I cannot tell you how excited I was when I received the final revisions for the AfroApparel icon!

I promise I will post more about this soon, in the meantime, hang tight! Follow progress on AfroApparel.com

I believe there was a man named Jesus, his mother was Mary, and he said he was God. He also said that he made all that we know and see.

Based on history, study, and a personal encounter, I believe he is who he says he is.
I subscribe to his teachings of love, peace, and joy. And I try each day to treat others as I would like to be treated.
I believe that if I stay true to his teachings, I will have an awesome life on this earth, and when time has passed, I will be with him – my creator.

Much more important than his teachings was his sacrifice. You see, there are laws of the universe that have been put in place. For example, what goes up, must come down, or, one day we will all die. Another law is that the consequence of sin, is death.

Sin is defined as “doing what I know is wrong” and “not doing what I know is right”.

If we are honest, we are all guilty of sin. The Bible [the book that God wrote] says that the consequence of sin is that we will be separated from God in a [real] place called hell – for eternity. Hell will not be pleasant at all.

So Jesus realizes that we will sin, and we will repeatedly do so, even if we have the best intentions. He then said: I will take upon myself the consequence of sin on your behalf… I’ll be honest, this part is mysterious to me, and I am still trying to figure it out. He says that if we have faith – in the sequence of events surrounding his life, his death, and his coming back to life – we will not suffer the consequence of sin.

This mystery is what causes me to continue to learn about, and seek after God. I do this by reading my Bible, by going to church, and meeting with other people who believe and are seeking as I do. I also do my best to practice what Jesus taught, with hopes that I can grow closer to him.

Listen, I know that I am not perfect, and I know that I am not always a good model of who Jesus is, I am genuinely trying to fix this.

So, yeah, this is what I believe.

What do you believe? Who do you believe in? Please email me at hello [at] dbala.com and lets talk about it, or leave a private comment below, and I’ll be sure to respond.

Thank you.

Enjoy!

Today, I asked for permission to use someone else’s image, and they said no…

I learned 2 things:

1.) It felt good to ask, although I was disappointed by the answer. If I had _wrongfully_ used their work (even for no personal gain), and they had stumbled upon it somehow, it would have caused some bad feelings, and then a sense of violation – and then anger. I’ve felt that before when my work was used without my permission, and I would not wish that upon anyone else.

2.) Getting a “NO” caused the original idea to morph in my mind, and now I am inspired with an even better idea.

During this whole process I stumbled upon Brand Africa and I cannot tell you how much respect I have for the group, check out their website and see some of the good work they are doing.

I hope they can use the t-shirt concept (above) to further their cause.

I was having a debate with some friends about how “becoming an expert at something requires focus and single-mindedness on the subject matter“. My position in the debate was that I want my sons (now 1 and 2.5 in age) to be “supremely excellent” at something (music, sports, academics… whatever). I drew some contention when I said that I will not allow my boys to engage in more than one activity at a time. If they want to play sports, then that means no music lessons, etc. My colleague mentioned that this will stifle the polymathic potential in my boys (a polymath is a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning – like Einstein). The debate eventually fizzled, but I left feeling a little unjustified. Today it hit me; the point I was trying to convey (unsuccessfully) was the 10,000 hour rule, and how as a father, I will do my best to see my boys reach that mark.

The 10,000 hour rule was made famous by Malcom Gladwell in his book “Outliers”. Gladwell repeatedly mentions the “10,000-Hour Rule”, claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.

The rule was originally based on a study by Anders Ericsson. Gladwell (via Ericsson) claims that greatness requires enormous time, and the key to success in any field, is simply a matter of practicing a specific task that can be accomplished with 20 hours of work a week, for 10 years (reaching the 10,000-Hour mark). Gladwell refers to Bill Gates as an example of this: “Gates met the 10,000-Hour Rule when he gained access to a high school computer in 1968 at the age of 13, and spent 10,000 hours programming on it.”

I went to the actual study by Ericsson, and I found it really interesting… here are some excerpts:

Not magic, or genetics, or superiority – but practice and training:

When experts exhibit their superior performance in public their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are tempted to attribute it to special talents. Although a certain amount of knowledge and training seems necessary, the role of acquired skill for the highest levels of achievement has traditionally been minimized. However, when scientists began measuring the experts’ supposedly superior powers of speed, memory and intelligence with psychometric tests, no general superiority was found –the demonstrated superiority was domain specific. For example, the superiority of the chess experts’ memory was constrained to regular chess positions and did not generalize to other types of materials. Not even IQ could distinguish the best among chess players nor the most successful and creative among artists and scientists.

New Patterns from memory:

In their influential theory of expertise, Chase and Simon proposed that experts with extended experience acquire a larger number of more complex patterns and use these new patterns to store knowledge about which actions should be taken in similar situations.

According to this influential theory, expert performance is viewed as an extreme case of skill acquisition…

Extended experience:

Among investigators of expertise, it has generally been assumed that the performance of experts improved as a direct function of increases in their knowledge through training and extended experience.

In summary:

In a recent review, Ericsson and Lehmann found that (1) measures of general basic capacities do not predict success in a domain, (2) the superior performance of experts is often very domain specific and transfer outside their narrow area of expertise is surprisingly limited and (3) systematic differences between experts and less proficient individuals nearly always reflect attributes acquired by the experts during their lengthy training.

I want my boys to be supremely awesome! But I don’t want to be an over-bearing or fanatical father. I guess the challenge is to help them discover their passion and then guide and enable them to get to at-least 10,000 hours of engagement in that passion.

How we do all of this will take cooperation and coordination between my wife and I. But ultimately we need to be on the same page, and this post is my first attempt to doing so.

What do you think? Any advice? cries of outrage?

That was a year ago, and I recently just stumbled on my results, and all I could say is “hmmm…”

When I took this evaluation, I answered the questions in the mindset of “NOT who I am now” but “what I would like to be.”

And this is Daniel Bala Peterson’s Top Five Clifton StrengthsFinder Themes

Includer
People who are especially talented in the Includer theme are accepting of others. They show awareness of those who feel left out, and make an effort to include them.

Activator
People who are especially talented in the Activator theme can make things happen by turning thoughts into action. They are often impatient.

Arranger
People who are especially talented in the Arranger theme can organize, but they also have a flexibility that complements this ability. They like to figure out how all of the pieces and resources can be arranged for maximum productivity.

Positivity
People who are especially talented in the Positivity theme have an enthusiasm that is contagious. They are upbeat and can get others excited about what they are going to do.

Responsibility
People who are especially talented in the Responsibility theme take psychological ownership of what they say they will do. They are committed to stable values such as honesty and loyalty.

It is pretty crazy how I am actually morphing into that person that I wanted to be. My first year job review would agree, and so would my manager and colleagues… I think… I hope.

What have I learned?

1. Project who you want to be, act like it, and talk like it.

2. Take self evaluations, and [often] check back and review, and ask for feedback.

*this is a technical post, so you might not care.

After many many many moons of frustration, I’ve been FINALLY able to get my Adobe AIR 2.5 application to trigger installed clients, causing them to auto update. I am writing this post, so that it is crawled by web bots, and hopefully it helps someone else solve a similar problem.

In trying to find a solution, I googled: “Adobe AIR application not autoupdating”, “Adobe AIR application not auto updating”, “Adobe AIR HTML JS application fails to update”, “Adobe AIR 2.5 auto install”, “Adobe AIR updater framework not working fails to update” and so on.

I’ve cautiously upgraded this app through the different AIR framework versions, starting at 1.0 to 1.5 to 2.0 and then to 2.5.

oh… if you don’t know what Adobe AIR is, then this post is not for you. You can check it out here: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

debug steps:

0. Read countless numbers of blog and forum posts and documentation.

1.Verify that the application is indeed making a call to retrieve the update descriptor xml. I used a program called Little Snitch: http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html to explicitly identify the network call. This showed the call being made. I had initially used tcpdump to inspect traffic, and little snitch confirmed my finding.

2. Inspect and trace the currentState property of runtime.air.update.ApplicationUpdaterUI this document was very helpful: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/air/reference/html/air/update/ApplicationUpdater.html but as you can see, it is seriously out of date. If there is an updated version for the 2.5 framework, I have difficulty finding it.

[the fix:]
I did yet another google search, in the same vain as those listed above, but this time it came up with this article: Update AIR 2 or earlier to AIR 2.5 Application Updater framework. I had seen this one before, but for some reason, I missed this sentence:

The application descriptor file schema for applications that use AIR 2.5 is not compatible with earlier versions of the Application Updater framework.

[and this was the root of my problem!]

Specifically:

The version element is replaced with a new field, versionNumber. This field must contain one to three dot-separated numbers; no non-numeric characters are allowed.

At the end of the day, the solution was that I needed to:

replace: <version>4.0.1</version> with: <versionNumber>4.0.1</versionNumber>

[ridiculous right? I understand why they are doing this, but it is still ridiculous that such a trivial change caused me so much grief!]

I would also advice you to exercise caution and map out the different upgrade paths, the last thing you need are clients gone dark.

I found this update referenced in the release notes for 2.5: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/868/cpsid_86822.html and I would highly recommend that if you are having update issues, read the section on: Application versioning changes

[suggestion for Adobe]
1. They need to update their documentation highlighting the differences in between framework versions, specifically: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/air/reference/html/air/update/ApplicationUpdater.html

as of this writing, the documentation is lacking. Please Adobe, help us out!

If you are having issues and you need another set of eyes, send me a note, I’d be glad to help.

In doing some research for a paper, I stumbled across this post by William Geoffrey Shotts. I thought it was pretty profound and decided to re-blog it. The funny thing is that there is a lot of truth to this caricaturization!

Enjoy.

In the Beginning was The Plan
And then came The Assumptions
and The Assumptions were without Form
And The Plan was completely without Substance.
And The Darkness was upon The Face of The Workers.
And they spoke amongst themselves, saying
“It is a Crock of Shit, and it stinketh.”
And The Workers went unto their Supervisors and sayeth,
“It is a Pail of Dung and none may abide in the odor thereof.”
And The Supervisors went unto their Managers and sayeth unto them
“It is a Container of Excrement and it is very strong,
such that none may abide by it.”
And The Managers went unto their Directors and sayeth,
“It is a Vessel of Fertilizer, and none may abide its strength.”
And The Directors spoke amongst themselves, saying one to another,
“It contains that which aids Plant Growth, and it is very strong.”
And The Directors went unto The Vice Presidents and sayeth unto them,
“It promotes growth and is very Powerful.”
And The Vice Presidents went unto The President and sayeth unto him,
“This New Plan will Actively promote the growth and efficiency
of this Company, and these areas in particular.”
And The President looked upon The Plan
and saw that it was good, and The Plan became Policy.
And this is how “SHIT HAPPENS!”

originally posted at: http://www.gshotts.com/HUMOR/inthebeginning.htm

image attribution:
retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiousexpeditions/1335968674/
title: The bugs propose a plan…
Illustration from the Czech children’s book, Naměsíc a ještě dál.
Illustrated by Otokar Stafl, 1931

A Portrait of Christ from Jeremy Cowart on Vimeo.

Happy Easter everyone!

Enjoy!

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Enjoy!

I’m in a scary place professionally… I am starting to get this unshakeable sense of discontentment. There was a huge re-org at work, and new processes and people that didn’t “seem” to be working, a new manager that I’m reporting to, crappy weather which was making my commute sucky… all around jaded!

But then [at different times] I met with my new manager and former manager, and my manager’s manager, and we talked. And talked and talked. The thing with working in a big company is that there is a tendency to feel helpless, like your career is not under your control, that they can move you to wherever they want to, whenever they want to.

I am a strong believer in communication! The best advice I ever received was that:

A closed mouth never gets fed.

Another variation to that piece of advice is that: “it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the oil” – I don’t like this version though because it has connotations of being a nuisance.

But yeah… a closed mouth never gets fed.

Communication is a two way street. If I do not speak up when asked “is everything ok?”, or if I do not seek out the advice of people who I admire and look up to, or reach out to someone when the roadmap is unclear, then I have no right to complain, and I deserve all the stress and unwanted baggage that discontentment brings.

Count yourself blessed if at the other end of communication line, is an active, willing, and able communicator. This I believe is the single most effective skill that a manager possess. In that sense, we have some of the best managers here at CIM (I want to be like them when I grow up…)

I count myself blessed. At this point I am waiting for March 2011 to hit, and then we’ll see whats up.

This week at bu.edu, we discussed online marketing and the effects/benefits of blogs. I was appalled by the the number of people who had some sort of apprehension to blogging. For an online class, the response, to the topic of using blogs as a marketing tool, was very very backwards and old school – there were hints of paranoia and insecurity! I was disappointed. A common thread was the threat of “losing control” and divulging too much information, and causing more damage than good. And I thought to my self “Really? You -the organization- cannot put in place adequate policies and guidelines for posting blogs?”

I feel that the best marketing outlets that a company can have are it’s own people – you know, the ones “dogfooding-it”

I think having solid guidelines will liberate any staff to become your own best evangelists. A fellow classmate found a reference to “Corporate Blogging Policies and Guidelines” which shows how mature companies handle the issue blogging.

It is really GREAT stuff… my favorite bits of advice that I adhere to:

FROM SUN:
Don’t Tell Secrets: Common sense at work here; it’s perfectly OK to talk about your work and
have a dialog with the community, but it’s not OK to publish the recipe for one of our secret sauces.
There’s an official policy on protecting Sun’s proprietary and confidential information, but there are
still going to be judgment calls.

Write What You Know: The best way to be interesting, stay out of trouble, and have fun is to
write about what you know…

FROM IBM
Speak in the first person: Use your own voice; bring your own personality to the forefront; say
what is on your mind.

Use a disclaimer: Whether you publish to a blog or some other form of social media, make it clear
that what you say there is representative of your views and opinions and not necessarily the views
and opinions of IBM. At a minimum in your own blog, you should include the following standard disclaimer: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.”

attachment reference:
Altitude Branding. (October 2008). Corporate Blogging Policies and Guidelines. Retrieved January 21, 2011, from http://www.brasstackthinking.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/corporatebloggingpolicies.pdf

What is up with MadMonkey?

A lot of people have been asking what the deal is with MadMonkeyInc.com (MDMNKY). Often I have to ask myself what the deal is as well. With the New Year, reflection is important, and I’ve pondered awhile on MDMNKY, and this is what I’ve got.

SO it began as a joke/hobby/messing-around between us friends (Obi, Gbenro and myself). Gbenro came up with the name, which is brilliant, and Obi did all the (best) artwork. And me… I make things happen. That sounds silly right? Actually, I was invited later to join the project after Obi and Gbenro already had the name in place.

So officially, MDMNKY is all about – cool, eclectic, inspiring – tshirts. We want to branch out into other forms of apparel like shoes, hats, etc… but it starts with art on tees. As we got along with MDMNKY, each one of us, independently, worked on several group identity projects, which turned out very cool, and so we thought, if we joined our collective skill-sets, we could do some damage and MDMNKY turned out to be a great avenue for us to take on some of these projects. But we are realizing that it is so much more… after countless hours of conversation and debate, we formulated our manifesto which we are still forming. Check it out: OUR MANIESTO

As far as roles are concerned, it is interesting what each of our individual careers paths allow us to bring to the table.

Gbenro is a salesman – a pretty darn good one at that – and a great photographer. He brings the insight as to what will sell, this is undeniable. The struggle is that some of the art direction in place for MDMNKY does not always translate to popular and commercial acclaim.

Obi is a genius! He is finishing up his architectural design training at Parsons in NY. Obi sets the art direction for MDMNKY. He is a super gifted designer and Illustrator and my oldest friend.

As for me, I am a programmer, I do web and design, but more than that, my gift is project management – and I am getting trained so I can better apply this gift. I believe that I can take a concept, and intangible idea, and develop it. This has been my primary role with MDMNKY. Almost as a producer. I take the incredible artwork and ideas of Gbenro and Obi, flesh them out and try to bring them to life. All the while making sure we do not lose focus (scope) and also manage our budget. I set the timeline and make sure the are adhered to.

In a nutshell, I facilitate decision-making, planning, organizing, controlling production, and leading our charge to the future.

Technically though, I was able to execute a pretty s[l]ick website and even cooler GUESTBOOK. This site and the technology behind it has helped me land jobs, and get some technical notoriety (do a “view source” on the MDMNKY website and check out the jquery template implementation). Along the way, this project has taken my javascript/php/css/html/photoshop/illustrator skills to the next level. I’ve learned the Facebook and Twitter API’s, also improved my Google analytics and Adwords skills. More importantly my “risk versus reward” senses have been greatly heightened.

So the development of MDMNKY has been — exhilarating/frustrating/overwhelming/financially-draining/emotionally-draining — fun. I would do it again in a heart beat.

We are still in progress, so please check-in frequently, contact me if you have any questions or just to say hello – I truly covet your feedback.

much love
Bala

I am one of those guys who is into Facebook. I also like to “share” a lot. My wife thinks I am a “Like” addict, she thinks I need Facebook help… yeah, it’s that serious!

I am that dude that always wants to be liked – it is a fundamental personality flaw. I have borderline insecure/self-conscious tendencies. I AM WORKING ON THIS …promise.

For me, my social fetish started out pretty practical. My family lives in Africa, and they NEVER get any sort of insight into me and my life here in the States. I can be super superficial with my parents even over Skype. So when “The Facebook” became huge, and my parents in Nigeria got an account, and my friends in Holland started to Poke me, I figured “hey, now we can all do life together…” I could share pictures of the babies and my family and share about good and not-so-good times.

This has worked for me because, now, when I speak to daddy, he KNOWS when things are not right with me, he can go through my status updates, and read between the lines, and when he looks at me or hears my voice, he can pry. Facebook, and Twitter allow me to share with the world, but then provides clues as to my real status to those who care about me.

So far so good right? Social media allows me to connect and share and all that good stuff. But, nowadays, it’s getting a little ridiculous! I am getting friend requests from people who think they know me, and I gluttonously accept – because I want my friend count to be enormous. And I post updates (and sometimes exaggerate) because I am craving some sort of attention. aaahhh…. I am working on this too.

Now that you’ve had a glance into my issues. I would like to share with you something that I am very proud of, and that is the Solutions Award (pictured above). So far I’ve told you how I tend to solicit ooh’s and aah’s by posting the best and extreme parts of my life on my social networks… but in the second week of January 2011, I received an “Xfinity Guiding Principles Award” for “Delivering Solutions” at CIM. This was completely unexpected! I was shocked! I work with REALLY smart people, much of whom I respect very much, and even though I work very hard, I did not think I would get THIS award! If there were any awards I would want, it would be this one – because it means they think I work hard too.

The crazy humbling part of this award is that it represents the slow, un-glamorous, day-to-day grinding, caffeine-sustained bouts of hard work – the part of my life that NOONE wants to know about – that I would never share, except with those people who matter!

The point of this post is this: unsolicited praise is awesome! It is reassuring, affirming, encouraging, morale and ego boosting awesomeness! I got soo emotional when I heard one of my managers say “[he] …doesn’t admire problems, is a solution-oriented person, and collaborates to just find away…” – IT WAS SO SWEET! …and something in me said, “this feels good… this is the right type of attention…”

I want my dad to be proud of me – and I know he is!

thank you!

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My wife safely delivered our second son on July 21st. We named him Boaz Oluwamitobi Peterson. We will be calling him Tobi. So now we have Tolu and Tobi. I am really really happy, and I’ve been bombarded with so many other emotions like fear and anxiety and joy etc…

My biggest prayer is that I am able to provide my family with everything they need, physically, emotionally and spiritually. I truly don’t care what they become in life, but I hope they are supremely hardworking and super-passionate for everything they do.

Interestingly, I was browsing facebook while having my tea, and I came across this wall post by my friend Cai which I thought was profound. She says:

I could see how back in the biblical times when people lived for hundreds of years, they really had time on their hands. , now the avarage person lives to approximately 87 years. People compared to 400 years… We really better get wit what really is important and stop WASTING Time with things that don’t matter. Enjoy every minute you have, Love,laugh, and share your wisdom make a difference in someones life.

I know exactly what matters…

For more Tobi pictures check out: http://picasaweb.google.com/danielbalapeterson/BoazOluwamitobiPeterson

In my senior year at Kutztown University I met a Math Professor from the country of Mali. He had REALLY dark skin, and I thought to myself, “hah, i’m not the darkest guy at kutztown university!”. He had grey hair – the type that is common among older african men – the kind that looks like a combination of fine-ly ground black pepper and salt (in his case, more salt) – the kind of grey hair that only comes with wisdom. His grey hair reminded me of my father’s. But if Dr. Guisse dyed his hair black, he could fit in as one of the college students. I was immediately drawn to Dr. Amadou Guisse, an incredibly bright and opinionated man who could talk (and I could listen to) for hours on end.

And then I met his daughter Rhym (pronounced – Reem) who is her fathers daughter (smart/opinionated/grey-hair). At the time she was a computer science major like me, but she didn’t fit in. I could tell that she did not belong in a computer lab, rather a tv-set or stage… I think she finally realizes this, and she is making it happen. So she asked me to build her a website, and I couldn’t say no because I know her dad and her husband Jite is a very close friend of mine – he was one of the first people I met when we came to America, and we’ve been friends ever since.

Fortunately, on my commute, I can work on the train, and I was a able to finish this site for her. I wanted to capture her Arabic and French heritage and convey her bursting personality…

I hope I did a good job. What do you think? Check out: IamRhym.com

So i am madly in love with my wife, she is awesome. We work on our marriage daily, and often, when we have a chance, we will go to a marriage seminar or workshop. For us, there is a deliberate effort.

What I dislike about these seminars, is that the man is usually always the “bad guy,” we can’t seem to get it right, we keep dropping the ball. I asked my pastor why this is the case, and he tactfully said, (and I paraphrase) “historically the man is dubbed the head of the household and the responsibility for it’s success is first on him.”

See, we love the power – of being the head of the house – and wield it when it is to our advantage. The problem is that as the leader, there is also a heavier load to carry – you know… with great power comes great responsibility – spiderman (i think).

The difference between now and times-past is that we want the privilege which comes with power, but not the burden.

In marriage counseling, we also learnt that there are two ways people deal with conflict, and that is fight or flight. Simply put, you either stay and confront the situation, or you run away (emotionally or physically.) Again, too many of us are choosing the latter.

So, marriage is hard work, even when I stay and fight, it is not always positive, and it usually always hurts. But the alternative – being flighty – is not an option.

I want to leave you with this, in and of myself, I cannot win this fight. Greater men than me have lost the fight for fidelity, accountability, and honor. That is when my faith in Christ fills the gap. Nehemiah 4:14 says:

After I looked things over, I stood up and said to the nobles, the officials and the rest of the people, ‘Don’t be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons and your daughters, your wives and your homes.’

read the full context here: Nehemiah 4:14