The First Snow Is Early

It's not even Halloween and already flakes are falling.  Don't get me wrong, I LOVE IT.  I love the winter, I love the cold weather, and I love the snow.  To ski, to play in, and even just to look at, the snow always makes me feel more alive, and more serene.

My Dad hated it, and still does.  He viewed it as an annoyance, an element of nature that had to be shoveled, plowed, and fought through.  Winter is never his time.  He is a true summer guy and has been throughout his life.  This is not hard to understand considering where he grew up in Jamesport, Long Island.  His back yard was the gorgeous Peconic Bay, and his play toys were boats that he and his father made.  Whether it was by sail or by power, or on a ship, the water has always been his playground and even his office.

But the coming snow also always makes me reminisce to when I was young working with my Dad to help remove his nemesis.  We had a big and very old International Harvester traktor with a plow and chains on huge spiked tires.  I was so proud and psyched to come to the age when Dad let me hop in the driver seat and take over the plowing.  It was COLD, but driving the snow off of our long driveway was an all consuming task that kept the cold far from my mind.

I remember my Pop's winter work coat.  It was a brown thing with a fuzzy lining.  I remember his gloves and how his glasses fogged when he first went outside.  I remember the black winter hat that he wore to the office, a black fuzzy persian envoy.  I remember him sharpening the blades on my sled for a little more speed, and falling flat on his back once when he pushed a whole group of kids down Horseneck Path.

I am so grateful for all of these memories.  I am so grateful that I get to reminisce with my Dad as the first snows of 2011 start to come down.  The flakes may not stick today, but the memories they conjure will stick in my mind forever.

Lessons From 1938

I love revisiting history with my Dad for two reasons: 1- it keeps proving that history will repeat itself over and over, and 2- he was actually there for so much of it, so his view is more factual experience than historical conjecture.  


For example, he and I were discussing some of the new job programs that our federal government is planning to stick us with.  He began to reminisce about a time when there was another federal jobs program during a time of economic crisis.  Yes, I'm referring to the Great Depression that began in 1929 and the New Deal that resulted.


As we all know, the New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented between 1933 and 1936, during the first term of FDR.  The programs were responses to the Depression and focused on what historians call the "3 Rs": Relief, Recovery, and Reform. That is, Relief for the unemployed and poor; Recovery of the economy to normal levels; and Reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression, with its base in liberal ideas, big government machines, and newly empowered labor unions.  


The New Deal basically poured federal money towards job creation in the form of economic stimulus.  Sound familiar?  At the time, the New Deal was pouring unheard of amounts of federal money into the National Recovery Act,  the Wagoner Act to promote labor unions, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) relief program, the Social Security Act, and new programs to aid tenant farmers and migrant workers. The final major items of New Deal legislation were the creation of the United States Housing Authority and Farm Security Administration, both in 1937, then the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set maximum hours and minimum wages for most categories of workers, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938.  


Now, let's forget for a moment that many of these federal acts were considered (and actually were) unconstitutional, but rather let's focus on the real, plain, unadulterated truth as told by someone who was actually there.


NONE OF IT WORKED.  In fact, THESE FEDERAL PROGRAMS ONLY MADE THE DEPRESSION WORSE.  I quote my Dad, "the worst economic year during the Depression was actually 1938, years after the bulk of the New Deal was implemented.  There was NO business to be had anywhere in 1938.  That's when we hit rock bottom.  Truly the only thing that brought this country out of the Depression was WWII.  The New Deal just burdened us with federal programs that we still can't get rid of today.  Programs that are now called entitlements."


So, as I said above, as history repeats itself we can actually tell the future.  Our current administration will win re-election, burden us with more unconstitutional federal programs and regulations in the guise of "job creation", and 9 years after the Recession started in 2008 we will hit rock bottom, which means that we will then enter into a huge war in 2017.  With one distinct difference; this war will not be about fascism, it will be about 2 billion Chinese jacking us for the $30 Trillion we owe them.

I've Seen What Happy Is

My father continues to teach me every day. He continues to teach me the most important lessons of life. And he continues to teach me what it means to strive to be a good man.

His latest lesson derived from a glance and a facial expression. It was all at once an expression of complete and utter contentment, peace, accomplishment, and hope.

Last weekend my sister and her family joined me and my family at my parent's house. During the simple act of eating breakfast together around a large table I saw the expression that so moved me. It happened when my father looked around the table at his three grandsons, his granddaughter, his son, son-in-law, daughter, daughter-in-law, and his wife. I think even my new puppy caught glimpse.

He was for that moment filled with pride. It was a pride that I am just beginning to understand at this stage in my life, and one that I truly hope to feel at his stage in life. It was a pride earned from being the patriarch of a thriving family, and from being loved by that family.

With just a glance he teaches me. With just a glance I learn what I want in life. With just a glance I am utterly grateful.

HJ

Sharing Just For Sharing - The Plateau Of Social

Acta Non Verba is the credo of Father's alma mater, USMMA. It means "Actions Not Words."

My Dad and I are also big Theodore Roosevelt fans, who's personal credo was "speak softly and carry a big stick"-- another version of "Actions Not Words."

But today being famous has become its own virtue. People are famous just for being famous, with no "Action" required. The Kardashians are a prime example of this dynamic. Aside from one uninspiring sex tape (so I'm told) have any one of them ever done anything except whine in front of a camera? Other examples include the likes of Paris Hilton, The Situation, and a myriad of YouTubers out there just flooding the world with their own likenesses.

Social media has only served to exacerbate this phenomenon. In fact, sharing has now become its own virtue. Klout scores, Twitter followers, likes, retweets - they are all becoming a new doorway to our own perceived fame. While chasing this fame won't end social networking as we know it, I do believe it is leading to its plateau.

My friend Tony Gandia pointed out to me that UNfriending has become a trend. Why? because people are flooding us by hitting share just to hit share. People are pumping more and more useless and regurgitated information into the ether as if they themselves created the original content. All this in an attempt to to increase the Klout score, tack up some likes, grab some followers, and reach for our own little moments of fame.

There is information and data, and then there is noise. And here I am ready to hit "publish post" to create some more noise.

CAORF

CAORF (Pronounced Kay-orff) certainly sounds like some paradoxical enemy spy organization from "Get Smart". I can picture Agent 99 yelling to Max "look out Max! Boris is a CAORF agent!" (Max's nemeses were actually Chaos agents).

But in the real world CAORF stands for the Computer Aided Operations Research Facility which is located on the grounds of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, N.Y. Originally built by the Federal Government as the National Maritime Research Center, CAORF was for a time one of the most sophisticated ship simulators in the world. Why do I blog on CAORF? Two reasons: one- to make a point about the evolution of technology and two- (and almost more importantly) because my Dad had a huge hand in the development and management of the facility.

The facility's main purpose was and still is to train ship personnel in a full fidelity simulator, to look at the layouts of specific harbor and channel designs, to determine the viability of specific ship dimensions and designs to pass through those harbors and channels before the ship is even built, and to study the causes of accidents and to make recommendations to avoid them before they happen.

The simulator bridge contains actual maritime equipment, including radar, communications and steering mechanisms. Encompassing the bridge is a massive 240-foot horizontal 24-foot vertical panorama of actual port conditions. The simulation can be varied by type of vessel, cargo load, time of day, atmospheric and tide conditions, other ships passing and tug effects.

My first point is this; back in 1975 when CAORF was first operational all this was accomplished through several rooms of computers and video hardware. And by several rooms, I mean the facility practically had its own building on the Kings Point campus. I should know, I saw it several times. The facility was a complex myriad of refrigerator sized tape-to-tape drives, Smart Car sized CRTs, old style lamp driven projectors, miles of wires, behemoth cooling units, expansive control panels, and it had an electricity appetite of a small town. All of this produced what was considered at the time to be state-of-the-art graphics.

As has been said many times before, we now carry more technology power in the palms of our hands than NASA used to land a man on the moon, or than my Dad had to build CAORF.

First consider what a tremendous undertaking it had to have been to build CAORF back in '75. Today we can look at virtually any spot on the globe with Google maps on an iPhone, but back then it took a huge team of technologists, scientists, contractors, engineers, programmers, bureaucrats, electricians, fabricators, and project managers, etc... plus sizable budgets to even power up the instillation. Also consider for a second how CAORF helped to pioneer so much of the technology we take for granted today. For instance, it had 'apps' that ran on a simultaneous integration and manipulation of computer languages like Fortran, C, and even Basic, before there were Linux or even MSDOS based operating systems. These 'apps' created some of the first true topographical simulations ever, and are the basis of so many of today's gaming and CGI systems.

Now almost more of a museum than a functioning facility, CAORF stands as a true testament to the spirit of innovation so pervasive in the field of technology. My Dad might even say the same about himself at the age of 83. Much like how museums teach us the lessons of the past to help us keep evolving our human endeavors, so too do the stories, lessons, and experiences of men like my Dad help us to keep building onward.

Hangin' With Some Crazy Guys

I have hung out with some crazy people in my lifetime. During my college days and certainly during my first few years living in Manhattan I could usually be found in a death defying, sometimes law defying, and utterly common sense defying activity accompanied by one or more of my mad friends. But the people that I hung out with in even the craziest of moments couldn't hold a candle to some of the guys that my Dad knew.

Take for instance this story that my Dad has told me a few times over the years. It begins on a Navy Ship in a port near Korea during the war there. He used to see a small group of guys using the helo deck to do a light work out in the early hours of the morning. The light work out that these guys were doing included hundreds of push-ups with another guy on their back, swims of two or three miles off the side of the ship, and calisthenics that would kill most men. My Dad got to know the guys and found out that they were UDTs, the Navy's Under Water Demolition Team.

One evening while Dad was the officer on watch, he got a call from the local authorities in port. Its seems that 5 of his new UDT friends wandered into a bar that was strictly a Marine hangout. The 20 or so Marines that were in the bar did not take kindly to seeing a few 'sailors' make themselves at home in their establishment, and of course a ruckus ensued.

When my Dad received the call he heard a distressed police officer ask, "who the hell are these guys? Your 5 sailors are in my jail, and they put 20 Marines in the hospital."

Some of you may know that UDTs were the precursors to the modern day Navy SEALS. You may also know that it was a SEAL team that popped a cap through Osama's left eye ball recently.

Again, I've hung out with some crazy dudes in my time, but how I wish I was with my Dad picking up 5 insane UDTs from a Korean jail after putting 20 Marines in the hospital.

Perspective By Dad and Douglas Adams

Is it really work/life balance or is it money/life balance? After all, work is a conduit to money for most people unless you're lucky enough to be in an endeavor that you find personally fulfilling (which I luckily do).

Easter is always a great time to reflect on such things. It is a spiritual time when life begins anew, and hope seems to be budding with each spring flower and Yankee win. Easter is also a great time to chat with my Pop about life and get his learned prespective from 83 years of quality experience.

Like many men, he spent most of his life in the endeavor of making money. However his, more than most, were endeavors that provided him great personal and professional fulfilment. His career provided for his family, and in his earlier career he provided for his soul as well. From all of that effort, time, and life experience one theme came shining through in our discussions this weekend; money is a fine way to be comfortable, but it will not make you happy. Happiness comes from health, family, home, and worthwhile pursuits.

I know, I know... it's a bit cliche. But it bears reminding, especially as we face a recovery that is moving at a glacial pace. But has this recession left us in a better mindspace about how much emphasis we will put towards money versus life?

This got me to thinking of one of my favorite books which I recently started to re-read. It's the five part trilogy of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams, in which he kicks off the whole story like this:

" Orbiting at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-decended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This plant has a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

Happy Spring, and please remember to take a whiff of the budding flowers and to just listen to ball game on the radio.

And subject to my last blog, Pop met Ripley and thinks he's going to be a great one.