On Apple

Last week, Apple announced the latest stamping of its iPhone property: The iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c. Phil Schiller first introduced the newly-conceived 5c. It is a "beautiful" plastic phone with pricing from $99 on-contract. The crowed cheered just a little less enthusiastically than in years past. Maybe its because everyone already knew that it was coming.

What is stunning to me is that after this product announcement, Apple's stock tumbled 5%.
And 5% of $500 is significant. 
The reason Apple's stock fell isn't because the new iPhones aren't a great product.
It's that the analysts at wallstreet weren't happy with the pricing.
See, the iPhone 5c is a $99 phone. Apple's competition has phones for that price and even cheaper.
And in the years since Android and Samsung have come on the scene, Apple has been losing market share. According to the analysts, the iPhone 5c isn't cheap enough to allow Apple to gain back the segment that it created.
It may be a fantastic device.
It may even be an engineering marvel.
But someone, somewhere, published a report stating that it won't gain market share.
And therefore, people bailed out their Apple stock, sending the price down.

There are two problems with this thinking.
The first is that the market listens to analysts.
In the past few months that i've been paying attention to markets, i've learned enough to know that "analysts" don't have any idea what they're talking about, especially when it comes to tech stocks.

The second problem is more fundamental.
The analysts assume that "market share" = "success".

I believe that if Steve Jobs was still alive, the analysts wouldn't have dared to make such a report.
Because Steve Jobs never seemed to be after "market share".
His persona was someone who worked in "beautiful" and "magical".
He talked about numbers, sure.
But he always made products for his own sake, not for the mass market.

If Apple is still following its late cofounder's lead, then the analysts are dead wrong to assume that Apple's success lies with its market share.



I believe that we all face our own challenge with "analysts". People hold opinions of each other based on a combination of outward actions and the internal assumptions of the "analyst". I can accomplish something that makes me successful in my own eyes, but to someone else I may not be gaining market share.
The best thing that I can do is to ignore people who don't measure success the same way I do, and to continue pushing myself regardless of opinions.

Duration

Time is absolutely flying by. I noticed today that it feels like paychecks are coming more and more often- i measure time by weeks now, instead of by days. This is pretty frightening to me. I have a list of books that I intend to read concerning not getting stuck in a boring unfulfilling routine. But I suppose the real trick is to just "do something". I feel very much like this past summer escaped me and I have nothing to show for it. Every saturday, I tell myself that I need a project to work on. Instead, I end up lazing around. I'm not sure how to get the cure for this. I'll keep you posted.

On Proximity

We're coming up on the first Autumn in 18 years that I don't have to go to school. It's every bit as surreal as you'd expect. Thinking about school reminded me of a thought that I kept coming back to all last year.
I took a music credit both semesters of last year. It counted nothing towards my degree, but I finally decided to take upright bass lessons with one of the best players in our area. It was a lot of work, but in many ways it was a lot more fun and more rewarding than my coursework. That could have been entirely because it allowed me to escape from my engineering courses and hole up in a practice room. After all, practicing was required coursework. It was for school. I had to.

What truly fascinated me was how close the two buildings are together. That is, the art building and the science/engineering building. Their entrances are literally on opposite sides of the same road. And they are, together, the two largest buildings on UNH's campus. Yet for all their proximity and relative sizes, they are worlds apart on the inside.

Inside the science/engineering building are clean modern classrooms that were built in 2005. Students pour over textbooks at all hours of the day and night. The 24/7 unlocked doors provide access to project rooms whenever necessary. There is a dedicated library inside, just for engineering texts. In a word, the building is designed to be accommodating to its students. The system is designed to maximize success.

Inside the art building are cement-block walls from the 60s that have never been renovated. Students pour over music and studio projects. The doors lock at a reasonable hour most days, which means that the students sometimes break into the building in order to get their practicing or projects done on time. The system is not as nice to the art students. It forces them to break rules, and bends them until they create what their professors want.

I have no insight into art education, though I believe it may be broken. But I am floored by these two buildings. Because when I thought about it, they represent two very fundamental ideas that separate humanity from the rest of the world.
We frequently consider "art" to mean "expression". That is, you can consider anything as "art" if it is the product of someone's imagination, a free-flowing work from inside of someone's mind. Animals do not generally exhibit art-making behavior. It is a concept unique to us, that you can draw a picture and I can appreciate it, and somehow you can express very complicated ideas that could never be vocalized, and relate them without saying a word.

And on the other side of the "right-brain left-brain" is Mathematics, another fundamental concept unique to humans. Mathematics is a tool that we've created, and yet are still trying to discover. It is a completely different form of expression, one that uses numbers and expressions to model the universe that we live in.

For some reason or another, individuals tend to specialize in either "art" or "math". We put the buildings right next to each other, but few people manage to use both of them. The mere proximity isn't enough to make artists out of engineers, or mathematicians out of musicians.

Not sleeping.

This blog post is a letter to a specific individual. If it makes no sense to you, just imagine it as a creative writing exercise.
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Here's a story that I never tell people, partly because I loath having a diagnosis as a crutch.
The summer after the 8th grade, I was prescribed Prozac by a psychiatrist. We had been seeing him because I was diagnosed with a Nonverbal Learning Disorder. Go ahead and read the wikipedia. I just did, and honestly I was surprised at how well it pins me down. The doctor's reason for the Prozac included some kind of mumbo jumbo about "switching gears" and "holding on" to things too much. I never noticed a difference. Before I left for the weeklong NNED summer camp, I decided that instead of dealing with the incredible hassle and embarrassment of bringing medication to a teen camp and having to go to the nurse for each dose, I would simply not take the medicine to camp. My parents were fine with this idea, because I think all of us thought it was ridiculous that I was taking prozac in the first place.

After we told the doctor that I wouldn't be taking the medicine for a week, he gave me a stern look and said that if my behavior were to get me in trouble, that it would be my fault for not continuing the medicine.

I don't think I will ever forget how I felt after the conversation I had with that psychiatrist. I was physically upset because he had implied that I would have behavior problems due to not taking my prozac. That some how, chemicals were the only thing keeping me from being an insane child that needed mental help. The man didn't know me, but he had diagnosed me. That's not fair.

Here's a challenge. Me and you are out of touch. The only actual conversations that we've had in the past 2 years have been sitting down, in an office, with serious faces. Please honestly consider that you cannot be a judge of my character if you have not spent significant time with me. You need to talk, laugh, and dream with someone before you know their character. If anything is offensive to me about this situation, it is that you have diagnosed me, like a psychiatrist.

I wrote this as an email to myself in April. It is something that I've struggled with for a very long time:
"Im tired of fighting for my ideas. I dont have anyone who believes in me as a partner. I went to Troy but couldn't get anyone to visit the largest walmart in noth america with me. I went to engineering school alone with no support from anyone at the church. I worked on a project at work for a summer and no one supported the research I did on the EPA's diesel regulations. I did my senior project alone. I had a hard time getting people to play music with me, the one time it was for course credit. I hate sticking up for myself because deep down i feel like I shouldn't have to. Growing up, people always tell you to think for yourself and to be an individual, but what they really mean is to "think anything you want, as long as you think like me." 

My parents switched churches about ten years ago and never looked back. I've had plenty of conversations with them about why. The most of a reason that I could get is that they "just didn't fit". And that is completely alright. In fact, that's precisely why there are so many churches in the US. I'm not just saying that I "don't fit". I think I believe it.

I get along with plenty of people. But for some reason, I do not get along with the select handful of people who really matter in this situation. And that is why I am not convinced that its Me. I believe that there is a culture of offense in churches. I offend you, you offend me, and then neither of us talk about it until our friendship has disintegrated. In the "real world", which I am suddenly privileged to be a part of, people talk about their problems. But more often than not, we simply don't offend each other. When I understand that no one is being intentionally malicious to me, all the offensive old people that I work with are hilarious, and I genuinely enjoy hanging out with them.
Somehow, in the church, everyone takes everyone else with grave sincerity. That's a load of hooplah, and I don't want to attend a church where we can't make fun of each other.

But I will play along, at least for now. If you squeeze something hard enough, it will fit in just about anywhere.

Change

Just read this:
" If you adopt the rhythm of stability, then change is a threat. Adopt the rhythm of change, though, and you'll get restless right on schedule."
-Seth Godin

He's talking about how, when we're kids, we have the yearly change of moving to a new grade. Then we turn 18 and maybe go to college, but when that's over, its it. I'm feeling that right now- I could live the next 33 years with no change. Sure, I have some major life decisions left: marriage, house, kids, retirement. But I'm already restless about being stuck. I need to figure out how to get into a rhythm of change, before i've missed all the chances.

Genius

Read this in my Roman Civ textbook and couldn't pass it by:

"Every man has his own customs and his own religious practices. Similarly, the divine mind has given to different cities different religious rites which protect them. And, just as each man receives at birth his own soul, so, too, does each nation receive a genius [guardian spirit] which guides its destiny."
-Symmachus, Dispatches to the Emperor

That passage was written in the year 384, as part of a protest against Christianity's rising dominance in Rome.
It caught my eye because Symmachus mentions the idea of national spirits, which the Bible mentions in passing in Daniel:
"I have come to answer your prayer. But for twenty-one days the spirit prince of the kingdom of Persia blocked my way. Then Michael, one of the archangels, came to help me, and I left him there with the spirit prince of the kingdom of Persia." -Daniel 10:12/13

One subject that I have always wanted to learn more about is the intersection between Judaism and Greek culture/religion. Because I think that it must exist somewhere. Here we have a late-era Roman senator fighting against Christianity, and using language that we generally don't accept in Western thought, but that would have made perfect sense in Daniel's time.

Daniel presents us with the idea that nations are alive, that they have representatives outside of the physical world, and that they fight each other.
This is very much like Greek and even the Roman view of the gods.

I continue to believe that modern christianity has lost the vast nuance of ancient understanding somewhere in our quest for systematic theology.

Space between Words

I just went to a thesis recitation from some grad students in UNH's English department. It was entirely outside of my routine. The pieces included creative writing, poetry, journalism, and a novel. I attended specifically for the journalist, but the poet mentioned something in one of her tormented, grief-stricken poems about death: "the space between words."
I don't remember what, if anything, she had to say about it. Her pieces were stream-of-consciousnesses and hard to follow as a recitation. But it struck me that she for some reason or another found interest in the space between words.

As a musician, I've heard it said that "space" is one of the most important and under-appreciated parts of music- that the notes we don't play are just as crucial as the notes we do.
I've heard critical comparisons of "yesterday's music" to "modern pop music" where the major difference is the amount of "space": classic rock has room to breath, so to speak, and the instruments sit loosely with each other. Modern music is much more tightly packed, with studio limiters turned all the way up to give the illusion of loudness. And people of all types generally agree that the space that we used to put around notes is a good thing.

My senior capstone project uses little chips for sensing temperature and for software-controlled switches. The product line I chose is called "1wire" because the devices receive their power from the same wire that they send data on. (using only one wire between them: 1wire). The design challenge that this presents is that when a device is using the line to send data, everything else connected loses their power source. (the line is pulled high when idle, and when a device uses it, it gets pulled low.) This requires that each 1wire device has a little capacitor inside that stores enough energy to allow it to "hold its breath" when the line is in use and then recharge when the line is let go. If something keeps the line low for too long, all the devices in the chain will eventually use up their stored energy and reset themselves. Communication over a 1wire buss requires space between commands in order to work.

I think people must fundamentally be the same way.
When I have something important to say, I find myself talking slower, giving space around each word.
And I think about all the sermons or lectures I've sat through where the stream of words coming at me was so endless and deprived of space that I simply stopped listening.
Picture this:
You're stuck in a conversation with someone and you're distracted.
Maybe something is happening outside, like a sudden steam leak or a guy riding a unicycle, and it has stolen your attention from the person you were talking to. They continue to talk and you continue to nod and fake your engagement while secretly wishing that they would let you go investigate that sudden steam leak.
And then, they pause, mid-sentence.
Their words stop.

What do you do?

You realize that you've been caught. You turn your head and look them in the eye and maybe apologize for being distracted. Or maybe you pretend that nothing exciting is happening outside and that you really were present for the whole conversation.

Regardless, this is what occurred:
A space in between words caught your attention.

We become so used to words without spaces in between them that a pause is truly meaningful.
Perhaps, like 1wire, we need the pauses to catch our breath.
But people tend to avoid silence.
Silence is scary in a conversation. It means that someone is thinking instead of talking. It forces you to think, too. Maybe that's why we don't like the spaces between things. A space is somewhere that isn't, and that is just too meaningful for us to enjoy.

I would like to bring back space as a part of what I do.
If I play less notes, I will have to be more deliberate about the ones that I do play.
If I say less words, I will have to think about what I say before I say it.
If we let our conversations have pauses, we will be able to make better decisions.
If our lives have pauses between running around doing this or that, we will be able to enjoy the time that we actually have. We shouldn't need to take a vacation to hawaii in order to notice the ocean. We should have that space built-in to our lives.

Pacific

I have never particularly paid attention to the ocean before. But being in the middle of the pacific is a whole new experience.  I noticed the waves for the first time in a long while. It was very interesting to fly over the ocean between Oahu and Hawaii, because you could look out the window and just see water forever in every direction. But the water out there in the open ocean is just so calm. Like the water is peaceful. My dad said thats why they called it the pacific, and i think that i believe him. But sitting on beaches around this island, the rhythm of the ocean is very clear. There is a wave front that washes up on the beach and as it falls back into the water it runs into the next front which struggles to overtake it before reaching the beach again. The ocean pulses with energy just like our voices fill the air with energy. The ocean is talking to us. When the weather is calm, the ocean is peaceful. When the weather is rough, the ocean cries out to us.

I also never really paid attention to streetlights before our trip to Hawaii.
One of the most striking things about the island that we weren't expecting is how downright dark it as on the roads. Away from cities, there are no lights. And inside of cities, the only lights are dim, yellow LPS lamps spread rather thin around the road. I showed my family the craziness of the single-spectrum LPS light by showing them different colored soda cans in a walmart parking lot. The light turns everything "black and white" looking, as in, the color disappears.
I did some quick googling and confirmed my hunch that the yellow-only light is due to a law that supports all of the observatories on Mauna Kea. As in, the work of the astronomers on the island is so important that public policy has allowed them to control what kind of outdoor lighting is in use across the island. I find this quite fascinating. It makes me want to live on Hawaii, because Hawaii is awesome and cares about scientists. But the absence of light pollution made me think about light pollution. Why do we light up everything so brightly? Why do we make our planet glow at night, spending gobs and gobs of electricity just in case we want to see something?

I've also been thinking about airports.
Every time we went through an airport or got off of a plane during our vacation, I sincerely wanted to work in the airline industry. There are so many things that are just plain broken about it. I became acutely aware of the amount of time people waste in airports. You have a connecting flight with a 2 hour layover. Well, that's 2 hours of your life that you want to be traveling, but you are stationary. Airports have figured out this apparent 2-hour time suck. You spend twenty minutes waiting to get off of the plane, twenty minutes trying to figure out where your next terminal is, twenty minutes getting yourself there, twenty minutes in line for another TSA checkpoint, twenty minutes in line for a bagel... and sure enough, after you're done being lost and confused and angry at the people who design airports, you are just in time to board your next flight.
Whether intentional or not, airports are designed to waste time.
In fact, nearly all of them very much resemble malls on the inside. There are overpriced shops all over the place, and at the very end of your miserable walk through all of them, your terminal awaits you like an anchor store. I think that malls are also designed to waste our time, only instead of travel, they waste it with shopping. There ought to be some statistic out there comparing how much time people spend in malls and how many things they actually buy.

Being in Hawaii made me very aware of how we were spending our time. We spent a lot of time driving places. Sometimes it felt like a waste of time, like when we were driving back and forth between places. But most of the time it was an adventure. We were exploring Hawaii. The goal of driving was to get somewhere, leave the car, and experience the island. We therefore spent many hours tromping around on frozen lava flows, hiking a volcanic crater, snorkeling, eating at restaurants, and visiting with family. When it comes down to it, the time in the car wasn't wasted at all because there was always some incredible scenery outside the window, and always some conversation happening inside.

I thought about how back home, I spend countless hours on the internet. I waste so much time not doing anything in particular. I think we all probably spend far too much of our time not telling a story. Somehow, Hawaii didn't fall victim to that. We spent as much time as possible exploring and having an experience. With 60 days until my college graduation, I can't recall the last time I was able to spend a week just experiencing things. I hole up in my room tricking myself into thinking that i'm doing homework. Or maybe I actually do school work. We don't notice the ocean because we're too busy working. We don't think about our streetlights because we're too busy driving.
It may be that I noticed so many things during this one week trip because I wasn't distracted with anything else. I didn't work on my senior project, I just enjoyed being.
 
I'm trying to figure out how to use my time like we did on Hawaii.
I don't want to let any of it go to waste.

A Million Miles

I just got back home from a one-week family vacation to Hawaii.
The last time we took a family vacation, I think I was 12, so it has been about 10 years.
The background is that my aunt moved to the Big Island over the summer for a new job and my mom decided that during spring break, we should all go down and visit and see hawaii. Hawaii!

I can't possibly sum up the week as a blog, other than stating that one week is not long enough to visit Hawaii. But I do have lots of things I've been thinking about.

First, time.
There is a 6 hour time difference between the East Coast and Hawaii. This means that our 11-hour plane ride there from new york was actually only 5 hours long. Subsequently, we left Hawaii at 8pm saturday night and arrived at our house more than 24 hours later.

But time is so much more than just the numbers on our clocks.
That week in Hawaii was a trip that stopped time.
Perhaps because of the jetlag, none of us could ever keep straight what day of the week it was.
By the time Friday rolled around and we were exploring Volcano National Park, Wednesday's coral reef snorkeling felt simultaneously  an instant and a year in the past. The Island is so diverse and varied, and we saw so much and did so many things that it all became a blur of the past. I have immediate, happy memories of this vacation.

And yet, this was a family vacation.
Every moment of it felt like I was 12 again.
School disappeared and it was just me and my brother sharing the backseat of a rental car while Mom and Dad carted us around to all the things we had to see. These memories became memories of a time that was literally 10 years ago, and may be 10 years into the future, as well.

I left hawaii absolutely dreading to have class tomorrow morning. Vacation should last forever. There are too many mountains to climb and too much lava to see.

This trip is also significant because I started and finished a book on the plane. Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years has been in my pile of books for a while and I figured I'd finally give it a go. And that book sure did speak to me.
It's significant because Don's point in the book is that we need to be using our lives to live stories, interesting ones. Hawaii is a story to me. But this trip isn't the whole thing. I feel as if that little (big) island started a chapter of a story in my life. I feel almost how people talk about feeling when they come home from missions trips, all bubbly about how such and such a country changed their life and everyone needs to go there to experience the wonderment. There is some sort of inexplicable pull and draw for me now. Like, now that I've been there, and spent a week trying to pronounce the names of places, and driven all over and shopped at their walmarts, that it is a familiar place to me. That I should want to visit any chance I get and be exited any time someone mentions the Big Island. The same way I feel about Troy, where I called home for 9 months and spent uncountable energy exploring and habitating.

But most of all, it drops me off back here, at UNH, with 2 months left before I have the great and sincere privilege of beginning a life so expectedly boring that I am honestly quite frightened about it.
Don reminded me that I never really wanted a boring and regular desk job, but has left me asking myself what I could possibly expect myself to do about it.

Don also has me thinking that I need to start recording my memories, so that I can't forget them and so that I can figure out the story of where I've been.

2 months

Sometimes, you go through a season where time just straight disappears. I returned to my dorm room just now and realized that it had been 12 days since i crossed off a day on my calendar.
2 months from now, I will be graduating UNH with an engineering degree.
There might be some blogs here shortly.

Registration

Today, I registered for 3 things:
-The Undergraduate Research Conference, where I must present my senior design project.
-The FE Exam, the first of a long process to becoming a Professional Engineer.
-Intent to Graduate, where I tell UNH where to send my diploma.

It is the last one, which was the easiest form, that was the hardest to submit. I've been getting away with calling myself a student for almost 17 years. I've been a student in 3 states. Soon, I will no longer qualify for discounts on Adobe software and Apple products.

It is downright surreal.

Resolution

I'm somewhat agnostic towards New Years Resolutions, but here's something I've resolved for 2013:
I'm not going to be bullied.
I'm not going to let adults talk at me like I'm a child.
And when I am pushed, I will push back.

This came from a discussion that I had with my father this past weekend.
I know this sounds super college-graduation-trite, but as I've gotten older, I have developed more and more respect (and thanks) for my parents.