Chris Gribble

Be yourself - Everyone else is taken (Oscar Wilde)

1000 miles of connection

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When travelling for hours and hours together I thought a lot about what was important in life. Over and over as I hear men’s stories I am reminded of how important father’s are to their sons. I trust that a road trip allowed the space for what is important to be demonstrated and spoken to my son.

1000 miles of connection

What lies between the first mile
And the next one thousand,
Isn’t about a number,
Or, the planned destination,
One thousand miles of connection,
Is time shared watching white lines
Flow past, hour after hour,
Endless stretches,
Broken and unbroken lines,
Black bitumen stretching out,
Signposts saying we’re not there,
Not by a long shot,
Open horizons,
Making room for a conversation.

A thousand mile conversation
Is mostly about silence,
Pauses, between signposts,
Landmarks, glancing by,
Reminders of where we are,
Waiting patiently for us to arrive,
And go on, quickly,
Small surprises found along the road,
Shaping the next few words, then,
passed and forgotten,
This conversation that waited till now,
Taking a lifetime, plus one thousand miles.

Now, this conversation,
With its hours of silence,
And, endless black bitumen,
Connecting over a thousand shared miles,
With a tender emerging almost man,
The one shaped by my presence,
My words, creating his story,
Words that he will tell his son,
Reminding me, a truth I can neglect,
All it needed was a thousand miles.

Five benefits of checking email once a day

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My name is Chris and I am an email addict. I confess that I may relapse at any moment. But, for now I have my email habit under control.

Slowly I have been reducing my dependence until just recently I took control and decided to check my email once each day at 3.00 pm in the afternoon. At that time I deal with everything that needs to be dealt with from what I have received in the past twenty four hours.

The good news is my world hasn’t fallen apart. Even better news is that I am finding some tangible benefits in limiting my access to this important part of our modern communication.

Below is a list of five benefits that I have noticed since getting my email habit under control:

1. I spend more time on focussed activities.

One of the key issues about feeding my addiction was that it needed gratification several times an hour. My life was consumed by clicking from whatever I was doing to seeing what had arrived in my inbox. At one point I was receiving at least 60 emails an hour. The constant alert of a new arrival left me in a state of permanent distraction.

Focus is all about maintaining a sustained effort. This was not possible in my constant state of distraction. The result was that my productivity was at an all time low. Even though I was engaged in activity the whole time rarely was it actually getting the jobs done that needed to get done.

Nowadays I can sit down and write a 2000 word post in one sitting. I don’t find my attention wandering back to the inbox because I know that can wait till 3.00 pm this afternoon. This type of focus is required for some of the larger tasks that I need to attend to.

2. I no longer need instant gratification of opening the next email.

My system went into withdrawal for a period of time. I remember the empty feeling after I first shut off notifications on my mobile phone. This was the complete turning off not just putting things on silent. I think that quite mode’s vibration even more torture because you know something has arrived but you have to wait till you can check without being noticed. The instant gratification is delayed.

I am discovering that I am able to wait and appreciate the reward that comes from consistently applying myself in extended bursts. What is emerging is far more gratifying than the quick injection of dopamine that my body had become used to. According to Psychology.org the desire for instant gratification comes from a desire for dopamine. Researcher Kent Berridge writes,

“These two systems, the “wanting” (dopamine) and the “liking” (opioid) are complementary. The wanting system propels you to action and the liking system makes you feel satisfied and therefore pause your seeking. If your seeking isn’t turned off at least for a little while, then you start to run in an endless loop. The dopamine system is stronger than the opioid system. You tend to seek more than you are satisfied. Evolution again — seeking is more likely to keep you alive than sitting around in a satisfied stupor.”

I was a victim to an endless search for those chemicals that I find most gratifying. I have learned to replace these short term bursts of pleasure with the satisfaction of committing to a task and seeing it to completion.

3. I can take time out without being anxious

Weekends are mine again. I can take time out to refresh and relax. Usually when the time comes to return to work I am able to do this enthusiastically. I think that this is because my creative store is replenished and waiting to do something.

A settled restlessness

A tightening surge rises from within,
Uncertainty, fearfully, remembering,
Breaks the imagined calm,
Too much, too fast, too soon,
Restlessness breaks in on every task.

Serenity is imagined from my soul’s mind,
Hopefully, trusting, relearning,
Reality is almost in sight,
Rest, slow down, wait,
A settling transforms whatever comes today.

I wrote this poem as I was considering my anxious state that drove me to an incessant email checking. Rest is such a welcome friend but it required a more settled approach to my life. I needed to accept whatever came that day and learn again how to prioritise. In my anxiousness everything felt urgent and important. This became overwhelming to the point of damaging my health.

Each day I know how my day will start. I am a morning person so I don’t want to waste my creative energy answering email. Nowadays I dedicate that most productive time to doing my most creative work. Rather than being anxious I tend to look forward to the tasks that lay ahead for me on any day.

4. I sleep better at night

One of the things that I used to dread was going to bed because of the anticipation of a mass of emails to wade through the next morning. Often I would be checking emails till late at night to try to cut down on the number of emails that would await me in the morning.

Going to sleep is now a welcome part of my daily rhythm. I am thankful that I will wake rested to a new day that has new possibilities ahead. The half settled sleep of worry that I used to have when I went to sleep concerned about what message may arrive during the night is becoming a distant memory. If I do wake I no longer check what’s come in on my mobile phone hoping that my wife doesn’t catch me in the act.

5. I am not constantly distracted.

I was constantly distracted by my inflow of emails. A side effect was that I found it very difficult to delete anything in case it may be important sometime in the future. What happened was that with too much information coming to me I had no time to develop a filter to know what was important and what could be discarded. This overload of information left me constantly distracted.

Our obsession with what may be contained in the latest email that we receive is an indulgence that we can’t afford. Our minds are becoming bloated with information. The fear that something important may be missed is rarely realised.

Alain de Botton says that we need to have periods of fasting from all of this is we are ever going to be able to concentrate. My email checking routine allows space from the self imposed expectation of needing to respond instantly to something that more often than not can wait.

Three key strategies that helped me:

  1. I turned off notifications on the mobile phone – That constant ping that tells you something has arrived is not a part of my life. My advice is to not even play with the idea that you can get away with silent so no one knows about your addiction. This is only fooling yourself.
  2. I started by unplugging for a weekend – It’s always good to start with small victories. The weekend is a good starting point to begin disciplining a chronic email habit.
  3. I ruthlessly unsubscribe – Companies are constantly trying to get email addresses so that they can get their email message to you. Sometimes you need to supply your email address but the law is they need to have an unsubscribe function. Use it ruthlessly. They rarely will have information you need in a mass email. If you do need information you can always go back to that company’s website. I used to get close to 100 emails a day. Now I can get less than 20 emails for the whole day. Unsubscribe!

The Art of Forgiveness

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Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings.
Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move.
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty & frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Rumi

I recently spend a few weeks in Asia with my wife looking after an orphanage for children with HIV. We were accompanied by one other person, a close friend that we have known for many years. Our days were quite long. Starting at around 5am and often not finishing till 10pm or later. As time went on we all became increasingly tired.

At about the 10th day the tiredness had developed into irritations at things we all normally would overlook. Finally the irritation expressed itself in words and tone – specifically my words and my tone. Neither of which were helpful to anyone. Immediately as the words escaped my mouth I could see that I had inflicted pain on my dear friend.

My wife was quick to let me know that I was out of line. I said to her that I would apologise to try to rectify things.

As we were walking along together with the kids I went up to my friend and said these words, “ I am sorry. But, you have been doing this (I named my irritation) the whole time”.

As an apology it fell far short of providing healing words. On reflection and judging by the further tears invoked by my apology I could see that they had done more damage than good.

After giving us a bit more space I attempted again to talk to my friend this time with some more carefully chosen words. This time they were more helpful in healing the damage that I had inflicted earlier. What was even better was that we created a new level of openness in our relationship.

Forgiveness is a part of daily life. Every day we have to make choices about what we do with the inconsistencies, in considerations, failures and shortcomings of those around us. We also need to work out what we do with those things we find within ourselves.

One thing that is evident in most people is there is a level of restlessness in our souls. This expresses itself in the unsettledness that many people have in their circumstances but I believe is pointing to a deeper yearning that we all have.

Hugh Prather says that the root meaning of the verb, “to forgive” is to “let go”. He says that when we consider forgiveness in this way it becomes a “restful activity”. I think that this is the balm that we are looking to heal the wounds that life inflicts upon all of us.

Parker Palmer in a recent article in On Being reiterates the actions that come from not being able to work out our pain. He writes, “Violence is what happens when we don’t know what to do with our suffering”. The only way that we know how to deal with our own unforgiveness is to pass our own suffering onto others.

Ellen Bass expresses the healing path beautifully in her poem, Mules of Love,

Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

To conclude I would like to offer my own reflection on my actions on that day when I allowed my irritation to surface. I have immersed myself in the Psalms over the past year and sought to make them my prayers. The day after my outburst I came to Psalm 116 and this was the prayer that emerged from my reading of that Psalm.

Psalm 116

Forgiveness is my constant request Lord,
In a brief moment I chose death words,
That sought to see the worst,
In an instant anger took over,
Leaving deep hurt in its wake.

In the midst of this I cried for forgiveness,
I look to God for healing,
Seeking kindness to replace the anger,
Turning sadness into tears of laughter,
Lies are the hurtful twisting of truth,
That are spat out by venom’s tongue,
Seeking to separate my Spirit from God’s,
Looking for an opportunity for Death’s victory.

Today I will look for life’s words,
Seeking to restore the hope that begun,
Not allowing death to wreak destruction,
Looking to belong again after destroyed trust,
I will seek the goodness that belongs to me,
The rest that comes from loving deeply,
Giving daily thanksgiving to God,
For his abundant life giving words,
That are my hope for restoration.

I found in the last stanza the rest that comes from forgiveness that Prather talks about. The wounds inflicted required me to bring a different voice to our conversation that sought to discover the beauty in my dear friend. The conversation that ensued was one that brought a new level of honesty and a renewed capacity to care for each other.

A Celtic Meditation Exercise – Hand Meditation

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A Hand Meditation

Sitting with your palms up resting in your lap, eyes closed, tune into your breathing, relax your tension points and go into your centre.

Become aware of the air at your fingertips, between your fingers, on the palm of your hand. Experience the fullness, strength and maturity of your hands. Think of your hands, think of the most unforgettable hands you have known  the hands of your father, your mother, your grandparents. Remember the oldest hands that have rested in your hands. Think of the hands of a new-born child, your nephew or niece  of the incredible perfection, delicacy of the hands of a child. Once upon a time your hands were the same size.
Think of all that your hands have done since then. Almost all that you have learned is through your hands turning yourself over, crawling and creeping, walking and balancing yourself.; learning to hold something for the first time; feeding yourself; washing and bathing, dressing yourself. At one time your greatest accomplishment was tying your own shoes.

Think of all the learning your hands have done and how many activities they have mastered, the things that they have made. Remember the day you could write your own name.

Our hands were not just made for themselves but for others. How often were they given to help another. Remember all the kinds of work they have done, the tiredness and aching they have known, the cold and the heat, the soreness and the bruises. Remember the tears they have wiped away, our own or another’s, the blood they have bled, the healing they have experienced. How much hurt, anger and even violence have they expressed and how much gentleness, tenderness and love they have given.

How often they have been folded in prayer; both a sign of their powerlessness and of their power.

There is a mystery which we discover in the hand of a woman or a man that we love. There are the hands of a doctor, a nurse, an artist, a conductor, a priest, hands which you can never forget.

Now raise your right hand slowly and gently place it over your heart. Press more firmly until your hand picks up the beat of your heart that most mysterious of all human sounds, one’s own heartbeat, a rhythm learned in the womb from the heartbeat of one’s own mother. Press more firmly for a moment than release your hand and hold it just a fraction from your clothing. Experience the warmth between your hand and your heart. Now lower your hand to your lap very carefully as if you were carrying your heart. For it does. When you extend your hand to another, it’s not just bone and skin, it is your heart. A handshake is a real heart transplant.

Think of all the hands that have left their imprint on you. Fingerprints and hands that have left their imprint on you. Fingerprints and handprints are heartprints that can never be erased. The hand has its own memory. Think of all the places that carry your handprints and all the people who bear your handprint. They are indelible and will last forever.

Now without opening your eyes begin to write out of your stream of consciousness. Slowly become more aware of your outer extremities. The pressure of the air on your forehead. The sensation of the air touching your fingertips.

Slowly as you are ready become present to your reality once more.

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Happening upon happiness

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I discovered a strange thing over the past weekend.

Happiness is about spending time with people. Valuing them. Listening to the person. Not judging.

This is my wife’s perspective on the weekend we spent away.

“Chris told me he was taking me away for a ‘romantic weekend’. Our room with a queen size bed. Restaurant that serves pre- dinner drinks & nibblies. Ensuites that is a mere 200 metres from our queen bed. And a view to die for once you walk 2.4 km directly uphill. (Romantic weekend conjured up a different image in my head.)”

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We spent hours walking together. Talking. Listening. Sometimes not saying anything. There were no shops.

It was a happy time.

Ideas don’t need labels

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Our family are Aldi fans. We love the specials that come out each week. This is because the Gribbles love a bargain. However a special is not special unless you need the item that is being sold.

For some specials at our local Aldi people will line up well before opening time to ensure that they don’t miss out on a bargain. We usually miss out because we couldn’t be bothered to be that early.

Some specials don’t always hit the mark. Recently our Aldi had a sale of snow gear. Things like helmets, ski gloves, ski pants and so on.

When we arrived there was still a few of the clothing items and a huge pile of snow sleds. I looked at the snow sled and couldn’t see much use for it to begin with. An important point to remember is that it doesn’t snow in our area.

I had an idea. I thought about the slopes around our backyard. We might not have snow but we do have nice grassy hills.

I bought two of the sleds. They were only $15 each. My wife said I was crazy.

The result? Hours and hours of fun. You can check it out by clicking on this link.

Am I happy or unhappy

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I find it sad that we live in a world where right and wrong is determined by whether we are happy. By doing this a person is making the ultimate selfish comment. “I am happy when things work out my way” The insinuation is that I must be right if I feel happy. I am unhappy when things are not working out my way. Something must be wrong if this is occurring. I will either blame other people or God for this problem. Either response reflects the immaturity of childishness by demonstrating determining our place in the world on the basis of how the world is responding to me. Personal desire is the benchmark for right and wrong.

It has struck me recently that when dealing with conflict in my workplace that some people have never progressed simple childish responses. And ultimately if the decisions that I make don’t make them happy then I am wrong.

I hope that my children are able to grow beyond this. I don’t want to raise emotional infants. I hope that my children are able to see the world through other people’s eyes as well as their own. So that they don’t live in the illusion that simply because they are happy that everything else is alright.

Just joking

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Did you know that the ability to understand a joke is one of the signs of being human.

This is why humor, in a way, is a sort of Turing test for humans. One of the surest ways to figure out that someone comes from a totally different background, culture, generation, whatever, is to make a joke … and then realize they’re staring at you with a completely blank expression.

The article talked about the difficulty programmers have making a computer understand humour. One group have developed an AI program that understands knock knock jokes. But, these are the simplest jokes there are. And even that sounded like a mammoth project.

So perhaps to redefine Descartes,

“I laugh, therefore I am human.”

Some scary statistics regarding child safety online

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These are statistics compiled by Protectkids.org.They highlight the dangers that our kids face while online.

  • By the end of 1998, more than 40 percent of all American homes had computers, and 25 percent had Internet access. This trend is expected to continue. Children and teenagers are one of the fastest growing groups of Internet users. An estimated 10 million kids are online today. By the year 2002, this figure is expected to increase to 45 million, and by 2005 to 77 million.
    Youth Internet Safety Survey
  • Only 1/3 of the households with Internet access are proactively protecting their children with filtering or blocking software.
    Center for Missing and Exploited Children
  • 75% of children are willing to share personal information online about themselves and their family in exchange for goods and services.
    eMarketer
  • About 25 percent of the youth who encountered a sexual approach or solicitation told a parent.
    Youth Internet Safety Survery
  • One in five U.S. teenagers who regularly log on to the Internet say they have received an unwanted sexual solicitation via the Web. Solicitations were defined as requests to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk, or to give personal sexual information.
    Crimes Against Children Research Center
  • One in 33 youth received an aggressive sexual solicitation in the past year. This means a predator asked a young person to meet somewhere, called a young person on the phone, and/or sent the young person correspondence, money, or gifts through the U.S. Postal Service.
    Youth Internet Safety Survey
  • 77% of the targets for online preditors were age 14 or older. Another 22% were users ages 10 to 13.
    Crimes Against Children Research Center
  • 75 percent of the solicited youth were not troubled, 10 percent did not use chat rooms and 9 percent did not talk to strangers.
    Crimes Against Children Research Center
  • Only 25% of solicited children were distressed by their encounters and told a parent.
    Crimes Against Children Research Center
  • Only 17 percent of youth and 11 percent of parents could name a specific authority, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), CyberTipline, or an Internet service provider, to which they could report an Internet crime.
    Youth Internet Safety Survey

These statistics reflect the use of the internet in most developed countries. The increasing use of the internet as a place where young people meet and communicate socially has introduced a range of new opportunities for them to be exploited. Most parents are unaware of the dangers faced by their children online.

What is needed is for parents to provide their children with the resources to be able to guard against any unnecessary danger. Just like we teach our children at a very young age not to cross the street without an adult, then as they get older to look both ways before they cross and then we allow them to venture out on their own as they mature the same applies to web use.

At a very young age it is very important for a parent to be in total control of their children’s online environment. But, as they mature it become more a matter of supervised learning. Children don’t know what they don’t know.. Hopefully by controlling the level of risk and implementing the appropriate safeguards children can use the web safely.

How to keep your children safe on the internet – Hoopaa

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hoopaa3.jpg Hoopaa (http://www.hoopaa.com) comes from a Polynesian word that means safe or keep secure. The idea of hoopaa is to keep your kids safe while online because you are aware of where they have been and what they are doing. There is a range of programs available to purchase that allow you to keep track of what the kids are up to online.

Hoopaa is free. And it boasts and impressive range of features:

  • Continuous monitoring of all web sites visited;
  • Enables you to block web sites from any place at any time;
  • hoopaa can automatically block web sites according to their category; Sexuality, Games, Hate, Personal, Gambling or Religion. It’s the parents not hoopaa that makes the decision which categories are to be blocked.
  • All Internet access from a computer can be blocked during specified periods of the day.
  • The ability to provide a screen capture (an image of the page) of each web page visited; very important if you wish to track blog’s that children may access on a frequent basis;
  • Tracking and capturing of all MSN Messenger conversations from all computers in your house that hoopaa has been installed;
  • Daily email sent to you containing all web sites visited by each user of each computer registered to your hoopaa account and all MSN Messenger conversations;
  • You can login to hoopaa at any time to view all tracked information in real-time;
  • hoopaa only monitors what you, the Account Administrator authorizes;
  • You can cancel the tracking of any specific web site or MSN Messenger account at any time;
  • hoopaa can monitor your children’s MSN Messenger conversations even when they are at a friends house – as long as hoopaa has been installed on that computer;
  • hoopaa does not share or make available any information that can be tracked back to your email, your computer or MSN Messenger accounts;
  • hoopaa is an absolutely 100% free service to all end users;

The main downsides of this program is that it runs best on Internet Explorer a program that I don’t like because of its security issues. And, it only runs on Windows XP. For most users this will be ok for a while but I expect that as more users move to Vista hoopaa will be upgraded to that OS.

I plan to use it on my children’s computer over the next week so I will keep you up to date on how it goes. I also plan to review a couple of the more popular commercial programs over the next few months and we will see how they stack up against this free service. At first glance hoopaa seems to provide most of the resources that you would expect from the commercial software that is available.

CyberPatrol, NetNanny and CyberSitter are examples of filtering software. http://www.cyberpatrol.com , http://www.netnanny.com and http://www.cybersitter.com

How to keep your children safe on the internet – Create a safe environment for you children

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This is a very important aspect of keeping your children safe. Don’t just rely on monitoring software to keep your children safe online. More and more of our lives are going to be spent on the web and we need to make sure that the web world is as safe for our children as the physical environment that they live in.

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from PC Magazine 2006

Just like the real world there are lots of hazards that face our children online. But with good management these risks can be minimized.

The first step is to create a safe environment for your children to use the internet. As I have mentioned my children are quite young so I need to recognise that at this stage in their life this is primarily my responsibility. Again life online closely parallels the principles of good parenting in the real world.

Make sure they use the computer in a public area. Don’t allow them to use the internet unless you are prepared to supervise them physically. Most parents wouldn’t send their children to another suburb to use a playground by themselves. The same is true of the internet, don’t let them go to an internet site unless you are aware of what that site contains.

Get familiar with the web yourself. Do a bit of research yourself about what are the best sites for kids and set up the computer so that they have easy access to those sites. Firefox has an excellent system for creating bookmarks in a toolbar near the top of the browser. Use this to provide sites that will keep the children’s interest. We tend to use the same sites over and over. I know that I have my favourites that I use to help me in my work and in creating my blog. This also applies to kids, they will mostly want to use the same sites over and over so make sure that you play a big role in choosing those sites.

Set up your search for safety. There will be times when children will need to go outside their familiar areas. This may be for a school research project or they may just be curious about what else is out there. Google has a number of options that you can choose to create a safer search. To do this in Google go to preferences and then choose safe search filtering. You can then choose the filtering level to stop explicit images and text at the extremely safe level. Google is the search engine of choice for most internet users today.

Educate your children about the web. Communication about what is going on is vital. Make sure you talk to your children about some of the dangers of the web. For example by nature they are trusting souls but make sure that they know not to give out their personal details to anyone. Make them aware of the dangers of opening files that they don’t know anything about. Talk to them about the sites they are visiting and let them know that not all websites are good.
Check your browser history.This is not as effective for older children but most younger children will not be aware of the trail they leave in their browser’s history. Even if you have minimal monitoring software you can keep an eye on where they have been by simply clicking on the browsers history button and having a look at all the sites that have been visited. Get to know where you children go on the web.
Set guidelines for their time on the web. Monitor the amount of time they spend on the web. Just like watching too much TV, too much time on the web is not healthy for a child’s overall development. They need to have time to do other creative things as well.

How to keep your children safe on the internet – Introduction

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For many parents this is a big concern. We have friends who have banned their children entirely from the internet. They are not allowed to email, search or even play on designated kid’s sites. This will definitely keep their kids safe from any harm on the web but it certainly create problems for the way that they are able to deal with the modern world.

Keeping your children safe on the internet is not a one step solution. It takes a range of strategies to ensure that they are as safe as they possibly can be online.

What parents have to realize is that there is no silver bullet,says Herbert Lin, senior scientist at the National Research Council of the National Academies, where he directed a 2002 study on protecting children from sexual exploitation and online pornography. Filtering software has certainly gotten better, but do parents rely on it too much? In my opinion, they do. A filter is brittle. Even if it stops 90 percent of the bad stuff, what
do you do about the other 10 percent? You still have to have a thorough educational process.

I use my computer nearly every day for work. But more and more my daughter was wanting to search for things online for school projects or because she had heard about a particular subject. When I wasn’t busy I would let her use my computer to google the subject that she was interested in. However I could see that this was less than ideal because I wanted to work on my computer and she wanted to explore the web.
Recently we acquired a second computer specifically for the kids. I had a number of reasons for this:

  1. It got them off my computer. There is no excuse for any nasty accidents happening to it.
  2. It protects me from getting any nasties on my computer. My kids click and click. They don’t always understand what they are clicking on they will just do it so that the computer responds in some way. They know that much. The danger of this approach is that they could just as easily click on something that will introduce something undesirable to my computer.
  3. It gives them the freedom to explore when they need it not when I am not busy.
  4. It is a desktop PC that is placed in the play area that is overlooked by the kitchen and has a constant stream of traffic past it. It has gotten them out of my office and into the open. Whatever they are doing on the web is easily visible by myself or April.

The trouble with the internet is that it is full of unknowns once your kids are out there. The question that many parents ask is what can I do about this? What do we need to protect against?

There are the obvious and not so obvious things that we all know about like:

  • Pornography
  • Viruses
  • Online child predators
  • Dangerous chatrooms
  • Stealing personal information
  • Trojans
  • Spyware
  • Malware
  • Phishing
  • and so on

With my kids out their on the web I felt that I had to do some things to ensure that they were as safe as I could possibly make them without wrapping them up in a protective cocoon that didn’t allow them access to the resources and fun that they could have on the web.

The two main steps that I took were to:

  1. Protect them from any nasties – Install some monitoring software
  2. Protect the computer from any nasties – install user privileges

How I went about this I will outline in some coming posts. I will also take a look at some of the more popular software programs that are on the market ie. NetNanny and the like and see what you get for your dollar.

I actually installed a program called Naomi that has the following features:

  • Heuristic analysis capable of recognizing new material automatically.
  • Semantic analysis of web pages contents and analysis of their addresses and links.
  • Recognizes all the major languages (10+).
  • Recognizes ICRA labelling system.
  • Monitoring is not limited to web sites, but covers the whole local internet traffic.
  • Works with all service providers and software applications, and does not alter settings.
  • Allows blocking of file-sharing applications.
  • Password-protected (the password is chosen during the installation).
  • Easy to use: does not require configuration.
  • Can be used on slow connections (it does not perform any download in background).

And, its completely free. You cant get better value than that.
My kids are quite young and this system works just great I don’t want them to even get a glimpse of any pornography. Naomi does a great job in shutting it down very quickly. What all this means and how this compares to other commercial versions I will outline in the coming posts.

I realise that this is a bit of a diversion from the normal theme of ChrisGribble.com but I really want to be a responsible father and ensure that my children are safe. I am sure that there are plenty of other people who feel the same.

Never Give Up, Never Give Up, Never Give up – living with failure

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Sometimes I feel like the biggest failure. Thankfully I am not a depressive personality so this usually doesn't get me down. But, it does affect the way that I see myself. This week I have failed. Stuffed up, mixed things up and generally fallen far short of my own expectations of myself. "You won't get it right the first time. Your campaign will need to be reinvented, adjusted or scrapped. Count on it." I am not sure where I got this from but it is very true. Whatever we do will never be right the first time, or sometimes the second time or the third time. In these situations ,"Never Give Up, Never Give Up, Never Give up". If we think we got it right the first time we are probably wrong. I have often fallen for this. I have done something that I have thought was pretty good but hadn't realised that it still required more work. This is a mistake that we can all fall for, the belief that we have arrived in some way. When we do this we preclude the possibility that there may be more for us to learn. And, there is always more for us to learn. "Never Give Up, Never Give Up, Never Give up". I was talking to a friend today who told me that the person who said those words suffered from depression. Winston Churchill's legacy as a great politician was the image of tenacity. He was the true British bulldog who worried away at his task until he got what he wanted. There will always be things that we will fail at in some way. It's important to be able to live with that lack of perfection. Learning to live with failure is one of the most important lessons that we will ever learn in life. It is a character lesson that will stand us in good stead to live in this less than perfect world. Once we learn the lesson of living with failure it frees us to be able to see glimpses of perfection. It opens up possibilities of greater love – because one of its fundamental requirements is the ability to overlook minor irritations. It opens up our personal potential and allows us to generate a positive influence on others around us. It always for greater possibilities for satisfaction in every area of our lives. It releases new opportunities to conquer new frontiers in every area of our lives. So when things go wrong some of the best advice ever is to, "Never Give Up, Never Give Up, Never Give up". I found this riff from Seth Godin,

"Now, of course, most blogs are one-person operations. Which means that successful blogs are often run by restless, outward-bound people in a hurry. And a lot of bloggers either have day jobs or passionate sidelines. I think that's a good thing, even when they fail. It's frustrating for me to hear, "stick to your blogging," when people criticize a project created by a blogger–because it's part of the blogging, part of the learning, part of what's unfolding. I'd rather read a book that's informed by the activities (not the reporting) of the writer, and I'd rather read a blog that's based on the successes (and failures) of the blogger."

Facing Criticism – Who am I?

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Criticism always seems to be unfair. Even constructive criticism my have a barb to it and even though it may be intended for my good there may be a prick as the point is made. Because I have often held positions of leadership over the past 15 years I have often been the target of criticism. I have seen people want to inflict damage and hurt upon others and myself because of their perception about what I should or shouldn't have done or what I did or didn't do. My conclusion – I will never make everyone happy all of the time. And I will make most people unhappy some of the time. It is very important for me to know who I am if I want successfully lead, take the initiative and be a positive influence on my world. For some reason there will be people who will want to criticize even my noblest efforts. Why, I really don't know. I can't understand such a mentality that seeks to destroy and tear down. But they will are a part of my reality. Therefore to face this I need to have a solid sense of my own reality. I need to know who I am. Or in the words of someone else, "know thyself." Otherwise I will wrongly draw my self concept from the criticism that I face.

  1. If I know myself I do not immediately need to defend myself against everything that is said against me.
  2. If I know myself I can learn to laugh easily at the sillier aspects of the criticism that I face
  3. If I know myself i don't have to try to change to suit everyone else's perception of what I should be.

Who am I? I am Chris. I am over 40. Going a bit gray. Father of 4 kids. Husband to April. A bit intense in personality. I have some obsessive traits but I try to control them. A bit useless practically. But someone who cares deeply, tries to be a good friend to others and tries to make a positive contribution to other's lives. Thats me. Welcome.

Lose weight in 8 seconds – We’ll see?

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Yes it’s time. Time to make a few changes in my life. This year has been a year of changes but this could be one of the more important ones that I make. Like many Australians I have slipped into a fairly sedentary lifestyle. I enjoyed a burst of energy during my mid 30’s that lasted for a few years and slowly I have slipped into a lifestyle of less and less activity.
But I realise that I cannot continue this way. I have always enjoyed bike riding so this one is right up my alley.

A REVOLUTION in weight loss is about to hit Sydney after scientists devised a workout that burns three times the amount of fat.

They found their specific brand of interval training prompts the body to click into a metabolic response that allows more fat to be burned under the skin and within the muscles.

Researchers at the University of NSW and the Garvan Institute studied 45 overweight women over 15 weeks, putting them through a 20 minute cycling regime in which they sprinted on a stationary bike for eight seconds followed by 12 seconds of cycling lightly.

“They lost three times more weight as other women who exercised at a continuous, regular pace for 40 minutes,” UNSW Associate Professor Steve Boutcher said.

I intend to lose about 10 kg all up. Theoretically this should take me about 10 weeks but I will give myself 3 whole months. I don’t intend to blog all the time about it but it is an important part of the development of myself as a person.

A crucial figure is my waist measurement. It is 2 inches above what it should be and at my age this becomes increasingly important. So I need to reduce it.

Lets go!

ABC’s of Fatherhood – O

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O is for openness. I want to be very open with my children. One of the common experiences of children of my generation is that they never really got to know their fathers. That is they knew about them but they never really got to share some of the more intimate aspects of their life.

I try to be very open with my kids. In many ways that’s easy because of my personality. With people that I know and trust I can be very open. I tend to be more reserved with new acquaintances and unfamiliar circumstances. My children need to see in me the full range of emotions. Not just when I am irritable or enforcing discipline or even frustration because someone has drawn over the covers of our newly covered lounge. They also need to see the other emotions, sadness, disappointment and happiness in a range of situations.

Too often we can be guilty of not having enough time to sit with our kids and explain in their terms what is really going on. So we end up just having closed relationships that only deal with externals. The other day my daughter was talking on the phone to a friend. And she told this friend a whopping story because she thought that no one could hear here. But, I did. That day I took the time to talk to her about why she told the story. I tried to go beyond just dealing with the obvious lie. I had an opportunity to open up to her and say that I love her for who she is not for who she would like to be. I said that she didn’t need to tell stories for people to be her friend and that if they really wanted to be her friend they would like her just the way that she is. We talked about it. We were open. I was open to her about the fact that she was so very special just the way that she was. In the busyness of life it can be easy to just deal with problems quickly.

Openness required the commitment of time and effort into the relationship to ensure that we are able to talk about the stuff that does and doesn’t matter. Because it all matters in some way.

Changing my world – becoming a PPP

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Today I experienced the power of somone who was a positive presence person (PPP). PPP(people) are able to bring people to almost immediately into a positive state of mind.

I walked into a corner store to by a can of pepsi. The young person behind the counter was dressed in a singlet and shorts, was covered in tatoos and had a number of piercings on various appendages. My immediate expectation was that I could expect only a very basic level of customer service. And at worst I could experience a certain amount of contempt.

I was wrong. Completely, totally and utterly wrong.

It started when he served the lady in front of me. He was helpful and smiled and wished here a nice day. I found that my expectation of service was beginning to change. But, she was far more attractive than me and I am a not overly attractive middle aged man.

I was wrong.

It was even better than I thought. Somehow this young man made my purchase of a can of pepsi into one the highlights of my morning. It wasn’t just what he said or how he served me. It wasn’t what he did in the end that made a mundane task into something special.

It was his attitude to life that changed everything. He was a prime example of a PPP. He is an influencer, a leader who is able to change his world.

PPP’s do some of the following things regularly:

  • They change their world, they are not limited by their present context.
  • They change other people’s world – they are a positive influence and are able to change the attitudes of people around them.
  • They don’t worry about their present circumstances – they know that they are not the permanent thing in their life. Attitudes remain with us far longer.
  • They are not lmited by their present circumstances. Hope is a key element of being a PPP. It is a key component of being a whole person, living without hope is living a half life in which we survive with a part of our humanity missing.

 

Boundaries – what not to do with your children

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Cloud and Townsend (Boundaries) identify four typical ways that people will blur boundaries:

  1. Compliancy
    1. They are afraid of hurting someone by saying no.
    2. Their boundaries are so indistinct anyone is able to cross them and this opens the person up to abuse.
    3. They don’t like to rock the boat and will often give into a child’s demands rather than follow through with consequences
  2. Controlling
    1. This person doesn’t respect others boundaries and will often look for opportunities to intrude in other people’s lives.
    2. Controllers will rarely believe that they have done the wrong thing because they are so consumed with their own needs.
    3. As a parent they will have little understanding of their child’s needs or temperament instead they will enforce their standards or expectations on the child.
    4. Controllers are not really in control, rather they are controlled by their own insecurities and impulses. (For example they will become extremely angry when something doesn’t go their way)
  3. Non- responsives
    1. They are not able to hear the needs of others or see things from another’s perspective.
    2. They often will appear distant from their children. This wall is put up to protect them from further hurt
  4. Avoidants
    1. These people find it hard to accept good things from others Cloud and Townsend say that this is common in men who demonstrate it by finding it hard to accept help or advice.

The influence of parents

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Frederick II the emperor of Germany from 1196 to 1250 was called a wonder of the world by his admiring subjects. He was a keen scientist and conducted the following experiment,

He bade foster mothers and nurses to suckle their children, to bathe and wash them, but in no way to prattle to them, for he wanted to learn whether they would speak the Hebrew language, which was the oldest, or Greek or Latin or Arabic or perhaps the language of their parents of whom they had been born. But he laboured in vain because all the children died. For they could not live without the petting and joyful faces and loving words of their foster mothers.(Ross and McLaughlin, 1949, p.360)

Children learn to communicate through the messages that they receive from us. They are conditioned by the environment that we provide and are taught by us how to respond. A name given to this is behavioural conditioning.

There is a story about a young psychologist who wanted to train his small son to use the potty. Since children don’t usually find the toilet seat too much fun or too stimulating he decided to change this by bringing an element of pleasure to the toilet environment. He obtained a circus poster of a clown that was colourful and smiling with a big nose. He placed a red light bulb in the nose and switched it on while the child was on the potty. Needless to say the child enjoyed this immensely and as a result wanted to go to the toilet all the time. Later it wasnt too difficult to rig an electrical circuit so that whenever the child urinated the circuit was completed and the nose light up.

This also produced what is called a stimulus generalisation, which means that a stimulus like the original can produce a response like the original. One day the father and the son went on a car ride and were stopped by a red light.

Can you guess what happened?

Money isn’t everything

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We all know that is true. But we were given a couple of passes for us to go to a children’s expo in our city. It was supposed to have lots of fun things for kids to do.

We decided that we would go. We didn’t want to explain to the person that it would be difficult for us to afford the extra money to pay for the kids (the passes were only for the adults) so we decided for once that we would put it on credit (we never do this normally).

When we get there we find that we have to pay $5 cash for parking. This is not normally charged. Luckily we did have this on us.

But, we find at the ticket boot with it’s mile long line that they were only taking cash. This too was unusual. This precluded us from going in. We felt a bit disappointed plus we wasted $5 on parking for about 10 mins time.

We decided that we would take the kids to a park. We had a packed lunch already for the day at the Convention centre so we made the day into a picnic. Then we played in the playground and went for a walk. This also meant a lot of playing around together.

Even though we felt disappointed I don’t think the kids felt the slightest bit neglected. In fact they had a great time.

April and I talked on the way home and reflected on this. We are not poor, but we don’t have lots of spare cash. Like most families we need to watch how we spend our money. We tend to live simply. Ultimately it comes down to priorities. For us it is ensuring the kids can go to a good school and that we can spend time with them. This means that I make sacrifices in my career and that April doesn’t work.

When I think about the relationship that I have with my kids it is more than worth it.