester because it had no post rec in order to graduate. Little did I know that I would be taking the class has turned more engineers to liberal arts majors then the promise of more then a 31:1 girls to guys ratio in every non-engineering class. I had a problem set due yesterday which I have been delaying for the past two weeks. Like a professional engineer I delayed the assignment to the day it is due. We are currently doing transmission lines. It is simply designing electrical power transmission lines that carry electricity from a power generator (the people you pay every time you turn the lights on) to your home. Now in order to do this some of the values that are used are not represented in a regular number system, thus there is an imaginary component to represent another dimension which is added to the regular numbers. Annnnyway to the point of this post. In order to solve some of these problems we can do most of the work by hand, but in order to simplify the calculations we need to use a compass…a compass, of all things to use in 2012 the last thing I thought I would need to do some homework was a compass. I didn’t have one so even buying one from the store on campus was an awkward experience. I asked for a compass and the lady responded from behind the counter and said “you mean the type you use when you are lost?” I laughed as I felt like I was a bit lost, but I replied “No the geometric one.” Fast forward to the library where I actually started to do the work and throughout the three hours I was using the compass with the “Smith Chart” (that is needed to draw the circles on top of the other circles (see the picture above)) I couldn’t stop thinking that this has got to be the weirdest thing for a passerby-er to watch. All I was doing was furiously drawing circles and writing numbers. I realized that the 3D graphing calculator,my laptop, and my cell phone must have been jealous that I was solving these problems without the help of them. Even more ironic was the fact that I was solving electrical problems without electricity. For the first time in a long while I felt like an engineer, like what I was doing should have been done in a medieval castle with a quill and that I was laying the groundwork  for future engineers…maybe I’m exaggerating, but still. The technology around us really makes us forget what it was like before the internet, and calculators. Not too long ago the calculations that we regard as tedious were being done by hand and with a lot less precision. To sum this up a bit I realized how grateful I am for the movement of technology and how it can simplify our lives. Im sending this post out through the air, then through a cable, that is reaching you all through a network of different communication infrastructures. Let me rewind a few hundred years and a I would be sending you all personalized pigeon mail. Enjoy your personalized birdmail messages, please leave a cracker in his beak, he gets hungry on his way home. :)

As I let my imaginary bird go, I keep a feather for wisdom as you know…

Winter Days in Industrial Ways

After a long day at work and at the gym here are a few lines….

Although the content dont pay rent,

Ive spent more on developing lines that dont make a cent,

But I dont resent the time cause whenever I look down it says clark kent,

As the week begins in the same old way,

Articles on particles, the say old day,

Winter in the city is over cast and grey,

With gusts of wind ready to blow off a toupee,

I’d say, if I caught a break then things would go my way,

But all in all Im a bit exhausted,

For my eyes to close I need to defrost it,

Im getting so tired, time to turn off the light,

But wisdom does not die even at night.

 

Have a lovely evening and enjoy a picture I got the chance to take today :)

 

Winter light is hard to show, but ill look harder for the wisdom as I go…

Beauty can be found in the most industrial of locations

 

Life of Mi

I took my younger brother to watch the the movie Life of Pi. Now if you haven’t read anything by me before please be patient with this post as there is quite a lot to it. We leave for the movie and since movie theaters never have the right things, we brought the snacks along with us ( you try to find arnold palmer lemonade in the theater). I read the book a few years ago and I loved the book as I was in a phase where I spent a lot of time reading shipwreck novels. Being out on the sea, alone, held a symbolic parallel with how I viewed life when reading it. I began to see life very much as a solo mission, not because I was abandoned or because of some traumatic event but just because the coming and going of friends, the coming and going of the years passing by, and the lack of consistency is what drew me to the loneliness of the shipwreck that I could relate to.

I wont spoil a thing about the film so do not worry if you haven’t seen it yet. But one theme of the novel and subsequently the film was faith. I will not delve into the long story of how I became a Muslim but I will give insight on some of the things that drew me to believe in a higher power. Because you are never alway around someone, at some point in your life you will experience loneliness. When I say that, I don’t mean it in a depressing connotation, but it is more of a reflective, independent state, that you enter when you are alone. I was raised to be very independent, to go search for answers myself, and to figure things out on my own. My strongest social connections to this date are my brother, mother, and father. That is just how I was brought up. All of the friends I have had have been temporary in a sense and they come and go, and although I have plenty of people I talk to regularly, I realize that at the end of the day my independence is the thing I turn to. To fast forward a bit, my quest for finding the answers to more worldly questions that would pass my tests of logic and interrogation is what lead me to believe in the religion I am a part of today. Faith became a cane to lean on, to depend on, a cane that would never leave my side, even if when I rested my head on my bed alone at night where no other soul could hear my thoughts, I knew that there was a higher power out there.

This movie reminded me of how fleeting things can be, life, family, food, water, shelter, can all be gone in the blink of an eye and your level of appreciation of what you have left will be unlike any appreciation you had before. And with all of these things as variables, and as I began to become more mature I have found constants in faith and in the world around me. Not to say that everything in my life is perfect but I am trying to make the best out of everything and this movie reminded me of how important it can be to never loose hope.

My brother (just turned 17) absolutely loved the movie and was raving about it as we walked home (interesting because I was a year younger then him when I read it). We got home and he went on to watching an anime and I could not stop thinking about how beautiful a simple story can be. I love that now I have a simple outlet to tell stories of my own (and hopefully I get better at telling the stories). As I was sitting on my bed trying to come up with a cool idea for a unique logo my mother walks in and we start having a very mother-son conversation. I mean, it was very text book but at the same time it was very relevant. I am very close to my mother in that as I got older she became more of an advisor then a mother and her ability to be both at the same time and be so good at it is something I will never fully comprehend. But after watching that movie and after having some serious stress from school and relationship related stuff her advice was a beautiful complement to the movie. The film discussed the faith in life and what amazed me was that my mother focused her efforts of our talk on the observation of life.

Without her knowing that my blog was about picking things up from life she kept telling me to learn from every experience. But more then that, she told me something interesting about relationships and life in general. She talked about how in her marriage with my father how it is essential to set up ground rules for the relationship to last her. The two qualities that were highest on her priority list were respect and trust. I thought love would be up there on the list but she said that these two become the foundation for the relationship.

The conversation flowed into how important it is to learn from life. She told me how when she had me she was learning everything for the first time and with every year I grew she would read up as much as she could from the library to give her piece of mind on what to expect. She would learn from her life in addition to anything she could pick up along the way. She said that from the outside you could see more then when you are under stress in the situation, she also mentioned how important it is to learn from your mistakes. I suppose the majority of it was a reminder but I appreciated every word because no matter how many times I hear it I forget and I suppose that is why im staying up so late writing this, because at the end of the day the purpose of my blog is to learn from life and to benefit from it while having fun along the way. Goodnight reader and I hope I didn’t bore you to death :)

Search for what you need to know, and I’ll try to take that wisdom as I go…

New Money…Same Problems

Canada is coming out with new money its thinner, brighter, and crafted from a single sheet of alu-minium…oh wait wrong product :) Canada has created some new bills to protect itself from counterfeiting and fraud. Whenever a country does this I think to myself how much harder people are going to go trying to find out ways to continue to do illegal things. I’m not advocating their actions but last year I applied for an internship with an application security firm and one thing I realized was that every person there was a highly paid (and ridiculously over educated) hacker. These people are paid to find the insecurities in applications and software. This is no different from the counterfeiting and bootlegging that happens everyday to undercut “The Man”. This entity the larger it is the more subjected to copyright violations it is. For example Apple products are  so vastly copied throughout the tech markets that it would go from an electronics company to a law firm if it tried to go after to everyone that was copying its designs. What is funny is that sometimes it doesn’t even matter to the average consumer that Apple tends to be a step behind in components (hardware) but always a step ahead in aesthetics. To many this new Canadian money will just look like some shinny plastic (throwback to trading card games…ahh childhood) but it is a step in the right direction in trying to protect against counterfeiting. But I can’t help but to think that there is someone out there trying to recreate this new technology undetected.

I hope to get some money soon I dont even mind if its plastic…at least it won’t fray away in the wash (what does bleach do to plastic money?) Anyway, thanks for reading I hope you all are liking the content so far…plenty more to come.

As money rolls in slow, ill pick up the pennies of wisdom as I go…

Innocence of Children

On way to the locker room at my gym I was taking the elevator (…i realize the irony) and there was an old man on the elevator that seemed deep in thought with a pseudo-frown on. As I was head banging to an old R and B song a little girl no older then the age of three walks on with her mother. She was fiddling with her mothers iFone and sliding through pictures of sailboats, and for some strange reason when I looked at the old man his train of thought seemed interrupted by this little girl and her commentary of the sailboats. Her incoherent sentences and cute voice made me smile and when I looked over to the old man he too was smiling. It is amazing what the uncaring, unfiltered actions of a little girl can be like. We are constantly filtering ourselves, whether it is how we should behave in public or what we should or shouldn’t say to people. I miss the freedom of childhood, in the sense that when I want to sleep, I just do it, if I want to eat, I complain until I’m fed. If I did that now I would get fired from work and my parents would likely kick me out of the house (“I WANT BROKOLY AND GRAPE JUICE!!!!”)

The elevator began to feel like an illustration of the different stages of life, the little girl, me, the parent, and the old man. It dawned upon me that it is a beautiful thing the way we grow to maturity and we age after that peak. To think that one day I was that small and that there is the possibility of me having a child one day. We take for granted our age, when you are young you just want to be old and when old, Ive been told that many strive for youth. I think that things have become so complicated in my life personally that I don’t give it much thought. But now that I’m setting time aside to consider what it is I really want to do with my life I realize that I’m grateful to have lived the years I have and I’m content with my current age and am looking forward to what is ahead. Digging to be satisfied with what you have I think is a link to finding what it is that makes you happy.

The elevator doors open slow, so I hang on to the wisdom as I go…

:) Irrelevant but funny

Programmable Matter

Go Go Gadget Snooze Button! Good morning people, I slept almost ten yours straight and am in that weird state where I im so fully rested, I have become tired again (counter productive productivity).

Anyway these guys at MIT designed a motor to drive small independent objects that can drive the motions of an entire unit, allowing for basic shape making on a small scale.  This is pretty cool stuff, at school I used to work at an electro-optics lab where one of the main goals was fabricating materials that responded to electricity allowing for the storage of potential data on a light sensitive film of composite materials. Its a cool concept, but due to my impatience and the small space (I’m 6’3  almost 6’4…a brother needs so breathing room when in his green onezie and goggles)  I eventually left the lab to do my own robotics projects (dont worry avid readers I’ll be sharing those in the near future :) So the idea of making things smaller and faster and usable is very much the trend of the electronics industry now a day.

A few days ago I went in for an interview with a major corporation for an engineering rotational program and one of the “technical questions” that I was asked was where do I see technology going in the next 5 years? Well the real question is what truly new technology will come about to change the landscape of the trend we have been following for the past twenty years. A concept called Moores Law necessitates this change in technology in order for the marketplace of technology to change.

This is an example of Moores Law at work at the beginning of the invention of a new technology things progress rapidly, the success of the technology appears to be endless further pushing the bounds that were set up before it. But through the middle of the technology’s life span we see a slow down where the changes are almost periodic in a way. And lastly (and this is the stage we are in currently) you have huge “innovation” pushing the upper limits of what can physically be crafted by the technology. This decaying exponential is funny because as we reach this leveling off point its exciting to see what will come out of a high schoolers garage, or a major corporation’s R and D team, or even some new material that was found at six flags that seems to be the fusing of saliva and steel and it can be reprogrammed into the fastest hard drive imaginable (physically impossible but fun to think about none the less). The whole idea is that we are not sure of what will be the next technology but as someone of tries to keep up to date on tech hardware and programming I can say that we are pushing things to amazing limits that are bound by the laws of nature.

So next time you are picking up your phone to text or when you take that morning shower to wipe away the eye crusts (don’t lie eye crusts suck!) realize that there is a nerd some where who is sweating in a lab trying his best to make that next phone run off of your voice waves or have an shower head that can soothe the eye crusts away while providing enough water pressure to clean your body. At any rate I hope you can question more often because asking how does this thing work can be the most innovative thing you have done in a while.

As the robots of the future continue to grow, I’ll try to absorb some wisdom as I go…

Joy of Writing

Its funny how I feel like there are a million things that I could talk about right now, but I am stuck in that awkward phase where I dont know what my first post should be made of, or what it should be about. Any idea that comes to my mind (discussing motorcycles, or school projects, or interviews, or human feelings) all seem to pushy as to the direction to which this blog should be taken. Perhaps the best thing to post right now should be that I am relieved in a way to have started this.

In a sort of way writing has always been an outlet for me. I didn’t realize it until I was about thirteen it was a very interesting time in a kids life moving from middle school to high school a transition that seems very daunting and emotional at the same time. But it was also a time where the emotionally stressed (over dramatic teenager in me) needed an outlet of some sort. At the time I started writing rhymes (eventually became a hiphop head in high school, but thats another story and one of many phases I grew out of). I picked up a composition notebook and begun to write, as the words began to flow and I began to fill up the first page I realized that there was a betterment that came with writing. It wasn’t like I was writing a Shakespearean sonnet, it was probably some trashy spin off of a rap battle playing in my head, but still it was something creative enough that I decided to put on paper.

I took creative writing and some honors courses in high school to try to expand my skill set and it helped for the most part. But what I noticed most is that I was driven to write whenever I had extremes in emotion (excited for the summer to come, worried about an exam, angry over a fight) simple high school stuff that eventually developed into more complex college stuff and finally the catalyst for this blog my transition into the real world.

Im about to start my last semester of college while working as an engineer part time and the realities of starting a real life are beginning to show up and has pushed me to start writing again. Maybe its the end of the semester stress, on top of relationship jumbles, work, and trying to go the gym as much as possible that has forced my hand into this creative melting pot we call the interwebs, but at any rate, I’m liking it.

Creativity is a powerful stream of thought that is a burden to waste by not recording it in some way. I suppose that is why the internet, social networking, and the need to share has become so mainstream and a part of our day to day lives. Its a blessing and a curse as the value of what you publicize had the ability to either benefit you spiritually or cripple you to the point where your remarks are pooled into the jumble of bathroom usage updates that make up the majority of twitter feeds and facebook walls (toyolet tweets lol).

To whomever read this I hope you enjoyed my first real post, I hope you comment or share it, or just enjoy it enough to experiment with writing or starting something new.

As the night hours cycle slow, I try to observe the wisdom as I go.

…How I feel getting back into the writing swing of things :)