The Blog Less Traveled

In Sunday’s Parade magazine was an article on a Computer Science professor from Carnegie Mellon University who has pancreatic cancer. They say he has only a few months to live. What a shame it has to be cut so short. You get a real sense from the article that Randy Pausch has led a fulfilling and rewarding life. I’m sure he’s had a positive impact on many of his students and made life just a little brighter for many of his colleagues and friends.

Prior to finding out he had cancer, he had agreed to do a “last lecture” for the university. In these lectures, one talks on what matters most to them. Here are some of the ideas he wanted to share:

1. Always Have Fun
2. Dream Big
3. Ask for What You Want
4. Dare To Take a Risk
5. Look for the Best In Everybody
6. Make Time for What Matters
7. Let Kids Be Themselves

The lecture he gave is on YouTube. It’s about 75 minutes long but is well worth your time. If more people had this kind of attitude in life, the world would be a much nicer place to live in. I’ve had the great fortune of knowing someone like this, and I’m very thankful for it.

Click here for the video.

NOTE: This Wednesday, April 9th at 10PM EDT, ABC’s Primetime will feature Professor Pausch and his family.

A man was riding his Harley along a California beach when suddenly the sky clouded above his head and, in a booming voice, the Lord said, “Because you have tried to be faithful to me in all ways, I will grant you one wish. The biker pulled over and said, “Build a bridge to Hawaii so I can ride over anytime I want.”

The Lord said, “Your request is materialistic, think of the enormous challenges for that kind of undertaking; the supports required reaching the bottom of the Pacific and the concrete and steel it would take! It will nearly exhaust several natural resources. I can do it, but it is hard for me to justify your desire for worldly things. Take a little more time and think of something that could possibly help mankind.”

The biker thought about it for a long time. Finally, he said, “Lord, I wish that I and all men could understand women; I want to know how she feels inside, what she’s thinking when she gives me the silent treatment, why she cries, what she means when she says nothing’s wrong, and how I can make a woman truly happy.”

The Lord replied, “You want two lanes or four on that bridge?

Last night I was watching the movie, The Constant Gardener, for the second time. Normally, I just turn a DVD off when the video ends, but this time I let the credits start rolling. When I did, a most amazing song started playing. The song title is Kothbiro by a gentleman named Ayub Ogada.

Ayub Ogada is a Kenyan musician. In addition to his singing, he also plays an African stringed instrument called the nyatiti. Although this song came out on The Constant Gardener soundtrack in 2005, the song was actually recorded on his album, En Mana Kuoyo, which he recorded back in 1993. He’s also collaborated on several other songs with Susheela Raman and the Afro Celt Sound System.

Maybe I’ve been watching too many “Chick” flicks with my wife and daughter lately, but I really like the melody and lyrics of this song. You wouldn’t guess it from the melody, but the song is about cattle herding. The word Kothbiro translates roughly into English as “Rain is Coming”. Although sung in his natural tongue, the English translation is below:

Auma do you hear what I say
The rain is on its way
Return our cattle home
Yaye the children
What is it that you think you do?
The rain is on its way
Return our cattle home.

If you’d like to listen to the song, there’s a video on YouTube made by an individual from Argentina that used this song as the soundtrack. Click here.

If you’d like more information on Ayub Ogada, click here.

Definitely worth a listen.

Tag clouds are a pretty unique and clever presentation medium. In its original form, it’s used in a way to visually present the tags (topics) applied to a site’s content so the user can see the relative frequency of specific tags and use the actual tags presented in the visual as navigation aids around the website. Lately, however, I’m seeing these used in many other Internet venues. I’ve seen them used at websites to depict the occurrence and frequency of search items and also in the frequency of occurrence of words in a text file. In the example I’ve displayed below, I took the text of the Declaration of Independence and presented the occurrence of the 50 most used words. Even without the actual word count in parentheses beside the words, you can quickly visualize their relative frequency based on their size.

I’ve seen these tag cloud displays in other documents I’ve come across on the Internet and elsewhere, but I never really gave them much thought. They’re seen a lot on blogs and other Internet websites to show the usage of tags at that site. It seems like a very intuitive method of displaying your data to the user. Instead of having to graph the data and create a legend to define your graph’s axes, the data is self-describing in displaying it’s relative importance. Where the visualization becomes problematic is when there is a large variance in the set of data being presented. Font sizes needed to display the smallest and largest values may make the smaller values unreadable or the size of the display untenable. Of course, displaying large variances on a graph have the same problems when trying to depict small values.

I think that as people get more used to this presentation medium, it will be used for more and more types of data. There’s certainly no reason why you couldn’t use it to present financial data, sports information, survey results, etc.

What do you think?

Dear Grandson:

The other day I went up to our local Christian bookstore and saw a ‘Honk If You Love Jesus’ bumper sticker. I was feeling particularly sassy that day because I had just come from a thrilling choir performance, followed by a thunderous prayer meeting. So, I bought the sticker and put it on my bumper. Boy, am I glad I did, what an uplifting experience that followed. I was stopped at a red light at a busy intersection, just lost in thought about the Lord and how good he is, and I didn’t notice that the light had changed. It is a good thing someone else loves Jesus because if he hadn’t honked, I’d never have noticed. I found that lots of people love Jesus!

While I was sitting there, the guy behind started honking like crazy. And then he leaned out of his window and screamed, ‘For the love of God! Go! Go! Go! Jesus Christ, GO!’ What an exuberant cheerleader he was for Jesus! Everyone started honking! I just leaned out my window and started waving and smiling at all those loving people. I even honked my horn a few times to share in the love! There must have been a man from Florida back there because I heard him yelling something about a sunny beach. I saw another guy waving in a funny way with only his middle finger stuck up in the air. I asked my young teenage grandson in the back seat what that meant. He said it was probably a Hawaiian good luck sign or something. Well, I have never met anyone from Hawaii, so I leaned out the window and gave him the good luck sign right back. My grandson burst out laughing. Why even he was enjoying this religious experience!

A couple of the people were so caught up in the joy of the moment that they got out of their cars and started walking towards me. I bet they wanted to pray or ask what church I attended, but this is when I noticed the light had changed. So, I waved at all my brothers and sisters grinning, and drove on through the intersection. I noticed that I was the only car that got through the intersection before the light changed again and felt kind of sad that I had to leave them after all the love we had shared. So I slowed the car down, leaned out the window and gave them all the Hawaiian good luck sign one last time as I drove away.

Praise the Lord for such wonderful folks!

Will write again soon,

Love grandma

I’d like to think that I have a fairly wide range of musical tastes. Everything from Hard Rock to Classical and anything in between. At one time, I actually owned a record collection of almost 900 LP albums. With moving around the country so much, it became a real hassle to constantly box them up and lug them around. Those babies were heavy! I eventually sold them all and then created a new collection of over 400 CDs. With the advent of MP3 players and iTunes, my CD collection has pretty much stopped growing. I’ve converted all my CDs to digital music files and now have a collection of about 6500 songs on my computer. It’s nice being able to create tailored playlists and download them to my iPods.

Anyway, I thought I’d start a little section on the blog dedicated to music. I’m going to pick a group and song that I like, give a little background on it, and include a video link, if there is one. If you have a song that you’d like to see included here, let me know. I’ll give it a spin. So, without further ado, and in no particular order, I officially start the Music category.

My first selection is the song, Far Away, by Nickelback. This group hails from Canada and has been around since 1995. The song is from their fifth album, All the Right Reasons. It’s their latest album and it was released back in 2005. This album is not a one-hit album. It contains many excellent songs such as If Everyone Cared, Savin’ Me, Photograph, and Next Contestant. This is their best album, IMHO, and I highly recommend it.

Click here to view the video. BTW, this is a nicely done video. It doesn’t go overboard with a lot of high-tech video effects. It’s a nice story centered around a fireman and it has a somewhat surprising ending. I think it’s worth 4-5 minutes of your time.

Click here for more information on Nickelback.