Information Overload

Are you addicted to information?

How much time do you spend keeping updated? During the course of a normal day – checking email; reading news articles (online or print); texting with family, friends and co-workers; catching up on Facebook posts; tweeting about your latest exploits – there’s a lot of information that comes at us. The skill is in selectively tuning in to some while tuning out others.

We watched a YouTube video last week that claimed an estimate of a week’s worth of information from the New York Times contains more info than someone living in the 1700’s would conceivably learn in a lifetime … and that’s just one source of print material. And yet, we still seem to need more.

But is more necessarily better?

And now you know The Rest of the Story

In my first post I mentioned that I had been sitting in the doctors office. The reason why is that the week before, Joseph twisted his ankle during gym class.

Apparently, he and his friends were running at the wall and climbing one step up the padding, turning around and running back. It seems that when Joseph turned, his decided that it should continue in the previous direction. After "sleeping it off", we took him to the hospital the next morning for x-rays and saw circular swelling on the outside of his ankle.

Thankfully the fracture clinic was running that morning, so we came home with a temporary cast. The follow-up visit to our family doctor provided my initial observations for the blog, and led to a new cast for Joseph, to last for the next four to six weeks.

Joseph's first choice was a hot pink cast, but then he decided on this one. We thought he would have wanted the camouflage pattern, but then figured it would have been too hard to make out the signatures from his friends. So rainbow mix it is.

And now you know the rest of the story.

Who wants to Pay My Bills?

In the tradition of the Australia Tourism Board's "Best Job in the World", Doritos' "Become the Doritos Guru", and lately AirAsia's "So YOU want to be a pilot", I'm starting my own contest.

Introducing, "Who Wants to Pay my Bills"*

Yes, you heard me right. I'm granting one person the once-in-a-lifetime privilege to pay all of my current bills! All you have to do is submit a video entry on YouTube with the subject "Pay My Bills". That's it! A highly-trained panel of judges** will select from the plethora of entries and choose one lucky person to be the recipient of my bills - phone, light, heat, water, taxes ... everything!

So get posting, and I"ll laugh with you all the way to the bank!***

* This is not actually a real contest. No winners will be chosen. All of the previous contests listed are real, though.

** By "highly-trained panel of judges", I mean that my wife and I will show the videos to our kids, and see who laughs the most.

*** Good luck to all of the entrants for the legitimate contests listed above. The website hits to these contests says it all.

Out of Touch

This morning while sitting in the waiting room at the doctor's office (long story – I'll post it later), I was reminded of something that came up in our weekly small group. We are becoming more and more disconnected from everyone around us.

This mother and son were each playing with their own Nintendo DS systems while waiting for the doctor. Neither said a word to the other, focused instead on the little piece of technology in front of them. Ironically I was listening to my iPod at the time, but it still made me think of how much we don't interact with anyone anymore. On days when I've gone to the doctor's office with either of my boys I've read books to them or watched them play with toys in the corner, but that scene is becoming more unorthodox with each visit.

With the dominance of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, the instant communication avenues of cell phones, PDAs, Instant Messaging and email, we feel connected to so many other people. A quick look at my Facebook profile assures me that I have 230 friends with whom I can converse, share ideas or compete over a friendly game of Wordscraper. But how many of them do I see regularly? How many have I sat down with over coffee or even seen face-to-face in the last week? Month? Year? We have the illusion of being connected, but that's all that it is. Even when calling someone now we can use their home, office or cellular number, but we are more apt to be greeted by their voicemail message than by they themselves.

So my challenge for this week – at least for myself – is to sit down with someone this week, in person, and reconnect. It's up to you if you choose to follow suit.