I have this Yahoo! widget* running on my desktop:

Every 15 minutes it chimes on the quarter hour, and every hour it chimes once for every hour. What I love about this widget, besides the steampunk look of it, is how it is resetting my notion of time back to what it used to be and what I think is better.

I also have this widget on my desk:

It is a timer that allows me to keep focused on a task. With all the distractions that my computer generates, having this timer allows me to focus. (E.g. I will spend 20 minutes on email, and when the timer goes off, I will quit that and work on producing a report for 30 minutes). While this approach is good, I find that time becomes very fluid. It is less fluid than allowing myself get distracted by every pop up that occurs or open tab on my browser, but it is something I control and sometimes let slip by.

What I love about the steampunk clock widget is that it implies that time is independent of me. Time is important. Each hour, each quarter hour is important, and it tells me it is important by announcing it. It makes me appreciate time more as a thing in itself, and not something that I slosh around, 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there. It also makes me appreciate the order of time: there is a quarter hour, and then three more and that takes us to the top of the hour. Time marches on with the first widget. Finally, I think 15 minute intervals of time are best. We are always trying to squeeze more out of time: a quick minute here, a five minute break there. The steampunk widget says: no, 15 minute intervals are best for dividing up the day, and anything worth doing will need 15 minutes at least. It changes the pace of the day.

I like playing around with time. I feel like I am always aware of it, and how it is speeding by. What I like about the steampunk widget is how it is reshaping my approach to time.

* Yes, I still use Yahoo! widgets. In fact, I use quite a few of them. I find them very helpful in making me more productive.  I think the tools that Yahoo! provides are underappreciated.  I hope that will change and that more and more widgets are developed.

I was surfing around YouTube, finding clips of TV and music long past that remind me of winter and more. Things loved, long gone. For memory and winter are related.

YouTube – Northern Exposure – Joel goes back to New York

YouTube – Due south Opening

YouTube – Holly Cole sings on Due South

YouTube – John Mayer – Wheel

In Cape Breton these days, you can have a light supper of Italian capocollo, Spanish olives and an radicchio salad washed down with a nice glass of Barolo, before being driven to the theatre to catch a live simulcast of Anna Netrebko performing in the Met’s version of Don Pasquale. In other words, you can have many of the same experiences that someone in the big city like Toronto can have. This is astounding to me in some ways, because when I was younger and living in Cape Breton, that was not the case. What people in big cities enjoyed was something either you could not experience locally or something you got to experience much latter. Now, the people at Loblaws or the Metropolitan Opera didn’t get together and say: those poor Cape Bretoners…we should be nice and give this stuff to them. No, what happened is that first they found ways to be able to distribute these things cost effectively and profitably to areas like Cape Breton via innovations in their supply chain. Once they could do that, they understood that there was a market for these goods and services there just like there was in Toronto or Vancouver or other parts of Canada. And just like in other parts of Canada, not everyone in Cape Breton cared or wanted these things. But many Capers did, and that motivated these companies to distribute these goods and services to Sydney and Glace Bay and other parts of the Island.

Likewise with Africa and IT. As I pointed out here (Some thoughts on datafication and the poor way writers think about IT and Africa | Smart People I Know), it’s not a question of being nice. It’s a question of being innovative enough to reach and serve new markets that you were not able to reach and serve before. The demand is there. It’s a matter of the supply.

The comparison only goes so far, but often times when I read about people in India or Africa and other parts of the world, I think of my own experiences in Cape Breton. I think of the assumptions and limitations implied concerning Cape Bretoners, and then I try to see things in a more open way, just like I would hope people outside of Cape Breton see the people who live there.

(Photo of Anna Netrebko from the 2010 performance of Donzetti’s Don Pasquale.)

His latest, With bitter pills, Obama gets his health vote, is typical of his articles in the Globe. While it’s a good thing to have editorial columns criticizing Obama (and all other politicians, left and right), to see it in articles is another thing. If you read this, and his other columns, you will see how Yakabuski sees Obama and his situation in a very negative light. The overall column is more balanced. For example, this is true:

That is a singular achievement and the second in as many days for the President, who also extracted a commitment from developing countries to join the fight against global warming. But in both so-called successes, Mr. Obama acted as a broker of deals rather than a principled idealist. As such, he risks alienating his most fervent supporters.

Sounds pretty positive, yes? There’s lots more, too. And that’s what makes them odd: the articles themselves are balanced and well written, but there is almost an attempt to make them more negative then they are or need to be.

For example, on this article that I referenced, it is true that there is a strong negative reaction to this. But there’s also columns by such notable people like Paul Krugman and over at TPM media that balance that out. That’s the bigger picture, and from the Globe and it’s writers, I would like the bigger picture. If I want smaller more partisan pictures, there’s lots of blogs and other places for that.

There’s alot of good coverage in Yakabuski’s articles. But his negativity is odd, to say the least.

P.S. Thanks for reading this. If you have found it useful and you’d like to say thanks by buying me a coffee, you can do so here. Thanks! That’s awesome!

I am sick with a late winter cold today. Lying here, trying to get better, I thought of the benefits of minor hardship.

One benefit of such hardship is regaining an appreciation of things. Lying here, instead of rushing about like I normally do, I am appreciating how good it is to rest and relax and take it easy from time to time.

I am also drinking plenty of water. Every glass tastes good, and I associate drinking water (and resting) with getting better.

As a result of this minor hardship, I am gaining a new appreciation for water and resting, simple things that are easy to overlook with all the choices we have to drink and do.

The other benefit of minor hardships is that one recovers from the quite easily. We can gain insights awithout being burdened in the long term. This too is a good thing.

That said, I have posted this when I should be resting! I’ll send this off and fill up my water glass.

I have always loved birch trees. This tree of mine is a Himalayan Birch. I love the name, the exotic nature of it. But more than that, I love how it marks time for me. It marks the seasons. It marks the time when I bought it, how old my kids were when I bought it. It grows old along with me. And perhaps when I am gone, it will still be here, marking time and keeping company for someone else.

When I was a child and my grandfather was in his sixties, I was surprised that he planted apple trees in his yard. Especially when he told me it would likely take five years before any fruit would grow. That was mind boggling for me at the time. Now, I understand why he would have done that.

Be it ever so humble, if you have a chance, I recommend you plant a tree. When you do, and as you watch it grow, you will know why.

Muscles are made stronger by tearing them, and that the heart is one of those muscles.

Over at the great Tuneage site, you can hear and learn more of the wonderful Half Asleep by School of Seven Bells. It has layers of electronic sounds and ethereal vocals that overall reminds me of earlier Cocteau Twins.

Tuneage: it’s like a big bowl of candy. 🙂

On flickr is a wonderful photo of Children on the sculpture Crouching Spider by the great artist, Louise Bourgeois. (It’s part of a fine photostream).

What I love about this photo is that while the sculpture is almost monstrous by itself, with children hanging from it, it becomes something like a jungle gym. It transforms from a thing of horror to a thing of play and joy.

Reading some interview of Bourgeois, the reason for her fondness for spiders comes through. And yet although she is fond of them, she sometimes portrays them in a way that seems to want to play on our fears of them. It’s as if she wants us to think about them positively and negatively at the same time.

I also recalled a quote from her complaining about having children because of how it prevented her from doing her art. But in the interviews I found on the Web, the essays and interviews talk about her fondness of her children.

I wonder what she would have thought of this photograph. I think she would have liked it.

James Fallows over at The Atlantic has a good run down of why Barack Obama is such a formidable politician.

In short order, it is his:

1. formal oratory skills
2. his ability to use technology to raise money
3. his skill in getting out the vote (and his overall ground game)
4. his debating technique
5. his ability to tell stories and evoke emotions
6. his demeanour

Fallows smartly compares Obama to everyone from Clinton to Reagan to JFK. The thing is, he is all those things, but he is also something new. Someone others in the future will look back for comparisons.

One thing that Fallows left out is this: his ability to make others wrongly underestimate him. This is something Reagan and Clinton had. It’s a ease they have, that allows their opponents to relax or overestimate their own strengths.

It’s going to be an interesting eight years in American and world history. In the meantime, read James Fallows’s posting. It’s good.

I believe that we underestimate the positive affect our kindness and appreciation has on people. We believe it won’t make a difference, that the effort to do so will be unappreciated, or that it doesn’t matter.

Last week I used the City of Toronto’s web site to enroll my children on some skiing and swimming programs that the City provides. What I used to have to do — really — was get up at 4:30 or 5 a.m. and walk over to the community center and line up until 7 a.m. with many other people. I had to do this twice a year: September and January. Standing outside in Toronto in January at 5:30 or 6 in the morning to try and get your daughter in karate is the definition of ‘no fun’. However, the people from the city who ran it were very good, getting there at 6, giving out placeholder numbers to people, and letting them in before 7 just so people could stay warm. At 7, people would take turns working with staff to use the IT system the city has for registering. For high demand choices, you had to get to the system by 7:20, because they filled up immediately (once I tried to register my daughter in karate this way: it was filled by 7:10).

There were two other choices: a phone system (overloaded and not easy for me to use I found) and a web based system. The web based system was HAMMERED at 7 a.m. The first time I tried it a few years ago, it took me over an hour to get in. Needless to say, I went back to the 5 a.m. line up.

However, over the years of trying it, I have seen the web based system improve greatly, and I got in quickly this year (7:05), even though I am sure it still gets massive amount of load at exactly 7 a.m.

I was so impressed, I sent an email to the Mayor’s office (the office of the Mayor of Toronto is fantastic with answering email, usually answering within the hour and with specific responses to my email). I told them how impressed I was with the improvements they have made over time. (And after having stood in the freezing cold at 5 a.m., you appreciate it!). Not only were they appreciative, but they forwarded the email to others within the city, and they were all very appreciative as well. In fact, I was surprised how appreciative they were in the emails they sent back to me.

And so I thought I would write this, partially as a reminder to myself to be more appreciative (it’s a never ending journey and I am sure I have along way to go still). Partially to remind others. And partially to tell people — particularly the IT people I work with — that people do appreciate the work you do to make things better, even if they don’t always say so.

Enough blogging about money. Instead, I want to point out a great post in Looking Around – Art – Architecture – TIME on a new show at the Tate Britain museum. It’s a retrospective of one of favourite artists, Francis Bacon. While it his fifth retrospective, it is apparently a great one.

But I think this one passage is an interesting one, especially in light of the attention that artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have been getting lately

“To see this many Bacons gathered together reminded me again how rare it is to see new art that attempts, much less achieves, a genuine tragic dimension. Irony you can find in any gallery these days, also low comedy, puerile cool and industrial strength enigma. But in a time that has its share of tragedy — have you noticed? — where is the art that even tries to strike an equivalent note. What we have almost no language for anymore, at least not in art, is acute pain.”

While Hirst draws on Bacon, you get no sense of any great depth of emotion that Bacon has. He has dark representations without the feeling.

Instead of “I have nothing to say and I am saying it”, it is more “I have nothing to feel and I am painting that”.

According to the globeandmail.com, Maple Leaf’s CEO says likely source of listeria found:

“Listeria contamination deep within two meat slicing machines at a Toronto food-processing plant was the likely cause of the recent outbreak of the bacteria that has killed at least 13 people.

Maple Leaf Foods Inc. CEO Michael McCain said at a press conference in Toronto Friday evening that the Formax 180 slicers, on lines 8 and 9 of the company’s Toronto plant, were regularly cleaned but that listeria was found in parts of the machinery “well beyond the [manufacturer’s] recommended sanitation process.”

The slicers, which are about three metres long and two-and-a-half metres tall, have been completely disassembled, and Mr. McCain said that similar measures would be taken with all of the company’s slicing equipment.

He added that despite the discovery of listeria deep inside the machinery, “it’s not reasonable to expect that each piece of equipment has to be disassembled completely prior to use.””

I put the last part of the quote in bold, because I think that is relevant.

I went over to FORMAX site to see if I could get more information on the Formax 180. Given that there is no mention of the particular model on their site, I am assuming that a) it is an older model they no longer support b) it is similar to the newer models.

If I look at some of their new slicing models, like this one, I can see why the CEO of Maple Leaf would say it is “not reasonable to expect that each piece of equipment has to be disassembled completely prior to use”. They look like complex machinery. And I am assuming that complexity allows them to produce sliced meat at a very fast rate.

So, we have machines that are explicitly designed to be highly productive and implicitly designed to be hard to thoroughly clean.

My personal opinion is that I would like the machines to first and foremost be very easy to clean and then be highly productive.

In the meantime, I think I may cut back on my use of processed meat. I’ve already stopped using Maple Leaf Foods meats, but this is not likely a problem associated with just Maple Leaf Foods. I am assuming everyone in this business is using such machines, and all of them have the challenge of being able to clean them.

I also think Maple Leaf Foods and others need to rethink this problem, for their own sakes, as well as that of their customers.