How to Trick Your Taste Buds Into Enjoying More Healthy Foods

It makes great arguments about how we have evolved to eat certain types of foods (crunchy, sweet, and salty) based on survival instincts, and how we must use those instincts to replace processed foods with healthier choices.

While I agree with this article, particularly with regards to the “crunch” (chips are my Achilles heel…), it omits another – and potentially the biggest – “crunch” to which processed/junk foods appeal – the “time crunch“.

The processed food machines have also spent billions selling their “quick fix” meals to a society that, whether real or perceived, is also addicted to a time crunch. They have convinced us that time spent preparing meals is wasted, rather than time that can be enjoyed. As a result, many people would rather plunk their fat a$$ down in front of the TV with a pre-processed dinner cooking in the oven or microwave rather than take a little extra time to prepare a healthy meal. That needs to be addressed as well.

His main reasons for asserting this  are:

1. Ubiquitous Broadband

2. Dirt Cheap Storage

3. Superb Usability

I might add one more reason:

Because everyone is using it!

His current achievement was noted on his own blog post here.

His idea? From his own blog posts:

What if the data already collected by hospitals was used to display real-time estimates for emergency rooms wait times? 

His product gives patients an idea of how much time they should be able to expect to wait in a hospital emergency room, based on their injury. It can be accessed via computer or a mobile device. 

Shawn worked closely with Saint John Regional Hospital staff and administration for this project and hopes to have the project implemented provincially next.

Shawn has always been a go-getter. He is also the wonderful wizard behind Propertize.ca, a web site that puts the Province of New Brunswick’s existing property tax assessment information pages to shame.

A shining example of local creativity, determination, and talent, I can’t wait to see what Shawn comes up with next!

I am mentoring another offering of our “Understand Social Business” course with Sociallogical starting this weekend, and I can help you to become involved instead of being a spectator!

Our three week online course is limited to ten (10) participants, and is designed to walk you through the history of social media, how to use the tools, and will provide ideas on how you can grow a social business. There will be a minimum of three live online chats with all of us together, as well as continuous contact and feedback on progress.

To sign up for this course, navigate to http://learn.sociallogical.com and, when registering, use the coupon code CHRISLONDON.

Participants in the course will also be able to participate in our upcoming Uptown #Learnsocial Time Crunch on Saturday, February 4, 2012 from 10 am – 2 pm. This special event is meant to make good use of your time to look closely at how you represent yourself online, how you plan to use social to grow your business in 2012, and connect you with others who can help mentor you throughout the year. The best part? This event is free for graduates and current students of the “Understand Social Business” course and will concentrate on the following areas:

• boost and enhance your online profiles,
• get honest critique and help improving your online social profiles,
• get answers to questions focused on personal and business use of social media, and
• refresh your headshot in a session with a photographer so you can refresh your online avatar (for a fee)

To sign up for this course, navigate to http://learn.sociallogical.com and, when registering, use the coupon code CHRISLONDON.

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Here are details about the course:

Course requirements

A decent comfort and ability to navigate and use the internet for daily needs.

Who teaches it?

Community Manager Mentors with demonstrated success and experience in building a network online and facilitating discussion and learning for others.

How hard is it?

If you can find what you’re looking for in an online newspaper or play a YouTube video, you’ll be able to work your way through this course.

How long will it take?

3 chapters planned for 3 weeks in total (15-25 hours).

Who is it useful for?

Entrepreneurs and business people, ideally those who can implement what they learn immediately in their businesses and functions.

There’s a basic understanding of what opportunities and risks social business creates that most people don’t yet understand. This course is meant to:

1. provide anyone in business with a good understanding of social business.
2. guide students through the creation of an online portfolio they can share to demonstrate proficiency.

To accomplish these goals, there are three main sections of the course, with live online class discussions, facilitated by the course mentor, after each section before proceeding to the next. This is a 3-week course that can be completed on your own flexible time (except for the 3 live discussions) in a total of 15 hours or 25 hours – depending on how far down the rabbit hole you wish to go with the recommended readings that support each section. The section titles are:

Chapter 1: How Did We Get Here? How Do I Start?

The impact and opportunities of social media, the importance of strong profiles and how to create them.

Chapter 2: How To Use the Social Media Tool Box

Overviews of the strengths and weaknesses of the main platforms for business: Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, and Facebook, as well as exposure to other useful tools. The lingo and behaviours found on each and how to get setup with these channels.

Chapter 3: How to Grow a Social Business

A look at all of the different operations inside a business and how social can have a powerful, positive impact on each. How to introduce these practices and tools to each function and exposure to analytics and driving business decisions based on powerful, live social data.

To sign up for this course, navigate to http://learn.sociallogical.com and, when registering, use the coupon code CHRISLONDON.

Tomorrow will be my last working day at the New Brunswick Community College, a place I have spent the past seven years pouring my heart and soul into as an Instructor teaching Computer Programming/Information Technology, Business, and Office Administration students. Because of this, I am also leaving many close friends and colleagues as well as some great students I hope will become future colleagues.

I loved teaching. I was proud, excited to go to work, motivated to learn along with my students, and ever searching for new and better ways to transfer knowledge to the students so they could be successful. The long hours spent preparing and marking assignments, liaising with industry and attending school career fairs, counselling and mentoring students were all worth the reward that comes with watching them cross the stage at graduation. Along the way, I even managed to pick up a few teaching and education awards, so I guess I was pretty good at it. Teaching at the NBCC was truly my dream job.

So… Why am I leaving?

Well, it’s complicated. And yet also simple.

First and foremost (and easiest to explain) is job security. The second (harder to explain yet a much more influential decision-maker) is job satisfaction.

Here’s the back story: The NBCC is becoming a fledgling Crown Corporation, trying to spread its wings and escape the suffocating effects of being within the New Brunswick Government nest. As such, the NBCC is an organization in flux. Unfortunately, while trying to become more progressive, they remain at least partially tethered to some medieval government policies and HR practices – things that will take some time to fix.

This change is not simple. Picture a team of mechanics trying to change the tires on your car while you are driving it down the road at full speed. Currently, it’s like that part in a renovation project when everything is torn apart, it looks impossibly messy, and you really hope it all goes back together in the end. It’s a lot of work, and they have and will continue to make some mistakes. But, they have a mess of people (pardon the pun…) working on this transition in Fredericton. If pay scales are any indication, they are supposed to be smarter than the rest of us, so hopefully (for the students) they get it right and keep quality of education as the backbone of the organization.

During my seven years at the NBCC, despite receiving the same salary and benefits, I was always a “term (contract) employee” and never a “regular” employee (similar to tenure in a university environment). The numerous contracts varied in duration, often without rhyme or reason. If you have never done it, trust me when I say working on contract takes a toll on your sanity. And the older you get, the more likely it is to affect your health and well-being. When you come from an industry like mine where there is a shortage of skilled workers, you do sometimes feel like you are beating your head against a brick wall when you work for the government…

Plus, change is hard, and the transition away from government (more like “further from government”, not truly away) is part of that change. Last Spring, as part of a “workforce reduction”, the Saint John campus cut somewhere around 17 Instructional positions solely on the basis of seniority. As a (relatively) junior Instructor, mine was one of those instructional positions cut, and I found myself losing my Instructional status (and years of seniority) and transferred into a Business Analyst role – still on contract.

While being a Business Analyst is not a bad job (I have successfully managed or worked on plenty of projects in my time at the College on top of my Instructional duties and elsewhere in my career), it was not what I had left the ICT industry to come to the NBCC to do.

So, despite a chorus of “Don’t go, the College needs more people like you” (yes, I did just blatantly jump on this opportunity to blow my own horn a bit. I believe with everything I have done while at the NBCC, I have earned a bit of hubris, humour me…), things just didn’t feel the same anymore.

Job security and job satisfaction. There’s the one-two punch I mentioned earlier.

If you are lucky, you actually notice when you start becoming angry, bitter, and confused at the fact that, despite how hard you work and what you do, there is no light at the end of the tunnel you find yourself following. And if you are even luckier, you realize when it is time to do something positive and within your own control to change your situation before it becomes untenable and you do or say something nasty to the wrong people that you will always regret and negates all the good things you have managed to accomplish.

In hindsight, maybe I should thank the College for moving me away from the classroom. Without that push away from something I loved so much, I may never have considered leaving. I may have stayed longer, hanging around begging for scraps from one contract to the next indefinitely…

In any case, as a result of the previously mentioned events and despite the great relationships I have built up over the past seven years, after some much-needed reflection, I knew it was time to mix things up.

The good news is that my next move takes me back to my roots in the ICT industry, to Genesys Laboratories, a telecommunications company specializing in call centre and video conferencing software. Genesys is a place where numerous friends, former colleagues, classmates, and even students I have taught are already employed. And they all appear happy and (relatively) sane . That definitely takes away some of the initial angst associated with starting a new job. By all accounts, I am told it is a great place to work. If the level of respect, professionalism, and personal interest in my goals I experienced during the HR process at Genesys is any indication, it definitely will be!

This is also by no means the end of my teaching career. While I may work at Genesys during the days, I will continue to feed my insatiable need to teach by working in my alter ego form with Jeff Roach at Sociallogical as a Social Media Community Manager Mentor, Learning Design Consultant, and in any other capacity needed as well as continuing to teach SCUBA diving at the Dive Shack – in all my spare time…

So, while I am excited to be returning to industry and working directly on the technical side of things again, it is not without some sadness that I will no longer be at the NBCC, standing at the front of a class full of eager minds trying to keep up with their thirst for knowledge. Teaching is the most fulfilling thing I have ever done. I have a feeling it will find its way back into my life in the future.

Of course, being an early adopter, I upgraded.

So far, I notice a toolbar with the most commonly used tools has appeared above my page… I like that!

Irving Oil lays off 78 – New Brunswick – CBC News

Irving Oil (CBC Image)

Helga is the proprietor of a bar.

She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar.

To solve this problem, she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later.

Helga keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers’ loans).

Word gets around about Helga’s “drink now, pay later” marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Helga’s bar.

Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in town.

By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Helga gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages.

Consequently, Helga’s gross sales volume increases massively. A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Helga’s borrowing limit.

He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral!!!

At the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINK BONDS.

These “securities” then are bundled and traded on international securities markets.

Naive investors don’t really understand that the securities being sold to them as “AA” “Secured Bonds” really are debts of unemployed alcoholics.

Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb!!!, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation’s leading brokerage houses.

One day, even though the bond prices still are climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Helga’s bar. He so informs Helga.

Helga then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics they cannot pay back their drinking debts.

Since Helga cannot fulfill her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and Helga’s 11 employees lose their jobs.

Overnight, DRINK BOND prices drop by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the bank’s liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community.

The suppliers of Helga’s bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms’ pension funds in the BOND securities.

They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds.

Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.

Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multibillion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from the government.

The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers who’ve never been in Helga’s bar.

Now, hopefully you understand!

(Image from: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/be/Carl_Sagan_Planetary_Society.JPG/225px-Carl_Sagan_Planetary_Society.JPG)

Carl Sagan was a voice for science and rationalism. He made science “cool” (much more so than the actors on the “Big Bang Theory” ever will), he knew how to bring science to people who might not otherwise understand such daunting concepts, and he entertained while he educated.

I remember watching “Cosmos” and being fascinated by all the interesting facts and information about the galaxy. His show, along with David Suzuki’s “The Nature of Things” were two of my favourite shows on television when I was growing up and learning about the world and the universe around us. Both men opened my eyes to new wonders every week.

I read Carl Sagan’s book “Contact” when it was published in the late 1980s and later watched the movie about the book “Contact”, starring Jodi Foster and Matthew McConaughey in 1997. “Contact” (the movie and the book) once again allowed Carl Sagan to teach and  entertain.

As a staunch “non-believer” in religion of any kind (and particularly staunchly against religion’s influence on society), one of Carl Sagan’s quotes rings true to me. It explains quite nicely the fallacy of religions and allows me smile inside whenever someone “preaches” to me that I should/must believe in a god:

The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying… it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.

Unfortunately, in a world that every day seems to have more need of a calm, clear voice for science and rationalism, we can only wonder what else Carl Sagan may have accomplished if he were still alive and promoting science and rationalism over mythology and fear.

1 x iMac,
1 x MacBookPro using WiFi,
2 x Dell work laptops using WiFi (it’s drudgery using these… ,
2 x iPod Touches using WiFi,
1 x Netbook using WiFi,
1 x BluRay DVR with WiFi, BD-Live and Netflix,
1 x Wii with WiFi and Netflix,
1 x iPhone using WiFi, and
1 x BlackBerry using WiFi

To be truthful, we are not a house full of techie nuts. Well, OK, I am… But the reason we have so many differing devices is due to a ‘Brady Bunch’ situation – my girlfriend and I each have 2 of our own children, and we have semi-adopted one of her daughter’s friends, so we likely have more devices than most families should.

It is really hard to believe until you start listing the sheer number of devices that utilize the Internet…

In response to my initial rant on this, a friend quite rightly pointed out to me on Facebook

“Keep in mind if it is worthy and swag is involved, then it’s just a plus ”

Indeed he is correct, but give me the swag and let me decide if you are worthy of coming back to like/register/join.

Example – In this particular case, what has me miffed was (yet another) ‘free’ eBook on a potentially interesting topic, which, may I point out that by requiring me to ‘like’ a page or register for a newsletter, is not truly free… Now, because I will not be bribed into liking or joining, I won’t read their eBook, so I won’t find out if they know what they are talking about and are worth more of my precious time.

The whole swag for likes/registering gimmick It is a failed tactic used by old-school marketers who really don’t “get” social media.

Rather than using social media the way it is meant – as a conversation with potential clients and others in their industry – they wrongly see it as just another pipeline to shout out their advertising.

CBC Books – Canada Reads 2012 – Vote for the Canada Reads: True Stories Top 10.

Then, more bad luck. I ended up with a flu bug that has been sweeping the population, filling my lungs with icky green stuff and making life quite unbearable for the last week. Despite the setback, I had agreed to be part of the team, so I didn’t want to let them down, and today, we ran the race.

I ran the second leg, from Hampton to Hammond River, NB. It was a bit more than 10 km (6.5 miles), and although my time was atrocious ( 1:06:39 / min/mile ), I was happy to be able to run it at all, considering how bad I felt Friday.

Hammond River Run Map, as captured by Runkeeper.com

Turns out our team came 9th out of 23 relay teams, not so bad!

Anyway, a hearty congratulations to all who competed!

Steve Jobs saw things differently. I will remember Steve Jobs as a visionary and modern-day da Vinci, a man who could predict (or coerce) what the public wanted, a man who pioneered the concept of combining practicality and performance with elegance and style. He made products I use daily which make me want to be more productive and more creative. He pushed the competition to be better.

I had just watched the video of Steve Jobs presenting the WWDC 2011 Keynote the other day. He looked frail, and I had commented on that fact to a friend at the time. I guess it was a bit prophetic…

Grabbed this screenshot from www.apple.com

I can just imagine all those electrons screaming across the fibre over NB, Quebec, Ontario, and the prairies into Alberta, only to come screaming back across Alberta, the prairies, Ontario, Quebec and NB to display my Facebook pages… They must get awfully tired!

(Picture screen captured from Google Maps)

- Albert Einstein

***

Two couples were playing poker one evening.

Jim accidentally dropped some cards on the floor. When he bent down under the table to pick them up, he noticed Bob’s wife, Sue wasn’t wearing any underwear under her dress! Shocked by this, Jim upon trying to sit back up again, hit his head on the table and emerged red-faced.

Later, Jim went to the kitchen to get some refreshments. Bob’s wife followed and asked, ‘Did you see anything that you like under there?’ Surprised by her boldness, Jim admitted that, well indeed he did.

She said, ‘Well, you can have it but it will cost you $500. ‘After taking a minute or two to assess the financial and moral costs of this offer, Jim confirms that he is interested.

Sue told him that since her husband Bob worked Friday afternoons and Jim didn’t, Jim should be at her house around 2 p.m. Friday afternoon.

When Friday rolled around, Jim showed up at Bob’s house at 2 p.m. sharp – and after paying Sue the sum of $500 – they went to the bedroom and closed their transaction, as agreed. Jim quickly dressed and left.

As usual, Bob came home from work at 6 p.m. And upon arriving, asked his wife: ‘Did Jim come by the house this afternoon?’

With a lump in her throat Sue answered ‘Why yes, he did stop by for a few minutes this afternoon.’

Her heart nearly skipped a beat when her husband curtly asked, ‘And did he give you $500?’

Sue, using her best poker face, replied, ‘Well, yes, in fact he did give me $500.’

Bob, with a satisfied look on his face, surprised his wife by saying, ‘He came by the office this morning and borrowed $500 from me. He promised he’d stop by our house this afternoon on his way home and pay me back.’

Now THAT, my friends, is a stud poker player!