Stormy's Corner

Book review: The Long Tail

The Long Tail is a must read for anyone wondering how the Internet works or how it's changing the world as we know it.  In the book, Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired Magazine, explains how one simple principle is behind so many of the social and economic changes we are seeing with the internet.  The Internet makes it possible for many people to produce and publish cheaply and for many other people to find those "amateur" works easily.  For example, until the Internet, the only music you had access to was the top 40 on the radio or maybe the top 500 albums at the music store and maybe a local band at the bar on weekends.  Now you have access to hundreds of thousands of songs written and produced by anybody and everybody in the world.  Not only that but they are easily searchable in many different ways.  So a you don't have to listen to just hits anymore and you don't have to be a world wide hit to be successful.  That's what is changing the world.  Niche markets are growing (around all of these non-hit works) and at the same time the way we share and find these niche products is becoming easier and easier - creating new communities online.

Chris Anderson explains it much better than me and I highly recommend the book if you've noticed that the Internet is changing the world and wondered why.

Spearfishing

We watched a show on Spearfishing last night and I was curious enough to look up some more info on the web today.   Since it's done in the middle of the ocean with just a snorkel, mask and fins, I was curious how long they were holding their breath:

The very best free-diving spearfishers can hold their breath for durations of 2-4 minutes and dive to depths of 40 or even 60 meters (about 130 to 200 feet). However, dives of approximately 1 minute and 15 or 20 meters (about 50 to 70 feet) are more common for the average experienced spearfisher.

The woman we watched caught and reeled in a fish that was bigger than her!  All while in the water just wearing a wetsuit, snorkel, mask and fins.  She also had a spear gun and a couple of floats that held the extra line.  She was of course followed by a boat.  Speardivers can swim for several kilometers in the middle of the ocean hunting fish.

What do you want on your tombstone?

What do you want to be remembered by?  James Gray is currently missing at sea and the article in the New York Times (which reads like an obituary!) talks all about what a great researcher he is at Microsoft.  While I'm sure he'd like to be recognized for his work at Microsoft, I'm sure that's not all he is - the article briefly mentions a wife just to say that she's the one that called him in missing.

While I'm proud of my career and hope my work is recognized I hope my obituary (and not my missing at sea notice!) recognizes me for more than just that.

If I am missing at sea, I hope the authorities and media are all focused on information to help find me as opposed to my accomplishments in life!

I hope they find James Gray alive and well soon and he can tell us personally what he's proud of.

No candy bar for me ...

I wasn't meant to have a candy bar today ...

• I started with a trip to the break room with one dollar bill and two dimes,
• The machine was no longer taking dollar bills so even though I have free cokes at work, I decided to buy a 50 cent coke,
• Now I had a diet coke, two quarters and two dimes,
• According to the machine a Twix was 70 cents,
• I put in my change, hit the code for a Twix and was informed that the Twix was really 85 cents,
• So I changed my mind and hit the code for Reeces Peanut Butter Cups,
• The peanut butter cups started to come out but got hung up on metal hook,
• I banged the machine with my hip (much more effective than hitting it with your hand) and they came out from under the hook but got stuck on the M&Ms next to them,
• A trip back upstairs proved I had no more change anywhere,
• ...
• So I went for a walk instead!

Have you had a similar experience?

New family vocabulary

In my last post I said we need new vocabulary for in vitro kids for:

• my mom that carried me for 9 months
• my mom who donated an egg
• my dad who donated sperm
• etc

Well, we also need new vocabulary terms for all the new extended families out there:

• my husband's ex (how are you supposed to introduce her?)
• my step-grandmother (is that your stepmom's mother or your grandfather's new wife?)
• my half brother's cousin
• my half brother's stepbrother
• ...

What other terms can you think of?  How do you deal with them?

Choosing your child

The oldest woman to ever give birth got to pick her child's genes, or at least the donors, and then she gave birth to them:

Bousada, a Spaniard, sold her home in Spain to raise 30,000 pounds ($60,000) to pay for the treatment in the United States. She chose donor eggs from a "pretty, brown-haired 18-year-old" and sperm from a blond, blue-eyed Italian American. "I picked them from photos in a catalog. It was a bit like studying an estate agent's brochure and choosing a house," the paper quoted her as saying.

Amazing technology ... three people came together to create these children.  Plus all the doctors that helped.

I keep thinking that the English language needs a lot more new words.  It needs a word for "my biological mom who donated an egg", "my biological mom who gave birth to me", etc.

Free ride in space?

This guy turned down a free ride to space because he realized he'd have to pay $25,000 in taxes on it.   My SO suggested that he could sell his space clothes for $25K on eBay afterwards!

Small businesses: More Generation Y, Women and Baby Boomers

Intuit published an interesting study about small business trends.  According to the study more small businesses will be owned by Generation Y (1981-2001), baby boomers, women, and immigrants.  Generation Y because they don't believe in trusting a company to take care of them and they are quite comfortable with all of the new technologies and able to easily start not just one business but multiple ones at once.  Many high schools have now started small businesses.  I personally interviewed a Generation Yer who had started his own company in college - a website for trading video games online.  Baby boomers, according to the study, are more likely to start business with social causes in "retirement."  Women owned business will grow - maybe as they become more disillutioned with the glass ceiling.  Immigrant owned businesses will grow as the number of immigrants continue to grow. It's an interesting study, an easy read and well worth reading.

Woman fights off mountain lion

This woman fought off a mountain lion with a small log - a mountain lion that was attacking her husband.  It took persistence and multiple tries - at one point she tried to stab it in the eye with a pen.  The husband has had surgery and lots of stitches to repair the damage but the couple still plans to celebrate their 50th wedding anninversy in New Zealand this year!

Mountain lion attacks hiker in Calif.

Book review: Social Intelligence

I realized I never told you about one of the best books I read last year!  Social Intelligence.  Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence, has written a new book that focuses on how humans beings connect to each other and how those connections are learned or formed.  He does a good job of balancing very interesting anecdotes with descriptions of how all of this works at the biological level.

He spends a lot of time explaining how these social connections are learned as a child and how what we do or don't learn when we are young affects us later.  As a mom with a new baby, some of the experiments were actually scary!  He talked about how some moms can naturally tell when their babies need a break and leave them alone for a while and how others continue to "get in their face" and how this changes how the baby interacts with people as an adult!

If you've ever wondered how you knew someone was annoyed when they didn't say anything (or how someone else did and you didn't) or why you seem to connect so well with some people and not others, or how you could tell if someone is lying, or how much of our behavior is nurture versus nature, ... well then you should definitely read this book.  It's much more of a "why" book than a "how-to" book and it makes for some fascinating reading.

I just found out last week that Daniel Goleman used to teach at the massage school I'm studying at, Boulder College of Massage Therapy.  I wish I'd had a chance to take a class from him! (He now writes books and writes for the New York Times.)

Will airfares go up or down?

Anybody who has researched airfares on the web has experienced the frustration of not only trying to figure out if they have found the cheapest fare or not, but also of deciding whether there's any chance the fare will get cheaper or not.  Farecast tries to solve this problem.  When you research fares on Farecast, it will tell you whether it expects fares to go up, stay the same or get cheaper.  In addition, if the fares are expected to stay the same or get cheaper, they'll sell you insurance.  So for example, I researched fares for Denver to Boston for a random weekend in March.  Farecast said the cheapest fare was $219, fares were expected to hold steady over the next week but they recommended that I buy.  For $3 I could buy insurance called a "FareGuard."  So if I'm not ready to buy but I want to hold the fare, for $3 I can buy a FareGuard.  Then, when I'm ready to buy a ticket I use Farecast to look for the cheapest fare and if it's more than $219, Farecast will pay me the difference.  (If the fares are supposed to go up, they just recommend you buy now.  They don't insure "overpayment" which is usually the one that worries me.)

Just the forecast without the insurance is pretty cool.

Not all cities have forecasts yet but they are working on it.

Buying human eggs - who are we exploiting?

So I think buying human embryos is fraught with moral and ethical issues but what about human eggs?  This article seems to think it's unethical because the program that buys eggs (for stem cell research) might exploit poor women.  There are two issues that are getting mixed up here:

1. buying a human body part
2. buying part or all of a human

In the first case you could look at buying an egg like you do buying a kidney or buying blood plasma.  Within body parts there are two kinds, ones with an infinite supply (like plasma) and ones with a very finite supply (like kidneys.)  For parts with a finite supply, I think we definitely have to make sure that we don't take advantage of people.  Desperate people might sell something they really can't afford to sell or they might be coerced into it and there's no way to really give it back to them.  In the case of infinite supply, I don't see any problem with paying for it.  We pay for lots of different kinds of output from our bodies like construction work, sitting at a desk for hours, or participating in medical studies.  Those all take a toll on your body that is supposedly reversible and replenishable but costs you something and you get compensated for it.  Eggs, if they are a "human body part" fall into the replenishable category.   We have so many of them, it's unlikely we are going to run out.

However, if you look at human eggs as potential human beings, then you have a whole different issue.  This is like buying and selling embryos - you are just buying half of an embryo.  And since you can easily acquire sperm from a sperm bank or other source, you can easily make an embryo.  Add a surrogate mom and you have a human being.  When you sell human eggs, you once again come close to trafficing in humans and there's a whole slew of legal, ethical and moral issues that need to be addressed!

So I'd argue that when an organization buys human eggs they aren't exploiting the woman, but they are potentially exploiting a child depending on what they plan to do with that egg.

Challenges in life are fun!

I've been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do with my life and I had another ah-hah moment this weekend.  I spent the whole weekend with Caleb in the hospital and it didn't bother me at all - once they figured out that Caleb was going to be ok that is.  I did feel extremely grateful that we had health insurance - I might not have been as calm through three days in the hospital without insurance but that's another topic.  So being in the hospital with a sick kid didn't bother me.

We have also been spending a lot of money and vacation time lately.  Some of it planned (like for vacations and treadmills) and some of it unplanned (like for hospital stays and snow storms.)   And that didn't bother me.

And I realized a while ago that if I won the lottery I wouldn't want to go sit on the beach for the rest of my life.  I'd want a few interesting things to do.

While I was thinking about all this, I ran across Steve Pavlina's Life - The Ultimate Game post.  And it made sense.   He writes that life is like a video game and you don't play the game because winning is fun.  You want to win, but you don't play just because you want to win.  You also enjoy all the challenges along the way (can you get past that hairy monster or collect all the right objects?) and all the places you explore.  Even when you are losing, you might be having a lot of fun.   You might play one game for days, weeks or even months without "winning."

That explains why people hike the Appalachian Trail, sky dive or even raise kids. The challenges and the journey are as rewarding as the end goal.

I'm not big into video games, so I'd rather think of life as a game of cards.  You start out with the hand you're dealt and play it the best you can.  If you get all top cards, you'll win fast and it'll be exciting for a minute, but if you're dealt a not so good hand and you make it work, it's so much more satisfying.  You prove that you are good, not just lucky.  The way I see it I started out with a pretty good hand, my parents added a few good cards (like self-confidence and a college education) and now I'm playing the best I can.  When I get a bad card (like a hospital stay or an unexpected bill), I just add it to the mix and see how I can make it work out. [And sometimes you need that low card to get the straight!]

I'm having fun playing and I'm winning! :)

We're home!

We're home and Caleb is doing well!  His crib mattress is at a 45 degree angle and he has his own humidifier.

Cross Your Fingers!

We're two hours into the four hour test - can Caleb maintain his oxygen levels without supplemental oxygen?  If he can, we'll be going home in two hours!  Yeah!

Monday update to "Caleb has RSV"

We had kind of a rough night.  Caleb was doing good on 1/4 L at midnight so they decided to slowly turn down the oxygen overnight.  (They were trying to get us home today!) Only they didn't tell me.  So in the wee hours of the morning I couldn't figure out why his oxygen levels kept falling to 80% and then spontaneously going back up to 90%.  When they fell below 80% I paged the nurse.  The nurse that responded wasn't our nurse but she figured out that Caleb was on room air!   We turned it back up to 1/2 L and he fell asleep for a couple of hours and woke up his usual happy self.  But neither of us got a whole lot of sleep.  (Caleb's taking a nap now so all is good.) 

We are now back to a 1/4 L and expecting to see the doctor over lunch.

(Caleb's figured out how to get the oxygen tube out of his nose.  So he did that 3-4 times last night.  Luckily he hasn't figured out how to keep the machine from beeping when his oxygen levels falls so I always find him out!)

Sunday evening update to "Caleb has RSV" Part 2

10:21pm.  We are back down to 1/2 liter of oxygen and looking good!  Caleb spent the last couple of hours eating a ton (well, compared to the last couple of days anyway) and playing and talking.

Sunday evening update to "Caleb has RSV"

They got his oxygen down to 1/4 liter this afternoon.  (They turned it down little by little and then waited to see if his numbers held steady.)  But we had to turn it back up to a 3/4 liter this evening because his heart rate jumped back up to the 200s and his oxygen went down to 88%.  (Actually, probably his oxygen dropped and then his heart rate went up as he tried to get more oxygen.)

I don't know much about this but I don't think we'll be going home tomorrow.   He has to be completely off oxygen for four hours and still doing well before he's ready to go home.

Sunday update to "Caleb has RSV"

Caleb is doing much better today.  He slept all night, ate 5 ounces in one sitting and woke up "talking" like he normally does.  His heart rate has also come down a lot.  We even got a couple of smiles out of him today.  (He's been playing and interactive most of the time but no smiles.)  As soon as he can maintain this without oxygen, we'll be able to go home.  In the meantime, it's nice to be here in the hospital with all the help from all the experts.

Oh ... and did I mention that everyone that comes to visit has to wear a mask, gown and gloves?  (RSV is very contagious.)  I think Caleb's wondering why everyone looks so funny ... he stared at our new nurse this morning for a good 10 minutes.  Then he finally gave her a big smile!

Caleb has RSV

In case you are wondering where we are - Frank and I are camped out with Caleb in a hospital room this weekend.  Caleb has Respiratory Syncytial Virus, RSV for short since I haven't even figured out how to pronounce it yet.   For most of us this would be just a common cold but for the little guys like Caleb who are under six months of age, it can be quite serious. 

Caleb had been sick with a runny nose and a cough since Wednesday.  Many thanks to his day care provider who on Friday called us at work and said she thought we ought to take him to the doctor.  With a temperature of 99.6, a runny nose and a cough, we would have dismissed it as a cold until much later on Friday when it got much worse. 

After a very long wait in the urgent care waiting room (over 90 minutes during which our six year old was very, very good), we finally got in to see a doctor.  They immediately determined that his oxygen saturation was not sufficient (85% instead of at the 92+% they would have liked to have seen), his temperature was 101.6 and he was starting to have problems breathing.  You could hear him struggling to breath.   His heart rate was also over 200bmp - part of the trying to get enough oxygen to his body.  They immediately did chest xrays to eliminate pneumonia.  (The xrays were very cute - his whole torso fits on one xray.  You could also see his teeth even though none of come out yet!)  They sent us over to hospital and by 9pm we were checked into this room where we've spent the last few days.  They've been treating him with oxygen and nose suctioning.  (Not his favorite but he must realize it's helping because he's gotten better about them.)  The earliest we can hope to take him home is Monday morning.

Using someone else's sperm without permission

A few days ago I blogged about the adoption agency that is buying human embryos - I wrote that I think they are on morally shaky ground.  Well, today's news gives me the same confused and uncomfortable feeling.  This guy's family took sperm from his dead body, found a volunteer mom and they are having his kid!  They did have to prove in court that he wanted to have kids even though he hadn't left a will or anything in writing that said that.

I've had lots of discussions about sperm, pregnancy and fatherhood over the years because I have several friends that are single moms on purpose.  We used to get into debates about how best to get pregnant without ending up with a dad in the process - just for fun, I used to think.  One of my friends ended up getting a volunteer egg donor and a volunteer sperm donor and going the in vitro route.  The donors are a relative and a friend and although they are not active in the parenting role, she still maintains contact with them.  The other friend only says that she used a "donor." 

So if the donor agreed to help her, I don't see a problem.  So for argument's sake, let's say she found a way to get pregnant without him knowing.  Is that moral?  If he was dead like the guy mentioned above would that make the situation different?  Obviously she wouldn't be able to tell him but it would still be doing something without his explicit permission. Did you know if a woman gets pregnant, doesn't tell the guy, has the baby and then years later goes on welfare, the guy will be liable for current and back child support if the state can figure out who he is?  Kind of scary if you're a guy right?  Does that change your answer to the "is that moral?" question?   I mean, if he has legal and financial responsibility for the child, it seems like he should be informed that the child exists.  In the case of the dead man, will the family be responsible since they are the ones who made the decision to have a baby?

I think once again technology has enabled us to do some amazing things (impregnanting a woman after you are dead!) and has brought along with it some very complicated moral and ethical issues.

Book review: Guns, Germs and Steel

If you like to ask "why" questions, this book is for you.  Jared Diamond answers why some societies succeeded and why some, like the Mayans or Aztecs, didn't.  I don't want to give away the book, but here are some examples that he uses:

• Agricultural societies could store food.  Storing food enabled them to have people who specialized in something besides food gathering, like writing or medicine or fighting.
• Storing food allowed them to conquer other societies because they could take their food along and so they didn't need to stop fighting to gather food.
• Keeping animals brought a lot of diseases.  The people that kept the animals eventually became immune to most of the diseases but they would bring those diseases (like smallpox) to other societies and it would wipe them out.

Jared Diamond also spends time explaining that he doesn't think industrialized societies are necessarily any better than hunter-gather societies - hunter-gatherers might have actually been healthier, taller, stronger - but he is just explaining why some succeed and others die out.

It's a very interesting book and worth reading if you like knowing why things happened the way they did.

Travel tip: Why is one itinerary so important?

You should always put your entire trip on one itinerary.  Here are two reasons why along with some real life pain caused by multiple itineraries.

1. You should put all your flights on one itinerary because if anything goes wrong, the airlines will help you get to your final destination.  If you are on multiple itineraries they will play the blame game and nobody will be responsible for getting you home.   I ran into this last year flying home from the British Virgin Islands.  I booked a Denver-San Juan roundtrip ticket on Continental and a San Juan-Beef Island roundtrip ticket on American Eagle.  I booked them separately to save money.  On the way home my flight on American Eagle was delayed due to weather and I missed my Continental flight.  When I got to San Juan, I ran to the Continental desk but they said "Sorry, you were a no show.  We can get you out on the first flight tomorrow."  Now I was absolutely positive that the airlines had some kind of relationship where they could get me on one of the two American flights left.  It was that conviction that carried me through the next couple of hours.  After talking to Continental, I went to American.  They said they needed a piece of paper from American Eagle.  American Eagle said the delay was due to weather so it wasn't their fault and they couldn't help.  When I protested they said they could do something if I got a "ticket" from Continental.  At the Continental desk they printed every paper they could think of for me (they were very nice) but they wouldn't sell me a paper ticket for $50 because they said they didn't need it.  Two hours and many swallowed frustrated tears later, I finally got the right piece of paper from Continental, American Eagle took it and printed another piece of paper and American issued boarding passes for me.  Maybe this process would have been a lot less frustrating if the American Eagle folks had been nicer (they were extremely rude) or if they would have talked on the phone to the Continental agent.  I got her number and called her on my cell phone but the American Eagle folks wouldn't talk to her and kept sending me back and forth.  When I finally got the right Continental "ticket" for American Eagle, the guy said, "Now that wasn't so hard, was it?"  I was so, so mad, I couldn't say anything.  I was completely speechless for the first and only time in my life.  I called Frank and told him if they arrested me for murder, that I did it, so hire an attorney!  If both my flights had been on the same itinerary I would have been automatically rebooked on the American flight and I could have spent those two hours reading a book instead of walking around the airport.  Here's my path:

   

   
   
2. The second reason you should be all on one itinerary is if you have multiple people traveling, you want to be sure the airline keeps you together.  A few years ago I was in San Francisco for business and I used my frequent flier miles to fly Frank out for the weekend.  As luck would have it, Denver had a big snow storm and the airport closed on Sunday.  I called and United said they could fly me home on Monday since I was a 100K flyer but they couldn't get Frank home until Wednesday.  I pointed out that we were traveling together.  They said, nope, separate itineraries.  I pointed out that I had used my miles for Frank's ticket so shouldn't he get my status?  Nope.  So we ended up spending another three days in San Francisco!  If we'd been on the same itinerary they would have flown us both home on Monday.

So there are two very good reasons for keeping all your travel on one itinerary.  The airlines will make sure you get to your final destination with the people you are traveling with!

Watch who you bid against in eBay!

Last night on my way home I got a text message from eBay saying I hadn't won the item I bid on.  That was a little strange.  I use eSnipe, so usually if I bid, I win the item. - If the item is still below what I'm willing to pay for it, three seconds before the auction ends eSnipe places a bid for me.  No human can squeeze in a bid after that so if the item is going for a price I think is reasonable, I win it.  So eBay only gets a bid from me when I'm going to win the item.  If the item is out of the range I'm willing to pay, eBay never even knows I was interested in it.  So, if I got an email saying I lost, that meant someone had squeezed in a bid in the last three seconds of the auction!  They had to be using a tool like eSnipe too.  Interesting.

Then I got home and Frank said, "hey, I bought one of those shirts for Jacob!"  I said "for $6.50?"  He said, "yeees ... the yellow one?"  We were bidding against each other and I drove his bid up 50 cents!  We had a good laugh about it. 

FogDog Review: I won't order from them again

I ordered a treadmill from FogDog.com and I won't be ordering from them again.  I placed the order on 12/28/06, they sent me a confirmation email that same day.  According to the website they gave me to track my order it shipped on 12/29/06.  There were no updates to the website.  So I called on 1/12/07 and they said oh, it was with a shipping company near my house and they gave me their number.  I called the shipping company and they said they would drop it off on Monday.  Frank took the afternoon off on Monday, came home early and waited.  When the treadmill arrived it was damaged!  Well, these things happen, right?  So I called FogDog and they said when the treadmill arrives at the warehouse they will credit my account.  If I still want a treadmill, I need to place another order.  No "I'm sorry" or "we'll speed up the second order" or anything.  So I said, "no, thank you.  I will not be ordering from you again."  She said, "Thanks.  Good-bye."

So, needless to say, I won't be ordering from them again.  I got no status update for two weeks and then I got a damaged treadmill, no apology and was told to start the process all over again!

My grandmothers have blogs!

Both of my grandmothers have blogs now!  I'm very proud of them and I'm very proud of my mom for typing in the stories and creating the blogs:

• South Dakota Mary
• Vera

Check them out - they are/were amazing women!

Picking lice

Speaking of unusual careers.   This woman picks lice eggs out of (mostly) children's hair.  She charges $100/hr and it can take her 2-3 hours of painstakingly detailed work to completely remove the eggs from a head of hair. 

In case you are wondering why you can't just use one of those shampoos ... the shampoos kill the adult lice but the eggs remain on the hair and hatch later.

If you like detailed work, the market is wide open!

Best website for finding cheap airfares

I'm always looking for better sites to find cheap airfares.  I get really frustrated that the airlines can charge not just different fares for different days but different fares for the same seats on the same airplane!  I found this site, ITA Software, yesterday and it's great!  It even has an option "search within this 30 day timeframe for the cheapest roundtrip ticket assuming I want to stay 6-8 days."  Terrific.  You do need to register but it's free.

Snowshoeing!

I finally got Frank to go snowshoeing!  We just had to call it "hunting."

Buying human embryos

This adoption agency is now providing embryos!  They buy eggs from women, get sperm from donors, combine them, make embryos and then provide them to couples as a "service."  So they say they are not selling them.  But since they own them, it sure seems to me like they are selling them.  Whether or not they are selling them, they own them and they are either selling or giving them away.  Selling or giving away potential human beings. 

The owner of the adoption agency says she doesn't currently have a stockpile of embryos because they are taken (or sold?) as fast as she produces them.  But she could stockpile them because embryos can be frozen indefinitely.

So does this mean I could collect a library of human embryos, advertise them and sell them based on different potential characteristics?  And since they are frozen I don't have to feed or cloth them while I wait for someone to take them. ... I see the beginnings of a science fiction story.

With the number of couples trying to conceive and the number of people wanting to adopt growing constantly, I can see how there could be a huge demand for this type of service.  I can also see how it could be very easily abused.   

Not just dreaming of sailing anymore

I've been dreaming of sailing in the British Virgin Islands for a while now.  I even posted on how to plan a sailing vacation.  Well, I'm not just dreaming anymore - we decided to go ahead and do it.  The question is just which month and exactly how much are we going to spend on airfare!

I took a liveaboard sailing class a year ago September in the British Virgin Islands and loved it - I blogged about it.  (Remember the entries are in reverse order.)

Here are some reasons to sail in the BVI:

• It's beautiful.
• The snorkeling is awesome.  I've seen turtles, octopus, squid, barracuda, ... in addition to the regular coral and fish.
• You can always see land.
• All the islands have beaches with great sand and beach bars.
• Sun.
• Warm water.  Even I don't get cold after a couple of hours in the water.
• Everybody there is in a good mood.  (Probably because they are all on vacation. :)
• Boats.  Sailboats.
• Sailing.  Crossing the ocean silently with the wind in your hair and the sun on your face.
• People.  Everyone is ready to sit back, have a beer and laugh.  Or dance.  Or party.
• Willy T's.  The bar on a boat.
• Foxys.  The beach bar.
• Great weather.  It's the same 75-85 all year around.
• The place on top of the Baths with the great hammocks.
• The Baths.  Who doesn't like scrambling through rocks and caves.  Especially caves that are open to the sunlight!
• Good food.  Conch fritters, anyone?

I'm very much looking forward to going back!

Book review: Encyclopedia Prehistorica Dinosaurs and Sharks

These two books make great presents for boys.  Our son got his first one when he was five years old and he loves them.  Each page has a great big pop-up in the middle and lots of smaller pop-ups in the corners.  There's also lots of interesting information - I usually just read a couple of sentences per page.

What makes people friends?

This isn't a post about how to make or keep friends.  This is about an article that dives into the pyschology of friendship.  So if you don't like analyzing things, skip this post!

What makes people friends?  How do we choose who we are friends with?  The bottom line according to Friendship: The Laws of Attraction:

We become best friends with people who boost our self-esteem by affirming our identities as members of certain groups, and it's the same for both genders.

In English, that means that if we think of ourselves first as moms, we will probably either hang out with moms or people that tell us we are good moms.  If we think of ourselves first as engineers, we will probably be best friends with engineers or someone who tells us we are great engineers.

Once you've found your best friend, there are four key ingredients to friendship:

• self-disclosure - we share personal information and wait for the person to disclose equivilent personal information.  For example, I share that I'm having a hard time dealing with my brother and you share that you are having a hard time dealing with your husband.
• supportiveness - friends listen to those problems and support their friends either by commiserating, offering advise or just listening.
• interaction - you have to talk, email, write, ... it doesn't have to be in person.
• positiveness - nobody wants to listen to rants all the time.  People want to feel good so they tend to hang out with people that make them feel good.  (I had a friend who told me she loved hanging out with me because I always made her feel good I was so upbeat.  I had never thought about it but I found myself thinking about all my friends and how upbeat they were or weren't after that!)

So knowing all that probably won't help you find or make friends but maybe it will make for an interesting, postive, supportive interaction with your existing friends.

Negative Google Ads Associated with YOUR Name

I ran across something interesting yesterday.  If you search for "Joe Vitale" (the author of The Attractor Factor) in Google, the top two sponsored ads are extremely negative:

• Joe Vitale Sucks www.RichJerkWebsites.com      Don't buy anything from Joe Vitale until you read this.
• I was scammed 37 times Dannys-Scam-Review.com      These websites are absolute scams I will show you the ones that work

Now these are sites that paid to be put at the top when someone searched for "Joe Vitale."  They didn't show up when I searched for Vitale.  Nothing on their websites mentions Joe Vitale and nothing I found anywhere suggests that Joe Vitale is either a jerk or a scam artist.

A couple of salient points come to mind:

• Obviously, these people have found it financially advantageous to buy ads for the words "Joe Vitale" - they are assuming people that have read his book or heard about it might think he's a scam or at least have enough doubts to read their websites.  (I did.  I thought, wow, is he a scam artist, and I clicked on the link and looked for information and couldn't find any but in the meantime I read their website and saw all their ads.)  So these people drive traffic to their website by picking names that people might believe are scam artists.
• Poor Joe Vitale.  These people are making it look like he's a scam artist and as far as I know, there's nothing illegal about it.  The second one doesn't even say anything about Joe Vitale - it just says "I was scammed 37 times" when you search on his name.

I don't know whether to be impressed or horrified.  Luckily when I search on my name there are no sponsored links, good or bad.

Book review: The Secret

First off, there are three versions of the Secret by Rhonda Byrne:

• the book, The Secret.
• the audiobook, The Secret.  This contains many different people's voices, presumably from the movie version.
• the movie, The Secret DVD!  Most of the reviews you've seen are about the movie.

I listened to the audiobook version.

I think how you are introduced to a book greatly influences how much you like it or at least how open you are to liking it.  I first heard about The Secret from a group of friends who watched the movie together and they couldn't say enough good about it.  I was supposed to beg, steal or borrow a copy to watch!  So I downloaded the audiobook version.  I enjoyed it but if I hadn't listened to The Attractor Factor first, I would have dismissed it all as hokey.  The Secret introduces the law of attraction with a lot of hype and very big promises.  They make it seem like it is possible to wish a bike or a winning lottery ticket into existence through sheer will power.  Now while I believe that remaining positive and open will mean that many more opportunities will be available to you than if you are always negative, I don't think you can wish tomorrow's winning lottery ticket into your hand.  So while the audiobook was uplifting and positive, it was a bit unrealistic.  So, I wonder, if I'd read this negative review first, or if I hadn't learned about the law of attraction from The Attractor Factor, I wonder if I would have liked The Secret at all?  Would the negative review have set me up to think negatively about it, would I have concentrated on the hokiness and would I be writing a really negative review now?  If so, it just goes to show you that thinking positive brings positive results (I enjoyed listening to the book) and thinking negative brings negative results (I might not have made it through the book!)  On the influencing positively side, The Secret made the top ten list at Amazon.com and The New York Times.  Does that make you want to read it now?

Discrimination against non-vegetarians

Since I've written about unusual racisms or discriminations, like discriminating against atheists, I couldn't pass up blogging on this.

Dina was not allowed to buy a condo because she is not a vegetarian.

Solitude is good

Do you need time by yourself?  Most of us do whether we realize it or not.  I had a friend who used to call it "me time."  Whenever I started getting short with people he'd say I was missing my "me time."  I finally figured out he was right.

A few years ago I had a roommate who was around most of the time.  (And he was loud!)  I used to go into work late or come home early every day just so I would have some time alone in the house.  If I have some alone time in the morning, my whole day goes better.  I used to think it was because I hated feeling like I got up to go to work but now I think it's because I just need some time to myself to contemplate the day before I get going. 

It doesn't have to be first thing in the morning.  Back when Frank worked nights I used to get Jacob up in the morning, feed him and dress him and then we'd read stories until his grandparents picked him up.  Then I'd have my alone time.  (As a side note, Jacob doesn't remember those mornings.  He was only three years old.  I find that really sad because we really enjoyed them.  I'll keep the good memories for him!)

Ester Buchholtz wrote The call of solitude in Psychology Today where she says modern day society with all its connectedness, cell phones, internet, etc, is intruding on our alone time and we don't even know it.  But just because we don't realize that we aren't getting our "me time" doesn't mean that we don't need it.  She says one of the main problems is that we associate solitude with loneliness.  Anytime we are alone we think we are lonely.  I certainly know people that are always bored if they are alone (or they turn on the TV in order to not feel lonely) but I also know people who really enjoy hiking or hunting by themselves.  Her article is long but worth reading.