My commute went form one hour to ten minutes, and I'm still just as rushed in the morning.

Parkinson's Law states that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. I've noticed this for sure in the mornings when Jake and I get ready for work/school.

A month and a half ago my commute went from an hour plus to ten minutes. Meaning, I'd have an extra hour in the morning to get ready.

I'm just as rushed as I was before. Actually, not quite. I'm slightly more relaxed, but the difference is very slight. It doesn't feel like I have an extra hour.

Why? Because each task I do to get Jake ready stretches out until the hour is filled up.* This isn't intentional. It just happens.

Parkinson's Law applies everywhere, most interestingly at work. For example, these last two days at work I've had almost nothing to do. When I did get work it took me all day to do it.

I'm much more productive when I have lots to do and very little time to do it. I speed through my work and the days go by much, much faster.

____

* When you have a kid, there is no such thing as rushing. The more you try to rush, the slower you get. This is called "Kid Time". Estimate how long it would normally take you to do something, triple it, and that's Kid Time.

What if we could see anybody at any time?

What if technology existed that allowed us to view any human being at any time, without them knowing it?

Maybe we punch a wormhole through space-time and look at that person through a window. The how doesn't matter. Let's just say that's the way it was.

You would literally have no privacy. Anyone in the world could watch what you're doing at any time. If you're shitting or having sex or yelling at your child. Someone could be watching.

But maybe not. In fact, probably not. You're not that interesting to most people. To family, however, you might be interesting enough for them to watch you for a few minutes a day. Or maybe your ex girlfriend or boyfriend is thinking about you so they watch you for a few minutes.

Let's take this further. You could watch President Obama in a meeting. You could literally follow him for most of his waking life (as long as you didn't mind sacrificing your own life by wasting your time watching him).

You could watch any movie star you want and see what they're doing at this second. You could watch your boss or your son or the person robbing your house or an old high school sweetheart.

Imagine how different life would be. Now write a book about it.

***

Too late. I got this idea from a sci fi book called The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter.

Stop caring.

Stop caring what other people think. Their opinions shouldn't matter to you. The only thing that should matter is your opinion of yourself. And even that shouldn't matter too much.

Stop going inside your own head. Stop thinking about all your problems; whether you're happy, whether you have enough money, whether you should be married, or have a good enough job. Just stop!

Don't analyze yourself. And don't analyze others. Don't judge yourself, and don't judge others unless you're perfect. Accept things as how they are because that is how they are. They aren't anyway else.

Whenever you think about yourself, you miss an opportunity to notice something around you, in the real world outside of your own head.

If someone criticizes you they are secretly mentioning their own flaw or insecurity.

Stop caring about what people think because they've already made up their mind about you, and it isn't worth the effort for you to change their mind. Most people don't change their mind anyway.

If you are concerned about what other people think, realize those other people are more concerned about themselves than you. In a few days they won't even remember that they disapproved of you.

A few decades after that, they will be dead and will have forgotten you entirely. A few decades after your death no one left on earth will remember you. So it really doesn't matter what another person thinks about you.

***

Except for your boss. He or she matters because they decide the course of your career and your income level.

A work story about staples.

At work today I heard a large bang and my co-worker said, "Now you know why I need an industrial stapler."

The bang was the sound of the stapler. She showed me a thick stack of papers, now stapled together.

I nodded.

After a moment she excitedly said, "Look at this!" She came over to my desk and pointed to the stack of papers she had just stapled. "That's a damn near perfect staple."

I looked at the staple and it was perfectly straight and positioned in the corner of the stack. I congratulated her on her stapling.

Then I added: "And now I know how to mess you up. When I staple something for you I'll be sloppy with the staple."

"No!" she said.

Why are they closing all the roads during the olympics? Shouldn't they be opening more roads?

So the Olympics are coming here in a few weeks and all we hear about is how it's going to be impossible to travel.

Gridlock. Hour waits for public transit. No taxis available. Massive road closures.

Wait... what? Road closures? Why would VANOC close roads when we're hosting "the world" during the Olympics? Shouldn't we be opening MORE roads? I mean, hell, we built a new highway to Whistler, dynamiting the pristine Eagle buffs to clear the way.

If it's going to be so crowded then it seems like a no-brainer. Open roads so people can drive around and see the city.

We don't want our visitors saying, "Yeah Vancouver was nice - but the traffic was awful. You can't get anywhere in that city."

VANOC is saying "don't go to work if you work down town - work from home". Wha??? There are going to be thousands of tourists in Vancouver and we're not supposed to go to work? How are these tourists going to get basic services?

I don't understand.

***

The other day I was telling my Mom that Canada might win the games and she said no way. I said we came in second in the last games and we beat America. She said, impossible and wanted proof. Well here you go Mom:

Total Medal Count - Torino

Germany 29

USA 25

Canada 24

I was wrong. Canada came in third, by one medal. We beat Austria, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, France etc. This year we're supposed to win it all!

We don't fix or make things anymore.

I can't draw worth crap and I can barely work a screwdriver. I always blamed it on my hands. But this can't be the case. I can play guitar a little and I can type 60 plus words a minute. So what's wrong with me?

I'm typical, and that's the problem according to Matthew B. Crawford. His book, Shop class as soulcraft : an inquiry into the value of work laments the fact that most people in our society can't fix or build things with our hands anymore.

We don't need to. Everything's made cheaply in China. It's easier to buy a new item than repair an old one.

Crawford says this is a shame, because building things with your hands is good. It makes us happier, we're creating real things of tangible value in the world, and the pay's not bad (now that there's a shortage of trade workers since no one wants to do that anymore.)

He contrasts this with our current "creative" economy where we sit around in our post-industrial cubicles thinking of ways of doing things "being creative", but not actually doing them.

I want to learn how to draw.

One thing I'm horrible at - drawing. I haven't progressed in drawing since I was maybe 8 years old.

The other day I came across a website by a guy who decided he wanted to learn how to draw so he did one drawing for 2,000 days straight and posted each drawing on the site, no matter how bad. Well, after 2,000 days he was an artist. Literally.

It's truly amazing to see his progression. Anyone could do this. It would be hard though. Every day for 5 or 6 years? Scientists say that you need to practice at something for 10,000 hours before you become expert.

I've gone to a few bookstores to look for books about how to draw I quickly became intimidated. There are so many techniques and styles and things to draw I don't know where to start. Talking to people about drawing doesn't help because they just say things like, "Get a book. Draw something you like."

I don't know what I like. Maybe I'll take a drawing course? I need some guidance here. Throw me a fricken bone!

80% of jobs aren't advertised.

I'm thinking more and more about my upcoming job-hunt in June. I'm a bit worried about finding a job in this economy. It took me almost a year to find my current crappy job. I don't have a year to spare this time around.

Anyway, I've read a lot of books about how to find a job and they all say this in one form or another. 80% of jobs aren't advertised. I find this, literally speaking, to be very false. In every place I've worked, every position has been posted - either internally, externally or both.

The trend nowadays where I live is to no longer promote someone within. The human resources trend is to post the job internally and externally and have the public and the employees apply for it.

(Another trend is, instead of internally promoting your employees, you hire someone from outside your organization to fill the roll. That's why it's often better to leave a company and come back, rather than stay in the same old job hoping for a promotion.)

Many not-for-profits and union contracts have it in their bylaws that they have to post a job. Also, any company big enough to have a human resources department almost always posts their jobs because that's standard industry practice.

I will say this, however:

1) Even though a position is posted, many managers and companies already know who they're going to hire. By posting it, they're just going through the motions.

And it's for this reason that "networking" is important. And that's why all the books say "80% of the jobs aren't posted." Because they want you to network and it's easier to say this then to explain it the way I did right here.

We're not happy because we stopped evolving 10,000 years ago.

Humans stopped evolving about 10,000 years ago. That's when civilization began and permanently changed our lifestyles. We went from hunter-gatherers living on the savanna, to farmers.

The change happened quickly and genetic traits that would make us more successful (good with animals? good at identifying and growing different types of grasses?) began to be selected for.

Except that human evolution is slow, with approximately 50 years between generations. Culture changed again. We became an industrial society and now traits like machine aptitude, fine motor skill dexterity became selected for.

Except that culture changed again and now we live in a post-industrial society. Now those other traits don't matter because most of us work in the service industry. Basically things change too fast for our bodies to adapt. That's why we've stopped evolving.

No genetic traits can become dominant because they don't have enough time to spread through our populations. Things change too fast.

This is why we aren't happy. Our bodies are living 10,000 years behind our minds.

(I got the evolution part from the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters by Alan Miller. I made up the part about happiness, just because it sounds cool.)

Don't break the chain.

I wrote yesterday about how a guy drew one thing every day and posted it to his website. After a few years, he was an amazing artist.

There's a motivational technique called "Don't Break the Chain" whose central idea is that you should do something every single day, mark it in your calender, and try and keep the chain as long as possible. That's it.

Apparently Jerry Seinfeld is a big believer in this technique.

It works because 1) you're practicing every day and therefore improving your skill 2) every once and awhile, through quantity alone, you'll hit upon an amazing day. If you wrote 100 jokes a day, it wouldn't take many days to come up with a few amazing jokes.

(This blog is a bit like that. I haven't missed a day yet, but in reality I do a few posts at once so that I can have days off. So this blog is not a true chain. )

We first encounter the "Don't Break the Chain" technique when we're toddlers being toilet trained. Our parents put a gold star on the calendar and that gold star is so satisfying we want to fill the entire calendar with stars.

So what creative thing could you do every day or every week?

• write a short story
• write a poem
• write a song
• paint a picture
• draw a picture
• build something
• make something
• start a conversation with a stranger
• exercise

And that's all. You can't do anything else in a day or a week. Just those things.

Emergency plans never work.

Every now and then while driving I see a road sign that says, "Disaster Route". I wonder what the hell that means. I figure it's an evacuation route for some monstrous disaster. But I know that if the disaster is bad enough, there's no point relying on government emergency plans.

On January 12, Haiti was hit by a 7.0 Earthquake and 33 after shocks. Yesterday, Haiti got hit by another 5.9 earthquake. Estimates are that 100,000 people could die from this disaster.

I was watching CNN the other day and Anderson Cooper said that relief operations had been bungled. It took 3 days for international rescue teams to arrive because before landing in Haiti they were busy "assessing" the situation.

Have you noticed that in every major disaster, help never arrives on time and rescue efforts are bungled? That's just the way disasters work.

Here's the wikipedia entry on 1995's Kobe earthquake (approximately same size as Haiti and 6,000 people died):

In the aftermath, both citizens and specialists lost faith in the technology of their early warning systems and earthquake construction techniques. The national government of Japan was criticised for not acting quickly enough to save many people, for poorly managing Japanese volunteers, and for initially refusing help from foreign nations, including the United States, South Korea, Mongolia, and the United Kingdom.

And here's the entry on Hurricane Katrina:

The criticisms of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina primarily consisted of criticism of mismanagement and lack of leadership in the relief efforts in response to the storm and its aftermath. More specifically, the criticism focused on the delayed response to the flooding of New Orleans, and the subsequent state of chaos in the Crescent City.

Single Mom's aren't that bad.

I never thought much about single Moms. When I did think about them, I felt sorry for them. It's hard to imagine how tough it must be raising children and working a full-time job - with no help from a partner.

Ann Coulter, however, has thought a lot about single mothers. The notorious right-wing columnist devotes an entire chapter to them in her book Guilty : liberal "victims" and their assault on America.

Basically she says that single moms are the parasites of society. Why? Because their children populate our jails and welfare rolls. The worst part of it is, single moms didn't have to be single moms. They irresponsibly had children. They should have put them up for adoption.

Coulter says that our society worships single mothers. The media says how tough things are for single mothers, various celebrities worship single mothers as their heroes, and they receive lots of assistance from taxes and not for profit organizations.

Instead, she says, they shouldn't get any help. That would discourage other women from becoming single mothers, and slowly turn society around (because fewer children grow up and be ruined in these homes).

While her reasoning seems sound, she's an obnoxious writer. She comes off as cold, callous and disrespectful. She needs a punch in the mouth.

I have a feeling that if I told her this she'd laugh and say, "Of course I'm disrespectful of single mothers. They're all slime."

***

Note: She doesn't blame widowers or potential single moms who put up their kids for adoptions.

5 Random Things I Hate (part 4)

1) You call someone and then change your mind and hang up before leaving a message. I hate it when they phone you back and say, "Did you call my cell? What do you want?" Umm, I don't want anything. I changed my mind and ended the call. Now why are you wasting my time!! I didn't want to talk to you then and I don't want to talk to you now.

(Note: This happened today at work. I phoned a guy's cell and changed my mind and hung up. He phoned me back and said, "Yes?" I didn't say anything. He didn't say anything. There was a long awkward pause that stretched out... Finally I gave in and told him why I had aborted the call. Bastard!)

2) I hate that there is a website where users post pictures of their poop, and the other website users make comments on the various floaties. I hate that. No more explanation needed.

3) I hate small windows. I always want to look through them when I walk past. But, since they're small, I don't see much - just a glimpse. Then I want to stop and look into the window to see what's there. If the window was large or regular-sized, I'd have little desire to look closely in the window. I'd ignore it. Small windows, on the other hand, offer only a tantalizing glance.

4) I hate when people say, "The best revenge is to live well." NO! The best revenge is to actually get revenge. Living well isn't revenge - it's living well. The point of revenge is to severely punish that person for hurting you, and especially making them know it.

5) I hate that a few years ago I worked in offices that were inside a former NBA basketball training centre and the doorways and bathrooms were HUGE. I felt like a small child. And I hate that a few years later I work in offices located inside an elementary school and everything is tiny. Why can't I work in a place that fits my body size?!

Television gives me a headache.

When you have a kid you start to watch television much more critically. What shows are good for kids? What shows are awful?

The sad fact is that most shows are terrible. TV has changed tremendously in the last few years - mostly due to digital editing. Reality shows use editing to the extreme to construct a "story" around a bunch of people.

The edits are quick flashes of facial expressions, voice overs and action shots - often placed out of context and out of order. They condense 24 hours of film into 45 minutes.

The problem is that every time the screen on the TV changes it makes a little flash. In the old days, the screen didn't flash much because it didn't change much. Now when you watch TV, it's almost constant flickering and flashing.

That can't be good for your head. It's a major reason why we don't let Jake watch much TV. When we do watch TV with Jake, it's mostly live music (less flashy) or youtube videos.

Much Music or MTV is unwatchable because of the flickering. Reality shows are almost unwatchable. Even some kids shows are flashy, including Sesame Street.

Barney is pretty good because the screen doesn't flicker much. Unfortunately it's super annoying.

How to be an amazing writer.

I'm reading Write like the masters : emulating the best of Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, and others by William Cane.

He says that starting in the 1930s or so teaching rhetoric was phased out of the education system. Teachers decided to suddenly promote "originality" when it comes to writing. "Find your own voice." "Be unique." "Never, never plagiarize."

The problem is that the great literary masters studied rhetoric, emulated their contemporaries and copied the style of legendary writers before them.

The current advice to find your own voice has made us worse writers. Cane argues that before you can be a "unique" writer, you need to copy the voice and style of the greats.

My own take is that writers today are just as good, if not better, than they were back in 1800s or earlier. But I see his point. A central tenant of neuro-linguistic programming is to find someone who's good at something, break down what they do exactly, and copy ("model") it.

If writers did this, perhaps they'd be even better. On the other hand it would require some tough, tough reading. The literary greats weren't known for writing short, exciting, concise, minimalist books.

Jake gained 13 ounces in 16 days.

Not sure if that's good, but it sounds good to us. His eating has been outstanding lately, and his speed is slowly increasing. Worst meal is breakfast, but he still eats way way more than he did in the summer.

Drinking is still a challenge. It takes two of us to encourage him to drink his sippy cup. We have to put it in his mouth for him. If we give him the cup he throws it across the room. Grrr. It's frustrating.

Just the last couple nights he's been taking his sippy cup from the fridge and walking around with it, occasionally drinking. I've noticed the kids at daycare do that. This is a good sign.

Now that he's mostly off formula, we've started giving him Flintstone vitamins. They're the same from when I was a kid! The taste and smell of the vitamins brings one of those flash-back memories from when you young. I used to like the car vitamin best. I'd bite off the heads of the characters.

Jake isn't sure what to think of the vitamins. He doesn't like biting them yet because they're too hard and he's used to softer food.

We've gone overboard on literacy.

I was just talking to a teacher here at the elementary school and he showed me the grade 5 curriculum. Physical education was a half a page of goals and instructions. Social studies was a page long, same with science and math.

Reading and writing was 3 or 4 pages long. He said, "We've gone overboard on literacy." I asked him why and he said, "Because women have started writing the curriculum."

Then he got more serious and said, "Because kids don't read books anymore."

I said, "Is there a correlation between the length and detail of the curriculum and success at reading?"

He said, "Yes, an inverse one." He said a lot of the teachers don't bother with it - it's simply too detailed, unpractical and incomprehensible.

Then he gave me an example. "Imagine if the phys. ed curriculum was 4 pages long and kids were taught pre-kicking strategies before kicking a soccer ball, and kids were evaluated on 4 or 5 different aspects of kicking a ball."

I said, "Kids wouldn't want to do it. It would be annoying. They'd want to go read a book."

He nodded his head and I went to the washroom.

The middle class does all the work.

The comedian George Carlin once said that the rich people make all the money, the middle class does all the work and pays all the taxes, and the poor people are there to scare the shit out of the middle class.

I'd have to agree. The middle class gets royally screwed - especially in America (also in Canada to a somewhat lesser extent.) Let's take a look.

• The middle class was told to invest all their savings and money in the markets - mutual funds, stocks, mortgages, credit etc. They paid a ton of hidden fees to the rich corporations who pay their executives millions dollars of year.
• The system collapses because the middle class finally has their back broken by debt.
• The government then takes the money the middle class pays for taxes and gives it to the rich corporations who continue to pay their executives millions dollars of year as a "bail out".
• In other words, the rich people made money on the way up and made money on the way down.

We shouldn't love our job.

One of the most damaging things we hear nowadays is that we should "be in love with our job" and we should "do something we love".

Umm, no.

When did we get the idea that we should love work? Alain De Botton brought this to my attention in his book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

I think it stems from our cultural fascination with optimism, self-improvement and self-indulgence. Oprah Winfrey stuff.

By definition our "work" is just that - work. It's not our dream and it's not an amazing thing which will make us self-actualized. It's a job and it sucks. The weekends are awesome because we don't have to work.

That's the way it is and that's the way it has been for thousands of years of history. People don't like doing work. Why do the experts say we have to "love" our jobs?

This idea that we should love our jobs leads to people soulessly, cruising from job to job because they're never "happy". Young people get depressed because they think they're supposed to love their jobs - so they quit or go back to school or demand raises and other indulgences.

Now get off my lawn!

How to predict someone's performance.

I think it's interesting that we pretty much can't predict people's job performance ahead of time. Academics don't matter, intelligence doesn't matter, personality tests don't matter, traditional job interviews don't matter.

I was reading What the dog saw: and other adventure stories by Malcolm Gladwell. He talked about researchers at Harvard studying the effectiveness of teachers.

Apparently, if you watch a 10 second video-tape of someone teaching, you can rate their effectiveness as accurately as a class who's had that teacher for a semester. In other words, your snap judgment is pretty accurate.

Same with job interviews. People who watched a video of the first 20 seconds of a meeting between a candidate and the interviewer, judged the candidate just the same as the interviewer did.

Yet job interviews are a rite of passage in our society. I've had dozens and dozens of them. They're a sham, and generally pointless. They're not related to job performance and they're superfluous since you can make up your mind on whether you like a candidate within 20 seconds anyway.*

(*Note: I'm just talking "traditional" job interviews here. Structured, behavioural interviews are shown to be a better predictor of performance. The problem is almost no companies use them. I've had 2 in my life - and I failed to get the job in both of them.)

Are extended warranties good or bad?

Cindy bought me an expensive cell phone for Christmas. It lasted 10 days before it stopped working. She returned it to the store and they're mailing it to the repair centre in Toronto.

Nowadays when you buy electronics, the salesman pushes an extended warranty on you. Why? Because they make a huge commission off of it (I know this from a friend who works in retail), and because electronics are made shitty.

I don't know if the extended warranty trend is good or bad. On the plus side, an extended warranty means insurance on an electronic item. On the other hand, it's a cash-grab for electronics manufacturers who no longer have any motivation to build high quality items that last.

Since when did we have to start paying a premium on top of the original price, just to ensure that the object lasts longer than a year? Overall, I'm thinking this is a bad trend for consumers.

It's related to my October 15th post in which I wrote:

Another gripe I have with the post office is insurance on lost items. You can pay more to "cover" the cost of a lost item, in case the post office screws up. Here's what the post office is essentially saying:

"Here's the cost for mailing a letter. Now, if you pay more, and we screw up, you'll get your money back." Umm, shouldn't you get your money back, regardless? They didn't do their job.

The problem with Africa.

I'm reading The Betrayal of Africa by Gerald Caplan. The gist of the book is that Africa's problems stem mostly from the Western world. Specifically, the following:

1) Slavery and colonialism.

The European powers and America exploited the people as slaves. This damaged Africa's ability to develop, progress and grow.

2) Domination by South Africa
South Africa financed, provoked and encouraged strife within Africa - which led to numerous atrocities and civil wars.

3) Artificial Borders

In the 1800s the European colonial countries divided Africa into various states and borders, with little rhyme and reason, randomly separating ethnic groups, tribes and political entities. The resulting mishmash of states led to strife, infighting and ethnic racism.

4) The Big Men
African leadership. is replete with "big Men", egotistical, corrupt, tyrannical leaders who care only about power. The book quotes following disheartening statistic: Out of 200 regime changes in Africa during the last 30 years, zero were voluntary.

5) Corruption
Africa is ripe with corruption and bribing police officers, government officials, school teachers and administrators, has become commonplace. Why? Because wages are so low, and people are so poor. The only way to supplement your income and make more money is to accept bribes and encourage bribery.

6) Harsh Economic policies
Most of the foreign aid that goes to Africa is "tied" aid, meaning they get money, but they have to buy the goods of the country who gave them the money. For example, if Canada gave them a million dollars, they'd have to spend the million dollars buying our grains - which don't feed many people because they're so expensive. Also, most Western nations give only .07% of their budget to aid, although they pledged upwards of 1%.

7) China
China is a new player in Africa. It needs and wants to control much of the continents' resources, so it actively aids and develops many African countries. The problem is - it does so without moral conditions. In other words, it gives aid to corrupt and evil governments, and doesn't bother asking them to treat their people better.

I want to be a "whisperer".

I want to be a whisperer. A whisperer is a person with an abnormal and remarkable talent for communicating and controlling things.

There's Cesar Milan, the dog whisperer. He has a show on National Geographic. He helps fix the behavioural problems of various dogs. His catch phrases are, "Use calm, assertive energy" and "be the pack leader".

My wife worships Cesar.

There's the horse whisperer - which was a book and movie about a guy who was good at communicating with horses.

I think there's a baby whisperer and ghost whisperer and probably a million more whisperers.

I want to be a whisperer. It would be so cool having a talent like that. But what would I whisper to? A cat? And wouldn't that require spending ungodly amounts of time with animals?

I don't want to spend much time with animals.

Instead, I could be "the Jake" whisperer. Yes, that's it! I'll train myself to be an amazing communicator and influencer on Jake!

The problem with medical tests.

Here's why you shouldn't put much stock into medical tests.

Example 1:

Let's say that you are an average couple and you want find out if your child-to-be will have Down syndrome. The doctor tells you that there is a test with 95% accuracy. You take the test, and it's positive for Down syndrome. Now, how worried should you be?

To begin with, the chances were approximately 1 and 500 that your child has Down syndrome. This means that out of every 1000 people born, 2 will have Down syndrome.

Now let's give these thousand people the test mentioned above, which is 95% accurate. It turns out that 50 will be tested positive for Down syndrome. But we've just seen that only 2 actually have Down syndrome. This means that they're still only a one out of 25 chance that your child has Down syndrome, which is only 4%.

In other words, if you are a typical pregnant couple, and you take a medical test for Down syndrome which is 95% accurate, and you test positive for Down syndrome, there is a 96% chance your kid does NOT have Down syndrome. Does that make sense?

Example 2:

Let's say that you already have a child with Down syndrome, and therefore the chance is 1 in 100 that your next child will have Down syndrome. You take the test mentioned above and it comes out positive.

(This means that for every 100 people tested, there will be five false positives, and one true positive. This means your chances of having a child with Down syndrome would be one out of five, or 20%.)

In other words, if you are a couple in a high-risk category, and you take a test for Down syndrome which is 95% accurate, and it comes out positive, there is an 80% chance your child will NOT have Down syndrome.

Now how valuable do these medical tests sound?

Parenting with simplicity.

One of Cindy's co-workers says that he has an activity with his kid every single night. His kid is only eight or nine years old. When I was that age, my parents made sure I had activities, but they usually only happened once or twice a week.

Every single night? I'd have hated that.

I loved having free time. There was nothing quite like having a block of fire or six hours to do what ever you wanted, with absolutely no obligations. Unfortunately, for many kids free time seems to be a thing of the past.

I'm currently reading Simplicity parenting : using the extraordinary power of less to raise calmer, happier, and more secure kids by Kim John Payne.

The book argues that today's parents are overwhelming their children with activities, tasks, sports, toys and other over stimulating situations. The net result is that children are inheriting anxiety from their parents, and becoming stressed out.

The key is to simplify your children's life by reduction: reduce the number of activities, reduce the number of toys and reduce the overstimulation. This will make your children happy. Your children want to lead simple, calming lives.

Why do people hate Sarah Palin?

It amazes me how many people hate Sarah Palin. She seems like a nice person to me.

She's obviously smart, having been a governor of Alaska. She seems to be a good mom, and she has a loving family.

Yet people badmouth her constantly. She's ridiculed in the media, bashed on blogs and ripped apart in everyday conversations.

I wonder why she's hated?

Maybe it's because she's a powerful woman? Well, that can't be true. Hillary Clinton is a woman and she wasn't hated.

Maybe it's because she's attractive? But there are plenty of attractive women in the world, and they don't seem to be hated like Sarah Palin.

Maybe it's because of her political views? Yet people are not their political views. Just like people are not their sickenesses or weaknesses or talents. Anyway, her political views aren't that extreme. She's simply a conservative, and hundreds of thousands of Americans share the exact same views.

I don't really know why so many people dislike her. It doesn't seem fair, and I feel a little sorry for her. If she happened to stop by my neighborhood, I'd say a few friendly words to her.

Is it ethical to lie even though your lie is for a greater, ultimate truth?

Here's another philosophical post. I've been mildly interested in the health-care debate in the United States. Mostly because the United States is the only industrialized country that does not have universal health care.

American conservatives seem to resist a single-payer health care system. And President Obama promised that they would get one, but as it turns out the new health-care bill right now is a bailout for insurance companies. How did this happen?

Lies. American conservatives have been lying about the proposed health-care bill. For example, Sarah Palin made up the lie about how "death squads" would be in charge of deciding whether Americans live or die. The lie is outrageous, outlandish.

Yet people believe it. I have no doubt that Sarah Palin knows it's a lie - but I'm interested in a deeper topic. Does she justify the lie to herself because she knows that she is lying for a greater good, and that "lies" can be excused in this case?

Certainly she thinks a single-payer health care system would be a terrible thing for America. In her book she said that Canada should dismantle its own system and adopt American for-profit health-care.

So should we be allowed to lie in a debate if we know that we are right, and the lie helps convince someone that we are right?

I say no.

No matter how sure we are, there's always a chance we are wrong. When you lie to persuade people, you're not offering them a fair way to make up their minds. If you do manage to convince them, their knowledge is incomplete - so, in fact, you have not convinced them of anything.

So I conclude that lying is not justified even if you're sure you are correct.

I can actually feel myself getting dumber.

I've noticed lately that I can feel myself becoming less mentally sharp. I would love to blame this on lack of sleep, but the truth is I'm sleeping fine.

Maybe it's age? I'm not that old. But I do have the sense that I was much more mentally agile 10 years ago. I'm beginning to tell people the same stories over and over again. (I never used to do this. Now I no longer remember if I'd already told someone a particular story.)

I'm beginning to lose track of conversations. I don't recall this happening before. Just the other day we were having a technical conversation in our office, and I soon realized that much of the information went over my head.

I seem to be reaching my level of incompetence - as I basically have the same job as a did 10 years ago, and I realize that I'm very likely to have a similar job 10 years from now.

I'm beginning to notice there are younger people who have more success, smarts, money and talent than me. This certainly wasn't the case 10 years ago. (And to be honest, at this stage it's mostly older people who have more success, smarts, money, and talent. But the tide is slowly shifting.)

What does all this mean? It means that I've probably peaked, and it's going to be a slow decline from this day forward. Oh well. I had a good run.

The hardest thing about my job.

Cin and I were talking last night about the hardest parts of our jobs. For her it's not being overwhelmed by work - meeting deadlines and conducting investigations as fast as possible.

I couldn't really think of anything because my job is super easy. It's mostly paperwork. Then it hit me: the hardest part of my job is dealing with my boss's mistakes.

He's very good with people - very persuasive and personable and friendly. But he's a piss poor administrator. Disorganized, really bad memory, hasty and, most of all, he makes poor decisions.

So at my work there is a constant cleaning up of messes. I'm often the one who gets the job of cleaning up the pile of crap.

Example 1.

We're moving offices. My boss was in charge of organizing the phones. Instead of making a phone call to the cable company, going to VOIP and keeping our numbers. He decides to transfer our account over with Telus, who tells we get different phone numbers and says we can't use our $1500 phones they sold us a few months ago because they don't have digital lines where we're going. For 2 weeks he proceeds to email and talk to 3 different Telus people, including a guy from India, before giving up and dumping it on my lap the day before we move. His instructions to me: "Just make sure it's all working by Monday!" I spend a morning making phone calls and figuring it all out. I get everything working in the end.

Example 2.

He tells our future landlord we need 2 rooms because we have so much junk. The landlord tells us a week before that we only get one room. I suggest to the boss that since we don't have enough space, we continue to keep off site storage. The boss disagrees. A week later I see the single room and again tell the boss it's too small. We should keep our storage space. The boss dismisses the idea and says, "We'll just have to fit it in."

Here are pictures of the move. The extra stuff is in the hallway. My boss goes on vacation and leaves me in charge of cleaning up the mess. Literally. That is all.

Elementary school now and then.

Now that I have to work in an elementary school, I've noticed the differences between elementary schools today and elementary schools when I was a kid. (Based on an extremely small sample size!)

Here are the main the differences I've noticed.

1) Announcements. When I was a kid announcement seemed five minutes long. They started with the national anthem and concluded with the Lord's prayer. Nowadays, there aren't really announcements anymore. It's just a five second bulletin about which teacher is on recess duty.

2) The Recess Bell. When I was a kid, my school actually had a bell that would ring. This school has an annoying buzzer.

3) Classrooms. Today's classrooms are much more sophisticated. They have built-in cupboards, supply closets, sinks with running water, cable Internet and blackboards that move up and down like shades. When I was a kid, classrooms were just rooms with a closet where you could hang your coat.

4) More Happening. There's much more happening in today's schools. For example, not only does this school have regular classes, they also have a Korean school, a day care, a homeschool program and probably lots of other things I'm not aware of. There also seems to be a lot of staff doing one on one work with certain kids. I'll walk past a classroom, glance in and see a teacher working one-on-one with one or two students. I don't recall this ever happening when I was a kid in elementary school.

5) Sophisticated Alarms. When I was a kid schools did not have burglar alarms. Today they do. This school requires me to phone the alarm company, give them a code, turn off the alarm, tell them how long I plan on staying in the school, phone them when I'm about to leave, and set the alarm again. If I don't do any of these things the alarm company will send out a "runner" and I will be charged between $30 and $50.

6) Half Days. The schools in this district go half Fridays. This is becoming a provincial trend - half days, four days school weeks and soon shorter summer holidays. It comes down to money, and it's much cheaper to operate schools this way.

New Year's resolutions and predictions for 2010.

Does anybody make New Year's resolutions anymore?

For awhile there seemed to be a huge cultural backlash to making New Year's resolutions. Lots of people started saying, "resolutions never work, you shouldn't have to wait until the new year to make resolutions, you should make resolutions every day".

I still think it's a good idea to make resolutions. A resolution is a goal, and all the psychological literature shows that making and working toward goals is one of the best ways to improve yourself. January 1 is the perfect time to make goal because it's the start of a new year.

Having said that, I don't have any New Year's resolutions this year. I do, however, have a few New Year's predictions:

1) People will begin pronouncing the years like "twenty ten, twenty eleven, twenty twelve" rather than "two thousand eleven, two thousand twelve", which is a great thing because the "two thousand" phrase was getting long-winded.

2) The electric car will finally be available in North America, but will generally be a flop. Mostly because they will be too inconvenient to operate and fuel.

3) Canada will win the most medals ever in the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games. Canada might even "win" the games by getting more medals than any other country.

4) Another member of my family will be joining us in May 2010. He or she will be healthy.

5) By July 1st I will have (yet another) a new job.

6) My parents will be moving to Nanaimo and my sisters will both be getting new jobs, as well.