ThoughtBlip

So it’s been a while….thoughts have come and gone, many never to return I’m sure.

 I recently went through a serious neck injury.  It happened in an inflatable obstacle course during a teambuilding even at work.  We were all supposed to take turns racing through the obstacle course in a relay race - where the total time for each team would be used to determine the winning team.  The beginning of the course is a wall with a hole in it.  The person before me sprinted at the wall and dove through the hole - and then returned a minute or two later to tag me to go.  I ran at it as he did, dove through the hole, tucked to roll, and WHOOMP!  I went clean past the second obstacle and crashed into a wall.  It forced my head down harder and farther than you can imagine - chin to chest - and then some.  It was a horrible sensation, and every now and then I have a vivid recollection of it happening - something like a flashback where I can feel the immediate pain and tension. 

 I felt a pop.  I remember thinking “Oh sh*t, did I just pull a Christopher Reeve” and I froze.  My arms were buzzing, tingling, prickling all over as if they were plugged into sockets.  I made sure to stay completely still - not wanting to move, afraid I might actually paralyze or kill myself.  I thought to wiggle my toes, and they WORKED!  I tell people that was the happiest moment of my life outside of my son being born.  I could still feel my legs and my feet.. I then remember thinking to myself, literally, “As long as I don’t f*** it up, and as long as the paramedics don’t f*** it up, I’ll be OK… they can fix this”….Just had to make sure there wouldn’t be any further nerve damage. 

 The buzzing subsided - still felt weird… pain in my neck, back, and arms started setting in.  People kept pushing up against the inflatable course, which I was still lying on, to see what happened - inadvertently bouncing me around… I had to keep yelling to tell everyone to stay off…. I yelled for ice - to put an ice pack on the back of my neck to stop the swelling….it was very cold, but felt very good.  I wanted to minimize swelling to prevent any pressure on my spinal cord or nerves - just in case.

Face down on the vinyl/plastic surface - unable to move…skin on my cheek sticking to the weird material - and spit from my mouth smearing around…I was happy to stay put.  Happy to know that my spinal cord wasn’t severed - yet very scared not knowing what happened to me.. Did I break something?  Were there bone fragments from my spine floating around?  What would happen when I was moved?

Paramedics arrived - seemed like forever for them to get there… I’m thinking 20 minutes, but like one can tell in that position…. I’m sure I lost any real sense of time.  Man did they do a great job - I was in pain, but they were still able to get me onto a board - secure me, and lift me out into the ambulance without any sharp or scary pains… What a relief it was after I was moved and secured.

 I still couldn’t relax though - I was kind of sideways on the board, not quite centered… my body wanted to slump off to the left, I think it was.  My head was secured firmly though, so if I were to relax my body would have moved relative to my head - not good… I had to hold myself in position - one hand gripping the other to make sure I stayed completely fixed…

That’s all I can write now - will finish the story later….need to get up early for work, but it does feel good to write this down…. I want to get to the main point about how something like this changes you - your perspective - immediately - harshly- without hesistation…With an abruptness achieved in no other way than by something like this - something sudden, tragic, demanding immediate reflection, something you cannot turn away from because you have no other choice.  This is what happened to me.  Will write more soon.

I’m sure this has been thought of before, or at least wished for before… but imagine if you were able to simply plug your old spare computers together on a network and configure them to join a group of other computers… as a part of the whole… (I’m stealing the “Borg” name from StarTrek for now because of the “assimilation” factor).

Users of the “virtual” computer would not need to know or care when computers are added or removed from the Borg…all they would see is more HD space and an impact to performance.

 In a simple scenario, I can imagine the following:

1. installing a “Borg” on one computer with an identity. 
2. booting, say, a spare old laptop with, say, a bootstrap CD that will simply get the laptop up and running, and ask which Borg to connect to.
3. once connected to the Borg, the laptop is assimilated.

You wouldn’t have to interact directly with any of the hardware or peripherals - you’d just connect from another computer via a remote server display… or via another Borg.  File systems would automatically be merged into logical space, and mirrored.. the Borg would be fault tolerant once enough hardware was added so that if any single machine failed, it would be able to recover by shuffling information around from the parity or redundant data storage….

A system like this on current hardware without a large hardware base would be very slow given all the above overhead… but I can imagine the system being able to grow in power as hardware is added and removed, and processing is distributed among the hardware in the Borg… and much like TCP/IP where there can be redundant routing paths for reliability, there could be redundant processing requests so that computational failures and network outages don’t impact performance as one would initially assume…

The Borg itself would not be centralized - it would have to be a virtual system that is distributed, amorphous, constantly changing as people plug their systems into the Borg, and take them away…. It could even be possible to donate part of your system to the Borg, like with the search for extra terrestrial life….or all of the system to the Borg… When you are ready to remove your computer from the Borg, the Borg could even reinstall and configure an OS for you, or restore a backup… essentially allowing you to plug in, donate HW, restore to a previous state, and then unplug.

 Just a thought…

Everyone has heard the saying that “time waits for no man” or something like it.

Putting “something” off is to time as going into debt is to money.  The weight on your mind from putting something off is the interest you pay.  Sometimes circumstances call the debt due when not only is it not convenient, but it is most inconvenient.  Moreover, there can be consequences.  Time can be even worse than the roughest loan shark when it comes to calling unpaid debts due.

I’ve often wondered about the relationship between intelligence and financial success…

Why is it that there are so many people that are extremely well-off financially, even if they’re not the sharpest tool in the shed?

I started writing up my thoughts on this, and it quickly grew into something grotesquely huge…it quickly became a sprawling post of thoughts that I needed to drop and whittle down… breaking the issue down into manageable pieces.

For example, some of the constituent parts are:

• What do we think of as “intelligence” when we say someone is smart, intelligent, bright, etc.?
• What do we think of as financially successful?

I’m quite certain that all of us stereotype others whether or not we think it’s right (and whether or not we think we even *do* stereotype others). 

Without going down that rat hole just yet, I still propose that there are many successful people that aren’t necessarily the smartest people… and that many, or possibly even most, of the smartest people are not the most successful people (or even successful at all).  We’ll work the details out on the evidence of this later, but assuming that you agree for now – what could the explanation be?

I think it must be based on statistics and personality.  People that are “dumb” enought to try something - to believe that something is possible.  Being too smart for your own good comes into play here.  How often have you heard someone say that “if I had known it was going to be this difficult, I would never have done it.” ?  But they did do it, and now they’re immensely successful.

The “statistics” part is being willing to try and try (and try) again.  It’s a numbers game in a sense – if you keep trying enough, eventually you’ll break out.  Just yesterday, my dad mentioned a metaphor of a baby chick trying to hatch out of the egg… they don’t give up pecking away just because the shell didn’t crack open the first time… they keep pecking, and pecking, and they break out of the shell.  If they don’t, well, you know what happens.

The personality part is not giving up.  Being willing to try something new.  Wanting something more.  Not settling for the status-quo.  Being willing to work hard for something you believe in.  Without having these traits in your personality, you just won’t keep pecking… and the numbers most likely won’t play out in your favor.

So, to sum it up, I think the personality traits can vastly outweigh the intelligence factor.  Being a little smart helps, but just because you may be smarter than the other guy doesn’t get you a free-ride into the “success club” without having to take any risks or having to do any hard work… 

You’ve got to take risks… you’ve got to work hard… and the sooner you do it, the more often you do it, the more likely it is that you’ll be successful.

AND – A single taste of success is all it takes to fuel the fire to succeed again..and again… no matter what failures come your way.

So here’s my first thoughtblip post.  I have visions of grandeur for this site, but alas, I will be happy to finally share some of my thoughts, views, and opinions.  Right now I’m in the middle of a Financial and Investment Analysis course for Commercial Real Estate, taught in S. Florida by Joseph Petrole.  He’s extremely knowledgeable in the Commercial RE space, and his website is: www.petrogroup.com.  OK, back to edumakating myself so maybe I’ll be able to make some $$$ one of these days…