Author: dave Page 49 of 75

My daughter Jaime pointed me to this story from Sports Illustrated. It’s over a year old now, but it’s still an amazing read. I love to hear about stories like this…they inspire me. And I’m really just a big marshmallow, as most of you already know.

At the end of the story, there’s a link to a video about the story from YouTube. It’s best to read the story first.

Strongest Dad in the World
[From Sports Illustrated, By Rick Reilly]
June 15, 2005

I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots. But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.

Eighty-five times he’s pushed his disabled son,Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he’s not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars–all in the same day.

Dick’s also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?

And what has Rick done for his father? Not much–except save his life.

This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs. “He’ll be a vegetable the rest of his life;” Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. “Put him in an institution.”

But the Hoyts weren’t buying it. They noticed the way Rick’s eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. “No way,” Dick says he was told. “There’s nothing going on in his brain.”

“Tell him a joke,” Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain.

Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? “Go Bruins!” And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, “Dad, I want to do that.”

Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described “porker” who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. “Then it was me who was handicapped,” Dick says. “I was sore for two weeks.”

That day changed Rick’s life. “Dad,” he typed, “when we were running, it felt like I wasn’t disabled anymore!”

And that sentence changed Dick’s life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.

“No way,” Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren’t quite a single runner, and they weren’t quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.

Then somebody said, “Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?”

How’s a guy who never learned to swim and hadn’t ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried.

Now they’ve done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don’t you think?

Hey, Dick, why not see how you’d do on your own? “No way,” he says. Dick does it purely for “the awesome feeling” he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.

This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992–only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don’t keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.

“No question about it,” Rick types. “My dad is the Father of the Century.”

And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. “If you hadn’t been in such great shape,” one doctor told him, “you probably would’ve died 15 years ago.”

So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other’s life.

Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father’s Day.

That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy.

“The thing I’d most like,” Rick types, “is that my dad would sit in the chair and I would push him once.”

Hand me a hankie, would you?

Here’s the link to the video.

I’ve been falling behind lately when it comes to keeping up.

Whether it’s keeping up with mainstream news, tech news, communication news, blog posts, reading blogs, listening to podcasts, researching web design, thinking, walking the dogs — the list just keeps growing.

This past week, the blogosphere was abuzz over news that PR firm Edelman was behind a fake blog for WalMart. It seems that everyone has a take on this and they’ve all been posting about it. I couldn’t imagine what else I could add to the debate. So I haven’t posted until now.

The furor seems to be fading, now that Richard Edelman has blogged about it and admitted what they did was wrong. But as so often happens, the fact they took a few days to say anything has added to the problem. For more on this, see Shel Holtz’s insightful comments.

All I will add is that this story reinforces my already negative opinion of WalMart, which has a deserved reputation for aggressive tactics in almost every area of business. Why should taking advantage of this new social media area be any different?

What does seem surprising is that Edelman (which is touted as a PR firm that “gets” social media and has been working hard to prove it) should be involved in this. The lack of transparency in not acknowledging that their client was sponsoring the tour was a mistake and one they are paying for now. They should have known better.

Is this a case of a firm letting a valuable client sway their judgement? Or did they overlook the negative impacts this thing would have if the truth got out (as it has and as it always does)?

An interesting note to this story. While it has caused a firestorm in the blogosphere, I can’t find any stories in the traditional, mainstream media. I’m not sure what that signifies, beyond the obvious concern that bloggers might be guilty of a bit of navel gazing. In an age of paid product placement in movies, at grocery stores, billboard, etc., perhaps the larger public isn’t that concerned about paid placement in blog posts either.

Thanksgiving in Canada has always been one of my favourite holidays. The weather is nearly always wonderful. The bright fall skies, the fabulous colours in Ontario, the crisp, near-winter air in Saskatchewan, and now the sunny warmth of Vancouver Island. I love them all.

What they all have in common is a lot of tradition, the lack of pressure to buy the right gifts and everyones’ desire to sit down, enjoy a great dinner and warm conversation. In our case, there’s usually some mix of friends and family around and plenty of time to relive past dinners and toast the departed.

It’s usually at holidays that we pay attention to traditions. But maybe we’d all be a bit better off if we started paying more attention in between holidays.

This weekend in the Globe and Mail, there was an article about how families that eat dinner together regularly are more likely to have well-adjusted teenagers with fewer eating and behavioural issues. It seems that sitting down and talking to each other every day is a good thing. Who knew?

For the past decade, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University looked for a common denominator for kids who didn’t use alcohol, drugs, or tobacco; teens who did not become pregnant.

The researchers were surprised to find that, more significant than good grades at school or church attendance, the one thing that differentiated kids who “engaged in risky behaviours” from those who did not was eating family dinners.

(And kids who ate with their families five nights a week did better than kids who shared dinner on only two nights.)

Seriously though, a report like that points to a larger issue in our modern society – the cult of “doing more and more all the time.” All too often, we seem willing to sacrifice things that used to be taken for granted only a generation ago.

For example, few of us expect to walk to work anymore. Nor do we expect to be able to come home for lunch. Children no longer come home at lunch either. Heck, they only have 30 or 40 minutes to eat and get back to the classroom.

And when they’re done for the day, they’re not on their own. A lot of kids have an adult waiting for them at the end of the school day. I don’t think my Mom or Dad ever picked me up from school in all the 12 years I was there, except for a doctor’s appointment or something like that.

And with people working longer hours and still trying to pack in all kinds of activities, a lot of families have given up on the idea of sitting down to a meal at the end of the day.

But maybe we should reconsider. If we are really getting our priorities right, we’d make time for some of those things. Again, to quote from the Globe article:

Researchers point to specific health benefits too. A recent study at Syracuse University found that, among kids who have asthma, those who eat dinner with their families miss fewer days of school and have fewer emergency-room visits. Other benefits include: better nutrition, more thoughtful manners, lower incidence of eating disorders of all sorts — from anorexia to obesity.

So traditions are good for our kids. But we can push this idea a little further.

I also believe it’s time that businesses starting paying attention to some of these trends. Too many companies expect employees to work long hours, be available during off-work hours (via email, cellphones or Blackberries) and skip lunch on a regular basis to cram in a few more minutes of work.

But just as families might discover that cramming more and more activities into their day at the expense of long-held traditions (like a reasonable lunch hour and a sit-down dinner) could end up hurting their child’s development, so too companies should consider the long-term impacts of a modern workload on their employees’ health.

In Nova Scotia, the government has mandated that all provincial employees must take a 60 minute lunch break, preferably outside of the office. It’s been ordered and managers are expected to enforce the edict. And it’s already having a positive impact on people’s performance in the afternoon, when they report feeling energized and ready to work, instead of crashing.

It’s a simple thing, but a lot of little things added together turn into big things.

We’re coming out of a long cycle of business metrics that have rewarded short-term financial results at the expense of long-term stability, especially among employees. But as with all trends, the pendumlum eventually swings back.

I predict that soon progressive companies will realize that by ensuring their employees do “less” each day, they’ll actually gain in productivity, as well as bulding a more effective work force and reducing their churn rate.

The days of “re-engineering” jobs out of existence while burdening remaining employees with even more work are going to disappear. Also disappearing will be the idea that it’s cool to be over-worked, stressed out and a stranger to your kids. And I say good riddance.

Then we’ll have something to really celebrate at Thanksgiving.

If I’ve learned anything over the decades, it’s that one should never, ever, say never.

I am no fan of WalMart, as some of you may know. While I don’t deny how successful the company is from a financial point of view, I’ve always been uncomfortable with a business model that drives it’s competitors out of business and creates a master/slave relationship with its suppliers.

So I’ve made a point of not shopping at WalMart. It’s just a personal thing with me. I figure if I feel strongly about something, I should be prepared to put my money (or time, or whatever) where my mouth is. So I don’t shop there.

So that’s just me, right? And it’s not like I’m going to have any effect whatsoever on a big company like WalMart. The actions of one person are not that big a deal. Or are they?

In fact, if enough people were to do one thing, it could have a tremendous effect. So while I think of WalMart as a bad corporate citizen, I’ve got to admit that their sheer size could also make them a powerful tool for doing good things.

What made me realize this is a recent story on the Fast Company website, called How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change the World? One. And You’re Looking At It.. It talks about how a powerful tool in the battle to reduce the growth of greenhouse gases could be as a simple as changing the light bulbs you have in your house. That’s right — you. One person. Here’s what I’m talking about.

We’ve all seen those compact fluorescent bulbs for sale at the store. But if you’re like most people, you probably don’t buy them. They’re too expensive and you figure the light they give off is terrible, right? Well, times have changed and so have those bulbs — in almost every way.

One thing hasn’t changed: the energy savings. Compact fluorescents emit the same light as classic incandescents but use 75% or 80% less electricity.

What that means is that if every one of 110 million American households bought just one ice-cream-cone bulb, took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. One bulb swapped out, enough electricity saved to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island. In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads.

That’s the law of large numbers–a small action, multiplied by 110 million.

Those are startling numbers. And there’s a lot more startling stuff in the article. It’s a fascinating look at how a company like WalMart makes decisions on how to do its business and how those decisions can have significant effects.

This fall, WalMart will launch a major offensive on its customers to convince them to buy those energy efficient bulbs. And they’re dead serious about it. And if past actions are any indication, when WalMart decides to get serious about anything, it’s likely to happen.

This is quite the story. It’s startling to look at the implications. This could have a major effect on our world and I’ve got to admit I’m a bit stunned to think that a company like WalMart is about to lead such a significant revolution.

But perhaps I shouldn’t be. Again, looking back over my own experiences, it’s clear that significant change in our world has only come about when it’s become good business. We often overlook that. And while it can sometimes take other factors to bring businesses on board, a good idea has to make business sense to become successful.

So, while I ever shop at WalMart again? I’m not planning to but I will certainly be watching what happens with interest. And while I might not be willing to give them my business, I’ll certainly give them their due and congratulate them for such a significant socially responsible campaign.

It’s OneWebDay today, when people around the world are being encouraged to talk about what the Web means to them.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted to TheDailyUpload, so writing about what the Web has meant to me over the past decade and more seemed like a great way to get back into the swing of things.

But first, just so we’re all up-to-date, I am now settled in Victoria, BC. We have a lovely new home (rented) and most of our possessions that we brought with us from Ontario. (More on the mover’s saga in a future post.)

Now, a few random thoughts on how the Web has become a major part of my life over the years.

I’ve been connecting with others using on-line connections since the early 1980s. The monthly newspaper I was editing had a computer column and the guy who wrote it sent me his copy using an old 300-baud modem. It seemed like a miracle at the time. Heck, at that point, I was still writing my stories on an old manual Underwood and sending the copy to a typesetter via the mail. How times have changed.

It wasn’t long before I had a CompuServe account and was also learning about bulletin boards and FidoNet and later Gopher.

Eventually, services like CompuServe had to give in and open up to the Web and as browsers proliferated, how I used the web evolved. The newspaper I was working for wasn’t much interested in Web access for its employees, although a few of us were doing on-line research with our own email addresses. At that point, we needed separate phone lines for our modems and companies were loath to ante up for access.

It’s been interesting to be part of various companies during their unique adaptations to the power of the Internet. In 1984, I helped our accountant purchase the first computers we’d ever had — a pair of AT&T 6300’s, I think they were.

When I joined SaskTel in the mid-90s, they had a flourishing networked culture, but their Internet presence was still new. I helped to implement an Intranet, a form of user-driven distributed communication which many people used to the top-down hierarchy structure in SaskTel had a lot of trouble accepting.

In every company I’ve been in, I’ve become involved in advancing their use of electronic communications, with varying degrees of success.

This is what I love to do, no question, but there are time when I wonder about the ultimate price we’re paying. All around me, I see colleagues suffering from the stress of today’s modern workplace. The new tools which were supposed to make our life easier have instead created new pressures to perform.

Whatever happened to the idea that we “work to live?” and that we would all be enjoying 30-hour work weeks and 10 weeks of vacation each year? Right…

It seems the more we are able to do, the more we do. But are we accomplishing more? I used to put out an 80-page newspaper every month, filled with original articles, photographs and colour ads. It came out every month and I worked hard, but not crazy hours. Although today’s editors have a lot more electronic options and near-instantaneous communications, they seem to work a lot more hours than we did 25 years ago. But the publications still come out once a month.

Today, I have a website, a blog, a Flickr page, email addresses galore, a cellphone, plenty of computers and a never-ending list of things to do. I wouldn’t give any of them up at this point, but I do wonder about where we’re going.

There are a lot of reasons to be optimistic that we’re moving into a better place, but every so often, I wonder…What if we just turned everything off again?

That’s my take on this, OneWebDay.

I had planned to be back blogging by now, but I’ve run into a few snags here in Victoria that will keep me off-line for a few more days.

The big one is that our household furnishings haven’t arrived yet. So we’re still struggling a bit, and I don’t have any of my office equipment yet.

When we originally booked our move, we didn’t have an address in Victoria, so we were going to have our stuff sent out in a container and stored for awhile. Containers travel slower than trucks, but that wouldn’t have been a problem. But when we got our new house, we changed our order to get the stuff delivered quicker.

Unfortunately, the order didn’t get processed properly at the head office of the moving company, so our stuff didn’t even leave Hamilton until last week…then it got lost on the road, then the truck broke down — it was quite a litany of problems. The end result is that we might get delivery tomorrow but if not, then it won’t be until after Labour Day. Oh well…

In the meantime, the weather here has been outstanding. Nothing but sunshine the whole time. I’ve been having fun finding new places to walk the dogs and Roxy has discovered that there is nothing better in this world than swimming. We can’t keep her out of the water!

So, until I can get my office set up, my chances to blog are not that good. Did I mention that my hard drive on my PowerBook died just before I left? I’m still waiting to see whether it can be fixed — so I don’t have a computer at the moment that’s working.

Oh, and one more thing. Since every student out here is trying to get Internet access set up, we’re on a long list to get that as well…another thing I over-looked in the run-up to the move. I should have booked a time before I left Hamilton. But they are supposed to come and get us hooked up at the end of next week. So, assuming that my stuff has all arrived, we should be back in business before too long.