Maturity, however, is the topic at hand. It is a curious aspect of our natures that seems to mainly depend on our actions and mannerisms with respect to the current trends in social behaviour. If I say things like “yo” and “hella” my maturity decreases whereas saying “tannins” and “Roquefort” pushes it the opposite direction. With practice, a person could easily modify their maturity level to match their audience. The natural maturity level, however, is how a person acts when they let go and be themselves.

One major factor that affects your natural maturity level is the company you keep. As time goes by you tend to subconsciously integrate the random behaviour of those around you and parrot it later on. For myself, a majority of those I work with are younger. I am often torn between being the “cool” boss who can speak their language and being the respectable authority figure. It is a fine line which I hope that I do a good job walking but who knows, perhaps not.

With adulthood comes more and more pressure from society to “mature”. Buy a car, buy a house (with a big mortgage), furnish the house, buy a second car, upgrade the house, upgrade the furniture, etc. Personally I’m at the beginning stages: one car, first home, and just starting to like red wine. There will always be a kid inside and occasionally I make concessions for him. Recently I bought myself a 1-UP mushroom which now occupies a prominent spot on my desk beside a stuffed monkey and a Lego helicopter.

Is my theory actually true or just a correlation of my fledgling maturity with my team of co-ops? I’d be interested to hear anecdotes from others on their own maturity level and environment. Do kids increase or decrease it? Only time will tell where I end up on the maturity scale, but for now I really enjoy working with a great group of co-op students

Today I was making some notes on a printout from a coworker and, at full speed, drew the most perfect question mark ever. I fully suspect it will never be surpassed or even duplicated in my lifetime so I wanted to document the occasion and have it live forever in the annals of the Internet.

PERFECT QUESTION MARK IS PERFECT, BEHOLD!

(click for larger version)

In all seriousness please submit examples of your savant moments in penmanship. I feel compelled to build a font around this idea, we’ll call it Idiot Savant Script or something.

Firstly, Toronto is a nightmare to try and navigate if you need anything more than a simple subway trip or single bus route. Have you ever pulled up the PDF bus routes map from the TTC website? It is a rats nest. Additionally the TTC has one of the worst transit websites that I have ever seen and I wouldn’t trust them further than I could throw a trolley car to improve it. If Google is able to integrate TTC and GO Train data it would make navigation in Toronto as easy as breathing. Perhaps that is slightly exaggerated but you get the point.

Secondly, students who are looking for Off-Campus housing here in Kitchener/Waterloo would have a much easier time of learning the route they would need to take everyday instead of trusting landlords to tell them or having to figure it out from the GRT website. I would certainly be integrating walking directions into our Off-Campus housing and Sublet systems.

I wonder who I have to pester to get GRT, GO Transit and the TTC to open up their routes to Google.

Involuntarily I rise to my feet, heart swelling with pride and thoughts quiet.

We are proud and free. O Canada we stand on guard for thee.

Lest we forget.

All of those paperbacks were purchased from the US publishers before the US/CDN dollar parity and are currently sitting in huge warehouses or on store shelves collecting dust. I can certainly understand why book sellers are still charging the book price since their inventory lost around 30% of its market value in the last year. 30% of the billions of dollars worth of unsold books is an insane amount of money! A lot of smaller book stores would go out of business if they had to sell their books at the US listed price.

Most likely you recently bought Book 7 in the the Harry Potter series. I paid around $22 at Walmart where the actual price on the book jacket is $45. Wow, what a savings! How can they afford to give me 50% off? Oh wait. Between volume discount and the higher CDN dollar it makes perfect sense.

I really feel for the book selling industry but I am boycotting physical books until price comes back to reality. The book sellers are just going to have to take the hit. They should lower the price to sell off current inventory to provide capital to buy new books at the parity price. Of course that is assuming that the population of Canada has slowed their book buying and that US publishers have lowered their price to Canadian book sellers.

Bring on the e-books! Cory Doctorow offers all of his books as free e-book downloads.

Over the last year or so focus has turned to the coming election and the failures of the Bush administration. Every other story is about a new Bush policy or the Iraq war or political candidates for the next term, etc. It is very frustrating to read since as a Canadian it affects me indirectly but I have no voice. We Canadians don’t have the same mind set as sub-border-eans so it is obvious how I feel about the US currently. “Stop the War”, “Impeach Bush”, “Stop the corporate bailouts”, “Separate religion and State”, etc. These issues are all easy to pick a side and yell about. The big problem is that it doesn’t really matter since their economy is about to collapse and take many countries, including our own, down with it.

I don’t want to live through a recession as bad as the Great Depression but inevitably we are heading in that direction. Our economy is so tied to that of the US that a blip across the border ripples out and affects us quite strongly. I don’t know very much about why this is but I assume it has to do with trade and our fiscal policies. We sell a lot of wood and uranium to the US and import a lot of corn based products and manufactured goods. Our banks follow the lead of those in the US pretty closely since it is practically required of us.

2008 will be a telling year in terms of our fate. The housing bubble in the US has recently popped so the markets and the government are scrambling to figure out what to do. The issue is that people who shouldn’t have been able to buy homes were given sub-prime mortgages for huge amounts of money that their income could never support. The trick was to give them low payments for the first couple years and tell them not to worry until it goes up in the future. I can imagine most people expected the American dream to kick in for them, at least doubling their income. Of course the lenders who sell these mortgages then turn around and sell the debt to the banks with the backing being the house. Banks in turn flood the markets with securities backed by sub-prime mortgages which are bought up by other banks and investment firms. All seems well until somebody realizes that the house backing the mortgage really isn’t worth $400,000 and is only priced that high because of the housing bubble. Suddenly the developers and the current “owners” who are trying to sell are stuck with houses that will never sell for the price they are asking. Housing prices, as a result, start to come back down to reality which in some markets is about 33% of their price. What usually happens now is people start defaulting on their mortgages since they can’t sell the places or afford to pay for them. Quickly the market would come back to the correct housing value and lots of people would be out lots of money especially the sub-prime lenders and the banks who bought their debt. [The Dangerous Disconnect Between Home Prices and Fundamentals]

At the moment the Bush administration is about to enact a policy that would help people who can’t afford their house to not default on their mortgage. This is not technically a corporate bailout of the lenders but is only one step removed. If money is injected so that people can pay the lenders then the lenders will not go bankrupt and are bailed out. This very policy sent Japan into a recession that has taken around ten years to recover from. [Bush Moves to Aid Lenders] On a second front the Federal Reserve bank is injecting mountains of cash into the economy to keep it liquid so it will keep on working. With all the sub-prime mortgage debt floating around the market, banks and other investors are slowing down and being very careful which in turn shrinks the economy. [Fed Injects Reserves Into System] However, injecting money isn’t the miracle that it seems to be since essentially the government is reaching into everyones pocket collectively and taking out a portion of their cash. Injecting money makes the US dollar worth less and so each dollar in your pocket can buy less goods. This is called an invisible tax since you pay it but don’t realize it and is present in all economies the world over. [Why does fiat money seemingly work ?]

All in all it is shaping up to be scary times ahead. The US dollar has already dropped to almost par with the Canadian dollar (1USD = 0.95CDN, Sept 06, 2007). Foreign countries are dropping use of the US dollar as payment (can’t find the articles for this). China is rattling the American cage with its substantial supply of US dollars; they threaten to collapse the value of the dollar. The wars continue. Domestic terror is being perpetrated on the people by their own government (too many links to choose from).

An election is on the horizon and the only candidate that I seem to hear about is Ron Paul. He seems to have the backing of the Internet and it isn’t surprising why. Check out this video of him answering questions at Google (long). It gives me hope since he addresses the issue I talk about here at around 23 minutes in. Ron Paul would have my vote and I hope who ever actually wins will hold some of the same values and can rescue the American economy from collapse.

Recently an advisory group suggested to the Canadian government to demonetize the penny and then shortly after the nickel. Immediately you wonder how a transaction would be completed that came to an unpayable amount. Other countries use a system called Swedish rounding which is a symmetrical system of rounding to the nearest available currency amount. It would be hard for merchants to fix the system always in their favor because the purchase of multiple items would come to an unpredictable value. I think it is a very good idea and would save the country millions of dollars in minting.

Take a look at the article yourself and let me know if you agree it is a good idea.

Save the penny or leave the penny?

Do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of; how much more than is necessary do we spend in sleep, forgetting that the sleeping fox catches no poultry, and that there will be sleeping enough in the grave.
– Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth

It is certainly an odd quote which likely made a lot more sense when it was written. I assume the fox reference speaks to the background of Franklin but I admit that I only know as much as was detailed by the kid in Big Daddy. The message, however, is still clear; stop procrastinating and you will be successful.

If it was as easy as that we would all be in perfect shape due to our new years resolution. In fact, after a few years we would run out of stuff to resolve to do over the course of a year. It would probably run something like this: lose weight, read more books, learn martial arts, learn to cook, lose weight, learn to cook healthy, learn piano, write a book, make a million dollars, ?. At the end you are essentially Batman and just need to figure out a costume. But the moments of motivation pass, and quickly, so you do what you can and wait for the next wave.

Another great source of inspiration are movies, particularly those with a self-building plot line. A good example of this is during Batman Begins when Bruce Wayne is learning vigilante techniques from the League of Shadows. If you have seen The Last Samurai then you will likely remember when Algren (Cruise) starts to learn to use a katana eventually becoming quite proficient. Movies using this theme really motivate me to get to work or get out and exercise but only for a few days. I need to put together a montage to watch as needed, then I can be a highly motivated individual. What works for you?

My qualm with this saying is that I don’t really think that sliced bread is that fantastic of a thing. The wording takes for granted that you know what bread is so we can assume that it is not the invention of bread that the saying is referring to. So the jump is from bread to sliced bread a process that requires only a knife and a gentle hand. Sure in the old days a loaf of bread was probably consumed in a very medieval way. Ripping handfuls off of the loaf and tossing it around the room was probably a mainstay at dinner parties. I imagine sliced bread being invented by some mysophobic aristocrat that was sick of diving head first for the loaf at the beginning of every meal. Unfortunately the real truth is much less interesting.

I submit that people start using a different version of the same idea. How about something that was in fact a great and revolutionary invention, say, I don’t know, electricity. Or how about Penicillin? I think those might fit the bill a little better. Heck even regular bread would work, it was an extremely important advance in the agrarian history of the human race. Anybody have anything better?

After tonights game it looks like I am destined to be our teams goon. I swear that it is not because I am trying to be, honest! Body contact is not allowed in the league and is cause for a penalty when it occurs. The campus rec league is made up of players of all shapes, sizes, ages and skill levels. I am a big guy. You do the math.

Tonight I received three penalties: Body Contact, Tripping, and Body Contact. The tripping was definitely a good call, I was being lazy. However, those contact penalties were a joke and the ref knew it. The problem is that I am solid on my skates so if I come in for the puck against a smaller player chances are they are going to fall, and they did. Some of these players could come at me standing still and they would fall, and I would go to the box.

I am taking this as I sign that I need to work on my finesse.

So far the Screaming Donkeys are 3-0. I scored a goal in my first game last week so I am pretty happy. Our goalie, Sean Jackson, is playing amazing and the group of guys are really great. Soon we will be receiving our new shirts too, they are going to be nice.