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Well, I always knew that I’m just not that interested in being a mechanic. It just never interested me that much. I just drove the car, and on occassion do the extremely simple stuff like change wiper blades, refill the windshield washer fluid, replace light bulb, fill up gas

You could split the time pretty evenly, about 45 minutes trying to figure out how to pull out the damn thing, and another 45 minutes figuring out how to put it back into its cage. And OMG, the layout designers for the car really should be congratulated by mechanics all around the world. After all, it is them who made the location of these bulbs so hardly accessible and impossible for a regular joe like me to change, that all the mechanics can do this for $40 – $80 an hour

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*Sigh* … it looks like the beginning of one of those days… Let’s start this rant session shall we.

I’ve had this annoying cough for almost a week and a half now. It seemed like I was getting better last week, but it just got worse. My son and I went to the doctor on Friday (my son also had the cough), and the doctor prescribed us some medicine that was supposed to help make us drowsy at night to sleep better. Well, the medicine for my son seems to be working, as he’s been sleeping well the last few days, but mine just doesn’t help. Instead of sleeping well, the last 3 days, I’ve been coughing all night. My chest and stomach hurt from too much coughing, and last night was the worst. I went in to bed at 11, woke up at 12 coughing, tried to sleep at 12.30, woke up at 1 coughing, and repeat the pattern until about 4 before I could get a bit of sleep. The alarm went off at 6, contemplated calling the day off, but decided to go to work anyway.

On the GO train, the coach that arrived turned out to be the disabled coach, which had a lot less seats on the main deck, so being Monday and all, no seats were available. What’s annoying about this? Well, normally the coach where I get on is a normal coach, and I can get seats and have a bit of a nap on the way to work. So, I had so stand all the way for about 25 minutes … or so I thought. 5 minutes before we arrived at Union, the train stopped. We were informed that there were signal problems at Union, and people were working on it. We were stranded for about 40 minutes !!! In between, a lady fainted (note to everyone: eat your breakfast, and don’t put on too much layers of clothing in a packed environment with little air circulation), and at the end many people simultaneously talked on their cells informing employers about the wonders of a GO transit commute. My knees and feet were hurting, and I was really cranky, but tried to understand that technical problems occur on trains.

When we finally got to Union, the door barely opened, when this girl just cut in front of me, seemingly in a rush to go nowhere!!! since in front of me there was a jam of people trying to get out. I understand people cutting off others when there’s a clear passage going somewhere in front of the other person, but this was a slow moving line for crying out loud, what could you do but annoy the heck out of me by doing this? It’s not like you’re gonna get to the office 5 minutes faster or anything, and everyone’s at least 30 minutes late to wherever they were going. Argh, don’t know how that person’s brain was working.

Final straw this morning, I was going to the washroom when I saw a fellow lady worker trying to find her card to get in our building. She saw me, and just like calling a waiter, lifted her finger to notify me to open the door from inside for her. Being a gentlemen, I smiled and pushed the button to open the door. She tried opening the door from outside, but having so many bags on her hand, fumbled at it. I helped her push the door open, and lo and behold… she walked past me, no thank you, no good morning and no gesture whatsoever. Oh my goodness, what is this world becoming? I don’t expect to be paid or anything, but was that rude or what? I looked her name up in the address book, and she was supposed to be a missions critical senior consultant. I don’t know how you could meet clients with such an attitude and expect them to work with you. Felt like just confronting her with a ‘hey! where’s your manners?’, but decided to hold my peace.

Hope everybody else’s week has a better beginning than mine.

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Ever notice how quickly we get tired these days? Ever notice how we long for a nice vacation, even though we just took one a couple weeks ago? Ever notice how cranky, confrontational and unfriendly people seem in our daily lives? Ever notice that there seems to be tons of depressed, crazy and suicidal people in today’s society?

Welcome to the world of information overload. Although there are many reasons for those situations I mentioned above, I would suggest that one common reason in all of those is the abundance (and sometime too much) of information that people have to deal with in their daily lives.

First, let me define what I think ‘information overload’ is: It’s the flow of information, that comes way too fast and furious, causing us to take new information before we’ve had the time and chance to think about or use the previous information.

These are the days of instant solutions, instant news, instant food; people demand express availability of almost everything, including information, and that’s why there’s so much information flying around the world. People have enough problems to solve in life, and to solve problems, sometimes we need information. The overload of information just complicates the solution. It gives us too many choices to think about and how to best solve the problem quickly.

Let’s examine a couple examples from my morning trip to the office:
- I get off my shuttle ride, and in front of me are 5 or 6 free publications, including 2 newspapers, condo/home buying guides, employment newspapers, car buying/selling publications, training guides, and you know what? They’re all free to grab.
- On the train, advertisements galore, printed ads, electronic display ads, people reading newspapers, people listening to the radio, people listening to music, people using laptops to view their work … If you look outside, billboards, cars with printed ads, buildings with advertisements …
- Off the train, vendors selling food, people promoting a cause all over the station, advertisements on the floor, train display on the LCD monitors above.
- Walking to the office, the usual ads on the walls, people rushing to work all over the place, courier vans parked all over the place. I noted this because I’ve seen many courier vans get tickets for parking illegally in front of office buildings downtown. Information has to be delivered on time you know…

That’s within an hour of me leaving my house, can you imagine how much information we’re taking in a day? That’s why our mind is churning almost 16 hours a day (even more because sometimes I still think while I try sleep, causing me to lose many hours of sleep). Isn’t it any wonder that we’re stressed out all the time? Trying to solve problems, and yet the information that’s supposed to help us solve our problems just adds to what we have to process in our minds.

I’m bringing this up, because I notice that I’m quite confused as what I want to do in regarding to my income. I know that someday I would like to have my own business, and yet when I think about what I have to do, I just feel hopelessly overwhelmed. The information that I have to go through is just enormous in size. What kind of business to start, who I need to deal with, what I need to know, etc. etc. My first instinct as an IT guy would be the internet, and we all know how much information there is out there; filtering the information becomes a priority. Ditto with books, there are tons of authors out there, tons of books, and I need to research them first, which brings me back to the internet, and around the circle I go.

In this day and age, I do not believe that the ‘traditional’ vacation of 2 weeks/3 weeks out of the year works anymore. People need time off monthly, even weekly from the world. We need to take a break from the fast paced life we live in, time to process the information we have, relax and make good decisions.

I know it’s hard to just shunt out the world every now and then, heck it’s even hard to stay still in one place for a couple of minutes. And I know this, because I’m one guy who can’t stand doing nothing; I’m always doing something, checking email, browsing the web, going out on weekends. Sitting down in front of a fireplace and listening to music just isn’t me. And yet, I know that if I don’t take time off every once in awhile, I’ll be overwhelmed by this abundance of information around me.

That’s why for the last few weeks, I’ve resisted getting the free newspapers on the way to work, so I can relax, gather my thoughts and reflect on the train. It’s hard to do, because even if I’m sitting still, my mind still wanders around !!! But I suggest you try do this, it’ll keep your mind from being overloaded.

I’ll end this long post with 2 verses from the Bible:
Matthew 11:28
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

Psalm 46:10a
“Be still and know that I am God;”

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