Archive for the ‘Life’ Category
- Change your perspective from time to time.
… the obvious vantage point may not always be the best one.
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The plain fact is that great achievement, deep fulfillment, lasting relationships, or any other aspects of an unquenchably, relentlessly well lived life aren’t formulaically executable or neatly quantifiable. First and foremost, they’re searingly, and deeply personally, meaningful. The inconvenient truth is: you’ll probably have to not just blaze your own trail — you’ll also probably have to plot your own map for own journey. UMAIR HAQUE
and work hard!
- inbox hell…
“E-mail overload is something we are inadvertently doing to each other. You can’t solve this problem acting alone. You will end up simply ignoring, delaying, or rushing responses to many incoming messages, and risk annoying people or missing something great. That prospect is stressful.”
“But if we can mutually change the ground rules, maybe we can make that stress go away. That’s why it’s time for an Email Charter. ” Chris Anderson, TED.
Indeed. Please sign the email charter and let’s get out of our inboxes! David Pogue also has a couple of additions that should make it to your list. My favourite? Omit the Legal Vomit.
- My daily commute or how I plan to average 70 kilometers a week.
I am a big fan of winter and snow and the cold does not scare me. My holidays include heading to YellowKnife in the middle of winter and enjoying the frigid temperatures – except that with all this global warming finding cold places to visit is getting difficult. But what I don’t enjoy about the winter is all the slosh, and all the mess from melting snow in the city. So during the winter, although I continue to run, I don’t walk to the office. You see I live a mere 5 kilometers away from the office and walking back and forth between the office and my home is a great start and end of the day routine. Since I started working – and that’s two decades ago – I have never lived more than 5 kilometers from my work – with one exception which we will not spend time discussing
Queen West to Queen East
I have been a walking commuter for a month now (since the snow melted and spring arrived) and nothing stops my walking – not even the rain!
The rain is just about here!
I headed to the office on a holiday Monday and got totally soaked heading back home with my dog. I had not gotten that soaked since childhood! Water was in my shoes, socks, my pants, underwear … well pretty much everywhere and standing in the living room I formed a puddle of water large enough that it could have been used as a small swimming pool for a 5 year old!
Totally soaked!
Toronto’s streets are incredibly quiet when you venture out early in the morning. When I manage to leave the house at 6 AM, I own Queen street. There isn’t a soul outside and pretty much everyone is just about hitting the snooze button on their alarm clock. But when I leave late – say 8 AM or later – well, the hustle and bustle of Queen street is so unbearable that sometimes I duck into Graffiti alley to get all the way to work. You see I live on Queen West and work on Queen Est. So I have an all Queen Street daily commute. Never a dull moment.
Last month I started using Runkeeper to keep track of my running and walking. My running this year has been pretty pathetic – but I will be fixing that shortly. As I started using Runkeeper I started to make an effort to walk to the office every day and walk back home every day. That’s 10 kilometers a day. Each and every day. What I really liked seeing in Runkeeper was an uninterrupted week of walking to the office.
When my walks got interrupted you know I was on the road and not home! I started enjoying entering my walk data, watching the kilometers accumulate and realizing that I actually looked forward to the morning data entry routine! I had downloaded Runkeeper for my iphone a while back but my iphone crashed and killed all my apps and has since been refusing to sync – more on my iphone battles later but suffice it to say that this old iphone’s days are numbered!So how does this bring me to improving my running? Well simple: I am interested in building mileage and would like to see my average weeks include 50 to 70 kilometers in a combination of walking and running. When I manage to commute to the office daily, that’s almost 50 kilometers in a week (provided I walk both to the office and back home). And any running that I do tops that off! So that’s what I call building mileage. I am not focused on how quickly I can run or walk to the office but focused on doing it every day. Once that routine and discipline is set in stone, I will start looking at how to improve my time.
There is something pretty awesome about discovering the city you live in by commuting to work and re-seeing all the buildings and streets that you take for granted when driving. Walking brings me closer to my city. I also get to discover awesome graffiti along the way and the odd abandoned objects.
So here is to building a 70 kilometer week! And how is your commute going?
- Lunch!
I am a big fan of Ramen noodles. And today I am having a giant bowl of Ramen in the TinEye HQ. If you are a big fan of Ramen then you will love these ramen hacks! Mine today contains peas, green onions, line and sesame oil!
- Sicko!
I got the flu from hell. It has been so awful! Down for 4 days and counting! Would not wish this on my worst enemy hence the mask (and foggy glasses!).
Sicko!
- Power Vegans
BusinessWeek: “Having dolphins in a small tank outside a casino is crazy,” “Ordering vegetables is not.” Ah finally!
- Snow… wishing you were here
Yes, I find myself dreaming of snow in August. Yes. Snow. You would too if you were living in Toronto this week. Brings back memories of Ecuador and the last iceman (whom I wish I had met during my visit).
- Gameness, vaccines, turtles, life and startups
On Offensive Play by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker [...] those who select for gameness have a responsibility not to abuse that trust: if you have men in your charge who would jump off a cliff for you, you cannot march them to the edge of the cliff.
Does the vaccine matter? The Atlantic
The women agenda: NYT reader submitted photographs from around the world illustrating the importance of educating girls. Some great shots!
From Science Friday: Michael Musnick is a citizen scientist who studies wood turtles in the Great Swamp — a stretch of wetland about 60 miles north of New York City. He found turtles dying in the railroad tracks and proposed a solution to New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority: tiny turtle bridges.
There are close to 1.7 billion Internet users in the world. The network by the numbers.
Norwegian photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen spent six weeks living in the slums of Nairobi, then Caracas, Mumdai and Jakarta. His Foreign Policy photo essay is enlightening!
Best young entrepreneurs of 2009 from BusinessWeek and yes the list includes women!
Interview with Ken Segall, the man who named the iMac and wrote Think Different.
- Car park design
I would like Axel Peemoeller to design all the parking lots in Toronto.
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