Ideeahs

The government of France is looking into the legality of banning face-covering veils - the infamous burqa and similar attire. Sarko thinks that these veils have no place in French society and should be banned as they"debase women". Indeed the burqa and veils have become inexorably linked with serious, demeaning and shameful repression of women's rights. The Taliban, for example, are a sickening bunch of power hungry men that have absolutely no right to suppress women's rights. Illegal behaviour in France as it should be. It is my deep belief, however, that people need to have the freedom to live their lives, their dreams and to, consequently, fail or succeed. They need the right to move to a different city, province, country or continent to start anew or build a better future for themselves. To marry, divorce and love whomever they want. To read, listen to and watch whomever they please. To wear whatever they want to - be it a dress that is 1 mm below the crotc...

A short word asking my readers to get off their behinds and walk. Today I saw an example of how far people will go to avoid any physical exercise. Press a button on your keyless car door gizmo. Enter car. Start ignition and press button on garage door opener to open garage door. Backup out of garage. Press button on garage door opener to lower garage door. Back out of driveway and drive 310 metres. Park stop ignition and wait for your children to exit their school. Repeat first steps but in reverse order. In many cases it gets worse. The next step in the routine may be: Sit on your behind and watch TV while eating some salty and/or sugary snacks before dinner and more TV in the evening. People....what kind of example are you giving your children? My gosh. Unless you are carrying a heavy load you should consider it illegal to drive your car if you are going a distance that is less than one kilometre away - EACH way. ;-) Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Pl...

As I wrote the title of this entry I started singing the ABBA tune. This is not about my love for someone though. I am looking for a job. The best way to get a job is not to just complete online applications and send them into the bit bucket of some HR department. You will just end up in some dehumanizing database that nets down your life experience to some key words that can be searched on. Rather you need to make contact with people in the organization. Reach out, just like in sales, to people you know and make cold calls to some you do not know. I have been doing a fair bit of this and have come to a few conclusions. 1) Too busy. In my last job I received more than 100 emails a day. On top of all the other interruptions (phone calls, instant messaging, walk-ins) and my busy schedule of meetings (sometimes triple booked, often double booked) I rarely got to all of them on the day they came in. 2) There is a person at the other end. When an email comes from someone that they...

Yes I wish I was still living in Vancouver. Today, however, I fell upon a newspaper article and a study that reconfirms why we decided to move away from that beautiful city. The newspaper article explains how, in 2011, you will be able to rent a 270 square foot micro-loft in the shittiest neighbourhood in Vancouver for $675 a month. This is only possible, by the way, because of various subsidies that were handed to the developer. I also learnt that the city of Vancouver has a by-law that permits rentals to be as small as 195 square feet. The survey shows that housing affordability in Vancouver is the lowest of all cities surveyed in Canada, Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Ireland and the United Kingdom. The equation is simple. Average house price divided by average income. So in Vancouver the ratio is 9.3. This means that an average house is worth 9.3 times the average gross income. It did not surprise me that Vancouver was unaffordable. What did surprise me, howe...

Over the last twenty-four hours or so there has been a weather warning for the Montreal Island area. The warning was for heavy rains. We were expecting 20 to 50 mm. In Vancouver, if I recall properly, warnings would only pop up when 70 to 100 mm were expected. Conversely, in Vancouver a weather warning would be issued if temperatures dropped to, oh I dunno, minus five degrees Celsius . In Montreal the only time you would ever get a warning for cold weather might be if the temperature dropped below minus thirty. So it really is all relative isn't it? It is not so much the weather itself and nature's ability to cope with the downpours, cold, heat and wind that are of concern but rather that of man's and that of our structures' (bridges, culverts, dams, houses) to come out unscathed. At least we know to wear an extra pair of woollies. Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Please and thanks!

Last week The Montreal Gazette started appearing at our door. I let it slide a few days and then contacted their subscription department to let them know that I had not asked for delivery. They informed me that it was a free one month subscription which would cancel itself in mid-February. "Alright then", I thought. Who reads those papers anyways? After a few days of attentively reading the rag I started realizing that there was no real news in the paper. I had already ready the news - yesterday on the net. The only sections of a newspaper that may still have some value are the Life, Arts and Entertainment sections. It seems to me that no one on the net has yet created a site that gives a thorough view of local cultural scenes....at least not one that pops up on the main search engines and is therefore easily clicked on. Well for the last three days the paper has stopped appearing at our door. I should still have three weeks on my subscription. If The Gazette is tryi...

I remember being a child, playing with my airplanes and believing that I was actually piloting them to various destinations in the world. I mean really believing. I would chat with ground control, check my altimetre, greet the passengers in the cabin, push back from the gate, taxi to the runway and await departure control's clearance. I would then ascend to my given altitude and await further instructions on my way to one of the numerous designated paths across, for example, the Atlantic. This was real....and one day I would do it for real. This belief led to real excitement. I am sure that my body was flooded with all the best brain chemicals and hormones. It was healthy for me. Believing like a child, without the hindrance of real life road blocks and hurdles. Having a dream and going for it with a certain amount of naivety is not only healthy but it is what brings about some of the more game-changing events and innovations - whether to a single life or to larger groups. ...

Vancouver school trustees approve early Mandarin bilingual program Must be nice to live in a place where the public school system can offer four programs English French French Immersion Mandarin Bilingual rather than in a place where the government determines whether you can or cannot take English language education and is, in the process, slowly suffocating the English programs and continuing to cause angst. I find it hard to understand how the abolishment of the language laws is so politically unpalatable to the population of Quebec. I realize that these laws were voted on and agreed to by our elected representatives. So, the theory goes, this is what the people want. Maybe it is time for the municipal governments on the island of Montreal to put political pressure on the provincial government to revisit the laws so that Montreal can once again start attracting the best talent in the world, become an area that is growing and has a net influx of people. But I suspect that this is ...

Last March, on a drive back to Vancouver, BC from Everett, Washington we decided to move back "home", back to Montreal. After all it is the city where my wife and I both grew up and it deserved, I thought, to be called home. Where were you born? Montreal Where did you grow up? Montreal Where are you from? What and where is home exactly? When you have moved do you really have a home? Is home not a place but, rather, a feeling? Is it stability of place? If I had lived in one city my entire life I would have no question where home is - I may not like the place but I would know. The issue is that we have lived in three cities, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. 24 years in Montreal, 2 in Toronto and 15 in Vancouver. So now we are back in Montreal. It has been seven months back in Montreal, three months in our new house and I wonder when "home" will feel like home. Where are you from? Vancouver. That is where home still remains for me. I can still smell the for...

Dangerous distraction: Should progamming a GPS while driving be illegal in Canada? - Your View I read the article linked above and couldn't help but wonder why we need such a law. illegal to drive while on the phone illegal to drive while programming your GPS illegal to drive while opening and eating your candy bar illegal to drive while changing songs on your iPod illegal to drive while reaching for a kleenex in the backseat illegal to drive while looking in the rearview mirror to see the person in the backseat that you are speaking to Since it is likely that we will miss something I guess it means I can do that one thing. What might it be? I can still eat my burger, type on my laptop and slurp my milkshake while driving. Apparently that is not made explicitly illegal by any law. Keep it simple, I say. Just make it illegal to be an idiot and not concentrate on the road. Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Please and thanks!

My last entry, about Google and their threat to move out of China, began with the words "news is coming out about..." Well at the same time news was coming out about another event - the earthquake in Haiti. When events like this happen I always think about how we need to use perspective when judging events in life. However we, well I anyway, rarely use perspective. We tend to think that our plight is terrible. The furnace that needed to be replaced. Will that ice dam on the roof cause water damage this spring? What about that sump pump - will it work? That noisy bathroom fan. What a joke. We have nothing substantive to complain about in our lives...if perspective is used. So, with some perspective, I will say that I am among the luckiest person in the world. I live in Canada. A first-world, rich, well-off, society with a solid safety net. I have a house, two healthy children and an amazing wife. I now live in a city that it not prone to any serious natural dangers...

News is coming out about a cyber -attack last December that focused on the Gmail accounts of a few human-rights activists in China. When Google launched their . cn site in 2006 it was quite broadly bashed for giving in to Chinese government demands to censor certain sites out of search results. Google argues that it found that giving the Chinese broader access to web content than they had ever had before still merited the censorship. Fair enough. China needs to part of any global companies strategy (did you read that China has now taken over the United States in another market? The market for cars.) You simply can't call yourself global and ignore a market of 1.1 billion. Having said that Google seems to be rethinking their strategy towards China and I must say that I am very proud of what they are doing. Bottom line is that they want to work out a way to remove all censorship from their . cn site. If an agreement can't be worked out with Chinese authorities they are ...

About three hours ago I thought of the following challenge and posted it on my Facebook page: Go to Blockbuster Video with four people and, in fifteen minutes, walk out with a movie none of you have seen AND all of you want to see. Good luck. It sounds like a trial, or a right of passage doesn't it? With a wish of sarcastic "good luck" I mock you to attempt this with little belief that you will achieve it. The reason for the challenge was because of a couple of trying hours my wife and I had this afternoon and early evening with our children. A day that ended with a few lessons learned and laughs. After dinner plans we had were changed we decided that we should have a movie night. So we headed to Blockbuster and tried to pick a movie. We had agreed that it should be one that we ALL wanted to see though it did not have to be one that none of us had seen. After a few minutes of nahs, nos and I don't want to see that ones we all started getting frustrated. We ende...

Whether you consider wealth to be the number of friends you have, the quality of your inner peace, the value of your investment portfolio, or whether you use some other measure, the impact of sitting on your behind and doing nothing is clear. It will result in less wealth. If you don't go out and meet people you will not increase the number of friends you have. If you go out but do not communicate you will not increase your social network. If you don't increase your social network less opportunities will arise in your life. If you don't work at inner peace you will not increase its quality. Without trying to meditate for thirty minutes and shutting out your inner voice, without trying yoga, or qi gong or other practices and keeping an open minded it will be much harder to achieve inner peace. You will not be exposed to the solution that might bring you that sought after peace. If you do not go out and work to earn income. If you do not put some of your earnings away ...

Recently the Lester B. Pearson School Board, the English school board on the western part of the island of Montreal, decided that three schools would close and that more French would be taught in the schools. The reason for the closures is falling enrollment. During our last few years in Vancouver, the Vancouver School Board, went through a similar process and ended up closing a few schools. Reason...falling enrollment. On the surface the fact that the stories are similar seems odd. After all one city, on the west coast, continues to boom as it has for most of the last two decades. People are moving to the area in droves. Hardly a place where you would expect falling enrollment. The other city, in Quebec, has seen a fairly stagnant growth state for the last two decades. You might expect falling enrollment there, especially in an English school board that is not open to all citizens due to language laws. However, in the story is the same. People are leaving the city of Vancouve...

Hints from three interesting communities on how to live a healthier life. Socialize, eat more plants and less animals, have purpose in life and slow down. Listen to how communities in Italy, Japan and, yes, even the United States do it. Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Please and thanks!

Yesterday Google launched Nexus One - a terrible mistake in my opinion and here is why. Over the last twenty years we have seen various hardware devices become commodities. CD players, DVD players, PCs, mobile phones, laptops, digital cameras have all gone from luxury to commodities in no time. The value in the consumer electronics solution space has consistently moved from hardware towards application and usage. Game consoles are loss leaders to sell video games. Phones are loss leaders for telco providers to sign up users and offer them value added services. Some even say that digital cameras are loss leaders for people to buy memory cards...just like printers are loss leaders for those freaking ink cartridges that cost 60% of the price of the printer. The money is in the application not in the plastic. Google makes money selling ads and they are likely the best at doing it. As more and more devices allow consumers to surf the web the potential to display an ad to a consumer ...

A book, a movie and a meal. This entry is about how three items came together a few days ago to further convince me that the world needs to change and, happily, seems to be changing. And how each of us can make a difference. You may not care about changing the world but at least make an effort to change what you can directly control - your diet. Make this your resolution. Food Inc. - the movie - rent it. In Praise of Slowness - the book - read it. Red Cabbage Risotto - the meal - eat it. I consider that we are a lucky family. We can afford healthy foods, we have the time to cook up those foods into delicious meals and then we sit down, together, to enjoy it. Three times a day we do this. One of our favorite meals is a risotto recipe by Marcella Hazan (fantastic cook books - get some!). It is far from fast to make but is worth the two to two-and-a-half hours it takes to prepare. Shred 4 cups of red cabbage. Then chop up some pancetta and onions. Fry these two in a large kettl...