Ideeahs

I can no longer drive in Canada. This was news I got this evening courtesy of the Government of Quebec. Yep. My driver's license is now invalid. Let me explain..... We recently moved back to Quebec from British Columbia, two provinces in Canada. This is not the first time we have moved within Canada as we also lived in Ontario for a few years and moved back and forth. Since Canada is a confederation of power hungry, independently minded, self interested provinces moving within this one country is quite the pain in the behind. Every time you need to get new license plates, a new driver's license, new car insurance, new medicare cards. You see in this country, provinces have a heck of a lot of powers. That in itself is not the problem but the issue is the lack of organization and acceptance of one province's standards in another. Different drugs and medical procedures are reimbursed, at different levels, in different provinces for example. So back to my ability to drive. It t...

Not sure where this ideeah is going...maybe it will develop into something at one point. Who put the wo in man? Who put the woe in man? Woe man? Woman. Wo , man! Relax! Chill. There is no need for feminism, for machoism . Why is toughness masculine and softness feminine? No need to tag certain traits female or male. Look inside man...you'll find the wo . Woman....you'll find the man. Woe betide those that don't take a peek within. Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Please and thanks!

Computers and machines may one day match the power of the human brain. One day. This ideeah came about last night when I was at my children's school's meet-the-teacher night. Sitting two desks over from me was a man I immediately recognized. The last time I had seen him may very well have been in a classroom twenty-four years ago. As I remembered him, he remembered me. Name, surname, street, common friends. It all zoomed back and we were seventeen again sitting, not in our children's classroom but in our own classroom. In less than a second I had scanned all the images and videos of my memory and had assigned the correct name to that face. A two hour movie in a high-definition format that still does not match the vision of a human can be gigabytes and gigabytes in size. How many hours of video does a forty-one year old man have recorded in his brain. How many four megabyte pictures do we each have stored away in the folds of our grey drive. Tens of thousands. How...

Come on, come on.... Maybe we are all a little insane. No not maybe - we are. We just contain it within - many hide it well due to their ability to adapt to our modern world. Others not so well. Emotions rage within the depths of our red rivers. The oxygen within them becomes impregnated with all the distractions of life as our years progress. We grow with it and this polluted oxygen feeds our cells and our tissues, thoughts grow with these impurities built in. As the body takes it all in the inner insanity starts stirring - the inner revolt begins. With the years its head surfaces, limbs still in the body, thrashing and pushing against the outer world. Slowly personal education, personal experience, help individuality to rise, to solidify. Individuality - the antonym of well-oiled society? - develops. We start realizing that most of society's daily activities are mere facades that hide us from the truth of life. Avoid the truly important aspects of life by designing, buil...

This entry is about what our society considers an upgrade - something of greater value received for the price of something of lower value. While value is a subjective notion we generally equate it to some type of monetary measure. Money after all was invented to create an easy way to not only purchase items but to allow us to draw comparisons between the worth of different good or services. While money does serve a purpose in assigning a value there may also be other measures that one could use to determine whether one has been upgraded. So this ideeah occurred to me recently when I was renting a car. As I have started travelling regularly for work I have become a "frequent traveller" - not a frequent flyer. In my case this means car rentals - the town I need to travel to weekly is not served by airlines or trains. As a result I have become a Hertz Gold member and, likely very soon, will move up to the next level. Tangent --> By the way, if you need to travel for w...

More on the value of money. I spent the evening with some colleagues from India. Our conversation meandered between the various differences between our two countries (Canada and India). It reminded me of what I thought I wanted to do with this blog (read my first entry here ). So more on numbers: $2.00 = price of a can of Pepsi in a small town restaurant in the province of Quebec $20.00 = price of a pizza and beer in a small town restaurant in the province of Quebec $200.00 = monthly rent for an 800 square foot, 2 bedroom apartment in middle class neighbourhood of Bangalore, India Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Please and thanks!

For various reasons I have been thinking about how man exploits the earth and how our body of knowledge (our book of knowledge) is becoming every more complete and, consequently, we are becoming more and more confused and living in a more and more complicated world. Two simple reasons for the thought. Vermiculite and oil. We are in the process of purchasing a house. It turns out that the house may contain asbestos. This came about because one of the previous owners used a naturally occurring substance called vermiculite as an insulator. That in itself is not a problem as vermiculite - as far as our current book of knowledge tells us - is safe. The issue is that the mine that 80% of the vermiculite in North America came from was contaminated with asbestos veins. So....a known carcinogenic may be present. When I was a child we used to drive up to my aunt's place in the Laurentians, north of Montreal. One of my childhood memories is of the smell and look of the dirt roads that...