Monthly Archives: September 2024

AI Image Fails

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I use AI images to accompany roughly 18 to 19 out of 20 Daily-Ink posts. My general rule is that I’ll try one or two requests and pick from those. I don’t want to spend 10 or 15 minutes of my precious morning schedule to search for images, they are the side quest, my writing is the adventure.

However, it being the weekend, yesterday I had time to play… and yet I failed.

Here was my original request for my last blog post:

When that didn’t work, I got more and more detailed, even pausing the requests to ask Copilot (which uses DALL•E 3 to create images) if it knew what a waterpolo cap looked like. It described it perfectly… then I got it to reiterate my request before continuing. This is what I got:

But the caps still came out with helmet masks and at no point was the shooter facing the net. I finally gave up and cropped an image. Here is what I used, and then the full image:

Below are many of the fails. I recognize these are not common requests, and the images have some redeeming qualities, but there is still a way to go when it comes to AI text-to-image requests. So, when you see a less-than-perfect image added to my Daily-Ink posts, please recognize that I’m trying, but I’m not wasting time trying to get everything just right… I’d rather use that time to write, meditate, or exercise.

The past and the push

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When you hear great athletes talk about practice, they know what it means to push themselves. When they miss a shot, lose an easy opportunity, they don’t give up, they don’t negative self-talk, they double down and give more than they thought they could. When they are in a game and everything is on the line… there’s one more offensive rush, one more play to decide the game, they are 100% present with a singular focus.

I’m not a natural athlete, and like I said before, “…sometimes I could get in the zone. Sometimes the game slowed down for me and I could see more action around me. Sometimes I could see the play forming and feel the rhythm of the game. I didn’t have a switch I could turn on, I didn’t know what I could do to put myself in the zone. I didn’t have control of it.”

I wasn’t an athlete that could choose to get into that zone, it found me. And it might not have found me enough, but I have strong memories of those moments, I remember them and how powerful they were. But they are all in the past… and I find that hard. I want those moments again.

Perhaps I need to start archery again? Maybe I just need a regular workout buddy? I don’t know what will get me back to that, being someone who no longer does organized sports? What I do know is that I miss it. This isn’t about regret, it’s like nostalgia, yet different. It’s a yearning to feel the push, to feel the relentless drive, to be a reliable force in the pursuit of excellence.

It’s about feeling the push in the present.

Atomic Habits Lesson 3 – Make It Obvious

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Lesson 3 asks three questions:

  • What you will do?
  • When? And,
  • Where?

Developing good habits starts with obvious intentions. This works well as part of the 2 Minute Planning suggested in Lesson 2. 

Atomic Habits Lesson 3 – Make It Obvious

Lesson 4 will be shared on Monday, I’ll be taking the weekends off from these 10 lessons because they are being introduced to Inquiry Hub students on 10 consecutive school days.

Atomic Habits Lesson 2 – Two Minute Planning

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Creating Lesson 1 was a comedy of errors.

Version 1: I have Descript which adds captions, but I didn’t use it for my upload, despite knowing that I have a hearing impaired student at my school. That wouldn’t do.

Version 2: I added the captions, re-uploaded to YouTube, and only then noticed that the captions spelled James Clear’s last name as Clare. That wouldn’t do.

Version 3: I uploaded the 3rd version and noticed my cover title said ‘Identity based Goals’. The whole video is about Habits, not Goals. That wouldn’t do.

Version 4: Is live and good enough!

I’m going to focus more on just getting these done now, rather than changing minor imperfections. That said, I’m open to feedback.

Atomic Habits Lesson 2 – The Two Minute Rule.

This goes more specifically into Two Minute Planning. I’m not sure if this follows the true intention of James Clear’s two minute rule, but I think it works well for students to ritualize a good habit.

 

Atomic Habits Lesson 1 of 10

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I’ve had this ‘in the works‘ for a very long time. Here is lesson one of ten:

Lesson 1, ‘Identity Based Habits‘, is the first of 10 Lessons based on James Clear’s book ‘Atomic Habits’. It was created by Principal David Truss for Inquiry Hub Secondary Students.

I will share all 10 lessons here over the coming weeks. Atomic Habits is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and I wanted to share what I’ve learned with students at our school. These students get a lot more unstructured time than most high school students, and developing good habits about using that time well is something that can drastically improve a student’s effectiveness and output.

I hope to help guide our students to better productivity.

Put your own oxygen mask on first

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Arianna Huffington is 74 years old and she just recently started a new AI business. She started the Huffington Post at age 55 and sold it 6 years later for 315 million dollars. In this The Diary of a CEO podcast interview with Steven Bartlett she shares this gem of a story.

The moral of the story is simple: Leaders need to take care of themselves, and get enough sleep, in order to be at their best. She says, “All the science now makes it very clear that when we are depleted we are going to make bad decisions.”

Then quoting Jeff Bezos, “I sleep 8 hours a night… I’m judged by the quality of my decisions, not the quantity of my decisions.”

As the new school year begins, take this as a reminder to take care of yourself first, if you really want to take care of your staff and students. It’s not good enough to only exercise, and eat well, and get enough sleep when you are not busy. You owe it to yourself, those you serve, and your job, to treat yourself well. It’s not selfish to put on your oxygen mask first, it’s how you get enough air to take care of others.

Build good habits and take the time to care for yourself first, when you are busiest, and it will become very easy to do so all the time. You will benefit as a person, as a friend, as a partner, as a parent, as an employee, and as a leader. It starts with you taking care of you.

The Grind 2024

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My buddy Dave does the Grouse Grind once every year, close to his birthday. I did it with him a couple years ago, and back then we did it in just over an hour.

According to the website, “The Grouse Grind® is a 2.5-kilometre trail up the face of Grouse Mountain, commonly referred to as “Mother Nature’s Stairmaster”.”

Well, thanks to Dave pushing me, I just broke the 1 hour mark this year.

Dave did a bit faster than me. We took a 3 minute water break for my sake at the 1/2 way point and I had to slow down at the 3/4 mark. When I saw at this point that we were at 45 minutes in, I told Dave not to wait for me because I didn’t want to be the reason he didn’t break an hour.

So I finished at 59:52 and Dave made it to the top in 58:00. This climb is almost the same distance as our Coquitlam Crunch we do weekly but it’s 3 times the elevation, and takes us more than twice as long to the peak.

I’m not going to lie, nothing about this hour climb is fun. It’s gruelling from the time your heart rate spikes near the bottom and it is a push all the way to the top. But it feels great to know that we can still push ourselves to this level, and to actually do it faster than last time is an accomplishment.

That said, I’m happy to put off doing it again for another year. We’ll squeeze in another 40 Crunch climbs in before then.

Thanks for the push Dave, I expect the same next year.

Pre-game Blahs

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School starts on Tuesday. The past couple weeks have been building up, and up, and the hype is real. I’m getting excited about the year ahead. I want great things for my school community, and I’m looking forward to a wonderful year.

But it’s still a couple days away and the hype-up has been too long. Today I just feel drained. I’m taking a rest day on my workouts after pushing hard for two days and having a hard grind of a walk scheduled for tomorrow morning. I have a few errands to do, (I’m sitting in my car writing this after doing one of them now), and honestly I just feel blah.

I know this will change and the excitement will hit me again starting tomorrow night and well into the day Tuesday, but I’m just going to accept today as a low-energy, low productivity day. I’ll just let the blahs play themselves out.