Category Archives: Daily-Ink

Disengaged from the socials

It has been a slow process, but I’ve really disengaged from interactions on social media. It has become a one-way transmission tool for my daily blog, and not much else. Well, other than 30 minutes of TikTok that I watch instead of TV, but that’s entertainment rather than engagement. My only social media comments tend to be responses made to my posts about my blog.

I think the disengagement started with US political news dominating everything a few years back. I got fed up watching post after post that had no real connection to me as a Canadian, but still angered and upset me. I got tired of the childish anger and upset. Then came the pandemic, and more (digital) yelling and screaming about how to handle it… with healthy doses of ignorance and bickering about the science. But this fighting isn’t between professionals and real experts, it’s between doctors/scientists and ‘armchair experts’ that demonstrates how expert they are at spewing stupidity and ignorance.

Between politics and pandemic, I’m really done engaging on social media much. That said, these topics still reach me, and I still find myself talking about them here on my blog. Now there is a Canadian election, but I tend not to discuss who I’m voting for and why. Instead, I prefer to focus on encouraging people to get out and vote. I think it’s our duty as citizens to exercise our right to vote, and even want to see tax related fines for those that don’t.

I might be disengaged from social media. I may not like the news that I see. But I believe we should all be appreciative and respectful of living in a democracy, and that we should participate in a democracy if we want to keep it. If we value having a voice, we should use it in a vote… before worrying about what that voice should be saying on social media.

First Day of School

I’m genuinely excited about the year ahead. I know things are far from ‘back to normal’. I know safety is still a primary concern, and we’ll be wearing masks for quite some time yet. I know there will be unexpected challenges that come our way…

But the first day of a school year always holds so much promise! There is so much potential for us to do awesome things, and to watch our students shine. It’s an opportunity to look forward knowing that as educators we make a difference in people’s lives.

“With great responsibility comes great power”… that’s the reverse of the Spiderman quote, “With great power comes great responsibility”, and a teacher, John Sarte at Inquiry Hub, uses this to explain to students that while we give them a lot of time to work independently (a lot of responsibility) that comes with a lot of power. This is something that teachers understand, because they are given the great responsibility to teach, and they have tremendous power over what that experience looks like.

And collectively we have so much power over what the year ahead looks like… Let’s keep our optimism up, and make this school year exciting, engaging, and full of meaningful learning for everyone (teachers and students alike).

Future Tech: Prescription Glasses Metaphor

It’s the early 2030’s and you are walking downtown, heading to a specialist appointment. You don’t know where the office is, but you aren’t looking at a map on your phone. You haven’t done that in a few years. No, instead, you are looking through a contact lens that is like a heads-up display giving you augmented reality directions. There is simultaneously an arrow flashing 3 times in your view, showing you that you need to turn right in 15 meters, and a haptic vibration from an implant in your right elbow. The vibration you feel in your elbow has a pattern of long-short-short, which you have set to let you know is a map direction.

Had the vibration been in both elbows with a short-short pause short-short vibration, then you would know that it was a phone call from one of your chosen favourites, and your heads-up display would have shown you the name and/or photo. You have it set so that you need to look down and right to see the name and face of the person calling, but it could have been set to come up right into your line of sight. If the call was from an unknown number, you would not even have been bothered. Instead the call would have been answered by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant that (for voice phone calls) sounds like you, but with a decision tree to decide if the call is worth bugging you, leaving you a message for later, or even blocking the call if it determines it is spam. Since you are just walking, it might have offered you a text version of the message on an augmented display, but if you were in the specialist’s office, the AI would have waited until your appointment was over to notify you of a message.

You arrive at the specialist’s office and because you connected on LinkedIn, your AI has identified the secretary from her profile picture, and her name pops up above her head so that you can greet her appropriately. You wave your hand over a scanner, stare briefly at a ‘Yes’ box to indicate that you want to share your personal medical information, and you are done signing in. Because this is a medical specialist, that data includes the last year’s worth of bio information like heart rate, blood-sugar levels, and even blood pressure. A small implant collects this data in a just slightly more sophisticated way than the current apple watch. If the doctor didn’t want to run some specific tests on you, all this would have been done remotely, with the Zoom call actually happening through your contact  lenses and an implant in your ear. To get around the fact that you don’t have a camera on your face, the person you are talking to sees a perfect rendition of your face, and even if you were watching, you wouldn’t know that is wasn’t actually you. It even uses your voice intonation to help determine the emphasis on facial expressions, so if you said the same thing twice, it would look subtly different, rather than robotic.

Is this a future you want? Because it’s coming… and you will embrace it. You will participate in it. Because to not do so, would be to have a disadvantage.

When my youngest daughter was 9, we took a trip to England and France. In Paris we went to the Eiffel Tower, and it was there that we learned our daughter needed glasses. We had just come back from China, where we had been living for 2 years, and we hadn’t had eye exams in almost 3 years. We got to the top of the tower and my wife started pointing out things to look at, and my daughter couldn’t see any of them. At 9, she didn’t know that she couldn’t see well. She thought everyone saw the way she did. Distant hills were supposed to be blurry. What about street and store signs? Who needed to see those, they were in Chinese anyway, and we couldn’t read them. Once we returned home, we went to the optometrist and our daughter has worn glasses or contacts ever since.

The future I shared above is a future with a metaphorical 30/20 vision. It is the ability to see and feel things that people today can not see or feel without augmentation… and this will be the new version of 20/20 vision. The same way that my daughter was disadvantaged without her glasses, any person not augmenting their lives with technology will be disadvantaged compared to those around them. They will be less connected, less informed, less able to see. It would be like my daughter realizing that she couldn’t see like everyone else, and still deciding not to get glasses. Augmented reality will be the prescription glasses of the future, and you can choose to use the prescription, or stay in the dark.

Mind occupied

Yes, it’s the long weekend before school starts, and I should be resting up for what promises to be a challenging year… but I’m not able to let my thoughts of the days to come out of my mind. I’ll be going into work today, and making sure that everything I need to do the first couple days goes seamlessly. I know there will be distractions. I know there will be a lot of conversations and connections that will take time. I know that there are new members to the team that I’ll need to support, and that need to know how easy it is to get support. And ultimately, I know that no amount of planning will make the coming days go exactly as planned.

That’s why I’m going in today. I want the students first visit to the school this year to be something that makes them feel welcome. I want my first staff meeting to demonstrate that I was prepared and ready to support my staff. I want to be ready in such a way that when unexpected interruptions to my plans happen, things can still go smoothly.

I could sit at home and think about work all day today and tomorrow, or I can go to work, fell like I’ve fully prepared myself, then take tomorrow completely off. If my mind is going to be occupied with work, I might as well use my time effectively.

Keeping the IKEA streak alive

It’s not a streak to brag about. Every time I build IKEA furniture I do something wrong. Tonight I put a piece on backwards and taking it off took much longer than putting it on. Added to that, a cheap plastic fastener that holds one of the shelves together broke, and another trip to IKEA will need to happen. Fortunately, I had a lot of good help from my daughter and wife, and it was my wife that caught the mistake before I went to far ahead.

https://twitter.com/datruss/status/1434409327616421889?s=21

That may not be a steak that I’m too proud of, but here I am at midnight making sure that my steak of daily blogging stays in tact… something positive to go to bed thinking about. I hope to break the bad IKEA streak soon, but keep my Daily Ink streak going!

Lesson not learned

In February I broke my bow. I carelessly shot it without an arrow in it. When you dry shoot a compound bow, the force that usually goes to push the arrow forward ends up reverberating up the strings and the cams get the full brunt of the force. It sounds like a gunshot as the string gets stretched to great tension and breaks. I know this sound well because yesterday I heard it (and felt it) again.

Two days ago I planned to shoot after work. I had a dental cleaning then went back to shoot in my empty gym. But when I got back to work I kept working until almost 7pm and got too hungry to stay and shoot. At my dental cleaning I found out I had lost a small filling and was able to book another appointment yesterday.

So yesterday before my late appointment, I got my ‘to do’ list done at work and raced to squeeze in some archery before the appointment. I was going to have to rush to get a scoring round in. Rushing was a bad idea. I didn’t do my ritual setup when I took the bow out of the case. So I got to the shooting line and realized that I had not adjusted my sight scope, something usual done well before this point.

Instead of stepping away from the shooting line, to do my setup, I stood there and made the adjustment. At this point my usual shooting procedure was completely broken. I made the adjustment, then fired my bow, in the rush I was in, to get a scoring round in.

Bang, ow. I instantly knew my mistake.

I’ll go to the archery store this weekend to see if my bow cams are salvageable or not. If they aren’t, I know the lower cam is not available to be replaced… it’s the same brand and model as my old bow, not made anymore. If I have to buy a new bow, I’ll be sure to buy one that has been dry shot tested, some of the newer bows don’t explode when you make this mistake.

Both times I did this, I was in a rush and careless. Both times I have reminded myself that I’m still a rookie. But most archers don’t make this mistake, and even less make it twice. It’s an expensive lesson that I hope I have finally learned.

A quick thought on the new school year

For a large number of us the new school year brings excitement and possibilities. There is so much potential in a new school year, so many future opportunities to learn and grow.

It’s just good to remember that this is also a time of great anxiety and nervousness for some students. It’s a time of unknowns, and unfamiliarity, and fear.

It’s easy to get lost in the enthusiasm of students who are excited, and while this is wonderful and fully encouraged… remember that someone hesitant to join in an activity isn’t necessarily being difficult or noncompliant. Sometimes just coming to school is all the effort they can give.

We don’t always know what a kid is capable of, or what a kid needs, until we get to know the kid. And for some kids, it takes a while to get there… time they deserve to be given. A school year is a marathon rather than a sprint. Let’s make sure we give the slow starters the time, encouragement, care, and support they need to get to the finish line. Because it isn’t just getting to the finish line that’s important, it’s the journey there that really matters.

Living in the ‘Information’ Age

Like this funny TikTok suggests,we are living at a time when we have access to so much information… and that’s the problem.


I am dumbfounded by the news that people are self-medicating using a drug to treat livestock for parasites in order to ‘prevent’ or ‘cure’ themselves from covid-19… despite this being dangerous.

This is just batshit crazy. There is a large population of people that won’t take the vaccine because they don’t know what’s in it. Vaccines have been around since 1796, and have saved countless lives. Vaccines are proving that they are working, with drastic differences in Covid-19 hospitalization and deaths between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. The stats are so easy to see…

But these people will follow the advice of crackpots on Facebook and take a medicine designed for large livestock animals in unknown doses. These people are the same people that call anyone who gets the vaccine a sheep. Let that thought sink in.

These are people who get their information from that one crackpot doctor who knows more than every conventional doctor. They know someone, who knows someone, that this worked for. They know the government is out to get them, to strip them of their rights and freedoms and control them. And they skip by the articles on their crackpot pseudoscience news websites about chemtrails and alien created crop circles to get to the anti-vaccine ‘science’… not realizing that most people don’t get their facts from places where they have to choose their own conspiracy adventure.

We live in a world of easy access to too much information and miss-information, which feeds anyone’s beliefs. Information isn’t neutral… facts aren’t evenly distributed. I think that critical thinking might just be the most important skill of this century. Our biggest job in schools these days might just be developing kid’s bullshit detectors… before they start taking medication designed for bulls.

Feed your focus

In my morning meditation’s lesson, as part of the Calm App‘s daily 10 minute meditation, this quote was shared:

“Starve of your distractions, feed your focus.” – Daniel Goleman.

This is a wonderful quote, but it is easier said than done. It’s challenging because our distractions often bring us joy or at the very least, entertainment. But this goes well with the idea that, ‘Your priorities are not your priority‘. What is your focus? If your focus is just getting work done, or completing a series of tasks, that’s not really something to focus on. It’s analogous to having many priorities, which in turn is not a priority.

What’s your focus? What do you want to accomplish? If you find that thing that drives you, that makes you want to wake up earlier in the day to achieve or that you will stay up late trying to finish. If you find that kind of focus, well then it’s easy to feed. It’s then easier to starve your distractions… or at least limit them.

Things that I do:

• A morning healthy living routine to feel a sense of accomplishment before I start my day.

• Time limits on apps that I enjoy, and that entertain me. (This way I can still get some joy out of distractions, but the time spent on them fit within a threshold that doesn’t suck my time away mindlessly.)

• Calendar time to do the thing I really want to get done, and not just the things I have to do.

All that said, I still go through times when I seem to lack focus, or forget what I truly want to focus on. I still have bouts of procrastination and distraction. There are times when I have to intentionally starve my distractions. But in combining teo ideas, if I choose a single priority that I want to accomplish, and I also feed my focus on that priority… I get stuff done, and it feels amazing.

Wifi enabled fridge

We are shopping for new appliances as part of our planned renovation and I have to say that I don’t get it. Why would I need a wifi enabled fridge? At no point in my life have I ever spontaneously wondered what the temperature of my fridge was? Besides when I first got a fridge, or when I found some frozen lettuce at the back of the fridge (once), I don’t recall ever changing the temperature of my fridge.

Maybe in the future a ‘smart’ fridge might be able to tell me if I need to go shopping before I cook a recipe; or tell me my milk is low or expired; or suggest meals based on what might be expiring soon and what I have available. But right now it doesn’t serve a purpose that I can think of. Right now I don’t need to be connected to my fridge… it doesn’t need to be enabled. And I don’t need a Samsung with a screen on my fridge either. I’ll stick to magnets to hold family photos and memos.

Maybe at some point in the future the need will be there, but for now, I’ll pass on wifi enabled appliances… I see this feature as having very little function, and just being one more possible failure point on an appliance that already won’t last as long as it would have if built years ago.

If I’m missing out, please enlighten me. Who has a wifi fridge and how are you using this feature?