Difficulty Has Its Advantages.

It is through the surmounting of problems that we often gain insights which, we weren't expecting, that gives us the additional outcome of not only solving the original issue but often new ways of looking at old situations.  It has to be challenging enough to make one push their abilities either mentally or physically while being partially, at least at the onset of challenging the issue, attainable.-One needs to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. There is nothing more satisfying than overcoming an obstacle, or having that "Eureka!" moment.

Why is it then that some people when faced with a new challenge, look for others to solve whatever the issue is rather than seeing the situation as an opportunity to grow and explore? They seem to have no interest in attaining that marvellous Eureka moment. Initially I found this very confusing and then it dawned on me that surmounting challenges is a skill which must be taught. We may all be born explores, but when it comes to going outside of the comfort zone, that takes learning new skills so we can benefit from the experience. If a person does not have thse skills they panic This behaviour works for them because, others around them will often rush in to fix the situation, and thus the panic behaviour is reinforced. The next time something happens, the cycle repeats and the behaviour becomes entrenched, if not subconscious. This leads to the following routine:

Person "A" perceives the difficulty and immediately asks for assistance from person "B". Very quickly it becomes obvious to person B that the request for assistance really meant "You Resolved This for Me." If person B acquiesces, then person A learns that abdicating their responsibility works in the short term. But if the request for assistance is rejected, then something strange seems to happen in the situation. Person A does not attempt at all to solve whatever the issue is, an apathy occurs and the situation gets worse. This can happen to both people who are involved in the event.

The other thing that happens is person A develops a very short term outlook, never really considering future consequences, because doing so instigates a panic which starts the original behaviour all over again. Ultimately they missed the opportunity to grow by taking on new challenges etc. and people doing all the helping become embittered. Often this happens quite slowly, with a lot of defensive rationalizations built up by both people over time.

So how then do we encourage a person to learn the skills which are so vital to overcoming difficulty and break this routine? I have found that often person "A" appears to have no interest in learning anything new so making suggestions falls on deaf ears.

How then do we light the fire of learning?

This can be a difficult question-and-answer, particularly when, Person "A" is very intelligent, because they've seen and blocked all previous attempts to change. It is one of those situations where the smarter an individual is the more difficult it is for them to learn new material. (We have all been there, unable to accept something new, because we "know" something else to be true which is in conflict with whatever we are trying to learn, stubbornly hanging on to the old stuff.)

The first step then be to deconstruct what we or the other person already knows, to look at what they believe to be true and in the process we, the instructor, end up learning as well. So in the above scenario both person A and B have to look at their behaviours and beliefs. Learning does not occur in a vacuum.

I consider myself very lucky, because I love to learn and explore. The challenges in my life have expanded my boundaries and horizons and continue to do so. It is my belief that I inherited this from my parents behaviour and why I continue to believe that the very idea of being "Normal and adhering to the idea of anything universal-be it physical or ideological." Is not a good way to go for anyone because it ultimately will limit the person.

The mythical idea of a level playing field is probably to be avoided at all costs as far as the larger society is concerned, we don't want to make things too easy because that ultimately will stifle creativity. Perhaps then it is a good in the long run that solving the question of "lighting the fire of learning "is in itself difficult because the answer continues to evolve as to the outcomes. What is most important ultimately is that we all sincerely in our own ways keep endeavouring to improve our lives.

Never stop exploring on what ever level you can. :-).  May your difficulties  ultimately have advantages, and may that open new understandings for us all.

Patrick Clark

Patrick Clark's Success Story at Freedom Place

Postscript: I wrote this article last night as part of a submission to the Youth and Philanthropy Initiative Canada (YPI) program, so that the nonprofit organization that maintains my building Strive Living Society could be considered for a $5000 grant. I consider my life an ongoing success story. Schools and students involved in the YPI program are looking for stories to help combat negative stereotypes.I have decided to share this writing here as well in the hopes it inspires all who read it and please do feel free to comment.- Patrick


(All links open in a new window.)

Photo of myself, January 8, 2020.

I have spastic Cerebral Palsy, am 60 years old, use an electric wheelchair to get around and I let nothing stop me :-). A geek and a nerd. Most definitely, curious by design.

Here's my success story, and why success keeps on coming at Freedom Place. It is my sincerest wish that it inspires people and perhaps allows them to see success where they have not seen it before.

My life is an ongoing success, because I do not define accomplishments in narrow terms, and thus I'm able to gather up all of the small successes in daily life into an ongoing positive achievement. Do not misunderstand me, this is not some new age flowery sugarcoated outlook. Challenges exist, and indeed they are necessary. Without them people would not discover truly new avenues and ways of doing things. I understand this and it is a big part of my success.

When I first arrived at Freedom Place, after having some time to look around and absorb the environment, I was personally a little terrified because I understood that it would be very easy to slip into a routine where pretty much everything was comfortable and taken care of. To me that meant stagnation. So I reconnected with a volunteer group, The Vancouver Community Network (VCN) on Hastings in Vancouver and arranged to travel twice a week to the office to do some volunteering. I am a computer and electronics geek and VCN deals with refurbishing computers and assisting low income and destitute people to have access to the Internet.

• VCN does many other socially responsible things in addition to those mentioned. All to empower people via the use of technology in innovative ways. It is my honour to be involved with such a great group of people and the organization as a whole.

Some see me as a little extreme because I don't use handy dart unless absolutely necessary, I prefer to use my wheelchair to travel down to the Skytrain in to Vancouver and then to the office. It reminds me that it is important to be independent and stay connected with community as a whole.

Therefore, the secret to my success, is seeing the opportunities which exist for everyone rather than trying to package success into a predetermined shape. The tenants and staff at my home Freedom Place are Groovy and eccentric in their own ways, they help me and I help them. I have learned a lot in the past 18 months or so and that adds to success.

I am very thankful that I am not "normal" because that would've limited the opportunities to look at things differently. If you see someone, who appears to be different, introduce yourself to them, even if it feels a little funny. New ideas may be waiting right around the corner for you, and ideas can lead to success.

This is my ongoing success story.

Sincerely Patrick Clark, tenant at Freedom Place.

Honey, the cell phone provider shrunk the kid's (photos)!

My family at Christmas 2019.

Over the Christmas holidays many people send photos to and from each other via text messages.

While this seems like a great idea, especially considering the resolution most modern phones have in their cameras, what is not so widely known is that most carriers (cell phone providers) have very restrictive limits on the size of picture they actually send.They will not stop you from sending the photos, but will greatly reduce them in size on the other end. What looks to you as a beautiful, priceless snapshot, can get reduced to something resembling an old time television picture.

I saw this last week when a relative of mine sent six pictures in one text, the cell phone company reduced them in size to such an extent that they were a blurry mess. Even if one changes the settings in their camera there is no guarantee the picture will not be heavily shrunk. Making it impossible to ever get a nice printout. This photo started out as a 4 megapixel image. When I received it on my phone it was 33K. That's reduction of 51 times  (approximately). This is the untouched photoas it was received on my phone

Two rules of thumb to follow:

1. If you are sending pictures via text, send only one per text. The more you send in a single text the more they become compressed.

2. If you really want to make sure that your photo stays intact, use one of the many online storage options and upload your photos to the cloud and then distribute a link to them in your text.

A cautionary note. If you are using one of these cloud-based download services to store and retrieve your photos frequently. It is best to do it while the phone is hooked up to your Wi-Fi at home to avoid exceeding your cell phone plan "data" limit.

Patrick

Internet of Things lifespan

Image by Tumisu.
Used in accordance with the Pixabay license.

It is the first day of 2020, and I find myself thinking of all the "Internet of Things" (IoT) devices I have. In my single bedroom apartment there are 17 smart lights by LIFX (company info-opens new window), a smart television, a Google Home, a Google Nest Mini and if I can ever find them at some point there will be smart curtains as well. All of these devices have one thing in common, they all rely on the respective companies to stay in business in order to function.

Each time I ask Google to adjust the smart lights, a message goes out across the Internet to the LIFX company who in turn send the signal back to the appropriate light. My Sony TV functions in a very similar way. Gone are the days of having local control over anything. Even if I use my phone to control the lights, the signals still travel to and from the company servers. This can have interesting effects when things get busy for LIFX, the lights may go on or off in stages, instead of all at once. There may be only a second or two of the delay, but it seems to me a very complicated way to achieve the simple goal. If the Internet connection goes down then everything simply stops, stuck in whatever state it was last in.

Don't get me wrong, I love all these lights and the potential of the evolving technology is tremendous. But why are we building in such an Achilles' heel with all the new products? It is taking built-in obsolescence to a whole new level. While it is likely that Google and Amazon for the foreseeable future what happens to the plethora of smaller companies and their associated smart gizmos. Last year, as a Christmas gift, the organization I volunteer at gave me a smart plug which was supported by Google home at the time. The company however ran into some issues with their online security and as such they were instantly not supported by Google anymore. The problems have been rectified with the company as far as I know but I still cannot control that particular smart plug via the Google assistant. The smart plug still works fine with my phone but it shows how at the mercy we are when it comes to the winds of change and the future of companies.

So for me for example if LIFX ever closes down that means that my investment of 17 smart light bulbs at an average cost of $50 each, $850 total, will be a bitter pill indeed. They will still work as ordinary lights, and thank God they are energy efficient.

Anyway this is been a spontaneous ponder or rant depending on how you look at it.

What is being sentient like for you?

Over the last 18 months, because of the institution I live in, I have come in contact with many people with various levels of awareness and physical mobility, to say nothing of psychological functioning. All this has me reevaluating the presumption that all human beings share essentially the same "Sentient reality".

My own personal sense of self sits, dead centre in my head and radiates outward. Now, to make matters even more interesting, perhaps because I have a physical disability since childbirth, I tend to treat my limbs in the third person. "The legs", "The arms", and so forth. This is especially true when I was a child and ofcourse posed some problems, because it allowed me to rationalize things being up beyond my control. Slowly over time the various body parts have indeed become more integrated and not thought of as separate components. Still though, in times is duress the old habits reemerge and I have to consciously bring myself back together.

Throughout my day as I deal with people and observe them in various situations I find myself asking "What is their reality-what is being human for them-and what is their experience? "Anyone who is been through trauma of any sorts or indeed fallen in love knows how the world can appear instantaneously different, as though you were a different animal. Perhaps we are more different than we know, and the cause of some of our problems is that we don't acknowledge and make room for the differences.

Take, what I believe are, to very different people who presumably experience the world dramatically differently:

1. Pres. Donald Trump and;
2. Prof. Stephen Hawking.

Aside from the obvious differences, of which there are many, the essence of their realities must be vastly different  One would presume that the two minds worked fundamentally differently. Just how far did this difference go? Did it reach beyond the intellectual level, down to the way they both interfaced with the world? I believe so and this is what I find fascinating. Do these two minds work fundamentally differently, to such an extent that the experience of the world for each person would be different. Yet because we cannot plug into each other's head (yet) humanity has no way of confirming whether any existence is different from another.

Even subtle differences which are hard to quantify may combine to create for each individual a unique reality. Which because it is the only one they know, they never question that others may not experience things in the same way. We all just presume that the basic concepts of living in a 3D space are the same for everyone. And of course it goes far beyond that level of the physical to the very way people think, the process involved in making up a thought. Talk about going down the rabbit hole! :-). If we examine it closely, we may not even agree on what the "hole" is, to say nothing of the rabbit.

So my question to you is:

What is being sentient like for you? Does the above text make sense to you, or is your experience entirely different? Leave a comment below and let us know.

On a positive note

This is just a very quick entry .

Sometimes small things elicit surprising responses. Such was the case last night, when after fooling around when the photograph of a gladiola on our patio something quite nice emerged. So I decided to post it to Facebook. What a marvellous reaction. People wanted to know how I made the thing. In all honesty it was a complete accident. But nevertheless, everyone wanted to know the details of how it was done . So without further ado here are the details.

Where Are the Artistics

 "Where Are the Artistics?"

 

Last week a good friend of mine, said "Patrick you must get out and do something new. Get out of your own normal." He said this because I had mentioned feeling a little blue (slightly depressed). This opened up a whole discussion on where creative freethinking people hang out and express themselves in the modern world.

One would think, with all the information avenues we have at our fingertips that creativity would be overflowing, but as we talked about the issue it became clear, although it looks like on the surface that people have many options, in general a great many of these perceived choices are really very similar to one another, and if they are not, people tend to use only the attributes which they are already familiar with. The result is more of the same stuff everywhere. Rather than stretching their minds people nowadays tend to repeat what they already know. -- I miss the mind stretch! I simply love going down the path less taken. Especially when it involves understanding something new.--. Take Facebook and Twitter, what do most people do with them? Make comments and share photos.  This is got me thinking: "Where indeed are all the artistic, truly radical, minds hanging out?"

Living in Surrey British Columbia Canada, by the Guilford shopping mall, I have spent the past few months snooping around looking for those creative souls or clubs. So far the closest is, one slightly off the wall  librarian (being "slightly off the wall" is a good thing by the way), and I think they have a hard enough time, finding fellow souls as well. But somewhere, hopefully in Surrey, there has to be a "hideout" for these characters. The ones who dare to be them themselves, despite the mediocrity around them.  Don't get me wrong, I am not looking for a "Gunwielding Terminator type group", I am looking however for people and groups or organizations who follow their curiosity and are bored with the ordinary technologies or how they are used.

If this short post resonates with you or your group, regardless of the topic, do drop me a line. Even posing a question from out of left field might be enough to start the fire, to combat the mediocrity I see engulfing the modern society. And that right now includes me.

Take care Patrick

Your Internet Garden

In recent months I have had several occasions to clean up websites with various issues and a few common points have become clear:

There is a mistaken belief among website owners that once a website has been created and is on the Internet it needs no more attention... Nothing could be further from the truth!

Websites should be viewed as gardens, in that:

• They take a fair bit of planning and preparation.
• Look beautiful when their brand-new and,
• Wither and die if not maintained. In the case of websites, they become horribly infected with malware etc.

If you read nothing else, please understand, that all websites must be maintained usually on a weekly basis. This is because, even if none of the content changes, the various components which make the site work frequently have updates. I have seen many wonderful sites run into serious problems just because no one checked them on a weekly basis.

This started out as a short article, but then I went down the rabbit hole, as I thought of the various questions asked of me in the last few weeks. The short take away is this: If you don't know how to do maintenance, for your own peace of mind, get someone who does.

The following text, briefly breaks down the various aspects of the website one needs to be aware of particularly if you are going shopping for a new site. As I said, I went down the rabbit hole, so if you're not technically minded or don't want to be bored to death :-) feel free to skip the following. Just remember to take care of "your Internet garden".

All the best, take care, and feel free to keep on reading...

Patrick Clark

There is confusion about the various services involved which must come together in order for a website to exist and what each of the services are actually responsible for. I.e. the domain name registrar, the hosting company, the actual software which makes up the website, and the web designer. Many companies offer all these services in-house as a single package and while this is very convenient one still needs to understand the various aspects.

If you are in the market for a website, especially if this is your first, please read on, because the choices you make initially can have a major impact later on down the road. 

A suggestion: if you are planning to do a business related website and this is your first endeavour. I strongly recommend that you consider creating a alternate website not related to the business in order to get some initial experience of the process, and work involved. Start with something, perhaps related to a hobby. The experience you gain will be invaluable, later on.

Aspect 1. The website address and the Domain-name  Registrar. People understand that this is the website address they type in to their browser and magically a site appears. But in reality this "website address" is completely separate from the website you were actually looking at. As a matter of fact, there are specialized companies, called Domain-name Registrars which sell website addresses. Once you buy an address, it simply means that no one else can use that exact same one. Also, having a website address, does not mean you automatically have a legal copyright. If you are planning to use the domain name in business, you need to check with a legal representative before buying the domain.

Domain-name  Registrar company controls what happens when someone types in your website address in their browser. This can get fairly technical. You will have a separate account with this company just for maintaining your website address.

Aspect 2. The Website Hosting Company. This is the company that stores the files which make up the website and make it available on the Internet. They do not provide domain names. The domain name must be "linked" to the website. (In technical parlance this is called updating the DNS.) Again, you would have a separate account just for maintaining your website.

It is very important to understand that these two aspects of the website are completely separate and hence the need for two accounts one, with each company.

Aspect 3. The Software That Makes up the Website. Modern websites use different software. This can have a major impact if you decide later on to move your website to another hosting company. For example, as far as I know, a website created on WIX cannot be moved over to a company that uses WordPress software. So it is wise to ask the hosting company before spending a great deal of design time on a website, whether the website can be moved. (Sometimes called migrating.)

Aspect 4. The Web Designer. This is the person responsible for creating the design of the website. They will have to deal with both The Domain Name Registrar and the Website Hosting Company. Be very clear at the onset about what their duties are. Also make sure you have a plan in place should they leave.

This is by no means an all-inclusive list but it does cover the obvious basics. Owning and running a website cannot only be profitable, in either the monetary, or in other ways, it can also be a lot of fun. But it does take commitment and you must embrace change. That is the very essence of the Internet, change and evolution.

Until next time! And who knows on what topic :-)

 

PS: There are several other articles on the blog dealing with various aspects of website creation and upkeep. You can simply click this link to see the most current list of documents, or at any time, use the search box on the site to search for the keyword "website" or just click here to automate the search.

ARTICLE: New York Times. "Look for magical moments."

She’s 103 and Just Ran the 100-Meter Dash. Her Life Advice? ‘Look for Magic Moments’

Wow!  If this short, New York Times article, doesn't demonstrate that one's outlook on life has a major impact on everything. 

Briefly, at age 103, Julia Hawkins is still competing in the hundred metre dash. Moreover, she is articulate and enthusiastic. When did she start running?… Oh, at the young age of one hundred years. This is the kind of news that we should all receive in our inbox once or twice a day. It helps balance out the onslaught of all the advertising and negativity. There was also a short 20 second clip of her on the track.  

I sincerely hope the New York Times never takes this article down, or better yet, places it in its entirety in the public domain. Because we all need good news like this :-)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/sports/julia-hawkins-running.html

 

The Power of Habits

Habits are an incredibly human facility. It is an evolutionary efficiency adaption by the brain. For example: you see a hungry tiger-you run away from it! There is no thinking involved, it is evolution's way of keeping you alive! If you had to think about it, chances are by the time you decided to flee the Lions caloric intake would've increased.

Some say that it can take just three seconds to form a habit, but three weeks to break one. If we accept, for the sake of this discourse, that this is true then the question becomes "How can we ensure that the habits are positive and assisting us in some way?" Before that question can be answered, we must understand that habits come in a variety of forms. Some are automatic answers to situations and questions like "Donald Trump is a…". That politician has been around long enough that you probably had an automatic answer, along with an emotional response.  The emotional response is what ingraines the answer and usually colours the rest of your thinking for the moment. This usually happened so fast that you are not aware of it mentally although there may be many other reactions.

The trick of course is to become aware of all the automated reactions we have. Then critique them "is this making me feel better or worse? Etc.". Powerful habits can be formed also when were caught off guard, not watching our own barn doors so to speak and allowing the habit to fly right in. These are the ones that do take a lot of work, but I find, one way to lessen their impact is to again critique them and if they are no use to you, challenge them. Easier said than done, but over time this does work.

Keep track of positive and negative habits. Big and small. The moment the positives are greater than the negatives you may just feel a little better. Take each day one step at a time.