I had the great opportunity to learn from and know more about a great friend of the EMC, John Cohn, over the past several years.  One of the stories John shared to us a while ago told touched our hearts.  In short, pulled from his website, this is the short story:

Sam was an exuberant boy with a 1000 watt smile. He loved his friends, family, dog, and bird deeply. Sam was passionate about guitar, snowboarding, lacrosse, and having fun. Yes, having fun was important to Sam.

Springtime meant lacrosse for Sam and a time to play hard with his buddies. Ultimate frisbee at the park were memorable times for Sam and he would come home with a big smile on his face and grass stains on his body. Summers you could find Sam floating down the rivers, swinging from a rope swing, biking, or just hanging with friends. A summer would be complete with time spent at Camp Abnaki and jamming at Burlington Rock Camp. Fall would be the season Sam would try and stretch summer out a little bit more until the snow started to come. That time was then spent at Bolton Valley Resort on his snowboard. He enjoyed ariel tricks and hitting the rails. Mostly he enjoyed just hanging with his friends and little brother Gabe.

Sam loved music and was always plugged into some song. Guitar was second nature to Sam. He could play “Asturias” on his classical guitar to heavy metal on his Gibson. He enjoyed playing bass and wailing on the drums. His favorite times were when he would jamming with one of his friends, or his big brother Max.
It is hard to capture Sam’s true spirit in a few paragraphs. He taught us so much. Mostly he taught us to have fun, ease up, and to be there for each other. He is a true best friend to many and deeply missed.

Sam was born on May 28, 1992. He was hit by a car on November 20, 2006 in Florida while visiting friends. His beautiful body stayed strong long enough for organ donation. He gave his heart, liver, kidney, and kidney-pancreas so that four others would live. His spirit continues on through them and surrounds us today. Sam lived his life to its fullest on this planet.

To help with Sam's passing, John and his family create what are called SamStones.  Here's a short description, found on his website, of what they are:

If you would like to know more about Sam Stones, you can find out more here:  http://www.samestone.org/.  Corinn and I wanted to contribute, so we were given a bag of stones from Diane, John's wife, and will now bring them on our McBe Adventures.  My goal is to, as accurately as possible, track where I placed them with a photos of the location and to document that location within something like Google Maps.  So if you see future posts of SamStones, you'll know that we've traveled recently.  Below is our first map of where we placed many Sam Stones while in the UK.  Click on each marker, as the map is interactive, to learn more about the location we placed the stone and a short story of the site.  You can even change the terrain, move the map around, and zoom in and out!

Below are photos where we visited with Sam being part of the shots.  We tried placing Sam where we though he'd have a great view of the locations we visited.  Some shots were difficult to obtain while others we though were really great.  We figured this would be good to compliment the map above as a way to visually see more of where we traveled with him.  Hope you enjoy them! 

Arthur's Seat

 

The Nasmyths Home

 

The Nasmyths  :o) 

 

So, I'm going to brag about my husband a teeny tiny bit.  He's been working super hard as of late, pratically non-stop since mid-August, and I'm not exaggerating.  First it was to get ready for the trip to South Africa, then to get things move to the new EMC location, and right now it's been getting the EMC in working order for their big opening tonight!

I know Ray has posted some of his thoughts about his job and how hard he's been working on this blog.  I just want to share with everyone how amazing my husband is.  I can think of only one day since August 16th when he hasn't been working.  He goes in early, stays late and works weekends.  He does this partly because it's his job, but mostly because he cares.  In my MBA program we've discussed the intangibles that make up a business, one of those is the corporate culture, which is set by upper management, but the other is the workforce.  These intangibles are the heartbeat and breathe of a company and influence everything from top to bottom.  I know that Ray feels inspired by the goals of the EMC and the things they have already accomplished.  I also know that what he loves is to help the students succeed: it's the conversations, projects and difference that he gets to have with all of them that make his job worthwhile to him.  He feels fortunate to have a great boss and co-workers who are equally dedicated to these tasks (I know for a fact I'm not the only work-widow).

But I just wanted to take a minute to celebrate Ray!  Today, starting at 4:00, the EMC is having their big open house and fancy dinner.  CEOs of many companies will be in attendance, as will the Governor and likely a Congressman and a Senator (or two).  The EMC even made the cover of The Burlington Free Press today.  I couldn't be prouder of how dedicated to his work he is, how he gives 150% of himself to the center and how he's making a difference both at the Champlain community and in the world.  So as Champlain College and Vermont celebrate the Emergent Media Center today, I want to celebrate Ray, and thank him for everything he does.  I feel both lucky and privileged to be his partner!

I’m laying in bed right now with the glowing screen of my laptop and my wife, sleeping to the left of me, typing my blog tonight.  I have a feeling that I’ll be spending many of my blogs lying in bed doing the same in the future.  I guess I find it the best time of the day to quietly ponder and reflect on the day, before I pass out.  In my head, I’m constantly reflecting on every move or decision I make, much like a programmed infinite loop to keep myself in check.  It’s how I function; sometimes I wonder if it’s beneficial or detrimental to my wellbeing and/or mental health… but I’d like to think of it as a reoccurring attempt to better myself.  Do others experience this… as often as I do?

So it’s my first day back from vacation at work and oddly I found it to be… relaxing?  Fitting?  Like I didn’t miss a beat, although it was pretty obvious I was out of work for a week with the sifting of legit e-mail.  I feel like it should have been my responsibility over break to do this, but spending about a day to get back in the know seems kind of ridiculous to get work done.  I sometimes feel like I need to make up for lost time by working at home after work… Maybe everyone feels the same way.

Aside from dealing with the mundane getting back up to speed with things, I was reminded on many occasions why I enjoy my job.  Where else can you mix with a good group of young adults with flourishing minds who sometimes think exactly what you’re thinking or enjoy the same humor as you do?  What’s even cooler is that Ann’s on the same wave length.  It’s cool to be working in an environment with sooooo much craziness going on and yet still feel good at the end of the work day when arriving home to relax for the evening (if I can actually do that at all).  It’s not always a great day, but a majority make me smile.  Corinn gets an earful usually when I get home about what’s been happening at work and today, it was all about how lucky I am to work with the students and adults as well as the projects we will be working on with the United Nations and UVM coming up.  I’ve seen the progress on some of the other projects and I get jealous sometimes that I’m not down in the dirt, like these students are, creating the work they are producing for the projects at the EMC.

I very often feel that I need to be creating and innovating, yet don’t have the time.  I guess that’s why I spent a majority of my time on vacation programming/designing this site.  I find great satisfaction out of producing something that people use or admire.  I guess most people would, but it’s slightly different.  I get satisfaction out of programming or designing something regardless.  I feel that having the creative and technical interests I do open up a world of hurt when I think of all these ideas that could be produced.  It’s somewhat depressing after realizing I cannot do everything myself without having 60 hour days (of which I put in a request to God, but he hasn’t sent me an e-mail back yet).  Like today:  I came home, ate with Corinn while watching a bit of What Not to Wear, and the rest of my time was devoted to coding and mucking around with a photo website that can parse in and out XMP data embedded in graphics/media files like JPEG’s, GIF’s, MOV’s, etc.  If successful, this will help Corinn and I manage a bunch of our photos and other stuff at home by simply embedding metadata that will allow us to simply do a search for specific information like “family”, “shot with a Canon Digital Camera”, “GIV IT”, etc.  Ha, I just noticed I typed 666 words before the beginning of this sentence… Omen or just mere coincidence?   Maybe it’s telling me that I should stop talking technical stuff since it’s boring my audience… Hopefully any at all…

You know… I am about the luckiest guy.  I have a smart, beautiful wife who really cares about me, she gets me and puts up with my excitement of running up to her at 11pm on a work night, all excited about my recent success in parsing XMP data and how it’ll improve our lives.  Granted she’ll smile and roll her eyes, but she gets it.  Even if she doesn’t understand, Corinn will smile and say “that’s exciting” or “that’s great” and it’s a genuine congrats.

Maybe I should post this message now and go to bed…

Sam’s cute right now; he’s curled up between Corinn and me.  For a cat that doesn’t like to be held a lot, he definitely shows affection once in a while in a peaceful, non-meowing-until-his-lungs-are-sore way.

Reflecting on what I just wrote, I cannot tell if this is really good blog material.  Does it really matter?  Should I care?  I think a lot of people think along tangents and don’t really randomly jump.  Everything’s related to a previous experience or thought just before the next one arrives.  Very much like a though process like this:

• I like maple syrup
• My friend and I used to make maple syrup
• Mmmm… haven’t had pancakes in a while
• Wow, haven’t visited Sneakers in Winooski in a long time
• I wonder what Phlip’s doing right now
• Crap, I got to get back to him regarding the game we’re suppose to design
• I really like fighting games, but I really prefer RPGs
• I wanna buy the new Final Fantasy Tactics A2 game
• I really miss being a kid sometimes
• Man, I haven’t played Sim City in a while, I kind of miss that

…Now to get back to my original point…

So my thought process was linear because of my relationships or experiences I had that reminded me of the next thought.  Humans really suck at being organized, specifically being reminded.  How many times have we misplaced something and it took a good darn long time to find it?  Then we had to “back track”.  That’s how unorganized we are and it’s due to how we think.  It’s very difficult to have a leap in thought; in fact, I would suggest that it doesn’t happen at all.  We have a real weird way of relating things to other things in a bizarre network of poorly guided paths of communication and connection within our brain yet we are “smart” enough to actually come up with great ideas.  But they’re not really random ideas, we might say they are, but usually it’s because one thing lead to another.

So going back up to the flow of thought, if we had a conversation and you mentioned something about Maple Syrup (can never beat Vermont’s by the way), I might have that internal monologue saying “I like maple syrup”.  The next thing that may come out of my mouth would be the last piece of thought which is “Man, I haven’t played Sim City in a while, I kind of miss that.” You would most likely furrow your brow and state, “wow, that was pretty random,” and without understanding the context or how I arrived to that statement from Maple Syrup, you’d be right, but in fact, it was not really random at all.  Maple Syrup created a straight and “logical” path to that memory/reminder point in my history.  And if you had a different history than I, obviously you do, then that thought process might have arrived at, “my sister has a pet monkey…”  Naturally I would probably think that was an odd thing to say, but the thought process was the same, but through different experience therefore arriving at a different point in history, but possibly through the same pattern of electrical pulses in our brain through short pathways in our head linking everything together to arrive to the thought we want to convey or the fact we arrived at.

You may look back at the beginning of this blog and say, “wow, this was a pretty weird trip that Ray sent me on.” But maybe the point I have to realize is that the thought I want to convey is through an odd pattern of experiences that might provoke new ideas, theories, inventions, intentions, designs, etc. and that’s why maybe I shouldn’t go back and edit this blog for content.  Maybe this is a good thing that I should continue doing.  A brain dump of today’s work and then a reflection might bring something to mind?  Maybe seeing my though process might have others understand me better?  Is this an open diary?  Idea generator of sorts?  Maybe for me to better understand myself?  Others?  Purposes in life?  Life in general?

…?

…

…

…

I knew there was a reason why I spent as many hours trying to get this site up!  I guess I’ll just let it be what it’ll evolve into… Hopefully something people will enjoy and learn from.