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I heard an ad for a new book entitled “Peaks and Valleys” by Dr. Spencer Johnson, the same guy who wrote “Who Moved My Cheese?”.

I haven’t read the book, nor did the ad make me want to read the book. But the ad did get me to think about its description of the book’s results: how to “have more peaks and fewer valleys” in your life.

I can somewhat agree with the other descriptive points: “get out of a valley sooner” and “stay on a peak longer”. But more peaks and fewer valleys? Every peak requires a valley, and every valley requires a peak. You can’t have more peaks than valleys, nor can you have more valleys than peaks.

Well, I suppose that, depending on where you start and where you end, you can have one more of one than the other, but the difference can be no more than one. You can’t have many more peaks than valleys.

And staying on a peak longer just implies that you aren’t moving. You can loiter at the peak I suppose. Stay on a peak longer – if you’re happy where you are, then just don’t do anything different, and you’ll stay on that peak.

But these self-help/motivational-type books don’t want you to stay still – you need to go go go do do do be be be. So how do you stay on a peak longer while still moving?

To me, it looks like a plateau. But no one in that industry likes to have people plateau. “If you’re not advancing, you’re declining” or “if you’re not improving, you’re regressing”. I like plateaus though – they’re safer. You’re less likely to fall off a plateau than a peak, and the view from there is just as good.

The only way I see to have more peaks and fewer valleys while not plateauing is to have one big incline, like this:

But then you don’t really have a peak, since you never get to the top. And you never get to rest. And if you slip, it’s a long fall back all the way to the bottom with no valley to catch you.

“Why do you look with envy, O mountains with many peaks,At the mountain which God has desired for His abode?Surely the LORD will dwell there forever.”
– Psalm 68:16

I read an article about how a family went one month without spending any money.  It was more of an experiment or challenge than anything else.  It was not a viable long-term lifestyle, as it depended heavily on favors and free Costco samples.  But it did highlight what were needs and what were wants in that particular family.

The idea of not spending any money might appeal to many of you.  Go ahead and eliminate wasteful spending, or frivolous spending, but don’t aim for zero spending. 

If everyone stopped buying things for a month, what would that do to the economy?  You might be better off temporarily, but in the long run it would make things worse for everyone.  Yes, you should not spend excessively.  Yes, you should be thrifty when possible.  But other people’s livelihoods depend on your spending. 

Would you want everyone to boycott your business?  Then don’t boycott everyone else’s businesses.

“these he gathered together with the workmen of similar trades, and said, “Men, you know that our prosperity depends upon this business.”
– Acts 19:25

In a shameless spoof of MckMama’s Not Me Monday (via Four Now’s Not Me Monday), I am posting a Not Mine Monday. I am calling it Part 1 because I am planning on making this a regular somewhat occasional feature.

• My child did not come to the edge of his bed as I was about to finish changing the sheets and draw on the new clean sheets with a crayon. He would not do that, since he knows that crayons are for paper only.
• My child did not take the infant’s Boppy, put it around his own neck, and run around pretending to be wearing a life jacket in the water. He uses things only for their intended purposes.
• My child did not threaten to stay up until midnight because he was unhappy with our choice of bedtime for him. And I most certainly did not reply that he could stay up as late as he wanted as long as he was quiet and stayed in bed. That was not us – bedtime is always a smooth, orderly, and on-time process in our house.

But if our children did do those things, we would still love them.

Okay, I’ll throw a Not Me in here too: I did not use the infant’s burp cloth to wipe up the floor when his spit-up landed there. And I did not absent-mindedly wipe the infant’s face with that same part of the burp cloth that wiped the floor. Only sterile products go near the baby. If I had been holding the baby at that time, I would have thrown the burpey (burpee?) in the wash and gotten a new one. And cleaned the floor with a floor-cleaning thingy.

“and the priest shall take holy water in an earthenware vessel; and he shall take some of the dust that is on the floor of the tabernacle and put it into the water.”
– Numbers 5:17

We were about 5 minutes into a 45-minute van ride with the family, and the 5-year-old wanted to know some math answers.

“What’s 100 plus 100?”
Sometimes we ask him to figure out the answer, sometime we try to explain how it works, but for some reason this time I decided just to answer him.
“200”
“What’s 200 plus 200?”
“400”
“What’s ” (at this point I knew that my training in base-2 numbers would come in handy. As a software engineer, I have 2-to-the-X down pretty well) “400 plus 400?”
“800”

(Condensing the story here. When we made it to 12,800, I decided to call it “128-hundred” for quicker calculation and pronunciation, and I continued that way.)

“What’s 512-hundred plus 512-hundred?”
“1,024-hundred”
“What’s 1…what’s 1 hundred…what’s that number?”
“One thousand twenty four hundred”
“What’s that number plus that number?”
“2,048-hundred”

We continued like that, with his question of “What’s that plus that?” the rest of the way. Then we got to “65536-hundred”. After he asked me what that plus that was for 65535-hundred, I gave up. Mainly because I have 2^X memorized for X from 0 to 16, but this answer was 2¹⁷, so I would have to think about it.

I replied with “I don’t know.”  I expected that he would be disappointed, but he was rather pleased.  “I can count higher than you!” he said, with a grin on his face.

I let him enjoy his victory.

Last night on The Biggest Loser, they were getting quite ridiculous with the sponsorship censorship.

They are obsessed with blurring-out any logos, slogans, or names of brands that are not approved to be on the show.  If someone is wearing shoes that the show doesn’t want to be seen, then those shoes are blurred for the show, so that you can’t tell what brand they are.

If someone, anyone at all whether foreground or background, is wearing a shirt with a logo that is not okay, then it is blurred.  If they are showing a segment from inside someone’s house, you’ll see pictures on the wall – but some of the pictures will be blurred.

I don’t know if they have signed some contracts with corporate sponsors that dictate that they have to remove any competitors from the show.  That is a pretty strict contract, if that’s what they are enforcing, so I hope they are getting some good money for the effort that they have to make.

Or another reason could be that they are hoping to extort extract some money from companies. “We have a very popular show, but your products aren’t being shown because you’re not paying us any money.” or something like that.  Inadvertent product placement would be a legitimate concern on a reality TV show, because the average people that appear on the show don’t necessarily know or care with which companies the show has agreements. The people just wear or use what they normally do.

If you’ve seen The Biggest Loser lately, you are very aware that product placement matters a lot to them. The show has at least one very obvious product placement part of the show. It’s meant to appear as just another segment of the show, but we can instantly tell when a product-placement segment is beginning. They’re not fooling anyone.

The reason for this post was a certain fuzzing-out that occurred in yesterday’s episode. When Sione was going home, they showed the vehicle that was driving him to his house. They fuzzed the logo (or badge) in the middle of the vehicle’s grill, ostensibly to hide what brand of vehicle it was.

But it was a Cadillac Escalade!

Just hiding the logo on any Cadillac made in the last few years will have no effect, because their grills and overall shapes are distinctive. The show fooled no one.

Plus, they forgot to mask the word “Escalade” that was visible on the side of the SUV.

Cadillac has done a good job in designing the exterior of their vehicles. I can think of some vehicles, mainly sedans, that most people would not be able to identify without their badges. But Cadillacs do not fall into that category.

For that reason, I think TBL is going by some letter-of-the-law contract, because it is pointless to disguise only the Cadillac badge on an Escalade.

On a somewhat related note to my last post – 12:01 is not the start of the day. The new day starts right at midnight, 12:00.

I heard an ad recently that something was going on sale as soon as possible on such-and-such a day, and the ad specifically said 12:01 AM. But what day is it between 12:00 and 12:01? If the current time is half a second after midnight, isn’t that the first part of the day? What about a quarter of a second? You could keep going and going and the only way to have a definitive answer is to say exactly 12:00, or 00:00 for our military friends.

And since 12:00 is midnight, it must be the start of the new day (i.e. it’s early, not late) and must be AM, not PM.  Unless you use the military time of 24:00, in which case midnight is the end of the day.

I usually try to file my taxes in the middle part of the tax season, sometime between late February and mid March.  I don’t want the stress of last-second tax filing.  This year, due to several factors such as a new baby, this blog, and other projects, I found it was late March before I began doing my taxes.

My normal method is to start my taxes when I get my W-2, in early February.  I do most of it then, let it sit for a week or two, and then finish it.  I find that if I forget about it for that week or two, then it is easier to see things I missed or did wrong the first time.

My goal this year, after starting late, was to finish them while it was still March.  I saw I should be getting a refund, so I wanted to get that sooner rather than later.  Next year, I hope to owe a little bit, so I may plan to finish the taxes in March, but not file until April.

Anyway, it wasn’t until April 1st that I found the last two documents that I needed.  I thought that was an appropriate day to file the returns, as I could them make some comment about how the government tax policy is a joke or something.  I clicked the e-file button at about 5 minutes to midnight.  Being on dial-up, my computer took 6 minutes to file.  So my taxes were officially submitted at 12:01 on April 2nd.  Rats.

“God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day. ”
– Genesis 1:8