Creativity and School

This is an incredible talk about the educational system. It's 19 minutes long, but worth every minute.



Thanks to nikao for posting this....

Risky Business

Recently son #2 very thoughtfully bought me a package of Jelly Bellies. He was getting himself a bag and he remembered dear ol' dad and got me one too. That's my boy.

So for the past few days I've been snacking on Jelly Bellies while I work on the computer in the evening. The problem is, eating Jelly Bellies is risky business. The bag I have has 30 different flavors. My unscientific guess is about a quarter of those flavors are just plain old nasty. You never know what flavor your going get. You could get a couple of great ones and then one that tastes like the cross between the bottom of a coffee cup and an ashtray. Not that I've ever tried eating either one of those, but I imagine that's what it might taste like. When I mentioned it to son #2 as we were in the car headed somewhere, he laughed and said "Oh, that's the cappuccino. I didn't like it either." That's my boy.

Eating Jelly Bellies is not the only activity that is risky. In fact all of life is risky. People often comment that my riding motorcycles is risky. And there is an element of risk to riding. But anyone could trip, fall and die at almost anytime. Life is fragile and valuable. You can't just stay at home and avoid all risks. That's no way to live. The Christian life is no different. Often we long for safety, security and assurance. And while I understand that, being a follower of Christ should have an element of risk to it. You should be out there doing things, and some of those things will be risky in nature. People might laugh at you, or belittle you for your beliefs, or cuss you out, or who knows what. But how much did Jesus risk for you?

Reminds me of the old quote.

"A ship in harbor is safe -- but that is not what ships are built for."

John A. Shedd, Salt from My Attic, 1928

Are you hanging out in the harbor when you should be out sailing? What are you built for? Are you willing to take the risk to find out? That's worth pondering about.

It's the Thought That Counts

You've heard the saying, "It's the thought that counts." In fact I used it in a recent post here. But after thinking about that for bit, I'm not so sure that adage is true.

Generally actions speak much louder than words. So when someone gives you a late birthday card or present and kind of sheepishly shrugs and says "it's the thought that counts," you probably are not thinking deep in your heart that "yea, it's ok that you forgot all about me." At least, that's not usually what I am thinking. Maybe you're a better person than I am. Their actions say more about how they value you than their words do.

Now I think there are cases when you can use this and have it be effective. If you really tried to put together a nice birthday present, but it just didn't work out for some reason. I think you can say, "I really tried. I'm sorry it didn't work out. But hey, it's the thought that counts." I think it works in this situation, because you really did put some effort into it. And actions speak louder than words.

But usually if you put no effort out and try to pull the "it's the thought that counts", I think you're wimping out. I think most of the time our friends and spouses see through this weak excuse. If you don't believe me, I have a challenge for you. Guys, at your wife's next birthday or your wedding anniversary (which ever occurs next), I want you to do absolutely nothing. No gifts. No card. No special night out. No anything. Then that evening just before you fall asleep that night in your bed, roll over by your wife and say "I didn't forget your birthday/anniversary, I thought about you today several times. And you know, it's the thought that counts." If you survive that encounter, please comment here. I'm sure we'd all like to learn vicariously from your experience.

It's not the thought that counts. It's taking the time and spending the effort to do something that counts. Are you spending the appropriate amount of time and effort on the things that truly important? That's worth pondering about.

How Bad Can it Be?

We have DirecTV here at our sprawling estate [/sarcasm]. Well, I do have DirecTV, is the "sprawling estate" that is not so much. Anyway, we've been pretty happy with our service. Light-years better than the cable company we used to have. It's cheaper too. That's enough of the commercial for DirecTV.

Anyway, as a gesture of appreciation, DirecTV gave us free ShowTime for 3 months for being a loyal customer. We don't have any movie channels as part of our package. Netflix, an occasional pay-per-view movie and a few trips a year to the video store handles our movie needs quite nicely. So I was anxious to have ShowTime for a bit and see if we liked it.

Oh my, ShowTime is really bad. Not just a normal type of bad, it's colossally, horribly bad. The movies they show are horrible and they show them over and over and over and over.... In the two plus months we've had ShowTime I think I've watched one movie; and I had already seen that movie. The rest of them simply aren't worth watching. How does this channel turn a profit and stay in business?

I'm not upset for DirecTV giving us this disaster of a movie channel as an appreciation gift. Although here's a bit of advice to any DirecTV big-wigs who may be reading this, maybe you should consider letting the customer pick which channel their free 3 month appreciation gift will provide. I'm just saying... Even though I detest ShowTime, someone out there must be paying for and watching this channel. Although that thought baffles me. So I can understand why DirecTV would think that I might like it.

I guess the old adage, "it's the thought that counts" comes into play here. It's nice to remembered, even if the gift isn't my favorite.

Why Do You Ask, If You Aren't Going to Listen?

We all ask questions we don't really want an answer to. When you walk up to someone and say "Hey! What are you doing?" We usually don't really expect an answer; we can obviously see what they are doing. It's more of a greeting than a question. Another one is "How's it going?" If someone stopped and started giving you detailed information on how it was going in their life at the moment, we'd probably interrupt them and tell them that we weren't really that interested. Again, it's more of greeting than anything.

Someone once asked me for some advice about something. I listened to what they had to say and gave my honest advice. "That's a really bad idea." Hey, I'm a straight forward kind of guy. That same person later asked two other people for advice on that same topic in my presence. And they both said, "That's a really bad idea." Ok, they used different words, but basically the answer was the same - don't do that. Yet this person went ahead and did it anyway. Guess what, it truly was a bad idea. There were repercussions regarding that action. Something that could have easily been avoid if they had simply listened to sound advice from three people.

Why do we ask, if we aren't going to listen? Many times it's because we aren't really looking for advice - we are asking for permission. But even when we don't get the permission, we often do it anyway. What makes us so hard headed sometimes?

Please do me a favor. If you get some advice, especially if it's from multiple people, listen to it. You asked those people for a reason, presumably because you trust them. So trust them. And if I ever ask you for advice - make sure I listen.

Tap To Go

LA Metro has a new system to pay for your ride. It's called Tap to Go. You get this card that's kind of like credit card, you load it up for the month and then when you get on the bus you just tap it on some type of reader and then you go. Seems simple enough.

However, I think a better name would be Try to Tap and No Go. Ok, not the catchest title ever. But what a disaster it's been in rolling this program out. It was supposed to start in January. So every month when we made the trek to buy the boy's ticket for the month, they would tell us we need to get Tap to Go. We reply "Sure, let's do it." And then they would say "Well, it's not quite available yet. But you really need to get one." Huh? Eventually a lady ordered the two cards for us (because you can't order them online yourself). Twenty some days later, they arrived in the mail. Twenty days just mail us two cards. I tried to go online to prepay them so the boys could use them. What a horrible website they have. I created an account, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to add the cards to my account so I could put money on them. This would seem like an important part of the process. Eventually, I gave up and sent a message to support. They are supposed to answer in 24 to 48 hours. It's been a week and I still haven't heard from them. So I decided to get brave and call the help line. Surprisingly the wait time wasn't too bad and I got a friendly guy who told me they created accounts for the cards when they sent them to us. Really? That would have been useful information to include with the cards! He emailed me the info so I could log into each card and fill it up. Apparently, I'm not allowed to put both of them on one account. So this thing that is supposed to be so easy, apparently isn't.

This is the government bureaucracy that wants to run my health care. I can't imagine that ever being better that what I have now. I know our health care system needs help. But I think we could do better by fixing what we have instead the major change that has currently been proposed. The government has a hard time figuring out how to get people to pay a few bucks for a bus pass - I can't wait for the problems I'm going to have trying to get them pay for a surgery or a hospital visit. Just the thought of it gives me nightmares.

Oh well, at least my boys can ride the bus. I guess that's something.

They Know How to Get You

We've just had the 'pleasure' of getting son #1's senior pictures done. Overall it wasn't too bad of an experience. He went for his sitting (which we had to pay for separately). A month or so later, the proofs showed up at the house. It seemed like there was about 500 different pictures. Wow! Most of them were pretty good and few were not. But the number of them was overwhelming.

As we tried to figure out what pictures we wanted, the number of permutations was astounding. The problem we had was there was no way to get the number of pictures we wanted in any of the standard packages. We basically just wanted one pic of most of them. We could scan the photos and make our own copies, but that's against the studio's policy. But it was nearly impossible to get the right package with the right mix of photos and the price of the packages just kept going up and up. We eventually had risen to a point of getting one of the premiere packages. Premiere includes a premium price too.

The package we had to go with to get what we wanted, was more than we really wanted to pay. We also had to buy more pictures than we really needed. I'm frustrated with the studio for their policy of them owning the photos of my son. We hired them to take the pictures. They photographed my son, it's his likeness. Why doesn't he own the images instead of them? I felt like they were manipulating the love of my son for money. It frustrates me that it worked.

I don't like being manipulated, for love or for money. I wonder if that must be a bit how God feels when someone manipulates the image or reputation of his son, Jesus, for personal gain. There's a lot of low-lifes out there that will do anything for money. Of course, you know that already. But some how we think when it comes to church and religion, we could never get taken in by someone like that - yet it still happens. Be careful. Make sure the church or charity that your supporting with your money, is using the money the way they say they will. Don't let them manipulate you.

Have you done your homework in this area? Are the organizations you support doing what you think they are doing? That's worth pondering about...