I was reading an online discussion about a rumored video recorder from Apple when I came across a very interesting reply to a comment:

“Something friends with PVRs have told me is they ended up watching a lot less TV once they started using one .”

“That is *definitely* not the case in my house. Truth be told, we probably watch about the same amount of TV we always did, if not more, and we watch for the same reason we always did - it’s ‘down time’. We’re relaxing in the living room after dinner and want a couple of hours of mindless entrainment before bedtime.”

As I read this I was really struck by the sentence, “it’s ‘down time’. We’re relaxing in the living room after dinner and want a couple of hours of mindless entrainment before bedtime.”

After having a digital video recorder for the better part of 6 months now I would have to say I agree; my wife and I don’t watch less TV, we just spend more time watching TV we normally wouldn’t be able to see due to our schedules.

But what really struck me is the “mindless entertainment” part of the comment. The author is correct, 90% of the TV we watch is totally mindless. It’s so seldom that we turn off the TV, look at each other and say, “Gee, we really learned something new!”

It’s just what we do after dinner. And by “we” I mean the collective “we”. The behavior of sitting on the couch after dinner and watching TV is the modus operandi of almost every friend, family member, colleague and co-worker I have.

It’s the default behaviour of a lot of people in America today.

Just last night I was on the couch reading a book while my wife had the television on. I found it increasingly difficult to keep my attention turned toward my book. The Pavlovian response of paying attention to a TV that’s on was working hard to get the better of me!

So what’s the answer? The knee-jerk easy answer is to simply turn off the TV. But is that really the best answer? There are still programs I find interesting, informative, and humorous. I don’t want to cut TV out of my life completely - and I think that’s true for most of us who are addicted (and we shouldn’t kid ourselves, it’s an addiction).

Just like alcohol, I think television is fine in moderation, but it’s easy to over-do and the ramifications of overindulgence are not as clear as with alcohol. For me the biggest is the loss of time to do what I want to do with my time. There are only a finite number of hours we’re on this earth, and we should consider the time we have precious, we shouldn’t be so quick to squander it on television.

I think that the answer is to be more aware of the television I do consume and to be much more aware of the time I give to watching television. I don’t know about you, but my “to do” list for life is longer than I probably have time for even if I completely cut out television. It doesn’t make any sense to give up more of the long-term goals I want to accomplish by spending the limited time I have in front of the “boob tube.”

Almost exactly one year ago I first wrote about Debbie Lafave in an article entitled “Double standards”. In the past twelve months that article - and the accompanying pictures of Ms. Lafave - has been one of the most visited articles (and pictures) on this web site.

It seems that people can’t get enough of Debbie and why not? She’s cute and you know she’ll put out, but I think the reason most people can’t get enough is because they don’t understand what’s going on with this story.

And people want to try to understand why, with our puritanical, mixed-up views on sex, an attractive older woman would solicit sex from an under age male. It’s not supposed to work that way according to society! It’s a double standard, and it’s really causing people to be interested in this story.

See, if Debbie had a penis and was caught having sex with a student (boy or girl) the book would have already been thrown and she would have been locked away for a long time.

Instead Ms. Lafave will get three years of house arrest and seven years of probation. She will also be registered as a sex-offender, probably the harshest part of her punishment.

This sentence is so light as to almost not be a punishment. It’s a double standard.

In this country we have a terribly mixed up sense of what is and what isn’t acceptable. Is sex with a minor a bad thing or a not-so-bad thing? It depends. Does it depend on the minor or the relationship or the circumstances of the sex? No, not really. It appears that it depends more on whether the older party to the sex is a man or a woman.

Maybe it’s time for the United States of America and it’s people to think long and hard about situations like this. And, maybe it’s time we look more towards Europe for guidance.

P.T. Barnum was right, there is a sucker born every minute. Actually I think there are a few thousand suckers born every minute thanks to modern technology and the Internet.

A few days ago I received a slick mailer for a MLM program called “MoneywayZ” and it intrigued me because it said absolutely nothing about how you could make money with their program, only that you could make a lot of money doing it.

So I decided to search about on the Internet to see if I could find anything out about this program; much to my surprise I wasn’t able to easily find anything out about this MLM scheme. I found a lot of links to other people who were promoting it, and I found a lot of very similarly written come-ons posted to various newsgroups, but I didn’t find one person saying it was the “real deal” or calling it out as a scam. I thought that was very odd.

In searching for this particular program I ran across a myriad of other MLM program web sites out on the Internet. The thing that struck me most about almost every MLM program out there is that it promotes itself as requiring no selling whatsoever. Almost each and every program I looked at insisted that once I enrolled in their program the system would just start working for me and start generating income while I slept!

And no program I looked at save one mentioned anything about how exactly all of this money (with no selling required) was to be generated. The one lone MLM program I saw was upfront about it’s scheme; as a prospect you buy in for almost $4,000 and then you are in their system. When (or if) someone else signs up using your code and pays their almost-four-thousand-dollar fee to join the MLM program you receive a huge commission.

Sounds great, except I couldn’t actually find any other products or services being sold. So it sounded like a very elaborate pyramid scheme to me. I’m sure the program does just enough to be legitimate and keeps itself just the right side of legal.

I think it’s for this very reason I’m so turned off by the concept of multi-level-marketing programs. They have all abandoned the idea of requiring you to have (or learn) some sales and marketing skills, and they all scream, “NO SELLING REQUIRED” in a huge, bold font on their web sites. The focus is now so much on recruiting and driving your “lines” that all pretense of selling and marketing has been swept under the rug.

I know most people are intimidated by the thought of “selling” but I think that this is a disservice to people because they will otherwise have to “sell” at some point when they join a MLM program. If they never sell they’ll end up getting out what they put in to the program – which is just about nothing – and they’ll wonder why they failed.

Where is the market for an honest MLM program? There has to be a large audience willing to join a program that is upfront and says, “Yeah, you have to sell and market yourself and this program to be successful.”

Maybe such a program is out there, but it’s being masked by all of the MLM programs that leave me feeling dirty when I read their come-on pitch.

Sometimes joy comes from unexpected places. Last week my sister sent an email out requesting help for a charitable organization with which she’s affiliated. It’s a free pantry and they are trying to organize a toy drive to provide toys for Christmas to the under privileged children of the families that are helped by the free pantry. They decided that it would be wonderful to be able to give each child something of their own to open this holiday season.

I thought it was a very nice idea and something to which my wife and I wanted to donate. Because I have a busy schedule I thought I would just write a check and let either my sister or one of the other volunteers pick up toys, but the more I got to thinking about it I thought it would be a nice gesture to actually go and buy toys myself. So my wife and I went toy shopping today.

I have to say that it was some of the most fun we’ve had in a long time. Once we got to the store and started going down the toy aisle we turned into kids, reaching out for toys and things we thought would be great for the kids. The time flew by and before we knew it an hour had passed and our shopping cart was literally overflowing with toys. We both had to keep our hands on top of the load as we slowly wheeled it to the checkout lines.

It was so powerful to get excited about these toys and to try to see through the childrens’ eyes to capture the excitement we can only hope they have this Christmas. It also was a powerful reminder that we don’t do enough throughout the year to help others. It’s so easy to let the holidays get us caught up with “good cheer” while the rest of the year our “holiday spirit” languishes in the hustle-and-bustle of the daily grind. It really made me take pause today to think about how I can keep myself more motivated throughout the year to help others and not just get “in the mood” during the holidays.

Something as simple as buying these toys made me stop and realize how fortunate my wife and I really are; and it made us realize that we need to take a more active role during the rest of the year to help others too.

I had the TV on and Geraldo’s show “Geraldo At Large” was on. He reeks of being an alarmist, ready to do anything for a rating, and he still has that slimy daytime-talk-show-host feel about him in general. I just felt intellectually dirty watching his show. He obviously panders to the lowest common denominator and it just insults my intelligence. I can’t imagine how people can enjoy watching his brand of “entertainment” (I can’t bring myself to call it news, not even putting it in double-quotes).

If you use technology at work, chances are high you will hear something quite often from your IT staff. Something that sounds vaguely like, “…make sure you backup your important work…”

IT people - of which I am one - like to say things like this. It’s because it indemnifies us when we have to tell you that it’s not normal for your computer’s hard drive to sound like it’s grinding coffee beans. It’s not normal at all! It’s likely the sound of your data being scrubbed into oblivion by the spinning electronic bits inside.

We like to lecture, “If you had backed up your data this would be no big deal.” And we cluck our tongues at the idea that backing up is “just too difficult” to do on a regular basis. “That’s no excuse,” we retort, “It’s a necessary responsibility of using technology!”

And the dirty, dirty secret that almost 99.6% of all IT people have is this; they seldom backup their own important files. And by seldom I mean never.

And do you know why? Because backing up files is difficult, boring and generally - to borrow a non technical term - not “sexy”. Who wants to stay home and make sure their backup runs successfully? No one, that’s who!

And that brings me to the point of this message. After an almost three months long hiatus - caused by a hard drive failure and no recent backup - my web site is once again functional. I’m finally back on-line and can once again write about what’s on my mind. I’m hoping my audience (of perhaps 7 people) will at this point rejoice.

I can say with some experience now; if you don’t backup your data on a regular basis you’re just begging for trouble. I wasn’t and trouble certainly had no problem finding my server.

So please make sure you actually heed your local IT professional’s advice to “backup often” and you have my permission to feel smug and superior on the inside with the knowledge that he probably doesn’t follow his own advice!