6197 comments
2357 subscribers
Follow me on Twitter (@sachac)
Subscribe! Feed reader E-mail

Making things happen

My dad was telling all sorts of crazy stories at the breakfast table
earlier. It’s a good thing my mom reminded me to run and grab a
recorder. I caught some of the stories on video! =) He’s an awesome
storyteller, and he has such adventures.

He started by talking about the photography school my sister is
thinking of attending next year. The school is expensive, and they
don’t really teach anything my dad doesn’t already do. Then again,
he’s done everything—from aerial to underwater, from cars to fashion,
and even sports and photojournalism as well. He refuses to be niched,
and he loves breaking ground.

He regaled us with stories of his adventures, like the time that he
was shooting a ship. They gave him coordinates, and he looked them up
on Google Maps. He realized that he wouldn’t be able to get a good
shot because his fixed-wing plane would interfere with the flight path
at the nearby airport. He called the ship on his cellphone and gave
them new coordinates, spelling out a plan that would ensure the kind
of shot the client wanted. At 1000H they would be at the coordinates
he gave. They would keep their bearing for five minutes, then turn
toward the sun. They would execute a wide circle and then continue on
their journey. Impressed, the captain agreed, and everything went
exactly according to plan. Result? A head-on shot of the ship that was
so well lined up that it seemed to have been taken from a helicopter
and not from a fixed-wing plane.

My dad’s the kind of person who can move things to fit his vision, and
for whom things also just fall into place. He told us about
hitchhiking in Albay and how things kept happening for him. I managed
to record that, so I might put it up on YouTube soon. =)

He can do anything he wants to, because he wants to. The strength and
clarity of that desire could be part of the reason why people help him
make things happen. My mom wrote to airport managers and mayors,
arranged accommodation and fuel, organized exhibits—all because my
dad had a dream.

My dad can make things happen, and things happen for him. I have that
nature of my dad’s. I haven’t developed something more like my mom’s,
though. She’s more methodical and pays more attention to detail. In
the MBTI personality inventory thing, I think she would be an S-type
(Sensing), and my dad and I are firmly Ns (Intuitive). It would be
good for me to develop a little of that, but I don’t have to do
everything on my own, just as my dad works with others to make things
happen. =)

Random Emacs symbol: w3m-history-minimize – Command: Minimize the history so that there may be the current page only.

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/4104

On This Day...

  • 2013: Looking back and looking forward — Have you ever felt unsure about whether you’re moving forward or where the time went? A friend called me up [...]
  • 2012: Weekly review: Week ending December 30, 2011 — Lots of progress on Quantified Awesome thanks to last week’s long weekend. Looking forward to building more this long weekend. [...]
  • 2011: Weekly review: Week ending December 31, 2010 — From last week’s plans Work [X] Work on Project M: Make sure users have permissions to do things [...]
  • 2010: On the practice of a weekly review — A weekly review is an excellent idea. Here are some of the reasons why I do it: Track and celebrate accomplishments. [...]
  • 2009: Homebody — Fun with friends is fine and dandy; chefs and waiters, pretty handy; But it’s clear in every case that home remains [...]
  • 2009: Happiness and cats — Tania Samsonova sent me a link to this geeky-and-oh-so-true comic: Schrödinger’s (emotional) Miscalculation – Part 3. Tania, you rock! =D
  • 2008: Working on section on Org and projects — Just to say that I’m alive and writing. I’m at 1400 words or so for the section on Org and [...]
  • 2007: Big, hairy, audacious goal — 2My Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal for the next eight months is to help huge companies imagine how they can help people [...]
  • 2007: My books are balanced — I have to confess a certain delight in knowing that my books are balanced and that I have a full year [...]
  • 2007: Yay me! — I gave up watching New Year fireworks for the thrill of actually keeping a not-quite-New-Year goal of waking up before 7:30 [...]
  • 2004: On losing my data — Insightful post, then X-Windows died horribly. Agh! No auto-save! Yes, yes, I know, it doesn’t have season words or the wordplay I so [...]
  • 2004: Paper: Problem-based learning for foundation computer science courses — http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~judy/PBL/tr_cse_pbl99.pdf The foundation courses in computer science pose particular challenges for teacher and learner alike. This paper describes some of these challenges [...]
  • 2004: Considering part-time — Blast. My really long blog post disappeared after stuff crashed. In brief: I’m thinking of teaching part-time instead of full-time. I want [...]
  • 2004: Ackpth, lost mail — <sigh> Whoops.
  • 2004: Consolidating archives — tla make-archive -l sacha@free.net.ph--main ~/notebook/arch tla my-default-archive sacha@free.net.ph--main tla archive-setup emacs-wiki--sacha--1.0 tla tag arch@repose.cx--03/emacs-wiki--dev--1.0 emacs-wiki--sacha--1.0 tla cacherev emacs-wiki--sacha--1.0 tla get emacs-wiki--sacha--1.0 emacs-wiki
  • 2004: LDAP admin — -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux) hQEOAyM0ahSC/SeUEAQAiUiEncXWQems/3SY+A5JlHOP0F8sHJk4/S1lhSKZKsWD xpjIOFbxpn8rrtprOp9mnc9QMBGzRnnffinx9rbwz4nd0ryxHhuUigZbDDeItoON lMM5GupfkQuP/lJt+BtUxZsze5yj2KcXMDPPQawaM/WVqo01yUDDarVoauO6wtYD /jbZJv24fM4lbDKfzfMEEsw9Ik1wdt/ou5bCfK9OOfLCofV5zV0AuMl0HCpqEN7P 6E2wJRSzSRliG8DXCFcMsjbhWjIzr37x3smsTkHRkY8MPIsT4YGUIxNNlgj5HMMe 74Vvb5keEsM03AD/H9rKWEE2it76aUMmyQLTb7pgvzC50j0BMVBA/8g9CAkBHNie sBC1pYJENkEycwXSHaOv+Z4CbJ9+PNbabI6oUQJ0s21OdsxsEOisPmpxgvbP9Tjx =6lI2 -----END PGP MESSAGE-----
  • 2004: Good night in Dutch — welterusten, or just trusten for short.
  • 2004: Reaction to OnLove — I was recently considering the idea of having a “girlfriend” purely for emotional reasons. i prefer to name it “emotional buffer”. [...]
  • 2004: File-local variables in vim — :help modeline
  • 2004: On days — Only a few hours ago did fireworks light up the sky to celebrate the beginning of a new year, yet now [...]
  • 2004: SIGCSE: The first stop for computer science education research — http://www.acm.org/sigcse/ SIGCSE is the special interest group for computer science education in the Association for Computing Machinery. It regularly organizes conferences and the [...]
  • 2004: Resolutions for 2004 — Speak slower and lower. Check requirements within 3 days. Log all of my expenses in plain text in Emacs so that I [...]
  • 2004: Old computer — I’m having problems with the ADMTek Centaur-P. It’s a tulip card, but for some reason it does not want to be [...]