I’m already looking forward to a year from today.
Shyamalan, please please PLEASE don’t disappoint me. Avatar was the best animated TV show in the United States of the last decade.
Uncategorized
Somehow, I managed to miss 20th Century Fox being visionary and awesome and getting on board to produce/distribute the 2nd best of the Narnia books.
It looks like “Voyage of the Dawn Treader” will actually get made, and it’s up for a December 2010 release. I hope the series can hold up until “A Horse and His Boy” is made. That’s my favorite Narnia book.
Walden Media really has to be careful, though. The Narnia movie franchise runs the same danger of running out of steam as the Harry Potter movies. That is to say, even though the movie-making is top-notch, the series just gets bored. It’s almost as if the movies themselves get weary of being made. I know that’s anthropomorphizing a film, but that’s the best way I can describe it off the top of my head.
In any case, I’m glad Dawn Treader is back on the docket.
So yeah I’m no Twitter now: @JNori.
I’ll probably use Ping.fm to post to both Twitter and Facebook at the same time. I really like Facebook, but enough people are inviting me to Twitter that I might as well do it.
Let’s hear it for peer pressure!
Woo!
In case you haven’t been paying attention to my blog, outside of Destiny Image I spend a bit of time practiving Tae Kwon Do.
This past Saturdayblack belt and colored belt tests took place at West Shore Academy of Martial Arts. I took some pictures of the colored belt test, but wasn’t too aggressive about getting shots.
But it was fun.
Last week I acquired a new mousetrap for use at work.
You see, Destiny Image is in a rural area, surrounded by corn and wheat fields. We are often visited by mice, which like to crawl into the ventilation system, get stuck, and die. Apparently we don’t get the smart NIMH-escapee mice.
So that brings us to the new mousetrap.
Meet Sniper Wolf, Destiny Image’s new environmentally-safe, renewable-resource, self-powering mouse eliminating device:
Ain’t she a cute little thing?
She lives behind Warehouse 3, and loves to hang out with the warehouse crew.
I think that meteorologists, climatologists, weather modelers, and anyone else who has anything to do with the environmental sciences should have to ride motorcycles to work.
Then maybe, just maybe, they will understand why there are those of us who find it extremely laughable that they think they know ANYTHING about the climate and the weather on Earth.
When I ride my motorcycle to work–a whopping 13 miles–the temperature can vary by ten degrees or more along a distance of just a couple hundred yards. There’s no way you can purport to know what the mean temperature of the entire planet is without your margin of error being larger than any possible change. You just can’t get a large enough sample to account for all the variables.
So get a motorcycle, and see how much you trust your weather models then. 
I’ve always been a very creative person, but for the past four or five years I’ve really gotten out of the habit of just allowing creativity to happen.
By that, I mean playing. Like kids.
When children play, they aren’t bound by the constraints of logic, engineering, common sense, physics, the laws of nature, time, space, or even gravity. You want to travel through time? Build a time machine out of a cardboard box, an open doorway, or a Delorean.
One of my favorite creative “exercises” was LEGOs (copyright, trademark of the LEGO corporation in Denmark; please please please don’t sue me). I have a bin full of them. I’d sit down, and without thinking about what I wanted to make, I would just start sticking pieces together. Eventually, some sort of concept would emerge, that I would then focus on refining (usually by scrapping what I had done and starting over from scratch) what had been dredged up out of mind. Usually some kind of spaceship. But wow were they pretty spectacular ships. Beat out anything LEGO was selling in kits, that’s for sure.
I’m reading a little book right now called “The Imagineering Way”, and it’s about how Disney’s creative teams (called Imagineers) go about their creative process. It’s a fascinating little book on freeing your creativity and using a creative process that frees you instead of limits you.
It remind me of a chapter in John Maxwell’s “Put Your Dream to the Test”, wherein Michael Hyatt talks about focusing on what you want to do and where you want to be. Focus on the goal, and the “how” will come together. In “The Imagineering Way”, Karen Armitage asks “What am I doing that is getting in the way of what I want to happen.”
In my case, I think I’ve spent so much time handling the day-to-day of just getting things done and making decisions, that I’ve forgotten to focus on the big picture somewhat. I spend so much time on the “hows” that I’ve neglected the “whats”.
Here’s what I’m doing now to foster my creative process. Some of these things I used to do but got out of the habit, others are new:
1. Keep an idea notebook. Use it. (past notebooks have included everything from television shows to real estate development).
2. Get out the LEGO collection (put away when Munchkin was born).
3. Play with spaceship models again (I have an impression collection and am always looking for more).
4. Don’t worry about “how” an idea would work, just write it down.
5. Set up a tinker workspace (haven’t had one since high school).
6. Learn a new programming language (Python wins, I think).
7. Set aside at least an hour to exercise creativity every night by doing one of the above.
And above all: Stick with it!
For some time now, Nathan has been asking me what my dreams and aspirations are.
And my answer? I don’t know.
Not personally, anyway. I can’t say that I’ve really thought about it much in the past few years. But for me, separating myself from Destiny Image has always been just a bit of a challenge (and you can read as much sarcasm into that as you want). You see, I’m one of those people who puts their entire heart, mind, and soul into something when I really get involved with it. My own personal goals have been my goals at Destiny Image for so long, that I’m not sure where one ends and the other begins.
This year, I think I started to separate it a little bit, finally. I’ve scheduled trips that not only have nothing to do with work, but can’t have anything to do with work unless I let my creative juices start to run and make it about work.
Because while I may not have an overarching life goal at this point, I can set shorter-term goals. Things like spend more time with my daughter or don’t kill myself on my motorcycle or don’t get stressed out and actually enjoy vacation.
My mid-term and long-term goals have always incorporated Destiny Image, but I’m fairly adrift now. I’ve accomplished all the goals I’ve already set out to achieve, but I haven’t replaced them with new goals.
I have a long weekend; I think I will set aside some time to ponder this.
