My wife and I have done this bike tour for probably the seven or eight years. We always have a good time. One year it rained the entire time and it was still fun. This was little man’s third bike tour with us. He hung in Continue reading “The 2012 Five Boro Bike Tour”
Message to my kids.
Paintball: Urban Warfare
I started off the Spring break vacation by taking the family for some fun at New York City Paintball (http://www.newyorkcitypaintball.com). The break was just an excuse needed to arrange an early birthday outing for my wife who, believe it or not, had been asking me for months to take her to the paintball facility since it is located right next to LaGuardia. I thought this was pretty funny since my wife is one of the least violent people I have ever known. The kids are a bit more like me. My daughter is into the martial arts and my son is a Call of Duty/first person shooter veteran. To top it off, our good friend Tone Loc was visiting from Norway, so it Continue reading “Paintball: Urban Warfare”
Welcome back Windows
A few months back I built a new custom Windows 7 PC for little over a $1000 bucks. The new machine is a Quad Core i7 Intel system with 16GBs of ram and a 4TBs of internal storage. I switched back to Windows when the thought of purchasing a new similarly configured $5,000 Mac Pro desktop became unthinkable in these harsh economic times. Plus Windows 7 is now a viable Continue reading “Welcome back Windows”
Thoughts on Black History Month
Black History Month is here again and I find myself reflecting on how things have changed in just a few short years. For example, the story behind the above picture is that a little Black child visited the White House wanted to know if Obama’s hair “felt like his”, so the president obliged and let him see for himself. This brought to mind an exchange that my son and I had during the last primary season in 2008, before Obama was elected.
I took my son with me to vote, and as we were in the booth, he asked if he could grow up to become President one day. Now as a Black father this was one of those pivotal moments where you have to make a decision whether to tell him the truth about the world as you believe it, or allow them to remain innocent for awhile longer by painting them a picture of how the world should be. I try to always be truthful with my children, but in this moment I paused and decided to tell him how I hoped the future would look. “Yes, you can become the President one day”.
I just never thought it would happen in my lifetime.
Happy Christmas dance
After finding out what we got for our Christmas presents, my daughter and I did a little happy dance in celebration. She got a Canon T2i Continue reading “Happy Christmas dance”
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Launch
So last night I get in late from teaching an evening class and my son meets me at the door in damn near a panic. He tells me they are finalizing the pre-order sales for “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
HTML 5 and CSS 3 Training Class
In order to enhance the knowledge that I acquired in January when I took the WordPress theme design class at Noble Desktop, I decided to sign up for an HTML5 and CSS3 course. The industry is rapidly moving towards these new standards due to the advanced feature sets in HTML5 and CSS3 which allows for advanced animation, as well as for audio and video files to natively be supported in the browser without the need for third party plug-ins like Adobe’s Flash. While I didn’t feel like spending the money for the class, I needed to get up to speed on the new standards in order update the LaGuardia New Media curriculum, and to complete a much needed design update to my own web site. The class was once again held at Noble Desktop, and was once again, led by an amazing teacher named Victoria Torres. The two day course took us through the process of building an site from scratch using these new standards.
One of the unforeseen benefits of the class was that HTML 5 and CSS 3, when used in conjunction with a new mobile framework called PhoneGap, is becoming an excellent way of building mobile applications for both Android and iOS devises. PhoneGap was recently purchased by Adobe and was integrated into the latest version of Dreamweaver, release 5.5. This is a huge development for me since I can leverage our existing curriculum and begin to instruct students in the basics of mobile application develop by using PhoneGap.
The 2011 NYC Comic Con
The NYC Comic-Con was in town so the kids and I engaged in our yearly ritual. They had been looking forward to it since we went last year. The wife tagged along again for her second year. She will never admit it but I think she is starting to enjoy the madness as well. The kids had a blast as usual.
I was shocked how many people that ran into at the event that I knew from academia and business. I guess being a nerd is no longer a bad thing. The photos from the weekend can be found below….. Continue reading “The 2011 NYC Comic Con”
9/11: Ten years later
I can’t believe that it has been ten years since the 9/11 terrorist attack. So many things have changed since that day that I sometimes have a hard time remembering how things were prior to the attack. About four years ago, in one of the first posts I made on this blog, I spoke about my recollections of that day. In regards to that day, not much has changed for me since then. I am still uncomfortable in large crowds. I still don’t like traveling on public transportation. And I still worry whenever my children are out of my line of sight.