Have a nice day

Have a nice day! Even wikipedia has an article, albeit only one sentence, on it. Why do people say this? The wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_a_nice_day) claims that it's typically said by retail employees to customers, after a sale. I've heard it on a million answering machines. "Hello, I'm not here to take your call. Please leave me a message after the beep and I'll return your call as soon as I can. Have a nice day!"

It's a dry, toneless dismissal.

I guess we've all become retail employees. Even when we wish people a nice day, we really don't care whether they do or they don't. If they do, well and good. If they don't, well life sucks and it definitely sucks to be you. Bye bye is much better even though I've read somewhere that it was also used in the past to lull babies to sleep. Good-bye has been tainted by that TV show The Weakest Link. It sounds like an abrupt dismissal. A dry conclusion which would only serve after a terse unfulfilled encounter, like with the boss you don't like.

So is there a way to end a conversation without sounding plastic and distant. Without sounding dismissive, fatigued, bored and ready to split? I would guess that when a conversation has come to it's natural conclusion, all parties having run out of steam, nothing left to say then perhaps saying nothing is OK. But that wouldn't work. The importance of "have a nice day" is so that you can turn around and walk away, or put the phone down knowing that there'll be no additional sounds from the other end. Bye bye means, "I'm going to go now so you can safely stop talking."

I like "bye." It leaves no indication that I'm wishing you a pleasant after-conversation life. Nothing to say that I care about how the rest of your day proceeds. Nothing good, nothing bad. We're done here, let's move on.

So... have a nice day!

Christmas Time

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring not even a mouse.

The year was 1964 and independence had finally come. December 12th, 1964 we would finally get rid of the British colonialists and have self rule. Meanwhile, south on the continent, racial discrimination would persist for another thirty years!

Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada. Thursday November 29th, 2007. A snowstorm hit southern Ontario. People woke up to find a nice thick three, to four, inch blanket of snow. I remember when I had to shovel. Those days are now behind me. I can now boast that I don't mind the snow.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007. In a crowded mall in Omaha, the Westwood Mall a 19-year old boy went on a shooting spree. Ended up killing eight people, six of them Mall employees and two of them customers. He started shooting in the Von Maur department store. News that has been gathered about him since indicates that he had left his parents home, or been kicked out, had recently split with his girlfriend and also just lost his job.

Last night, December 6, 2007, going home from work on a fairly crowded bus, there was this teenager, ears plugged in, obviously listening to rap music. 50 cent to be exact. It was that song "In da club." Well, oblivious to the fact that there were people all around him he was singing the song, albeit out of tune, and making a point to emphasise the expletives. People kept looking at him and shaking their heads from side to side, but nobody said anything. And it was a white kid to boot. A white kid. Do you know how ridiculous these white kids look trying to act black? And ghetto black at that. I know he didn't feel ashamed, so I felt his shame on his behalf.

So Marion Jones has admitted to taking drugs prior to the 2000 Olympics where she obviously shone. I knew that there was something fishy about her natural abilities. And to tell us that her coach started supplementing her in 1999 with, what she thought was, flaxseed oil. You can almost convince me now that Flo-Jo also wasn't juicing on something. We can't say positively that she wasn't getting assistance of the pharmaceutical persuasion, but it's hard to be so good and make it look so easy like she did in the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Triple gold medal winner. Died at the tender age of 38 of a heart seizure. So it's a good thing that Marion Jones was crying and whining about having lost our trust, but for me, she lost my trust when she was hanging out with C.J. Hunter and then Tim Montgomery (who was also caught juicing). It's funny that track and field sports are now forever tainted. The list of suspected and convicted juicers is long. Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis and Linford Christie have all been tainted. Then there's the current suite of sprinters. We won't name any names, but the times that these guys are running, and continually beating, are too amazing to be true.

Birthday Greetings

Yes, it's my birthday today. 43 years and still alive, who would have thought? Given the dangerous lifestyle, risk taking, walking and running in the middle of the night in questionable neighbourhoods. We're lucky to be here.

But does this mean that we'll slow down and slide quietly into second base? (I hear that first base is passing 30, and second base is making it to 50, well actually I made that up). Time to get into fourth gear. Rev the engine and push onwards.

What special things do we plan for year 44? (Because it is year 44. The whole birthday thing is a misnomer. When you're born you are zero years old. On your first birthday, you turn 1 year old which means you have completed one year and so on your first birthday, you actually enter year two. And so on and so forth). Year 44, we plan to write a novel. 1 page a day, 365 days, should be a 365-page novel. Or perhaps, in four months, 2 pages a day, that will be, let's see thirty times four times two is 240. 240-pages.

So today will be a day of quiet reflection. Of stock taking. A day to look back but not go back. To contemplate on lessons learnt. To remember that we are not alone but our lives are intertwined with the lives of so many others. And that we make a difference in the words we speak. In the way we act and the things we do. We make a difference and add value if we care to.

So, happy birthday to me. Health, wealth, success and blessings for year 44 and for many more to come.

Being Whole

Being an entire person, means not only taking care of your career. Your spiritual or mental well-being, but also taking care of your body - as best as you can. We, at least those of us living a Western life, are living in the leisure class. We can afford the luxury to dwell on higher, philosophical, issues without too much concern about basic survival. We can concern ourselves with getting to know our inner self. We can focus on advancing our careers in order to live a comfortable life. Worry free. With the nicest things that life has to offer at our fingertips.

Once our minds are happy with the things that we can see and touch around us, we can then move on to finding God. We satisfy our souls with the fact that we get a sense of joy knowing that we feel a sense of peace that comes from spiritual accomplishment. Our hearts stop aching because we haven't found joy in the new Mercedes Benz. That our children have grown up and left us and we are robbed of that daily contact.

But to be fully human, living on this earth, we must also stretch and strengthen our bodies. This shell that gives us the ability to move around, sense our environment and give us an identity. Without this shell, we would be different. If you are lucky enough to have the gifts of a fully functional frame, then, as you would with your mind and soul, an attempt, a reasonably serious one, at making your body strong will ultimately enrich your life.

As we grow older, and definitely as we enter the Western workforce, we neglect any pursuits of a physical nature. We slip into a sedentary lifestyle with the excuse that we are too busy, or it's too cold, or too hot, or too dangerous to do any form of exercise. The industries that surround us too emphasise that you don't need to exercise too much. Thirty minutes a day is all. What lies.

In fact, there's now a discord between physical health and looking healthy. Medical science has come a long way. We can now improve our bodies without ever having to walk a single mile. As soon as things look like they're falling out of place, we can run to the nearest doctor and ask for cosmetic adjustments. Then run to the nearest fashion boutique and wear the slimmest, most fashionable clothing to match the medically shaped body. In today's world, what you see is not always what is. This particular affliction of trying to look good affects Western women more than it does the men. Women are more prone to undergoing bouts of starvation, or butchering under the surgeon's knife than get on a treadmill.

We've come full circle. From a time when working the farm, or soldiering for our survival was a daily back-breaking occupation. We now slip quietly into our vehicles in the morning, and spend all day sitting down in front of a computer terminal. Knowledge workers, we call ourselves. No wonder we can't do anything when we have a chance to. The more inactive your muscles are, the less desire and ability they have to do anything. The stronger they are, the more they want to move and become active. Use it, or lose it. How true.

It's unreasonable to expect that a weak frame can contribute positively to a mental attitude that is sharp and astute. After all, that brain is housed in this sluggishly moving body. It's also unreasonable to expect that your mental health, your outlook, our view of life, can be at its peak when you feel lethargic and tired.

It's definitely terminal to spend an entire existence sitting in front of a computer day-after-day, week-after-week, month-after-month and expect good health. That is, unless you do something about it.

There are 24 hours in a day. We sleep for 7 or 8 of them. Of the remaining 16 (or 17) we normally work for 8. Of the remaining 8 we will spend time doing peripheral work. Commuting. Preparing things. If you have children, most of that time is spent parenting. However, it's not impossible to find at least 1 or 2 hours in a day for yourself.

Priorities. For most Western people, this amounts to trying to get the most leisure as possible. Whatever spare hours are found can be spent in maximising leisure time. Every activity that's done contributes towards depositing towards this leisure account. Work is now seen as effort that's not really necessarily a good thing. Work is what we do, so that we can acquire more leisure.

So, what amount of time should you spend making sure that your body keeps up with your mind? That you are as physically keen as your mind and your spirit is? That you can continue to look good and feel good too? There are limits imposed by age of course, but for the most part, most of the limitations are imposed by our minds. It's a reality that as we get older we slow down and physically become weaker. More prone to accidents and age related diseases. However, physical activity can continue all the way till you draw your last breath.

30 minutes, three times a week, is clearly not enough. It's the mantra of many fitness programs and is entire garbage. 30 minutes daily is slightly better, but it has to be a quality 30 minutes of high impact physical exercise. But I believe that 1 hour daily, should be the required minimum. At 1 hour, the atrophic consequence of sitting at a desk all day is more likely to be negated. As time goes on, fitness levels will rise to the point where additional minutes of exercise can be earned during the 8-hour work shift.

Priorities and Motivation are the two key ingredients. Making physical fitness a priority is a requirement. If it's not, it's easily relegated to fifth place where it never reaches the top of the list. Motivation is that thing inside you that makes you really want to do it without being coaxed. You have a deep inner feeling of anticipation and can't wait to get to your activity. Motivation is necessary if fitness is to become a life goal. But you also really have to enjoy what you are doing. Playing a sport is one way of getting active. For those of us with children, we always sign them up for this sport or that sport, neglecting to sign ourselves up for anything. Running is a great sport, but too many adults fear it with no justification at all except for the fact that they have never really been taught how to run. They are trying to learn to run by watching and trying to imitate. It's like a non-swimmer jumping into a pool and hoping that if they flail their arms about like an Olympic swimmer, they too will move through the water with the ease of a dolphin.

As you become active, so too will your body shape itself to accommodate your passion for sport. It probably won't be instantaneous. It might even take years, but at the end of it all, you can look proudly at what you sculpted and be proud. And definitely, like a blacksmith folds layers and layers of steel, putting the blade back into the fire and folding it again and again to make the finest sword, what you forge out of the fires of sweat and tears will ultimately be a beautiful thing. And that beauty will shine from the inside out, unlike the beauty forged from the surgeons knife, or from the latest shoes and dresses.

Like a former employer once told me just before they let me go... Go out there and take life on!"

CSS Positioning IE vs Firefox/Mozilla

I've spent the past two days figuring out how to vertically align elements so that it would show up in Internet Explorer as well as Firefox. There are two methods that I'm going to post here, and they're not very pretty. But they've both worked.



In example 1, I had a set of images. Small images. I wanted to line them up vertically centered (middle) of a black strip. Here's what I wanted.

There are seven small images. I used the following CSS that worked for both IE7 and Firefox 2.0

#indexBanner {
clear: both;
width: 700px;
height: 90px;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
line-height: 90px;
background-color: black;
text-align: center;
font-size: 90px;
}

That sets up the banner that's going to hold the images. It's 700 pixels wide and 90 pixels high. It has no margins and no padding. I've also coloured it black. Now the interesting things. The line that reads:

text-align: center;

will make sure that the images are placed in the center of that DIV. That's right. They won't be placed left-to-right as would be normal. This is because, I wanted extra black space at both ends equally, and not all of it on the right side. Got it?

The next two lines that read:

line-height: 90px;
font-size: 90px;

are there to make IE happy. Basically, I have no text in that DIV, therefore IE will not align the images to the middle of the DIV. It will align them at the top. If I had text, this would be a different issue since I could use a vertical-align: middle; statement to align the text properly to the middle of the DIV and then the image would behave properly.

It's an IE thing.

Since the default font is about 10pt, the image ends up at the top. So, I made the height of a line of text equal to the height of the DIV. In addition, I made the font size the height of the DIV. Now IE will correctly align the image to the middle (vertically) of the DIV.

But we're not done yet, the images will still align to the top since we haven't told them to go to the middle, vertically. So we have a couple more things to do. We use the following to adjust the image positioning.

*>#indexBanner {
font-size: 12pt;
}

This fixes the problem with the font for other browsers. IE doesn't understand the *> directive, so it will ignore this line completely. And then:

#indexBanner img {
margin: 0 -15px;
padding: 0;
vertical-align: middle;
}

What this does is allow the image to align vertically. The vertical-align directive only works for inline elements, not block elements. The margin for each image is moved because IE has a habit of padding extra pixels around images. And removing the padding is a good precaution.

*>#indexBanner img {
margin: 0 -1px;
}

This last directive will fix margins for other browsers (Firefox). Even though the additional space that the browser puts is little, (about 2 pixels around which means 4 pixels between pictures) they look better when they're spaced tighter.

So, in your HTML, you just put img tags for each image between the div with an ID of indexBanner.

Here's the second solution...

I actually tried to replicate this in a different case. Here's the effect that I wanted.

In this example, you see a very simple, and common, web layout. We have a logo at the top left of a bar that could potentially contain some interesting image and a menu directly below it. Creating the backdrop is easy. It's positioning the LOGO, to the left and vertically in the middle that's problematic between browsers. Here's the CSS I used to make this work in IE7 and Firefox 2.x

#header {
clear: both;
width: 650px;
height: 77px;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
background: url('greenmarbly.jpg') repeat;
line-height: 77px;
font-size: 70px;
}

I'm sure you noticed the IE fix with the line-height and the font-size. Notice that the font-size is not the exact same height as the DIV that I'll create. I found that If I made the font-size the same width as the DIV, the DIV would actually grow bigger than 77 pixels. And only by experimenting with the font-size did I arrive at this size. Here's where the vertical alignment instructions are:

#header img {
margin-left: 20px;
vertical-align: middle;
}

Notice that the image will push itself 20 pixels away from the left margin. In Firefox, this would have worked with setting a padding width also, but IE won't respect it. And finally, the fix for the font size:

*>#header {
font-size: 10pt;
}

IE will ignore this instruction since it doesn't understand it. All other browsers will override the 70 pixel font size we gave this element earlier. And this code works for both IE and Firefox.

A couple of final points. The vertical-align instruction only works for inline elements. It does not work for block elements that's why we had to modify the img tag. Secondly, it helps if you have text in the DIV. If you have text, some of the IE work arounds are not necessary. Remember, images align themselves to text. So if there's no text, then the browser is free to do whatever it wants. So I actually cheated a bit. I put some text in the HTML in order for Firefox (which wouldn't obey these rules) to work properly. The HTML looks like this:

<div id="header">
<img src="myLogo" />
</div>

Notice the non-breaking space that I put at the end of the image declaration. This non-breaking space will be aligned properly vertically centered by Firefox and so the image will be aligned in the middle of it.

It's a strange world. I wish I didn't care about all these subtleties.

The Prayer

Dear God, I thank you that you have given me over forty years of life. I thank you for your graciousness and good health that I have been able to enjoy, and continue to enjoy. Most of all, I thank you for the loving company of good people. People who have cared for me all my life without whom I would not be able to enjoy living and continuing to learn.

Lord, I have not been the most gracious of people. In fact, I normally don't notice that you are there walking beside me. I care too much for my own pleasures and have a tendency to hurt others. Despite all this, you continue to love and watch over me and my family. No matter what the issues are and no matter how far I try to stray, you are always willing to pick me up when I fall.

Lord, I thank you for my wife and children. You alone know that I really don't deserve them and perhaps they don't deserve me. But you chose to give them to me. Perhaps this was your way of making sure that I was watched over and taken care of.

I acknowledge your presence and your wonder. I believe that you have always been there for me and continue to ensure that I don't make decisions that are too disastrous for me. For this I can never be thankful enough.

I ask that you continue to take care of me and watch over me. I know that I will continue to waver, but I understand your commitment to me and bow down to your authority over me. I also ask even more that you watch and take care of my loving wife and children. That they may never be distressed or know pain. I know that on this earthly world, that is almost an impossibility, but I would graciously ask that you teach them to understand what it is and how to deal with it. That they may emulate their mother in compassion and fortitude. That they may grow into adults who will contribute to the wealth of mankind and leave this world a better place than they found it.

In Jesus' name, your loving son who died for us all I pray.

Amen.