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June 19, 2011 7:37 PM Flying through June Thousands upon thousands of words pictured below.  I drove past a field of green last week...  Of course, it was a city-owned field, and thus the green was from all the dandylions.  Ding Dong  Every once in a while I will see the sun and shadows shining and cast upon an everyday, ordinary object and feel obligated to attempt to photograph it. This candle stick in our bathroom was one such example.  To eat, or not to eat?    As the babies grow and interact, some of their traits are starting to shine. Both are very determined individuals. When they see something they want, they persue it with great gusto.  Kristi thought the mohawk looked so cute on our little guy, she shaved the sides and cut it in.    A lot of the time, the twins will entertain themselves with whatever they find on the floor. Tupperware is a recent favorite, though they have no shortage of their own toys. My son is quite fascinated with lids. I've started to see wheels turning as he studies things. He found the spinner in the dishwasher and spent 10 minutes spinning it while I looked on, quietly smiling.   The face, even small ones, are so incredibly expressive. Although their words are still limited to sounds and grunts, their faces convey much about what's going on inside. Part of me can't wait until they start using words and talking; part of me also acknowledges a time may come when I'll wish they had no words. 
 We're trying to figure out what's causing this rash to appear almost constantly on our little guy's face. Kristi's been removing all kinds of things from his diet, and sometimes it seems to get better. Of course, he loves to scratch it and thus - makes it worse, especially when he's sleeping. Right now the suspect is gluten. It seems strange to me that this generation has so many alergies, especially to things (like gluten) that I had never even heard of before! But then you start reading and find out that gluten is in everything! In the pamphlet of information we got from the public health nurse, it lists the kinds of food that can contain gluten and wheat. It would have probably been simpler and shorter for them to have listed the things that don't have gluten in them. Where are all these alergies coming from?      Although the sun and fresh are are welcome, our little miss did not care for the feeling of grass on her foot. And so, she held it aloft all the while examining blades of grass and the empty flower cup she found.  What, daddy?  I was contemplating buying one of those propane-powered Mosquito Magnets, to try to put a dent in the massive mosquito population that surrounds our house. Through the course of my research, I discovered a good many amazing things about these otherwise hated pests... For example, only the females bite. The males (see the picture I took of one resting on my living room window) do not have a probiscus. They have a very advanced sensory mechanism though, and can detect carbon dioxide from a hundred feet away to help them find prey. They also use thermal imaging to detect heat sources (since everything warm is usually breathing) and motion also. Some breeds of mosquitoes will fly over 130 km in their lifetime. Think about that! That tiny blood sucker you just swatted might have been born in Red Deer! Actually, they are usually non-migratory so once you squash a local population it's quite unlikely they will be able to recover. The last sense they use to seek out their next blood meal, necessary for reproduction, is smell. People who sweat more generally get bit more, although most mosquitoes actually prefer the blood of birds to other mammals. Pretty interesting, huh? SMACK! Got one!   The babies got a new toy for their birthday, a toy bus that has flashing lights and plays music and makes other bus noises. It has been a smashing success.  There was a bike swap at church a few weeks ago, and we traded in the girls' old bikes for some newer, larger ones. The larger of the two, a great size with lots of room to grow, had two flat tires on it. Having spent a good many hours of my summers with my own bicycles upside down, the girls and I went on a hunt for leaks in the tubes. Honestly, it warmed my heart to see them in there with wrenches and grease-covered hands. My children will know how to fix things        I've been quite caught up in my work lately. There has been no shortage of intriguing projects that keep falling in my lap. Currently, a colleague and I are effecting widespread repairs on the entire card access systems at one of the sky scrapers downtown. Some of the problems are simple fixes, others have us both crawling through ceilings and chasing wires with toning wands... I must admit it's been quite a fun project. Of couse, I've always had a bit of a wire fetish, and there is no shortage of supply in this place!  After emptying the dishwasher the other day, I turned my back for a moment only to discover it started loading itself.   New meaning to the phrase "Pinch One Out"  Nothing is as cool as sunglasses.  Night night. June 22, 2011 Slowly transitioning from clutter to clean Last night I sold my Clariion array and two IBM Netfinity servers to a man who was just as eager to acquire them as I was to relenquish them. My whole life I have been what you might call a hoarder. Collector; keeper; accumulator — I hate throwing out something I feel has value, but for me it's value has passed or waned. In this case, these boxes that have been taking up a sizable chunk of floor space in my basement for the past several years would have initially cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. Of course, nothing depreciates like technology, and fastest of all probably computers. But none the less, everything still worked just fine, and it had served me well for several years, hosting this very web site. But, whether it's my nature or my upbringing, I could not bring myself to haul it all away to the dump. Even though in my mind I knew I would never use them again, and could forsee no useful function for them in my own posession. To the right person, however, they may well be gold. One man's refuse is another man's treasure. I placed ads on Kijiji and waited. Waited indeed I did, and I had actually forgotten that they were even still listed when I received an email from a man, seeking to know if I still had them available. When I invited him over to view, he was just as excited to take them off my hands as I was to recover the space they had been occupying, and I must say that today - I feel much better. This whole act of purging really does wonders for the mind — as well as the basement. It has been a process, a change of life even, for me, but one that has certainly been for the better. Man's greatest limitation. In this age of information overload, there is no shortage of know-how. It seems that for any question you could possibly compose, Google has 10,000 pages of answers. Not sure what to make for supper? Google some fast, easy, recipies. Not sure how to fix a leaky faucet? Many web sites will walk you through the subject. Want to know what a car's air bag exploding inside a clothes dryer looks like? Enter the great time suck that is Youtube. Stay in touch with people you went to kindergarten with on Facebook. Order pizza online. The amount of information that is accessible to us is virtually endless. But as I am becoming an older, more experienced human being, growing up in an age where we have all the information we could ever need (and more than we'd ever want) what I see as the greatest limiting factor is not information, or even ability, but time. This truth has been sinking in for me over the past few years as I watch the hours become days become weeks become "Didn't we just do our taxes?" To which my patient wife replies, "Yes John, last year." Now instead of lamenting the inevitable or frantically trying to sieze every moment, I believe there is a happy medium somewhere inbetween and it comes with a choice. I recognize that I only have 24 hours in a day, some of which must be spent sleeping, some of which at work, some of which looking after children. I need to eat, part of my day will involve driving. And in the remaining hour or two that's left I have a choice. What will I spend that time on? Let me back up a bit here. In order to understand the collector's mentality, you have to appreciate the fact that whenever I, as a hoarder, would keep a widget, it was because I believed it had value, or could be made into something of value. "Don't throw that old computer out, I can rebuild it and sell it or turn it into a game computer for the kids or a music computer for the house." - or - "Keep that SCSI cable, those things cost $50 a piece!" The problem ends up being not one of value but of time. I never have the time to rebuild that old computer, and that SCSI cable I kept connects two pieces of hardware that are obsolete together. So even though it might have cost me $50 to buy, I will never, ever, use it again. But in the back of my mind I kept thinking, But I could do something with that, so I'd better not get rid of it. Let me tell you, after years of watching "could" projects stack up, filling my garages and crawl spaces and basements with stuff that sits and waits, the time will never come. But what is more incredibly liberating instead is to clear out all the "could" project material, create a usable workspace and then work on one project at a time, from start to finish. Not only will you feel better about your environment having it uncluttered with stuff, but you will also have more space and remarkably - more time too. I used to feel a heavy weight hang over my soul at the thought of all the projects I had waiting in the basement to be looked at. I felt compelled to keep things, but had no time to use them, but couldn't get rid of them because I felt they had value if I had time to use them. Does anyone see a vicious circle forming here? It's a trap, and one that can only be broken out of by a decision to change. Apart from discovering many things about my ingrained inclination to gather, I've also been studying other aspects of my personality, and the effects this has on my outward behaviour. Understanding who one is goes a long way to understanding what one does. I have long held a fascination with having computers control physical devices in our environment. I believe this first manifested itself around grade 5 or 6, when I was involved in the installation of an underground sprinkler system at Harvest Hills Alliance Church. I was already living in the shadow of several of the volunteers who were building that church, and this exposed me to a good many facets of building construction. As I ran along the trenches, "helping" to install these sprinklers, something clicked in my brain and I became fascinated with them. But it went deeper than just watering grass, I would often doodle sprinkler systems on my notebook covers and had my mom drive me to Regency Irrigation to pick up pamphlets and brochures on the subject. I had a two inch, red binder filled with product spec sheets on all the latest irrigation products from Hunter, Rain Bird, Irritrol, Hardie, and a few others - those are just the ones I recall off the top of my head! I would draw rough-scale drawings of my parents house and then plot sprinklers all over the lawn, drawing arcs to indicate the spray of each head, ensuring 100% head-to-head overlap; just like the how-to guide said. I was calculating GPM and PSI and imagining elaborate systems with 40 zones (this, on a yard of some 100x200 feet, minus buildings!) Of course, my parents did not install an underground sprinkler system. Living on a well that could supply at most, 45 gallons of water at a time, meant that we couldn't even water the grass, let alone irrigate it on a regular basis. But the dream was still there in my head, and one of the first things I set out to do when I owned my own house was: (can you guess?) Install an underground sprinkler system. And so I did. It was a thing of beauty, and many hours I spent afterwards watching it water away. I had it connected to my security system, which was tied into the telephone system, which could be controlled from my cell phone, and so I would sit outside, phone in hand, turning on this zone, turning off that zone. Heads would pop up out of the ground, water would spray out of them, tiny beads of glistening light would sparkle atop each watered blade of grass, and then - with the press of a button, the streams of water would subside, the heads would retract into the ground again, and the process would repeat. I never grew tired of it either. Was it the water? Was it the control? Was it the understanding of the process from end to end? Was it the final fulfilment of a childhood dream? These are the questions I now sift through, trying to understand myself better. I am, incidently, preparing to install an underground sprinkler system in my new house, if Canada Post ever gets it's act together and delivers the last of the parts I am waiting for to do so... Unions. An entity I have no respect for whatsoever. They had their place in time, but they have overstayed their welcome and need to be abolished altogether. Let those who want to work, do so with all vigor and get paid accordingly. Why should [we, the consumers and tax payers] be forced to prop up an element of society that feels they are entitled to some of the highest pay brackets available to the common man while doing the least amount of work without threat of consequence? Everyone has seen the city workers at work, they have become the butt of a very common and well deserved stereotype. We've all seen it: Look out the window next time you drive past a construction site and you will see 5 or 10 people standing around, while one guy works. And you don't want to know what those five or ten union employees are being paid to stand there. Even more frustrating is the fact that it is my money that is paying them! The union is inefficient. It promotes outsourcing of as much work as possible because it is too expensive to have it done by union-paid employees. Take a look around you. How many of the things within arms reach of where you are sitting right now have the phrase Made in China written on them? Go ahead, take a look. Have you ever stopped to think about why that is? How can it be cheaper to send materials over an ocean to a foreign country, get them made into a glass or a television or a baby gate, and shipped BACK over the same ocean, pass through several stages of markup and STILL cost less than a product made in our own country!?! It's because of unions. Union labour is the most expensive on the planet, and it is the least productive. They need to go, but I fear even at this point it would be too little, too late. But John, you're comparing apples to oranges. A lot of the jobs union workers do don't have non-union equivalents. Perhaps, but I will give you a side-by-side comparison. Air Canada versus West Jet. Both are airlines that operate in this country. One is a great big union, already bankrupt once over but bailed out by yours and my tax dollars. The other, a private organization that takes care of it's employees. And you want to see the difference! Air Canada - loses bags on many of it's overbooked flights. Customer service doesn't care, if you do get your bags back, heaven help you if they're not sopping wet or smashed to bits. It's happened to me several times. West Jet. Never lost a bag, staff are happy and friendly and pleasant to deal with. Just look at their lineups at the airport! Air Canada goes on strike, demanding more money while stranding thousands of passengers - Smiling West Jet employees are handing out pizza as you wait in line to check your bags. There is a difference. We need more West Jets and less Air Canadas. Anyways, that was an empromptu rant. It just seems like all you ever hear about unions is that they are always complaining. And then, like spoiled children they go on strike to demand more money. It's like throwing a company-wide temper tantrum. Time to grow up, people. Get a real job, do a good job, and get paid accordingly. Unions really do frustrate me. I can't stand people who feel they're entitled to something. The world does not owe you anything. To get anything in life, you have to earn it. Don't expect others to give it to you, don't fool yourself into thinking you deserve it. You don't, and they won't. Hard work and perseverence are the keys to success. Accepting life's unchangable facts is the key to peace, and not getting those two mixed up is the key to wisdom. (The Serenity poem, loosely paraphrased.) See what happens when I don't write for a long time? Verbage. And lots of it! Back to the control issue, I have asked myself, "Is it a matter of control or a matter of connection?" Do I enjoy integrating [things] together more because I like to have control of my environment or because I like to connect things together? I remember the first time I connected two computers together, it was around 1991 using a 300 baud modem. It's hard to imagine a world without networked computers, but really, the Internet hasn't been around for all that long. At that time, you had a terminal, and you could watch the characters from the other computer appear on your screen. It got better, and soon I was very active on all the local Commodore 64 Bulletin Board Systems, or BBSes. Social networking for the enlightened geek of the early nineties. We eventually got an IBM compatible computer at home, in fact a couple of 486's and my brother and I used to play a first person shooter game called Rise of the Triad. One day one of my friends told me that you could play against each other if you had a serial cable connecting the two computers together. I found a 25' serial cable, cut one end off and made a NULL modem, and my brother, upstairs, and I, downstairs, played our first game of ROTT against each other. It was thrilling, but on even more levels for me. I sought to understand this primitive network and wanted to connect more computers together. Eventually, a 3Com hub fell into my lap, and a number of 10-Base T Ethernet Network cards did also. NE2000 compatible drivers were necessary (remember, we were still running DOS and Windows 95 at this time!) But before long I had gotten my feet wet with primitive IPX networking, and eventually TCP/IP - the protocol that enables what we now know as the Internet to function. Connecting computers together fascinated me. I loved watching the little green lights on the Hub blink as data flew back and forth between the computers. Now from my room I could print to a printer upstairs! This was a new conecpt in an age when printers usually had to be directly connected to the computer you wanted to print from with a 25 pin Parallel cable. There was no USB, there was no network printing - these things had not yet been invented! Here we are, almost two decades later, and I am actively working on a program, Venturii, to connect different types of equipment together. Is it about control? I think it's more about the connection. Call me the electronic match maker. June 23, 2011 Bad Night = Bad Day? How much does sleep affect your demeanor? I thought I had a good sleep last night. I was doing pretty good at it in fact until one of the kids came and asked if I was going to work this morning. Slept soundly through two alarms, didn't notice Kristi getting up, completely out cold. And you know you didn't finish your sleep when you get to the bathroom and find yourself nodding off DURING the morning bathroom duties. Alright, so I'm up. Teeth brushed, glide on some deoderant, get dressed, out the door I go. Low Fuel. Thanks Truck. Pull in at the gas station and you know how there are two pumps to choose from, and common courtesy states that you pull through to the farthest pump, so that someone else can pull in behind you since more than likely you'll be done first. Right? Am I crazy? So anyway, I'm almost into position at the second pump when this lady in some big import vehicle just about collides with the front end of my truck. (No, it was not a near miss and I did not fill out any paperwork.) But I am documenting the experience here. The car was a grey GLK 350, Alberta license plate number MDU-500, it looked like a Mazda. But it had the gas filler on the wrong side of the car. So there I am, three quarters of the way up to the pump and she gets in front of me and gestures like I'm the idiot. I put my hands up, as much as if to say, "What are you doing?" And we sat there for a moment. And it was at that time that I realized that my demeanor is not it's usual, happy self today. I felt confrontational. Aggressive even. And why? For what reason. It's not as though we smashed our cars together, it's not as though she got out and started yelling at me, what was it about this situation that made me feel .. inexplainably angry? Anyway, after a brief moment, I backed up to the pump behind me and she drove around the pump island and pulled up at the pump on the far side. She paid at the pump and I paid inside, but I had to shake my head as I returned to my vehicle to see a line up of cars behind me with the empty space in front of me — exactly the situation I aim to avoid with my practice of common courtesy pump selection that was averted today. But on the brighter side, the sun is shining, it is a gorgeous day today, and I have a great job that I love. I was reading some of the comments posted on CTV's web site on an article covering the Canada Post strike, and there isn't a lot of sympathy out there for the postal workers. It then occurred to me that our kids might well grow up in an age where they don't know what a mail box is. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so. Already our house has a superbox - a grey mailbox that everyone's mail gets delivered to. We don't even have door-to-door delivery anyway. And frankly, what do we get in the mail nowadays in the first place? I'd say 75% of it is junk mail which doesn't even get read but lands straight in the recycle bin. One of the issues on the table with the postal system is moving from 5 day/week delivery to 3 day/week. Frankly, three days is plenty, and even probably too much still! If I got mail on Tuesdays and Fridays, that would be more than enough. The rest of the mail is bills, maybe the odd post card, and in my current situation, a box of underground sprinkler parts, but besides that, it's not the essential service it used to be. Canada Post needs to trim down it's operation, and if the postal union doesn't like it, they need only look around at companies like Blockbuster to see how the mighty can fall. There's an entire sector of the market that has fallen to newer, better technology. Sure it had a good run at it, they made their money, but they didn't adapt to a changing world. And now, it's getting harder and harder to even find a place to rent a movie. For that matter, does anyone really rent movies anymore? Pay $5, and heaven forbid you return it late. If you can't download the movie, you can watch it online. More and more the services Canada Post used to render are being replaced by online variants. It started with E-Mail. Nobody writes letters anymore. Online banking, online bills, (although ironically this is a service largely provided by Canada Post...) It's time to reevaluate whether or not we even need a public mail delivery system. As an interesting turn of fate, I believe it was the striking workers themselves who initiated what will ultimately become the demise of Canada Post. First they went on rotating 24 hour strikes in isolated centres. What immediately happened? Consumers lost confidence in Canada Post and started looking for alternatives. There are half a dozen courier companies out there, ready, willing and able to do the same work — better, and without complaining. I've griped in the past about UPS and their brokerage fees at the border, but brokerage fees aside, they get the job done and they do it well. If UPS did away with their brokerage fees, I'd never lick another stamp as long as I live. Even if the whole operation started again tomorrow, the damage is done. We, the consumer, have lost confidence in the ability of Canada Post to deliver mail in a timely fashion, and we, the consumer, have a choice. It's almost noon now, and I am feeling positively inspired to do some yard work! How's that for a strange mood swing? Now what might have compelled such a specific, in—from—left—field statement? Well, near where I am working today, a landscaping contractor is doing some large scale landscaping on what will become a very nice park downtown. The smell of fresh earth probably kicked off my enthusiasm, but then I noticed a good portion of the sodded grass is seeding, and the smell of fresh grass is everywhere. New plants just starting to take root have all been planted in rows, and there is something in the air that I find inspiring. I think I will seed my back yard this afternoon after all. I was going to wait until the sprinkler system was in, but with the strike looming and no ETA on those parts, maybe starting sooner rather than later is better. If all else fails, I can always seed again after it's in, but that may give the ground some time to get a start on filling out the grass, and the sprinkler installation isn't going to unearth the entire yard... I ran into Wayne again today at lunch time, better known as Mr. Hoff. This time it was he who spotted I, and so we chatted for a bit. I told him we'd like to have him and his family over for supper sometime, so hopefully our next meeting is at our house. I know I've written about him before on my web site, but he was one of the most influential teachers I had through my high school years, and a man I both admire and respect. When he first arrived, our class was in chaos. The home room teacher of our grade 7 class was kind and gentle, but strove to befriend the students before he had established himself as the authority figure in the room. As such, our class quickly ran amuck, and was as close to anarchy as most will ever experience living in North America. Picture a room of 12-year-olds, talking back to the teacher at will with no fear of recourse, doing whatever they wanted all day. Nobody was learning anything. After three months or so, I remember him appearing before the class, backed by Mr. Maertz, the school principal, and he apologized to the class for failing as a teacher and as a leader, and was announcing his resignation from the school. The next two weeks were a strong wakeup call as Larry Maertz took the wheel and steered the class back towards some semblance of order. But he was the principal, and spending all day in class with a group of unruly students was not permitting him to do the remainder of his full time duties. And so enters Mr. Hoff. June 27, 2011 The X Era and the road to classroom recovery (Continued from June 23, 2011) Anyone observing our class would have come to but one conclusion: These kids need discipline. And so we began on a long road to recovery. Mr. Hoff introduced a system of consequences for delinquent behavior. He kept a clipboard handy with each students' name on it, and marked an "X" beside each name whenever an infraction occurred. Three X's within a weeks' time earned the offender a lunch time detention with an assignment of 50 math problems to be completed within the course of that lunch, or else an additional lunch time detention was earned with an additional quota of math problems. Once three X's had been earned within a week's time, each additional X meant an additional day of detention. It was simple cause and effect. I remember spending more than a few lunch hours honing my math skills. I'm sure pretty much everyone saw their name on the detention list at least once, but I remember this one girl in our class, Jenny Fitger, who racked up several months of detention in one class. I'll never forget the image of her sitting on the edge of her seat, spouting obscenities at Mr Hoff, and him - standing at the front of the room, clipboard in hand, marking off X after X after X beside her name. And so it started, the long road to recovery. Eventually the class fell back in line as no seventh grader likes doing long division on a sunny day while the sound of children laughing and playing wafts in on summer air through screened windows. Learning resumed and the class began to respect and even to like this stern disciplinarian, and some of his more personable traits started to emerge. With great skill on the piano, Mr. Hoff directed and put on several musicals and plays. He was a riot on camping trips and retreats. I still engage audiences with some of the five-minute-mysteries he told us on one particularly interesting outing to Frank Slide and an abandoned mine nearby. Actually, I believe it was that same trip where Pat and Dana presented him with a homemade tribute they had created for him: a large, white, wooden "X." In a journal entry I came across, (I believe it was a school project) one of the assigned topics was My Best Day Ever. (Or something to that effect.) In this segment of the project, I detailed an end of the year award ceremony, where on this particular day I received an award for Christian Character. Not a bad award to receive, but the reason for this particular award, presented by Mr. Hoff, was my development of a sense of humor that does not offend, exclude, or ridicule anyone or anything, collectively referred to as the John Joke. I guess I should now refer to them as Award Winning John Jokes! (Did I ever tell you the one about the two antennas who met on a roof?) Mr. Hoff remained a teacher of mine through grade 9, but after that I changed schools and didn't really see him after that. I ran into him at Rob Easu's wedding, wherein he instructed me to call him by his first name, Wayne, now that I have graduated into the realm of adulthood. Only recently have I run into him downtown on a number of occasions, thus moving to the front of the mind all these memories and more. On another note, Canada Post is back to work today, with talks of having mail delivered as early as tomorrow. Will this mean I might have my sprinkler parts in time for the long weekend? Fingers are definitely crossed! BACK to Journal Index |