Recreation

July 17th, 2009 . . . . . .

Go Beyond with 10Beyond

My friend David Russell, Chief Inspiration Officer at 10Beyond, is doing great things with his team at 10Beyond, a new, innovative way for all of us to support our cause – and at the same time spread the word and encourage others to do the same.  See below email I received from David, to me as a 10Beyond user… won’t you consider joining the Core 100 today for your cause?

BTW, here is my current tag I use in my email:

The note from David Russell:


Tom, can you spare a dollar a day?

May Yip Harburg forgive me for butchering a line from his famous Depression era theme song, “Brother, can
you spare a dime?” but in the spirit of hard economic times and corporate transparency, I’ll risk the backlash in hope that you’ll respond to my request for a favor. I’m asking, begging, pleading with you to spare $1 a day for one month in support of your favorite nonprofit. Ok, there is a catch. I want you to make your donation through 10BEYOND.com and be a part of our CORE100 group of users. We need your help to gain the critical mass we need to begin to make a real difference to nonprofits all over the USA. By making your gift through 10BEYOND.com, not only will we send ninety-two cents of every dollar to your nonprofit, but we’ll also give you a cool way to spread the word about your nonprofit with every email message you send, using customized ema il “tags” that indicate your support for that organization. Next, we’ll report to you the impact your donation has made throughout your online network of peers – we call it your Influence. For example, if you inspire 10 people to give as you have, and each of those 10 inspires 10 others, you will have directly influenced 100 people to give $3,000 or more to a nonprofit cause – all because you put a tag in your email. Making a difference is now as easy as sending an email. More than simply joining a cause, 10BEYOND.com lets you put your money where your message is – I call it PYMWYMI – a goofy way to remind folks that anyone can join a cause, but it takes PYMWYMI (pronounced pim-wim-ee) to make a real difference in the budgets of nonprofits who depend on actual money, not just fans, to carry out their work.

So please, spare a dollar a day for your favorite cause today. If you have questions about how 10BEYOND.com works, just click around on our website for the answers, or email me personally at drussell at 10beyond.com. By the way, you can help build my own Influence by clicking my tag below. I’ve customized it with a photo of my son and our loved and missed family dog, Chap. Thanks for your help. –

David W. Russell, Founder/CEO

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January 23rd, 2009 . .

Blue Fracture




P1176543

Originally uploaded by gcrgcr

Took this shot last weekend up at Red Feather Lakes in Northern Colorado. Lake Hiawatha was fairly well frozen over. You can see the camera settings I used. I tried color correction but I like the blue hue that was in the original, so this is untouched. Oh, and yes, those are my toes. Darn it. Guess it is worth cropping.

You can see the whole set here.


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August 11th, 2008 . . . . . . .

Dad Week




Dad Week Board

Originally uploaded by gcrgcr

What is Dad Week you ask? It is basically a vacation – or maybe even a “staycation” (ugh, so pop culture – thanks for that George!)

As a family, we’ve already been on some cool trips this year. Walt Disney World in January and Las Vegas in March for the NASCAR race. For summer fun, the kids have stayed busy with friends around town, local camps and activities, camping, etc…

Sometime earlier in the summer, I suggested that I would take a week off to just be home and do a bunch of fun things with the kids.

One key was to schedule this before the kids go back to school – which is next week!

Then, we had to pick out the things we wanted to do and get them scheduled. With no shortage of ideas to fill up six or seven days, we had to have a process to whittle things down a bit. At work, our development team (and some of our other operations teams) use the Agile process. We use Rally software.

If you are not familiar with the Agile process, in a nutshell, you plan development in ‘iterations’. There is a careful planning process that includes product management or others needing development work brining their “stories”. Stories are requirements or tasks to complete or progress a project. While the Rally software allows this to all be done electronically, our teams have found that using post-it notes helps in the acceptance, scheduling and tracking with our teams. So, long story short, we did this at home.

Each of us created three “stories” – things we wanted to do during Dad Week. One thing could cost money (e.g. the Movies) and two things had to not cost money (or be very minimal in cost). We then sat down and worked together to accepts stories and schedule them throughout the Dad Week days. The kids came up with great suggestions, and we’ve been having a blast. You can see the photo of our Dad Week Board above. Here is some of the list:

  • Water World
  • Family Guitar Hero Contest
  • Out To Lunch
  • Go Hiking
  • Hit a Movie
  • Splurge Breakfast (Waffles, Bacon, Sausage and real maple syrup) [Thanks Neil!]
  • Kids Plan and Cook Dinner Night
  • Erie Go Kart Track Day
  • Reading at the Library

And so on… You get the idea. No doubt this is keeping us busy, but we are having a great time. Dad Week is over half way completed. Today we did “Out to Lunch” – Oskar Blues in Lyons, Colorado, and then “Go Hiking” – Heil Valley Ranch near Boulder. We’ve got much more to do the next few days, of course check here for updates. We should have plenty of photos to share too.

I called it Dad Week, but four days into it, it probably should just be called Family Week. Missing work is always less than ideal for me – I love my work – but family and times like these are important – no matter how simple they seem. This has been really great so far and hopefully will be a family tradition from here on out!

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April 30th, 2008 . . . . . . . .

Hoover Dam




P3031156

Originally uploaded by gcrgcr

Yep, the title and photo pretty much say it all.

When we were in Las Vegas in March for the NASCAR race, we (like many other tourists) found a morning to head south and over to Hoover Dam.

There are a lot of pictures here, some interesting, some not. Here are a few things you should know:

AJ was sick and spent most of the time in the car with Joie, so mostly Jesse and Max in photos. And when you see AJ, well, he doesn’t look great. BTW, he spent 6+ hours in our hotel room thereafter until he felt better – it was a bummer for all, but mostly for him.

Zoom lens. This trip was my first outing with this new camera – my Olympus E-410. I’ve accidentally left the standard lens in a different backpack, so all I had was this higher-powered lens. Close photos were hard to take, if not impossible. Note that Max and Jesse standing in two states at once had to be two photos. (I’ll stitch those together in photoshop, I think to myself. Yeah, right.)

The highway they are building overhead just freaks me out. Those are the tallest concrete support columns I’ve ever seen and although high places don’t freak me out that much, this kind of does. I can’t imagine driving on that highway. They should call it sky highway, at least the way it looks from the current highway down at Hoover dam. Can’t wait to see when they finish it.

So, that’s it – consider this your being trapped at my house and I roll out the slide projector except you don’t have to watch all 88 slides if you don’t want to. If you really want this particular experience, try the slideshow! :)

Enjoy!

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