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An interesting thing has happened to me over this past year. Almost every time there has been a big family dinner on my wife’s side of the family, I have been press ganged into making the gravy. Up until this year, my gravy making has been hit and miss. I would more often than not have large lumps in the gravy … I’m sure this had had my gravy making grandma McCue turning in her grave. My mother on the other hand (just like my grandma did in her day) consistently makes excellent tasting, wonderfully smooth gravy. Her ability to make great gravy, along with my wife’s ability to tell people that I "make gravy" (without commenting on the quality of the gravy I make), has made it so that my sister-in-laws have consistently asked me to make the gravy at our family dinners for about a year now. No one every asks me to make gravy on my side of the family (I will occasionally be asked to cut the meat). They all look to the experts that my mother has personally trained over the years (my sisters). I have watched the process of gravy making since I was a child, but did not have any practical experience until after I was married. The experience I did get after marrying Heather, didn’t come that frequently, and occasionally produced disaster (like the time I put the pyrex pan on the element to warm the gravy… until the pan exploded, delaying Thanksgiving dinner by an hour or so.)

A few years ago Heather’s mother and father passed away. Her dad was the "gravy guy" in the family until his passing, and it appears that I have inherited his role in family dinners. For now, I am the go to guy for gravy. I have consistently made good tasting, non lumpy gravy all year now! I’m confident that my grandmother McCue smiles down on me every time I make her wonderful tasting, non lumpy, southern Albertan gravy. I’ve also noticed that when my wife tells people that I can make gravy, she doesn’t just stop by saying that I can "make gravy", but qualifies it by saying that I make "good" or "excellent" gravy. Kind of weird that circumstances have made me the "Gravy Guy" in at least half of my world.

 

I read an interesting article a few weeks ago. The title caught my attention. It was called, "Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer?" I know that sometimes I think I’d be happier if I had a bit more money in my pocket. So what did the researchers find out? The article said that people who are struggling to put a roof over their head and food on their table typically saw an increase in happiness as their income increased. Their happiness continued to increase until the per-capita house hold income reached $12,000 (This is for the United States, in US dollars). After that point there was virtually no increase in reported happiness as income rose above that level. On a graph, happiness increased steadily with income, until the $12,000 per person mark, and then it went almost completely flat.

A different research group also took a look at lottery winners in Great Britain. Interestingly he found that in the case of people who won large lotteries (over $200,000); they reported a significant increase in happiness immediately after winning, but within a year, most were back to the same level of happiness that they were at before winning.

Both of these studies confirm what I saw a number of years ago while I was living in Brazil. Most of the people I worked with would be considered "poor" if they lived in Canada, but most were quite happy in spite of their relative lack of material possessions.

What this tells me is that if someone is unhappy with a little bit of money (once their basic needs are met), then there is a very good chance that they will be unhappy with a lot of money. It turns out that money doesn’t buy happiness in the long run. I better get back to work so I can afford my gym membership …

I’ve been using Google Documents lately for some of my writing, and the one thing I love about it is that it makes it so easy to do real time collaboration on a document. It doesn’t matter where the other person is pyhsically located. It doesn’t matter what software they have on their computer. The only thing they need is a web browser and an Internet connection and you’re in business. You type something in, and the other person on their computer sees what you’re typing, and can do their editing. It also has basic version control built in so that you can go back and see what edits other people have made over the life of the document. Very handy!

On the negative side, the default font size is a little bit small, and when you cut and past text from other web sites into the document it typically keeps the formatting, and sometimes make a mess of the document. You can change the formatting to try to make the document formatting consistent, but very occasionally the pasted text won’t conform and stays with it’s original formatting no matter what you do. A small thing, but it can be annoying when you’re trying to get a document to look nice.

Up until now the big show stopper for me from an academic perspective has been the lack of foot notes or end notes. When writing something to be published in academic circles, foot notes, or at least end notes, are essential. I like to cite my sources, and with Google Docs it has been impossible to do foot notes, and difficult to do end notes.

The solution came to me the other day. I’ve been using Google Notebook to clip interesting text and images that I want to use in my research (Notebook is a great tool for capturing and organizing research). Why not just hyperlink from my document to the text I clipped in my Google notebook as the citation? The Google Notebook clipping has a link to the original resource I grabbed the information from, so you are taken directly to the quotation, and have access to the original document. I’m sure that in formal academic circles this might not be sufficient (for now at least), but for the informal, practical research that I typically engage in this is perfect.

1. Everything gets cited.
2. If the original source that I’m citing disappears, people can still see my source in the copy of it I’ve made in Google Notebook.
3. I can still collaborate very easily with other people on the document, in real time if I need to.

What I’m really excited about is the next version of Firefox that will have a built in framework for "off line" applications. I’d love to be able to use Google documents (as well as other on-line applications) on my laptop when I’m not able to be connected to a network (like on an airplane)…

About a month ago I was able to help implement some collaboration technology that will be a big help to Moot teams, and study groups at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law. The technology consists of the following:

• A plasma display (ideally 42" or larger).
• A video switch for students to plug their laptops into.
• A table that allows 2 to 4 students to face the display

What typically happens is that a group of 2 to 4 students will plug their laptops into the video switch. As the group works on their project they can in turn display what is on their laptop screen on the Plasma screen so that the whole group can look at it and comment on what the person is working on (Here are our instructions for students on how to use the equipment).

The feedback from students has been positive, although some have mentioned that they would prefer to have the equipment in a group study room so that they could keep their discussion private.

What we have done is basically a "poor cousin’s" version of what MIT and Stanford are doing. Instead of a video switch, they use a dedicated PC with server software loaded on it. This software allows the networked laptops to share the Plasma screen between all the computers at the same time. The laptop screens are not shared, but as the users move their laptop cursor to the top of their laptop screen, the cursor magically appears on the Plasma screen… and all 4 laptop uses can interact on the plasma screen at the same time if they want.

The software that enables this collaboration is called TeamSpot. There is a server component that runs on a dedicated PC which is connected to the plasma screen. Each laptop needs to have TeamSpot client software installed to work properly (or at all).

I found a great article by Merlin Mann of 43 Folders on how to keep your e-mail inbox under control. There are a few people at the Law School I work at that have enormous inboxes… One individual has over 20,000 messages in his inbox. One day I got a call from him because his e-mail program (Outlook) was crashing on him. It turns out that Outlook does have an upper limit on the number of message it can hold in an inbox.

Here are the highlights from the article:

The basic idea is to firewall processing as a discrete phase you go through no more than every hour or two at the most. For God’s sake, don’t live in your Inbox if there’s any way you can avoid it.

Processing determines as quickly as possible what, if anything, to do with each piece (in ascending order of urgency and importance):

• delete it
• archive it
• defer it for later response
• generate an action from it
• respond to it immediately (if it—literally—will take less than 2 minutes or is so Earth-shattering that it just can’t wait)

Then as often as time allows, I return to the response and action folders and crank through as many replies and complete (or generate) as many todos as I can—usually in 5-email sprints.

The critical point, as ever, is to focus on action and not on the administration and housekeeping. If the action is just a response, respond. If it requires more than a return email, either do it or get it in your “next actions” and keep moving.

As I said in the Google Group post, “you have to remember you’re in the business of making sandwiches—not deciding the prettiest way to stack the customers’ orders.”

Zen slap: An email auto-check set for every minute means 60 potential distractions every hour, or almost 500 per day. Look back at a week of your emails and ask yourself: how many distractions was that really worth? How much crucial, instantly actionable email did I receive to make it worth shifting my attention over 2000 times?

A couple of years ago while attending a conference, I heard a wonderful presentation by Clay Shirky entitled "Ontology is Overrated." Clay talked about how the categorization scheme (or ontology) that libraries use, is basically a 300 year old hack that allowed allowed libraries to warehouse large numbers of books, and find those books relatively quickly and easily. On the surface this sounds like a great system (and historically speaking it was), except that some books do not fit neatly into just one category. As well, some categories created years ago by librarians do not make much sense in our current day and age (Marxism and its several sub categories are a good example of this).

For kids in K-12, it makes no sense to go to a library for research for the following reasons:

1. The number of resources on the Internet typically dwarfs what is available in the school or local public library.
2. It is more convenient to do the research at the same place they are writing their paper - in front of a computer.

I can’t begin to tell you how big a factor #2 is. Not only is the Internet widely perceived as having more information (I won’t get into a discussion about reliability here), but it is undoubtedly more convenient. Kids arriving a university are going to have to be trained how to use libraries effectively. University libraries have a big advantage over K-12 libraries in that they have access to large numbers of paid databases and journals not available on the Internet (or at school and public libraries for that matter). They need to effectively communicate this fact to new undergraduates, and train them how to access that information in order to stay relevant.

I highly recommend listening to this presentation… It is engaging and thought provoking. Here is a link to a web page where you can play the audio directly from the web page. As well, here is a link to a down-loadable mp3 file. Enjoy!