SMICK.NET | Website of Mike Smick Graphics and Web Developer

I bought two laptops today

My wife doesn’t know this yet, and she’ll probably punch me, but I bought two laptops today. This purchase was based on a long-term, well-thought-out impulse buy. So what’s up? Well I’ll tell you and maybe you’ll buy two laptops as well. But you don’t have much time to get this kind of laptop. Oh and it’s a $400 direct hit on the wallet.
One Laptop per Child

Over a year ago, I heard about an initiative called the “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) project created by a guy named Negroponte. His mission was to create a way to help educate children in 3rd world countries. He decided he could create a communications and learning device to do this. But he knew he’d have major challenges bringing this to fruition. A device would have to be electronic, but work with all the problems that poorer regions have. His idea became a laptop that would overcome as many of these difficulties. It would be low power and have a means to self power, with a hand or foot crank. It would be shock resistant, easy to use and a very open platform. His initiative grew to an organization and is working with governments to see about getting as many of these into schools as possible.

People, myself included have said that these countries need water and basic necessities, not computers. Not true. In fact, that kind of thinking is very one sided. You see, there are thousands or more villages that have school houses, they have systems in place where kids learn. But they can be given a great resource. I’m a bit concerned that this initiative will make the machines vulnerable to theft. This could be true, but it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be tried.

The organization originally was only going to build the laptops and supply them in bulk. But they decided that the demand was so strong that it would be a great idea to allow western countries get them too. But with a limit. There is only a two-week window which the laptops can be bought. And the two that I bought, I only get one of them. The other is a donation to somebody. After reading about the laptop, it appears to be something I can use and may even solve a problem I’ve had lately with a project I’ll be releasing in the next couple months.

I like being as philathropic as I can, but I’m fairly selfish too. I’m of course writing off half of this purchase as a charitable donation. The other half will be written off under my company, as it’s a work related expense for special projects I’m doing. In particular as a communications device as well as the tablet stylus features I’ll need.

Some really cool features of this laptop:

There’s a lot more to it, and once there’s a hefty community here in the US, more things will be shared and configured among the techy and education crowd. Plus the world over using it will introduce more cool configurations and possibilities. If I can write articles from it in the car and on trips, it’s really valuable to me. It can also be a good platform to program learning games using flash for example. It might just be great to have in the living room to boot up and find out latest movie times.

If you want the best overview on this laptop, read David Pogue’s review in the New York Times and watch the embedded movie with the article.

This is a huge win of a purchase for me. I don’t know who’s going to get my 2nd laptop, but it’s an even bigger win for them. $400 is a lot of money and of course I won’t be eating for a few weeks. But how cool is it to contribute to a good cause, get a new gadget, change a few lives? It’s really cool damnit!

November 12, 2007 at 8:57 pm | computers, gadgets, learning, philosophy, tools | No comment

Dealing with the aging of loved ones

I’ve written about death before. It’s a topic you can’t avoid sometimes I suppose. It’s a topic worth exploring. Though I feel like my own death might be a ways off, being only thirty, I suppose you never know. Over the past few days, I’ve had a couple experiences that started to seem like a pattern. Noticing it, I began to desire to put it into words. This is just a short exercise, so bear with me.

Over time, we’ll have loved ones that grow old and die. When you are close to them and have been for some time, you’ll see the changes in front of you. One experience I had was thinking about my wife and I. We are still young and active. We are as sharp as can be in terms of mind alertness and personality. But eventually, we won’t be as sharp. One of us will get to the point where we notice the other starting to fail at certain things. It’s strange, but the thing that was most sad was thinking about one day having to tell someone else about how that loved one used to be, before they started getting old. Saying the words felt the most scary. “Yes I remember when they used to be so witty, and now s/he’s really lost a lot of that, really faded in the last three years.” I don’t know why, but it really gets me emotionally to think of that.

Another experience was I was watching this movie called “American Movie” about this guy my age who desperately wants to make a film. He feels like it’s his way to get out of being poor, or to be somebody. It’s a wonderful documentary. In it, he has an older uncle that he’s always trying to convince to fund his projects. The uncle is pretty old, his speech is slurred, his mind seems dulled. Sadly, the uncle dies sometime during the final production of the documentary, as it’s mentioned in the credits. At one point, the filmmaker’s dad, brother to the old uncle talks about him and how he used to be. The father is older, but still very sharp. He’s lived through seeing his brother grow up, become a scholar and then grow old and become senile. That might have been the brother that taught him to play baseball or tennis. That was the brother he might have looked up to, the one he wanted to grow strong like, or emulate. Now he’s a tired, old and dying man. How would you deal with that?

The third experience was today. I was helping my friend move a couple pieces of furniture in his new house. He had a photo of his mother on the window sill. He and his siblings are going to make a trip with mom in the coming months. An Alaskan cruise. They have an urgency to go this year because mom is starting to show signs of aging. Some frailty, even senility. They want to create this trip and experience it, as well as have the memory of it while mom can still do it. She deserves to experience it with all the senses she can. Everyone else too. How will they feel on the plane ride back from that trip? Once it’s over, it’s not the end of her life by any means. But they will have some feelings to contend with perhaps.

I don’t want any loved ones to die, certainly not my close family and my loving wife. But it’s going to happen isn’t it? This mindscape I live daily, lost in thought not nearly in the moment as I should be, it’s happening to all of us though. We can face it now, keeping it close to us, or face it later. We will have to face it. A popular writer I recently read about decided to estimate how much longer he has left to live. From that, he’s started a running countdown clock on his website. He wanted something he would see every single day. He’s done this to completely face that fact of his own death and to deal with how much there is to create, to accomplish before his own passing day.

I guess I don’t have an exercise on this as I thought I did. Writing this article has been the exercise. For you, maybe reading it will be. I ask that you take care of yourself and loved ones. Have many special and exerting experiences to stay sharp to live fully and enjoy others around you. Drink good red wine, do crossword puzzles and math problems, engage in new conversations, meditate. Or just be you for as long as you can.

September 28, 2007 at 5:27 am | family, philosophy | 1 comment

He’s almost 40 and rides a kid’s bike

At fifteen, when I starting riding bikes seriously, learning tricks and enjoying those times with my friends, we’d watch a lot of bike videos together before and after we’d go riding. On a typical bright Saturday morning after a sleepover, we’d wake up and have some cereal. We’d go to the sofa and shove a VHS tape into the player. Some of the pro riders on the videos would eventually become heroes for me.

Someone performs a stunt on camera, the video is edited into a montage with music. You sit and stare at this imagery and it gives you satisfaction, often making you want to perform the trick yourself.

A bike trick is a very interesting human construct. Let me try to convey this as best I can, and maybe you have your own interpretation as to why it has evolved this way. You take the normal state of riding a bike. But then you alter it. You create a position or maneuver in which you are doing something unique with the bike. For example, you stand on the front peg with one foot and twirl the back end of the bike around. Now you are still in the same position behind the handlebars, but the rest of the bike is in front of you. You coast behind the bike and use your free foot to assist with balance on this one wheel. From this position, you either continue with another transitional stunt, or do the reverse and bring the bike back to a normal state. You “pull” the trick when you know that you have performed the maneuver and returned to normal riding without touching on the ground.

To simplify it into steps:

1. Riding normally (relaxed state)
2. Create difficult situation for yourself where you are likely to fall down.
3. Return to normal riding without breaking your balance

I’d say there are two reasons why we call a bike stunt a ‘trick’. One is again how unique it looks to the viewer. The more strange the position, or the more perceived complexity, the more magical it is. This includes aerial stunts. When someone flies twelve feet over spinning the handlebars in mid-air, people describe a sense of awe. They imagine what it would be like to fly that high and maybe the adrenaline rush and risk of landing safely The second reason we say they are tricks is more with sensations the rider experiences.? There are many sensations during a trick ranging from fear and urgency to relaxation and there is a process where you learn to fit yourself in that perfect position where minimal force is required to maintain balance. ? Maybe it’s the sensation of a perfect spinning motion where your mind and body are so dialed into the move that your focus turns inward. Over the course of learning the maneuver people have described creating a muscle memory, where performing it becomes easier and consistency can be achieved and easily returned to even between long periods without practice.

When you walk around the block, you don’t think to yourself that it is an amazing act of balance and performance of the nervous system. But there was a time when you were learning to walk that you might have had to cross a distance of five or ten feet to reach your mothers arms as you were encouraged by her to go a little bit further. ? The excitement has faded with walking for most people just as the trickiness of a bike stunt wears off once it can be achieved too easily. To the rider it ceases to be a trick although a new viewer might be impressed by it.

This raises several questions with me. What force would encourage a person to perform a non standard riding maneuver just to see if they could pull out of it successfully?? Why would we create a self-induced difficulty through non-standard use of a bicycle? We almost take this for granted, but it’s actually quite strange. Try to pretend being an alien observing this type of behavior in humans. Can you come up with a theory??? I draw from Joseph Campbell’s writing on cross cultural heroes in mythology and try to imagine how this behavior might be part of us innately.

Tonight I was reading an interview with one of my heroes from the bike videos I watched over and over. Hero might be the wrong word, as I don’t really want to be like him in any way, but there are certain aspects of his riding that I would like to experience for myself.? Wait though. Maybe he truly is a hero then. If I would like to experience some of the things he’s done, if he’s become part of my memory, if he is a subject of the stories I tell, then doesn’t that make him a hero?

Chase Gouin is his name. Read what Chase Gouin says about flatland freestyle that goes a little deeper than you might expect from a 35 year old who rides a kids bike.

About why I got into bikes and stayed with it for so long? Camradarie is one thing. But I enjoy riding alone too. My reasons have changed over time too. There has always been the narcissism that goes with completing a stunt successfully. But now I think of the enormous range of emotion and tactile experience in biking. I suppose I could describe it, but if you’ve skied down a mountain or swam in a lake, then you can fill that in yourself.

July 22, 2007 at 4:37 am | bikes, freestyle, philosophy | No comment