Seize the moment! Act on the idea.

So many great ideas are lost forever because people don't take action on them immediately. I don't mean that you can go out and rule the world right now or that you even have to, but it is so critical to make some movement toward the goal. Even if that's only writing down a few notes because of the way we move now days literally billions of thoughts are lost to the ether if you don't take some precautionary measures.

Indeed this happened with this very blog post  you're reading. Often times I've been zipping around Vancouver or Surrey and something that has inspired me, one of those "Great Thoughts" or at least the beginning idea of something very cool. Now days I almost automatically recorded in my phone.

It's such a simple thing to do that is why a moment ago I stop work for a few minutes because that's how this very article occurred. It just popped into my head while I was doing something else completely unrelated. So instead of a coffee break I'm having a "Quick write that down now moment." So this article won't be very long and as a matter of fact we might've reached the end for, now anyway . But before I go  and return to the real world. Please remember to take action and next time something inspirational occurs to you.

I promise not only will you be surprised you may be astounded where the idea takes you.

Continue to have a great day!

 Patrick

Dealing with the challenges of procrastination... If you ever get around to it.

Much has been written over the years about procrastination. It is something everyone can relate to at some point or with some aspect of their life.

For me personally it has reared its ugly head in the form of one issue. My God it has been challenging to overcome but, I think I've made some inroads. This may be an article that gets longer and longer as I proceed.

• The first thing I did was acknowledge that part of me really doesn't want to deal with the issue at hand.
  
  
• That was followed by a promise to myself not to ride the old "Guilt Train".
  
  
• The third thing I did was, instead of taking on the entire issue and becoming all knowledgeable about the topic and the individuals involved, I gave myself permission to deal with smaller aspects and acknowledge when any movement toward a solution had been found.

These three steps have personally improved the situation. Now it seems to be the smarter you and are the more aware you are, the more creative forms of procrastinations you can dream up.

Anyway this is just being a micro article. Scarcely more than a thought... For now and will have to see how things progress. But it is nice to know that they are progressing.

Take care Patrick

Resistance to change.

 

 

We, the human race, are an unusual lot...

On one hand we are curious, but we are also, often at the same moment resistant to change. There is a tendency to be a creature of habit, a lover of routine. Talk about a contradiction!

I'm about to have a conversation with someone who is very resistant to change. They are incredibly intelligent but I get the sense they have a fixed way of seeing the world and all the parts therein and those parts are organized, if not hardcoded. In previous interactions with this person the same patterns keep being reinforced. And I've been pondering how to deal with this for a long time because the situation they have an effect on is in my opinion inhibiting growth.

It is very interesting that as children because we know nothing about experience we indulge in change, that old so marvellous feeling of finding something new. Then as teenagers we actively rebelled against it. Something happens though in our late 30s or early 40s. We begin to get comfortable about our surroundings and I wonder if we see our own existence as a bit of an empire that we built. Kind of like, "this is my Castle design and no one is going to alter it". I find myself wondering if this is by design. Maybe evolution literally turns off the desire to find new stuff so that the new generation has less to compete with. Maybe it's a built-in obsolescence, mentally speaking.

Well don't count me, Patrick Clark to be part of that group. Or at least that's what I find myself yelling at the top of my lungs when this thought occurred to me a moment to go :-). I am not so sure I like being comfortable. I like a bit of the unknown on a daily basis. A little bit of out-of-control goes a long way to keep you alert.

Just an interesting thought.
Have a great day everyone. And thank you for dropping by. As we get near the weekend I shall try to write more in-depth articles. Perhaps a video. There won't be too many videos though although they take no time to shoot. It's the postproduction that takes all the work.

Technology is great, but getting to the details of that technology still takes a lot of commitment and effort. Thank goodness. I wonder how artificial intelligence and chat GPT will alter my workflow in the future. I'm pretty sure I will have one but I bet it will be quite different.

And now before I ramble on ....see you tomorrow and have a great day!

Take care Patrick

Why Do People Get Bored?

 

In the place where I live there quite a number of people who always say something like "I'm bored" actually I hear quite a bit, to be clear it's not everyone but a fairly good number. Yet when I say "Why don't you do this… Or that?" They come back with "No. I don't want to do that" this dialogue goes around and around for a while and both parties get nowhere.

It has become clear to me that actually what is going on in most cases is that the individual who's doing the complaining really just wants to be entertained or to be more specific they want to offload the responsibility of fixing their boring situation on to someone else. To get out of this rut, that is to say to become "un-board" they must put some effort into it. Solutions don't just appear out of nowhere.

This could become quite a lengthy article and I think the best way to describe it is for me to do a video. You will find a brand-new one right below. It details not so much the steps in becoming "un-board" but a different way to look at things. Which can be boiled down to:

1. If there is something you cannot change, then accepted it and move on.
   
   
2. Don't seek perfection in becoming "un-bored", except an imperfect solution. It will get you farther down the road in the long run.
   
   
3. Be prepared to put some effort into changing your situation or point of view. Life is not a free ride, but if you put some work into it, boy can it be fun😀.

Below is a full 10 minute video. At this time it can only be seen on this website, until I can go through the appropriate steps to get it fully indexed properly. Like all the things even YouTube takes some practice. It will probably be discoverable on YouTube within the week depending upon how much time I have.

Until then, to get the direct link to this this particular article , click on its title and then bookmark it or send it to a friend. Or you can just come back to this website 😀. You can also search on Google of course.

Here's the video it is about 10 minutes long. If you enjoyed please let me know and I will do more as time permits.

Take care Patrick

A Life after Gathering Stuff

 

As I've mentioned in other articles on this blog, I live in an assisted living building which means that we have staff available to us 24 hours a day. The building is 14 years old now and so they've decided to replace the carpet with vinyl flooring. This is good, the original carpet was beginning to look a little frayed. This has meant that a lot of material items, which we will henceforth call "Stuff", in honour of the late comedian George Carlin, has been pulled out and rearranged to make room for the work crew. It is amazing how much stuff there is. It seems to have come out of nowhere and yet I know that it is been there all along. 

George Carlin's classic standup routine "Your Stuff"

Of that huge mountain of stuff how much do we really need? Why are we so attached to gathering as many belongings as possible around us? I mean when you think about it only a small fraction of that stuff adds to your life in the long run. Works of art are marvellous items of stuff and that lends them some merit in hanging around for a long time. But we all have that dear friend who's apartment or house it's just overflowing with stuff which we all know they don't need. Yet they cannot seem to get rid of it. What in human nature is being met here? What is the urge that is being satisfied or is it an insecurity.

When I looked into this building I made a conscious choice to minimize the gathering of stuff because I just moved out of the apartment building where it spent 34 years gathering stuff and most of it was utterly useless and just the pain to get rid of. But some people in my building and friends I know can't get enough stuff. They are constantly on Amazon or Best Buy or Walmart paying good money for more, and more stuff. I have seen suites that are crammed full of it. Bringing me to my ultimate conclusion of the assuming that they must get an adrenaline hit when they gather or pay for stuff.

When I saw the number chairs downstairs I thought "My God! We must have a billion seats." The human race just keeps cranking more stuff out.

For me when I finally did move and got rid of 90% of my stuff. After the shock wore off I found it quite liberating. Yes, there can be "A Life after Gathering Stuff ".

Have a great day. This is been a random thought which just evolved into a short blurb.
Patrick

Finding psychological limiting boundaries and brainstorming

 When was the last time you did something truly outside of your boundaries of experience?

This doesn't have to be extreme, think about it for a moment though. Sometimes it's even hard to figure out initially where those boundaries are. Most people need a little push, something which takes them somewhere unexpected for a moment and then their minds start to explore.

However, with all the things going on in everyone's life now days, and from my perception it seems to be an ever-growing list, we often forget to slow down so we can contemplate things like brainstorming and boundaries. So that I think is the first step, to slow down, pause for a moment and pay attention to what ever comes to mind. Those quiet little thoughts are the gateways to opening up new avenues of ideas if you only listen.

As so often happens in my life now days I was talking with a friend this morning and then shortly later speaking with someone else and it occurred to me these for two people with tremendously different ways of interacting with their world and environment. Both of these people are very creative but wow in a different way. One is artistic, musical, and incredibly curious. While the other is incredibly curious but only when they can manipulate something to their advantage and they have a habit of going down a very dark path. They do become stuck in a "mood" on occasion and everyone else around them knows leave them be on those days. In other words one of these people uses their insights and creativity to expand their world and while the other tends to use the same talents to restrict their world. I suspect you couldn't talk either of them out of their own modes of operation either.

How this relates to brainstorming and finding psychological limits is as follows:

The first person brainstorms automatically all the time and they can come up with the most ridiculously wonderful ideas out of the blue. Now that I think about it I've never seen this person really stuck on an issue or problem. What they will do in such a situation is immediately asked someone else their opinion. The two of them will chat and sooner or later an avenue presents itself. That boundary has been expanded a little bit 😀.

The second person, our darker minded friend, if given the same insights would take them and restrict their world in some respect. They will attempt to validate their current psychological boundaries in the process rather than going outside of them. This is particularly true when it comes to politics for them. So maybe, just maybe, the initial steps in brainstorming and finding your psychological boundaries are simply a willingness to:

1. Break your own rules of expectation including what you might perceive as right and wrong. In other words don't judge anything. Give yourself permission to let any thought float in.
   
   
2. Consider your current state of mind. Are you waiting for something to happen passively or are you engaged in putting energy into the process.
   
   
3. Even with brainstorming which is usually just bringing in random thoughts to get a creative streak going you should have some reason and motivation. If you don't and that very situation becomes something to consider. It literally becomes the first brainstorming thought. If we are stuck on how to start ask yourself why. The answer you get back might just start a dialogue with yourself and that just might kick the whole thing off.

So today's goal if you want one is to see what brainstorming and boundary busting you can get up to. Once again you are changing the world. One thought at a time. As a practical example as I started this little article I wasn't sure how to really approach it. Well one thought led to another, which led to another, which led to another which ultimately led to momentum. Again it was going outside of boundaries and finding them.

I started with two very different friends as an example and then began to apply the same considerations to the greater surroundings. I broke my own boundary! This behaviour could become a little addictive, what a wonderful way to start the weekend.

Now that I think about it this reminds me of another article I wrote a while ago called "Challenge The Brick Wall" which is on this blog as well. It's fascinating how the mind and people work with the world… Isn't it!


Take care Patrick

Iconic pop-culture imagery from the past

 

This post originated from one of those spontaneous ideas that just occurred to one out of the blue. "Where the heck did the original test pattern used on old-school TVs come from and why to to bizarre picture?" I got quite excited about the idea and just a little while ago started digging into it. Almost instantly however I found a website called "Print" with an article entitled "Deciphering the Language of TV Test Patterns" by Stephen Heller which pretty much gives you all the information you could ever want in two minutes. So that took away my thunder.

"Wacky Pack" sticker.
Photo by Tom Gill
License CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Still though there is something to be said about enduring iconic imagery. I suspect if you're born in the 60s or earlier the test pattern is a major icon for you. So what will be the iconic images of today? Immediately I would say "the Internet" but it really doesn't have a universal symbol. There are some general ones, and definitely one which indicates Wi-Fi but nothing super specific where everyone around the world would know right away "that picture represents... Something." Where 90% of the people seeing the image would understand what it's referring to immediately.

I wonder if we are getting away from, iconic imagery in general? My childhood was certainly loaded with them even if a good chunk of that was thanks to commercial advertising.

 
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holder  Thomas Altfather Good

The Campbell's Soup can comes to mind (The four 50th Anniversary "Art Of Soup" Campbell's Tomato Soup cans featuring a facsimile autograph by, portrait of, and quote from,Andy Warhol. The commemorative cans were released on 2012-09-02 at Target Stores. They contain actual tomato soup.) Does anyone remember the "Wacky Pack" stickers that came out in the 70s they were kind of a mad magazine artwork format where they would do a take off on products?   I'll include images in this article if I can find copyright cleared examples.) There appears to be quite a big online hobbyist community dedicated to just Wacky Pack stickers so click Wacky Pack link if you really want to go down memory lane. For now I'll post a few images in this article.

 As you can tell I'm writing this on the fly because I really do want to get something posted tonight.

Maybe we will look back a few years now and the icon of the early 21st century will be the cell phone.

"Wacky Pack" sticker.
Photo by Tom Gill
License CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Although I must admit it won't be too exciting to look at. When a cell phone is turned off it looks like a black rectangle. Perhaps this is a time in to the old sci-fi movie 2001 a space Odyssey in which a mysterious "black rectangle" is discovered at several points in the movie.

What other icons or images helped shape my early life?… Oh I have one "The How And Why Wonder Books" series of books. Just the perfect kind of reading material for a young Geek mind. I had a small orange crate to hold my collection of maybe 15 to 20 books. They were great.

There was the original series Star Trek. But that's really not worth covering here because Star Trek iconography is still tremendously popular and all over the Internet. There are people out there that could do a much better job at covering its associated iconic symbols than I ever could.

Wonder Bread postcard 1961.
Photo by Steve Shook
License CC BY 2.0

Heck as a child even our bread was an icon. The "Wonder Bread" pattern was all over the place.

If this article sparks any imagery or iconic symbols for you. Let me know in the comments and we will keep adding to this post.

Take care and I will try to post another item in 24 to 48 hours. It is been very busy this week which is why there is been the disruption. Okay now let's see if I can find all the iconic artwork necessary for this post 😀.

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4.0 International license.
Photo by James Vaughan

Take care Patrick

Where does one find the time?

I don't know about you, but lately the amount of things I have to do seems to be going up and up.

To make matters more interesting the reason seems to be that we know what were doing for certain tasks and that other people are somehow missing the experience or the knack. I don't want to leave people and projects high and dry. For the last few months it seems every weekend I find myself saying "Next weekend I am taking it off." But inevitably something comes up. It may not be directly related to work but it's just enough to consume chunks of the weekend or one's free time. Right now for example I'm already thinking about tomorrow morning. There is a server that needs work, a guide needs to be written, someone else need today for a consultation. If you been reading my blog this is good news for you because that consultation has to do with another article I wrote a month or two ago about smart assistance for the disabled. I can't remember the title right off hand but I'll make sure there's a link.

Anyway this is a supershort entry and I'm going to set the blog to release it tomorrow morning at 9 AM. With a little bit of luck all find some time during the day. To add a more meaningful article or at least start one.

Take care Patrick (and of course stay tuned.)

Your Perfect Memories Of The Past: A Product of Our Time.

  "A Product of Our Time..."

Whenever people speculate about the future or indeed consider the past, we always do so knowingly and unknowingly through psychological and social filters. I find this fascinating. It means that unless a person is very careful, bias of one form or another always sneaks in. Maybe we do it subconsciously most of the time to make the topic more relatable, to bend it a little bit to our worldviews.

A few moments ago, I was speaking with someone who has a rather severe disability and they were complaining about our current government in Canada, saying things like "10 years ago it wasn't like this. We had more freedom." Their dialogue continued for a while, and I was struck by the fact that for this person everything appeared to be better in the past.

Now regardless of your political views, I do believe that we've moved considerably forward on most social fronts. I remember when wheelchair cutaways (ramps) and sidewalks were nonexistent in the lower mainland of British Columbia. My life is been long enough that I have met some of the people that started the political momentum to get ramps put into sidewalks. I accept that my own memories are biased as well, because things weren't as easy as they are now in many ways. You don't have to go back too far, and the very devices you are using now to read this post were not only nonexistent, they were impossible to implement. So when looking to the past we really are doing so from the point of view of the here and now.

So I have a hunch that if we could have perfect memories of the past, we would end up appreciating the present a lot more. I wonder how that would change people? Think about it, it would be a profound ability and I suspect it would be somewhat of a burden. Maybe technology in the not too distant future will give us the ability to one day start a recording device at birth which preserves a perfect record of one's life. Imagine being able to review any event in your life. Boy I'm sure that would change one's perspective on a lot of things.

Even though such a device wouldn't be a perfect record since it couldn't include the entire context of the experience and would definitely give us much more to go on. It is a really fascinating thought. Your own "History Archive".

When I ponder this whole idea three things come to mind, especially when considering, the profound impact the information might have.

1. Would you want to be able to delete information and memories? Presuming if you did this, if you then accidentally forgot the memory the information would be gone forever. So the question isn't as clear as it first seems
   .
2. What if you discovered that your biological recount of an event didn't at all match the perfect historical record? What effect would that have on you? Presuming that the historical record could only be deleted not modified.
   
   
3. Knowing everything is being recorded how would that affect your behaviour, or would you just get used to it and act naturally regardless?

It is likely to some degree at some point people and society will have to face some aspects of this. As a matter of fact we are there now to a small extent. The Internet collectively stores a great deal of information about you and I. Should it be preserved? For let's say, cultural historians?

Wow, these are questions that I don't believe the human race has ever really had to contend with up until now. I started this article off thinking about past and our perception. Now we have ended up talking about the future and considering the recorded record we are all making.

Food for thought, indeed.

Take care Patrick

Yahoo, it's the beloved weekend! (Free Photos)

License: Non Commercial
No Derivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

 Yahoo, it's the beloved weekend! Here's a few free photos.

I can't think of much to write today. Myself and my brain are just not in that space.

Although usually I can come up with something to say almost instantly today, for whatever reason-The Rabbits Just Aren't There (and I have no idea what I mean by that last statement, because it just occurred to me and since I do most of my typing by voice dictation it just came out and I think it sounds rather cool.)

So for today I am just going to post some pictures I've taken over the years using various cameras and edited with Corel PaintShop Pro Ultimate. (Software publishers site.) If anything strikes your fancy you are free to download it and use it as you wish. I hereby declare that anything you see in this post which is using this domain is in the public domain.

I do have a few photographs for purchase up on Displate. If you've never heard of this company they print artwork on metal with the result being that the posters are held on the wall by simple magnets. They ship all over the world.

Okay here in no particular order are a few photos taken over the years.

All but the last one, which is a picture of the Sun Tower taken in Vancouver are in their original full-size files. Simply click on the photo. Unfortunately the original of the Sun Tower has been lost to time. 

The photos were taken across the lifespan of three cameras: (Links to the Canon Camera Museum.)

• Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III
• Canon PowerShot SX120 SI
• Canon PowerShot SX620 HS

Enjoy your weekend and continue to have a great day.

Patrick

PS: This post will scroll off the front page of the blog in about 10 days. If you would like to revisit it easily click this link and bookmark the resulting page. Tip:All posts can be permanently bookmarked in your browser by clicking on their title and then bookmarking their own webpage. You will know you have the correct page when you see only one article.

 Click photo to enlarge, and then right-click, to save.

Also available on Displate as a metal poster. Direct link here.

 

 

Also available on Displate as a metal poster. Direct link here.