Yarr harr! The pirate life for me!

Good morning, and happy Monday. Hope that the weekend went well and was eventful for all of my fine readers. Mine was relaxing. Splash of working out, some online classes, a book and cooked all of the food needed for my lunches this week. I also had every pirate theme song stuck in my head, bouncing around for really no reason.

It works for what I wanted to talk about today. Being carefree and taking life’s events in stride. Pirates, at least the ones that Hollywood has glamour us with, show this carefree nature. Alright, enough with pirates.

I talked about stress a few weeks ago, and this topic does kind of touch back to what I had been saying then. It is alright to have a little bit of stress in your life and to use it as a motivator. Knowing when to say “hell with it” and just let the events play out is another way to look at life.

There are moments in our lives that we have no control over. We can work hard towards a promotion but in the end it is someone else who decides if we get it or not. We can not force them to give it to us thinking that we are entitled simply because we worked hard. There should of course be some type of pay off for hard work that comes in the form of success and knowledge. This outlook applies a lot in the professional world, at least from what I have seen and been apart of. This thought can also be applied to someone’s personal life as well. Simply put, you can not force a person to love you.

There are a lot of actions we can take into our own hands, some leading into peace of mind or a successful life. I am going to end this with a quote I seen this morning.

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”

Have a wonderful day!

The weekend is upon us! So happy Friday!

Wow, not really sure why but I am excited this morning, and more awake then usual. Just have that extra skip to my step. Onwards to the small thought that popped up this morning.

As I was doing a small yoga routine this morning to help stretch myself out, I had two thoughts. One was my arms should not be this tight and sore two days after the workout. Need more bananas in my diet it seems, and there is nothing wrong with more fruit, and the farmers market is here today! Alright, not to get side tracked, the second thought was about education.

The education that I had been thinking about was not the traditional school learning, where you crack opens a book or takes a test. I was thinking more along the lines of education through experience. Participating in some form of workshop, getting that hands on experience. Doing something not for the sake of making money or because it is a job, but to gain some type of knowledge or skill or a better understanding of a craft.

It seems, from my perspective at least, that many individuals don’t want to push themselves to learn. They are content with following the same routine day in and day out, not taking an opportunity to peruse a learning experience that would open up their world to a new hobby or possibly a new profession.

There are tons of resources out in the world ranging from classes at a community center to the online community with YouTube videos. So many different avenues to go down that really are their no reason not to!

Myself personally, I have signed up to take part in a blacksmithing and lock picking class at the local Idea Foundry, which I can not wait to start. I also signed up for a few online courses in graphic design and agile development so that I can work on a few certificates. Then there is the skydiving…but that is more just try it out.

The options are out there, and you are never too old to start learning something new. More of comment to the younger readers. Do not worry about working to earn right now, especially if you are in school, work to learn instead.

The attitude you have towards may seem like such a small thing, but makes the world of difference.

Have an absolute wonderful weekend!

I would like to take a moment before going into this post today, to pay my respects for all of those that have been lost due to the explosion that happened in China yesterday.

A bit of a grim start, for that I am sorry, but on to the post! We did it readers; I made it over the half way mark for the week. Which means the weekend is right around the corner! Hopefully some sort of plans have been made or not made if you are planning to relax. I myself was looking into checking out this antique shop that I had stumbled across yesterday while I was out at lunch. Going to be exciting.

I want to loop back around today with this post to the postings I made over the course of this week, focusing most of the attention on yesterdays and Monday’s. So communication and relationships, the two go hand in hand.

The ability to communicate well is a key factor in a stable relationship. Again this does not apply to just a boyfriend or a girlfriend although it is much more apparent as a factor, more so to all types of relationships that a person creates over time. I feel that most relationships have a falling out due to lack of good communication from both parties. Small issues that should be addressed early on end up compounding and becoming a driving wedge between the two.

Since I reflect a lot back upon my own experiences, I will use one as an example. Roughly a year ago today, I was working as a mobile developer for a small start up company making health and wellness applications, was in a healthy relationship, and had a trip to Seattle that I had been preparing for. A year ago today, If you would have asked me what I wanted to do for a living, with out missing a beat I would have told you with 100% certainty that it was to work in the game industry. I have already talked about that point in a previous post, and am currently working on a more expanded post on that matter, so for now I am going to look a bit past it.

The professional relationship I had was in a decent spot. Looking back, I noticed that there were opportunities that I had to grow it even more. Pitching in with an opinion at an all hands meeting, or stand up. Speaking with other team members more as well as just getting to know them better. I got along swimmingly with all the other developers, but would have enjoyed talking more with our graphic designer to better understand her vision of how the application should look.

Now a huge glaring communication problem that I can recall from my time at the job was our process with testing the application. An issue that could have been avoided by taking a opportunity early on and speaking with our core group of testers and learning about the process that they use. Well short version is I did not. Because of that, when we started to move into a heavy testing phase while implementing more features to the application….we may have ran into some complications. Mostly between myself and the individual who was in charge of testing.

There were heated discussions which ultimately lead to that really awkward feeling in the office. You know that feeling, the one where you see two people staring daggers at one another and you are stuck in between both of them, not being able to excuse yourself? Yeah, it was that type of situation. To be fair I was not upset after the initial discussion took place, a slight bit annoyed, but nothing like steam shooting out of my ears. It was not until other team members started asking if I was okay, multiple times that the discussion really started to grind away my patience and make me upset.

Everything worked out in the end, Ashley and I ended up sitting down and talking after the weekend and discussed how we could better the process for our application testing. Reflecting back on the whole situation, I know it all could have been avoided if I had properly reached out past my own team and learned more about the testing process, or the graphic design or anything really.

At the end of the day, not everyone has good communication. Being able to accurately communicate ideas to a team or problems to a partner in a relationship is a difficult process. A very difficult one due to a multitude of varying reasons.

I talked a bit yesterday about how the lack of human interaction is causing the loss of generating new bonds between others. Hopefully today with a bit of my reflection it adds more depth to that and shows that it is not just for communication on the surface level, but it also is a major pillar for a balanced life in other regards.

I am of the opinion that we all want better lives. I believe that we are going about it all wrong though. We are trying to find happiness, success, peace online when in really that which we seek can be offline and right in front of us.

I am going to wrap up today’s post with a quote that I see everyday as I walk into my office.

“When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us” - Alexander Graham Bell

Have a wonderful Thursday.

おはよう！

For those that can not read that, good morning! Fun fact for the day, is that drinking a PowerAde after brushing ones teeth, and is absolutely horrid. Ranking it up on the list with orange juice.

Anyways, I wanted to write up a bit about communication. I was thinking about how we talk with one another and how lots of the way we communicate has been lost over the past few years. What used to be the norm of face to face conversations has slowly faded away into the background, being replaced by text messages and Facebook interactions.

This raises some interesting problems. One issue I feel is that the authenticity of the conversation is lost. The passion of a topic could be lost in translation over a text message. Where as in person, you can see the animation and hear the voice pick up when excited. Another issue is the lack of human interaction. Again not being able to hear and see the excitement radiating from another person as they talk is something that is missing in a lot of our day to day interactions. I feel that so many people these days are missing out on the chance of making new friends because they would prefer not to put themselves into a position that they may embarrass themselves or are afraid of not being liked.

Something else that comes to mind is that I have noticed that a person can text another all the time but then never make an effort to see them. I have been guilty of this a few times in my life, but this is more of a topic for another day.

All of these missed opportunities of making new friends! This is whole idea is one of the driving reasons behind myself wanting to meet someone new everyday. There are so many wonderful people in the world that all have something unique about themselves that I honestly can’t wait to find out about.

I hope the rest of the day goes well.

さようなら

Good morning, what a wonderful Tuesday it has already started out to be!

Before I begin with what I was thinking about this morning, I wanted to say thank you for reading my small ramblings as you enjoy the morning, I hope that something I say may spark a thought or realization and let you see life in a different way.

This is a perfect way to start the post, and the topic that came to mind this morning.

Life is so ironic.

On my way into work today, I was struck by an interesting idea. Driven mostly by a bit of my past, I had been rolling around with the idea that is bolded above. Let me lay out what I had thought of a bit this morning as I looked out of my office window.

It takes sadness to know happiness, noise to appreciate silence, absence to value presence, misery to treasure contentment, loss to appreciate gain, and turmoil to honor peace.

My understanding and I suppose realization as I am writing this is rather simple. That is life and unless you compare one aspect to another, then it will be hard to truly embrace.

Have a wonderful morning, see you all tomorrow.