The burning question of the week:

What was your parents’ room like (beds, bedspreads, easy chairs, etc.)? Were you allowed to rest in their bed when you were sick?

I remember my parents’ room as being very Victorian. I’m pretty sure they bought most of their furniture at some sort of an auction and it was all very antique-esque. They had a tall mirror on top of their dresser, a large bed with a big ol’ headboard and that’s about what I remember. You see, I have a terrible memory, especially when it comes to my childhood. I remember that my mom used to hide birthday (and some Christmas) presents in their bedroom closet. We’d often sneak in there before our birthdays to see what awaited. I remember sneaking in there one August day to find a “My Pet Monster”. I was pumped. Apparently that was circa 1985 or thereabouts.

I also just remembered that there was a sort of walk-in closet that they kept the ironing board in, along with my Dad’s roll-top desk. And I think there was even a closet in there, and a window. So maybe it wasn’t a walk-in closet but a really small room that could only be entered through another room. That house actually had at least three rooms that could only be entered by walking through another room. Not so great for privacy.

Because of my shady memory, I have only certain memories of my parents’ bedroom. I don’t ever recall sleeping in their bed when sick or anything but I probably did. I also remember:

• Listening at their closed door to see if they were awake when we got home super late at night. I can’t remember why, though.
• Finding my Mom’s dental tools and wondering what they were for (I think she had used them to clean her own teeth).
• Showing my Mom my penmanship grades in the corner of their room. She told me I was the first Rasmusson to get an A in penmanship. I was proud. Unfortunately, things went downhill from there. Thanks for nothing, keyboard.
• Sitting in their room with my brother York after we both got home way later than we should have while York stood up to my folks and I cowered in the corner. He pointed at them one at a time and said “Screw you, and screw you!” I was shocked. Floored. York has since turned out to be one of the most upstanding guys you’ll ever meet. Aaaah, teenagers.
• Watching scary movies with the sibs while my parents hosted a Christmas party downstairs
• Feeding (and not feeding) the bird they kept in their room for a very short time before we neglected to provide it sufficient water. We weren’t the greatest at caring for small animals.
• Playing on their bed that was part waterbed, part mattress bed. I guess it was a water mattress.
• Sitting on the bed while my Mom used a sewing needle to remove splinters. I hated that so much but it was always worth it.

Looking back, I think that their room wasn’t really very big but at the time it seemed huge. Amazing how things change as you grow. I’m blessed to have great parents who gave all of their free time to us. And now they’re blessed with a much bigger and more comfortable room. They deserve it.

This week’s question:

Do you remember any visitors that came to your classroom – like the mayor, an actor or a cowboy star?

Not off the top of my head, I don’t. Lame answer, I know, but I don’t have any great experiences to share on this one. So instead, I’ll list some of the people I’d love to shadow for a little while or hang out with or live with. I’m not a backstage pass and signature kind of guy. If I won backstage passes to go see my favorite band, I might say hi to the members of the band and introduce myself but I’m not the star-struck type. I would more likely give the passes to someone else – or better yet, sell them on eBay. Stars are just ordinary people who happen to be famous. Admittedly, however, there are those whose lives I find fascinating and would love to learn from. Some of them are:

• George Washington – he’s an example to many and did some pretty amazing things, even when the odd’s were really against him
• Benjamin Franklin – A creative soul – I would love to have been able to pick his brain about the thinking process and witnesses some of his political and tangible accomplishments.
• Moses – he’s pretty much toward the top of the list. What a life this man lived.
• Jesus Christ – He IS the top of the list, for sure. Can you imagine spending time with Him?
• Tony Robins – I’ve listened to a lot of his books on tape and would love to find out how well he practices what he teaches. If he’s half as amazing in real life as he is in his seminars and such, he’d be an amazing tutor to shadow
• Leonardo DaVinci – back to the creative arena, this guy was the king of so many mediums and such an amazing artists. His controversial and highly debated life would have been fascinating to witness as well.

There are others, I’m sure, but time is short and baby Ava is fussy so I’ll wrap this up. If we could take the good from these people’s lives and emulate it, we could do a world of good – famous or not. Many of the most amazing individuals that ever lived were never written about or made famous. That doesn’t make them one bit less amazing to me.

Rock on,
Nils

Tags: famous people, nils

Last week I was at the Rasmusson Family Reunion so I didn’t take the time to write in my history section here. I’ll attempt two posts this time. Last week’s question:

Did you have a favorite teacher?

Of course, the snide part of me wants to simply answer “Yes.” but I presume the question should have read “Who was your favorite teacher? Why?” So here goes.

It was my Junior or Senior year. Can’t remember which but I think it was my Senior year in high school. 1995-1996. I had always done well in English. Unlike Math, English comes fairly naturally to me. I’m not guru but it’s easier for me than it is for some. I found myself sitting in the room of Mr. Cangelosi. We called him Mr. Cange. As most students of his will tell you, he’s not an easy teacher but he’s a great teacher. At the time (15 years ago) he was a goin’ grey haired, middle aged guy, probably in his early 40′s. I scoured the web for a photo of him just now but came up with nothing.

In short, I loved what Mr. Cange did. He took it upon himself to expose students to culture. He was strict about grammar and encouraged quality writing by giving quality feedback. He read through each of our assignments meticulously and helped us to improve where we needed improving. Most of all, he brought different viewpoints into our lives. I remember reading books like Siddhartha, which was an eye-opening introduction into a Buddhist way of thinking for me. We read other books that just made me realize that there’s a lot more to life than what little I had experienced. Our assignments helped us to see things from a different perspective and to appreciate what we had. I honestly can’t remember many details, I just remember that he opened my eyes and a good teach should do that. To cause others to be introspective and to change as a result is a gift. He has that gift.

Oh yeah, I also remember that we weren’t allowed to use the word “thing” in his class. It forced us to always use a more descriptive or appropriate word. From then on, I made it a point to avoid the “T word” in any papers I submitted. I don’t know that I was perfect at it but I was certainly conscientious of it. So thanks, Mr. Tom Cangelosi. You were a great teacher and, if you’re still teaching today, I’m guessing you still are.

What I’ve learned about effective instructors:

• An effective instructor causes students to internalize what is being taught
• They help others to fully understand what is being taught by seeing it through the proper perspective
• They provide good feedback. Students can’t learn if they don’t know what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.
• They give students to room. Hitler was an effective leader (more of a persuader, really) but not an effective instructor. Students need to grow individually and come to their own conclusions.

That’s it for this week. Hopefully I can adapt some of what Mr. Cange taught me into my life and my children’s lives.

Rock on,
Nils

Tags: favorite teacher, history, mr. cangelosi, nils, the gilbert school, tom cangelosi

Grooveshark Mobile

I’ve been a long time fan of Grooveshark for many reasons. It’s not a perfect internet radio but it’s pretty awesome. For quite a while now, I’ve been hearing that Grooveshark is working on an app for the iPhone but it seemed like it would never arrive. Finally, on August 5th, it did. With Grooveshark Mobile, you can do the following:

• Listen to any song you want – anything at all whether you own it or not
• Create playlists of all your favorite songs and keep them with you both on the computer and on your phone
• Enjoy customized radio stations based on the music you like, much like Pandora
• And here’s the kicker: DOWNLOAD any songs or playlists to your phone in offline mode for listening to any time you want, with or without internet connection

So that’s pretty rad. But THERE IS A CATCH. You get all of this free for 30 days but if you want to continue with it after that, you have to become a pro member for $3/month. Not too shabby for that price, though. I’m a total cheapskate and I think I’ll do it. Plus, as a pro member, when you use Grooveshark on your laptop or desktop there will be no ads. Nice.

About Offline Mode: In order to download a song for offline mode, simply click on the Details (li’l right arrow) for the song or playlist you want to download and select “Make Available Offline”. Then you’ll see a progress bar of the download underneath that song or playlist.

With offline mode, you’ll want to leave it disabled most of the time that you have an internet connection (3G or WiFi) and enable it only when you don’t have a connection because you can’t stream music or browse through un-downloaded playlists while in offline mode.

So give it a try. Hopefully you’ll enjoy being able to listen to just about any song you can imagine. Long live Grooveshark!

- nils

Tags: grooveshark, grooveshark mobile, iphone, mobile, music, nils

This week’s assignment:

Did you study a foreign language? Did those lessons stick with you? Were you ever able to use that language on vacation or in your community?

Nils (Elder Rasmusson) at the Orelhao (phone booth)

Like many LDS men, I served a full-time two year mission. I was lucky enough to be called to serve in Campinas, Brazil. As preparation for the mission, I spent two months in the Missionary Training Center (MTC) in Provo, UT, where I studied Portuguese as well as missionary skills for about 12 hours/day. I had a great time there, though not everybody enjoys the MTC. It was helped by the fact that I was closer than I had been to my girlfriend (and now wife), even though I couldn’t see her. She left me care packages under a nearby tree and we wrote to each other about every other day. In the MTC, as well as on the rest of your mission, you can’t speak to your girlfriend, friends, etc. In fact, you can only speak to your family twice/year. Otherwise it’s just letters but I think they do emails now. That would be nice. But I digress.

Learning Portuguese wasn’t easy for me but the situation made it as easy as can be expected. I took a year of Latin and three years of French (as in, French 1, French 1 again, and French 2) in high school but that didn’t do much for me. No real interest. I was much more interested in the cute girl who sat in front of me (even when my brother started dating her) than the language. By the time I left the MTC, I felt like I could handle myself in Portuguese. I was mostly wrong. When we got to Brazil, I had a very hard time understanding people but not nearly as hard as it was for them to understand me. They couldn’t understand a word the scrawny white gringo said. Oh well. My first missionary companion (we’re always paired up for safety and strength) was a native Brazilian and spoke no English, so I had to learn quick. I was grateful for that. By the time I was two months into my mission I felt I was pretty fluent. Fluent for a missionary, however, is not the same as it would be for an average person moving to the country. We didn’t have to know how to say words like windshield wipers or tax attorney, or other things that didn’t pertain to us. We’d get by just fine but we mostly knew words that applied to our situation.

By the time I left Brazil, I felt very comfortable speaking Portuguese. I was easily understood and had no trouble understanding anybody else. I’m sure I had a moderate accent but it didn’t impede my communication.

Upon returning home to the good ol’ USofA, I found that nobody spoke Portuguese except my brother and I. My brother happened to have served his mission in Portugal and our missions overlapped for a year. I did notice, however, that tons of people spoke Spanish so I set out to try to learn it myself. I bought some books and programs and got to the point where I can speak it OK – not fluently but I can understand most of what people say and I can get my point across in a poor and barely intelligible way. Still, it’s great to have that skill, if you want to call it that. I use Spanish all the time in one fashion or another. On our recent cruise to Ensenada, I was able to barter my way down from $25 per Bonsai tree to $25 for two in Spanish. Not too shabby. Too bad I didn’t realize that we couldn’t actually take the Bonsais back onto the boat. I then got to use my English to sell the Bonsais to the English speaking Mexican guy who was selling a bunch of useless nick-nacks in a booth. All’s well that ends well.

As it turns out, for the last 16 months or so I’ve been working everyday on a business with one of my old mission companions who, obviously, speaks Portuguese. We lace many of our conversations with Portuguese but with the understanding that our ability to speak the language more than ten years after leaving Brazil is ruim demais.

- Nils

Tags: brasil, brazil, campinas, foreign language, history, nils

Sunset along the Wasatch Front

Took this set of pictures tonight on my compact point and shoot from across the street. I love Utah. And thunderstorms.

Just learned about this one. This allows you to make changes only to Chrome and Safari which both tend to render the same but often slightly differently than Firefox and IE.
@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) { /* hacked for chrome and safari */
#mainNav li { margin:0 26px 0 0; }
}

Tags: browser, chrome, css, hack, nils, safari, specific, web design

This is the first of (hopefully) many entries that were prompted by my Mom. She gave me a jar full of writing assignments designed to record my life, in a sense, on a weekly basis. Today’s question:

What was your favorite season at your house? Do you remember summer as too hot or exhilarating and perfect? Did you swim a lot in the summer?

Well, this one is easy. Summer for sure. I’ve always been a huge fan of summers. I grew up in Connecticut where the summers were mostly pleasant and there was a never ending source of mischief. In my earlier years, summer was a time to hang out with the neighborhood kids (most of whom were from several blocks away in any given direction) and rescue stray cats. Well, we didn’t rescue them as much as scrounged together enough money to buy them cat food and milk. As I recall, there was even a newspaper article in the local paper about our group. I was referred to as a 12-year old Dennis the Menace looking boy in the article. Not that I wreaked havoc on my elderly neighbor but I had reddish hair and a cowlick to boot. But I digress.

Highland Lake! We did, in fact, swim a ton in the summer. We often went up to Highland Lake, which was about a 20 minute walk, I’d guess. Why guess? Thanks to Google Maps I can see. Yup – about twenty minutes. Here’s the route:

View Larger Map

Highland Lake Spillways

We often bought treats at some little diner at the edge of the lake, Laffy Taffys mostly. I remember one day with Michael and Brian Cane going up to the spillways at the lake – an area where cars drove a section of road where several inches of lake water streamed over the road and into a stream beyond. There was a sidewalk that you used to get across but if  cars went fast at all, you’d get splashed. We spent an afternoon up there trying to get cars to fly through and soak us. We were successful. Aaah, Google Maps to the rescue again. Here’ s a street view capture of exactly the place.

We spent many summer days at the beach, though I’m no longer sure what the name of that beach was.

Winsted YMCA

Aside from swimming at the lake we often went swimming at the YMCA public pool. Public as long as you had a membership or two dollars. I distinctly remember being the last of our group to get in while the poor counter person counted out my two dollars in pennies on a few occasions. We spent many-a-summer-day at “The Y”. Our family wasn’t the wealthiest so we often had free or discounted memberships, which was great. Or maybe my parents paid it and I didn’t know about it. Not sure.

This is hardly an exhaustive account of my summers but it’s a start. Perhaps I’ll add more later. I will say, however, that I still adore summertime. It’s the season of relaxation, vacations, sun and fun. So here’s to you, summer. You rock.

- Nils

Ashish Tiwari

I hate to do this but I don’t really have a choice. If you work with Ashish Tiwari of Indore India, be warned. I hired him to create a payment gateway module for a Magento store I’ve been working on for a customer. He indicated that it would take a week or two of part time work and he’d have it ready. $800 later (on a $1300 website gig) it looked like he had finished because I was able to place the order in Magento and it went through successfully.  Shame on me for not testing more thoroughly. All he did was make it work on the front end. The money from the test order never made it to the site owner’s account. What’s worse? The code he added to the back end caused all of the admin section to malfunction. I couldn’t even disable the custom payment module he had installed. I got errors left and right, all pointing back to the module code he had added. It took me a week or two to realize that it didn’t actually work because I was busy creating stylesheets and graphics to spiff up the site.

Obviously, I began emailing Ashish Tiwari to find out what was going on and why it wasn’t working. It was at this point that he went AWOL. Gone off the face of the planet. No replies. Ever. Period. I had hired him via a site called oDesk, which I’ve used quite a bit before and since. oDesk has, in my opinion, a poorly thought out rule that disallows leaving feedback after 14 days from the time the other party leaves feedback. So he quickly left good feedback for me (why wouldn’t he? I just gave him $800 for nothing!) and closed the project, telling me he’d finish it offline for free. I thought he had finished the payment module and he had been offering to do some of the front-end work, too. I didn’t leave feedback right away because he kept promising to do extra work for free and I worried that leaving negative feedback for not following through would only ensure that he never did follow through. Aaah, what a sucker I was. The 14 days lapsed (I wasn’t aware of the 14 day rule at the time), he got his money and I had NO way to warn others or leave any feedback for him. I contacted oDesk about this and they basically told me to be more careful next time. Gee, thanks. So that’s the gist of the nightmare I’ve been through. Today’s lesson?

DON’T DO BUSINESS WITH ASHISH TIWARI OF INDORE INDIA!

I’m writing a post about this in hopes that others will be warned. I literally have no way to warn people on oDesk since they’ve removed that right from me. Ashish, feel free to refund me any time, bud!

PS – One more sketchy thing that raised a red flag was that he booked most of his hours offline, claiming that his internet connection was spotty. oDesk requires that contractors stay logged in while working so it can capture a screenshot of the work they’re doing for the client every ten minutes. Shockingly, I hardly had any screen shots to see. I took his word for it. Lesson learned.

Peace out.
- Nils

Tags: Ashish Tiwari

We finally took the plunge and bought a HDTV. We’ve been (mostly me, actually) coveting HDTVs for years and now we have joined the elite club of individuals with many more pixels behind the glass. Being the bargain shopper that I am I decided to get a larger slightly used TV instead of a smaller new one. I bought a Vizio 47″ LCD for $500 and it’s a thing of beauty. I then bought Hancock on Blu-Ray last night and watched it until 1:30 AM. It rocked. Nils will strive to post more regularly.