Category: Personal

4 Steps to Keeping New Year’s Resolutions

This post is from the SMUG Department of Philosophy. It isn’t about social media as much as it’s about personal growth. But in keeping with the rest of the SMUG curriculum, it’s based on my practical experience, and what has worked for me. In writing it I’m mainly reminding myself to apply what I’ve learned, so that in the coming year I might repeat my occasional successes instead of my more plentiful failures. If it helps you, so much the better.

In other words, it’s SMUG philosophy, not smug philosophy.

More often than not, January 1 has essentially taken me by surprise, like I didn’t even see it coming. As I overdosed on college football and enjoyed what was typically the last day of a break from the office, I suddenly realized I was at the start of whole new year and that I should think of some things I want to change. And without exception, those New Year’s resolutions have been shoved to the back burner within the next couple of weeks, and usually much more quickly.

But I have had some instances in which I was able to make meaningful long-term changes. So as I reflect on them, I want to draw some insights and tips that will help me as I look to mend my ways in 2009. You might consider applying them, too.

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Flip Video of High School Sports

The Flip video camera, which SMUGgles know I like a lot, does a reasonably decent job of capturing video of sporting events, as long as they’re in a relatively small venue.

Here’s video I shot last night, of my daughter’s high school basketball team in their home opener. They won the game 68-40.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1eyB-OsUnE]

If you click through to view the video directly on YouTube (instead of embedded), you can choose “Watch in High Quality,” which is a significant improvement.

Maybe for the next game I’ll try a tripod with the Flip. I really like how it saves time in digitizing though, as compared with shooting miniDV and having to import the tape. Being able to just copy the files to the hard drive and import into iMovie instead of playing an entire tape to digitize and import cuts the production time roughly in half.

Here, for comparison, is a video I shot last year with a Panasonic MiniDV camera. I’m not sure what my encoding settings were (probably not very good), but the video I shot with the Flip seems to compare favorably with this:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEz2iW8d0p0]

Given its relatively non-existent zoom (it only goes to 2x, and that’s a digital zoom, not optical), you need to be pretty close to the action to get decent game video with a Flip. But given its speed and ease of use, I think the quality is acceptable (provided you keep your finger from creeping into the viewfinder.)

Thanksgiving Reflections 2008

As I noted two years ago in Top 10 Reasons I’m Thankful, and to Whom, my performance in composing annual Christmas letters was spotty in the B.B. (Before Blog) era. Doing a family newsletter was such a production that procrastination (and eventually abject failure) was the most frequent outcome.

But that all changed in 2006, and I followed it up last year with another compilation (though that one was in December, on my daughter Rachel’s first wedding anniversary).

My new tradition is not only to beat what was formerly the Christmas snail mail crush, but to have my year-in-review distributed before the Black Friday sales have even begun.

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A Sobering and Sad Yet Proud Day

I’m not talking about the national elections (except a bit at the end.) I experienced all of these emotions before noon yesterday, as we attended the funeral for my aunt Donna, who passed away Nov. 1 after having Alzheimer’s for about 13 years. A funeral is always sobering, but Donna’s was more so personally because she was my Mom’s sister, and she developed symptoms when she was just 55. I’m only 10 years younger now than she was then. It makes me realize anew how precious each day is.

Donna’s husband Rod has been amazing through the whole process, first caring for her at home and then faithfully going to visit her every day in the nursing home, even when she long ago ceased to recognize him. Rod exemplified “in sickness and in health…as long as you both shall live.” I want to honor him and tell the world how thankful we are for his love for Donna, and how proud we are of him. So I just did.

picture-61

Another proud moment came in the afternoon, when we returned home and took the family out for our civic experience in voting. My daughter Rebekah cast her first ballot.

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Bekah and her parents contributed 3 votes of Sen. Norm Coleman’s (at this writing) 762-vote margin over Al Franken in the Minnesota U.S. Senate race, with 99 percent of precincts reporting. A recount is coming, but we don’t have hanging or dimpled chads like Florida (we mostly have optical scanning of fill-in-the-circle ballots), and the precincts outstanding are from remote areas of the northern Minnesota  arrowhead where there probably aren’t enough votes to make up the difference.

So it was a day of mixed emotions, but the big lesson we took from Uncle Rod is that how you handle adversity is what matters most, and from the election we again saw that every vote counted. And in the Minnesota Senate race, it will be counted again.