It was one of the few days I head up into the city (San Francisco) for a couple of meetings. Instead of driving as I usually do, I decided to take the train. It was early enough in during the commute time that I could still get a seat. I sat down and started to have a look around. It’s habit. I like to be aware of the environment around me. It was the usual mix of daily commuters on the train, except for one. A lady; probably in her mid 20’s sat a few rows in front of me. on her lap sat her dog. One of those dogs that look like they have a beard and extremely bushy eye brows. A little research online told me that they are called Schnauzer’s. Cute little fellow, sitting there chewing on his chew toy. Beside her was a little baby pram. Seemed normal enough.

After a few minutes of vigorous chewing, her dog got fed up with his toy and dropped it. The owner bent down, picked up the toy and tossed it into the pram. Hmmm… that does not seem very sanitary for the baby; I thought to myself. Then I realized that the lady had been playing with her dog the whole time and had not even once looked into the pram to see how the baby was doing. I decided to pay a little more attention to the pram. It was then that I realized that the pram was not for a baby buy for the dog.. it was a doggie pram.

Just like regular human baby prams it had a sun hood, looked like it folded for easy storage, had zippers and compartments for storing toys and treats and actually seemed very very study. I would say looked more sturdy than a lot of baby prams. The only thing that gave it away was the brand that was stamped at the top of the hood – “Pet Gear” http://www.amazon.com/Pet-Gear-Trails-Stroller-30-pounds/dp/B0006Z9RB2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1271711560&sr=8-1

The following description is from the Pet Gear Inc, website:

“Pet Gear strollers are a great way to take your pet with you on a long walk through the park, a walk around the block, or maybe even shopping at the mall. They safely contain and protect your pet wherever you go. The Happy Trails Plus stroller has a fashionable Euro-Canopy, removable weather guard, large storage basket, parent tray, waterproof interior pad, front swivel wheels, shock absorbers, and rear brakes.”

Something is very wrong with this image. Isn’t the whole point of taking your dog for a walk to WALK YOUR DOG? For your dog to get exercise? I mean, am I being old fashioned by thinking that this is a little crazy?

What do you’ll think?

We as a race of people are always fascinated by Heroes. As children and as adults, we love to read super hero comics and watch movies about super heroes. The theme of most successful move involves heroes of some sort, doing something out of the ordinary and something heroic. It captures our imagination and sweeps us up into a land of fantasy. Heroes are things of legend. Right?

What if that is not true. What if we all have the capability and the capacity of being a hero. Doing something extra ordinary. Saving people and making a difference in the world. Wouldn’t that be an amazing world to live in? Well guess what. It is the world we live in; and it is possible for every single one of us to be HEROES.

Welcome to the word of Dr. Philip Zimbardo. Dr. Z as he is affectionately called by his students is professor emeritus at Stanford University where he has spent 50 years teaching and studying psychology. Philip Zimbardo is one of the most distinguished living psychologists, having served as President of the American Psychological Association, designed and narrated the award winning 26-part PBS series, Discovering Psychology, and has published more than 50 books and 400 professional and popular articles and chapters, among them, Shyness, The Lucifer Effect, and The Time Paradox. He is best-known to the public for his controversial Stanford Prison Experiment that highlighted the ease with which ordinary intelligent college students could cross the line between good and evil when caught up in the matrix of situational and systemic forces.

He has made it his life time goal to study human behavior; specifically what makes people do “bad” things, and what makes people do good. His latest book the “Lucifer Effect” explores this in detail. In his book he talks about Lucifer (commonly known to all of us as the DEVIL) In fact, Lucifer was god’s FAVORITE angel until he disobeyed god and was banned into HELL. Hows does someone so good. Someone so pure; go from being the very representation of good into being the very representation of evil?

Dr. Z, says that heroes are not born heroes. They do not have special powers. Its their belief and the situation that makes a hero. By studying heroes over time; both the famous heroes of history past and newer everyday heroes from around the world he is convinced that “EVERYONE IS A HERO IS WAITING” Given the right situation we all have it in us to shine and do heroic deeds. Even something like taking some time to teach the elderly and non tech savvy how to use the internet or the computer can make you a hero. You are the person you are helping’s hero. Standing up to domestic abuse can make you a hero.

Dr. Z talks about this at his 2008 TED appearance where he introduced the idea of the Heroic Imagination Project (www.heroicimagination.org) or HIP for short. The Heroic Imagination Project (HIP) will inspires ordinary people to trigger extraordinary social change. HIP is based on the insight that all people have the capacity to act heroically, and that it’s possible to prepare anyone to be a hero when called upon.

I mean what an amazing goal. The more i read about and learn about this project, it just makes me happy. It makes me happy because i truly this that something like this could have an amazing impact on peoples outlook. HIP plans on introducing school based curriculum to educate middle and high school children about heroism. Image, a new generation of children brought up with the knowledge that they can be heroes. That helping others is the correct thing to do. This does not mean to go out and act irrationally, but to know what is right. From what I gather; frameworks and modals are being developed that will allow teachers to analyze heroes of the past and teach the underlying principals the guided that person to do something heroic. Those same principals can be used in everyday life by us, whether its standing up to a school bully, or helping an elderly person cross the road.

It all comes down to DOING THE RIGHT THING.

I wish Dr. Zimbardo and the whole HIP team all the very best in this endeavor and here’s to a better and brighter tomorrow!

Source: www.heroicimagination.org

There used to be a time (not too long ago) were having a day named after you or after a particular purpose actually meant something (eg: Martin Luther King Day, Veterans Day, etc…).These days of meaning seem to have seen their last light of day.

It seems as if every day is some sort of obscure day, or every week is some sort of week or every month is some sort of month.

Its at a point where its starting to get annoying. I mean, seriously. Give a dude a chance. I’m still trying to get leave to celebrate Chinchilla day.

I digress.. back to books. I love them. I love to sit down and have a nice read. You know actually thumb through the pages of a real book instead of scrolling through pages on a monitor.

Books are expensive to keep buying and once you have bought a book, how many times do you really read it? I have a bunch of books and at most i’ve read a book 2 times. Renting is totally the way to go.

I wrote about a cool new startup called Rentalic a little while ago. Well this is perfect. People with a whole bunch of books can list their entire library out on Rentalic and rent them out to other users.

To visit Rentlic go to www.rentalic.com

We need a national rent your books out day!

I miss flying airlines like Malaysian, Singapore Airlines, Emirates, Sri Lankan Airlines and the like where you actually looked forward to the food and its FREE. Virgin Atlantic now flies domestic routes in the US under the local brand of Virgin America and they provide you a nice free meal and snacks for local domestic flights while still being competitive with the other US airlines, so why cant they?

i’m betting that a lot of the people out there right now, criticizing Phelps has also smoked some marijuana at some point in their life.

its part of growing up. let the kid experience life and grow up. he seems to have a solid grounding and just because he smoked pot once does not mean he is a pot head. it just means he is finding his way as all kids do, and that means learning things for themselves.

please don’t get me wrong, i am in no way saying that what he did was right. all i’m saying is that by putting all this pressure on him your paving the way to failure. its the same reason that most kid star actors end up as washed up druggies. its because of all the pressure put on them. lay off.. and let the kid grow up as a regular person.

don’t you have better things to report on? you as the media are reporting on this story because you say he is a role model and on the moral issue and the message he is giving out to his fans. what about your[collective media] moral issues? i mean after all all your doing is creating a story out of nothing to fatten your wallets. i find that quite hypocritical.

i have a routine, i walk towards my car, press the unlock, listen to the reassuring click sound that tells me the car has been unlocked and i open the door and get in. same when i get down from the car. i click the car and wait to hear it click back to know the door is locked and we are all good.

today morning i had my hands full of stuff and was a bit preoccupied when i ran out of the apartment, closed the front door and locked it. dammit, it did not lock; so i tried it again. still unlocked. i was starting to get annoyed at the door. why was it not locking itself. after staring daggers at the poor door for a few seconds it struck me that this was my apartment front door not my car door. thats why it was not clicking back at me when i clicked on the lock button. DUH!

i proceeded to sheepishly put the door key into the lock, turn the key locking the door, looked both to my left and right to make sure non of my neighbors had witnessed this very embarrassing moment of me clicking my front door and headed to my car which responded much better and as expected to my unlock clicks than my front door had.

this got me thinking. why don’t they have the same mechanism for buildings that they have for automobiles. its a very useful technology that can be used in many different area’s. why was its implementation stopped at just automobiles?

am i the only one this has happened to? i would love to hear if anyone of you have experiences something similar.

well i guess i should say that its no longer an underlying tone. the following news video shows the open ignorance of some Americans which is a direct representation of the current state of literacy and general knowledge that alot of Americans in the south are known for, as well as a glimpse into how racism still plays a very big part in America. the land of the free.

the whole video is pretty sad and funny at the same time, but there were some highlights to this that stood out more than others. we actually learnt facts that no one knew before this

* Obama is actually a DUCK.

* Palin, (who could not keep her own daughter from screwing around and getting knocked up) is filled with the holy spirit and will bring honesty and integrity to the white house. this actually reminds me of a quote from Confucius

“It is not possible for one to teach others who cannot teach his own family.”

* Obama and his wife could be anti white.

* Obama is friends with a known terrorist. wait… didn’t president bush charter a plane to fly some laden’s out of America right after 9-11, because they were close family friends of his???

you may be wondering what the hell am i going on about? flushing after you take a leak. so here’s the deal. we share our building with another company and i don’t know if its someone from my office or from the one we share the building with but SOMEONE never flushes. they use the urinal and then just leave. wtf!!! it totally pisses me off every time i go and have to see this.

now that i have got this off my chest i feel a little better. well not really it still annoys the crap out of me and really pisses me off (no pun intended)

ARGHHHH!

it’s rising listing fees along with all the other hundreds of fees that exists make it so complicated and unpractical to use for the average joe who is trying to sell something thats been gathering dust in his garage.

i know the few times i’ve tried to sell something i’ve gotten so frustrated that i just exited the process half way through.

all i find when i go to ebay anymore is lots and lots of “super sellers” and stores and estate sales by auction houses etc… and a few individual users scattered far and wide. i mean seriously. its proabably easier to spot a star in the sky from times square in new york than it is to find an individual seller on ebay anymore.

ebay has turned into this huge online mall and quite frankly i don’t know if i like it anymore. i’m sure its not just me and that there are lots of people out there who think the same.

Reference:
www.ebay.com

my comments are in red.

1. Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.
2. An adult giraffe’s kick is so powerful that it can decapitate a lion.
3. The word “lethologica” describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want. [makes total sense. if your not going to remember the word anyway choose the hardest word possible]
4. The brain continues sending electrical wave signals for 37 hours after death
5. Every year approximately 2,500 left-handed people are killed by using object or machinery designed for right-handed people. [only? worldwide?]
6. During their periods womens middle fingers shrink. No one knows why. [NSFW comment. deleted to keep this blog pg13]
7. Between 1902 and 1907, the same tiger killed 434 people in India.
8. In “Silence of the Lambs”, Hannibal Lector (Anthony Hopkins) never blinks. [its a movie. they deleted the scenes he blinked in.. DUH  I on the other hand am non blinking KING... challenge me, i dare you. i'll even win a staring competition online. even my picture never blinks thats how good i am]
9. During World War II, the very first bomb dropped on Berlin by the Allies killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo. [awwweee]
10. 45% of Americans don’t know that the sun is a star. [i could have told you that]
11. More people are killed by donkeys annually than are killed in plane crashes. [we should introduce a donkey safety regulatory board to monitor this grave threat to humankind]
12. The largest number of children born to one woman, who was a Russian peasant is 69 [holy shit. talk about being horney as a goat]
13. The clown fish has the ability to change its sex. If a breeding female dies, the male fish will change its sex and mate with another male. [wierd.. how come they did'nt show this on nemo?]
14. Dolphins can swim and sleep at the same time. [ha.. thats nothing. i used to study and sleep at the same time. all throughout college]
15. When the divorce rate goes up in the United States, toy makers report that the sale of toys also rise. [noooooooooo really? i would have never guessed!]