Each one of the photos above have an outsized impact on me. You will see just a picture, but these pictures have deep meaning to me. Here’s a little bit about each one.

Four Corners Landmark - “The American West”
The American West is a lot newer, and so it is constantly growing. Most cities and towns in Virginia were founded or started in the 1600s or the 1700s - 150 years before the American Civil War. The state of Arizona was declared a state in 1912, 9 years before my Grandfather was born. The Four Corners Landmark is a little spot in the middle of nowhere where the four states meet. The emptiness of the land reminds me of the opportunity that lies ahead of us, and not the past that is behind us.

Firewood on the back of a pickup truck - “Work at any age”
As a little boy growing up on a Dairy Farm in Wisconsin, my grandfather and I would go to the woods and make firewood together. It is where I learned to work, and learned how you never really retire. You are always waking up and getting something done. That doesn’t matter if you are five years old, or eighty-five years old. I will always be doing something with my life. I have a hard time sitting down and staying put in one place.

Elk - “Get close to your food”
One of my personal goals is to live a more sustainable lifestyle. I want to know where my food comes from. Instead of buying meat and fish from the grocery store, I prefer to fish for my own and hunt on my own. Instead of always buying fruits and vegetables from the grocery store, I want to have a small greenhouse one day. Knowing where it comes from, how it was prepared is important to me. Understanding the sacrifice that an animal had to take to put food on your table makes you appreciate the circle of life.

Red Rocks in Sedona, Ariz - “Hobbies are for fun”
One of my goals in the past few years has been to start getting into outdoor and wildlife photography. I have read books. I take lots of pictures. I have thrown out so many photos it is unreal. I am self-taught and love the pursuit of “that perfect photo”. Learning about focal length, aperture size, exposure, framing has been a fun little hobby of mine.

Buckey O’Neill’s Biography - “You can always do more”
Just reading that biography made me feel like an absolute reject. I thought to myself, “You can always do more. Stop making excuses.” That is there to remind me that life is about living, and you can probably always do another thing if you want to. Most people just make excuses in their heads which puts them into depression and sometimes even worse. If you go to sleep in your bed at night and are not exhausted, then you probably slacked off that day. O’Neill also served under US President Teddy Roosevelt’s Administration, and one of my favorite speeches of all time comes from Teddy Roosevelt: “The Man In The Arena”

The Man in the Arena Quote

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” - Teddy Roosevelt

Snow in a canyon - “Prepare for the unexpected”
This photo was taken on the ledge of the Grand Canyon. What you are unable to see from this photo is that that canyon goes down for an entire mile, but you can’t see it. If you expected it to end there, you would be shocked to go down for another 4,000 feet. The moral of the story? Prepare for the unexpected. You might lose your job. What would you do in that case? You might get into a car accident. How can you get to work? Your mother might pass away early in your life. Have you done everything you can to support her and the family in her passing? If your children are lost or don’t know how to get home, do they know how to operate a telephone? If they do, do they have your phone number memorized? Don’t go overboard, though. No need to build that concrete bunker in Alaska with enough provisions for 25 years. Approach it within reason. Lastly, have fun with it! It’s more about having a peace of mind than it is about the end of the world.

Cash Register Typo - “Software Bugs are everywhere”
If you look closely, the POS Software has a bug. Total should start on the first character position in the display, but it starts in the second character position. This forces the total to wrap around to the next line. In the industry, we call this an “off-by-one error” which is common because lists in programming starts counting from 0 instead of 1, causing a common error. This shows how much we rely on software these days, and it also shows how there is just not enough craftsmanship in our industry. As we don’t take the time to understand the problem, we often make mistakes. Software quality across the industry is a tough problem that is easy to solve, but we are not doing ourselves a favor. The lack of software quality forces us to make less features and fix more bugs, mostly to the detriment of the lowest guy on the totem pole. Our first couple of years in the industry is just meant to “fix bugs that other people made.”

Mobile Apps Update Software Screen - “Software bloat”
Another common issue with our software these days is the additional bloat brought on by frameworks and libraries, and inefficient programming languages to the benefit of the developer and the detriment of the user. In this example, that is a lot of data to download mobile apps, especially when you have hundreds of apps on your phone. Parkinson’s Law of Data states “Data expands to fill the space available for storage” and that is why we still have space issues when we have 512 GB of space on our phones and Terrabytes of data on our laptop, but it just never seems to be enough.

The Original Pancake House Restaurant - “Oh California, how expensive you are”
This is the menu of The Original Pancake House Restaurant in Los Altos, CA. My favorite is the Corned Beef Hash for $17.38! California is an expensive state, and the residents of California don’t seem to care. I’ll get my Corned Beef Hash from the grocery store for $2/can and make it better at home, the way I like it rather than pay that amount of money.

Grand Canyon National Park - “Take the leap”
This is where I started my first entrepreneurship adventure. I ended up having to shut down the business but I got a taste of it and look forward to one day being a full-time entrepreneur as opposed to a part-timer.