Weekly Highlights (29/11/2009)

Posted by lemiffe in lemiffe, Life, Photography, Weekly Highlights on Nov 29th, 2009 | 3 comments

This picture was taken whilst I took a stroll through the great city of Glasgow. I found this beautiful church upon my way through Bath St. and positioned myself at an angle in which the photo would somehow describe how tall the steeple really looked and felt.

This was taken yesterday while we walked through the German Market, a part of the Edinburgh Christmas celebrations which start on St. Andrews Festival and end the night before Christmas. The place was so crowded one could barely walk, and had to wait for people to organise and keep moving. The lights were beautiful tones of yellow, however, I chose this picture as it describes more of how I felt at the time more than how it actually looked to the eye.

We had to wait so long to get the bus back home. The cars couldn’t move amongst so much traffic. It was everywhere. The fog was all around us, and it was so cold. After 10 to 15 minutes the bus came along, but the wait was well worth taking some photographs. The scene around us burst with people, fog, and close-to-stationary vehicles.

Unproductive? Stressed out? This might help…

Posted by lemiffe in Business, Communication, Life on Nov 25th, 2009 | 0 comments

How can you be more productive at home and at work, while ridding yourself of unnecessary stress? These are a few tips I have found along the way:

Pending matters (personal or work) tend to stick to your brain through the day, even though you are not focusing on them. They are like a cancer that cuts off productivity, just like a person who is going through divorce or difficult times will have trouble coping with work and friends, this holds with any kind of personal activities that have been left pending.

• If you take email seriously, divide it into “personal” and “work” folders. Attend to personal mail before leaving to work each morning, or at night before going to bed.
• Write down task lists (Use Google Calendar, Outlook, Google Tasks or even pen and paper) and divide them into days. You can’t do everything in a day, so be realistic. Try to do everything that is personal at home, and everything that is work related at the office.
• When you don’t accomplish a pending task, don’t leave it “hanging”. Set it for a later time (after work maybe?) and remove it from the “overdue” list. If it was something urgent you couldn’t accomplish and it involves someone else, let that person know (email? phone?) immediately that it will take you another day to finish it.
• While at work, be sure to have your pending activities listed appropiately and go through them in order, remember you can’t do everything at once and it will only stress you out thinking about how much you have to do, specially when you have a deadline.
• If you read personal email at work, try to archive (or store) personal emails that arrive, and mark in your calendar that you must attend to those emails when you get home. If it is something urgent, reply at once that you will attend to the issue at a later time.

By following these steps, hopefully you will be able to clear your mind at work and start to focus on what you have to do, not what you had to do and didn’t do, nor what you have pending and might have to do later. Everything at its time.

Now get to work!

Someone named David

Posted by lemiffe in Life, Photography on Nov 24th, 2009 | 0 comments

I went for a stroll through the graveyard the other day. It was a random event, however, enjoyable to a certain extent. I didn’t intend to make a photoshoot out of it, however, I found some interesting scenes and moments along the way.

I was thinking about the people who had gone through life and were now buried in the cemetery. What might their lives have been like? How must they have looked? Could there be a trace of history they have left behind? What will their descendants think or know about them? Did they even have offspring at all?

It’s interesting when all these questions come to mind as you start formulating all these stories about lives you know nothing certain about, except for their last words. I sometimes wonder about what will my last words be, I would at least hope for them to be somewhat meaningful. Or maybe something completely random would do just as well.

Weekly Highlights (22/11/2009)

Posted by lemiffe in lemiffe, Life, Photography, Sightseeing, Weekly Highlights on Nov 22nd, 2009 | 0 comments

I will try to upload weekly highlights of interesting moments and photos taken during the week, hopefully to inspire you and others to do the same. Look around, visit places, take photos. In life every moment counts.

At the start of this week I travelled to Glasgow to finish a pending job. Just down on West George St. in Glasgow City Centre I found this interesting fair being built up. My guess is for St. Andrews Day.

This is the view of the loch in Linlithgow. It was a rainy + cloudy day, and heaven knows why we randomly decided to take a trip to Linlithgow, a town of which I had never heard about, but it was a great experience despite the rain.

A silhouette of you, from inside Linlithgow Palace. You can see the beautiful small town just outside the window.

Doug McGuff’s “Dirty Dozen for Black Swan Avoidance”

Posted by lemiffe in Life on Nov 13th, 2009 | 0 comments

A Black Swan is a term coined by Nassim Taleb that describes an unpredictable event whose effect is greatly disproportionate to its cause.

Doug McGuff has written the following 12 tips from the perspective an emergency physician, which under a common point of view might seem a bit excessive or neurotic, however, might end up saving your life. We obviously can never follow all of them, as many of us rely on cycling to work daily through traffic, but it’s never too much to ask for a little precaution.

Read on and digest only the necessary:

1. Drive the biggest vehicle you can afford to drive. Your greatest risk of death comes from a motor vehicle accident. Despite all the data from the government on crash test safety, I can say unequivocally that in a 2-car accident, the person in the larger car always fairs better. Force=Mass x Acceleration. The vehicle with larger mass imparts the greater force. Also, purchase the newest large vehicle that you can afford. Crumple zones in newer cars can expand deceleration time from 30 milliseconds to 90 milliseconds which decreases deceleration forces by a factor of 3. I am not a believer in global warming or man’s contribution to it, but if you are and you want to do your part by driving a Smart Car or a Prius you should be commended for potentially standing by your convictions with your life. Also, if your midlife crisis plans include a motorcycle or sports car, realize that you might resolve your midlife crisis by avoiding old age all together. It goes without saying to wear your seatbelts, and you should be engulfed by as many air bags as possible. If we were truly rational about risk, all seat belts would be 5-point restraints and we would wear helmets while driving.
2. Never get on a 4-wheeler ATV. These are the most dangerous vehicle that I know of. ATV’s have produced more quadriplegics than anything else I have seen.
3. Do not road cycle or jog on public roads/roadsides. This is self-evident.
4. Do not fly a plane or helicopter unless you are a full-time professional pilot. If you are a doctor, lawyer, actor, athlete, stockbroker or other well-to-do professional do not get a pilot’s license. Expertise in one area of life does not transfer to piloting, often with fatal results.
5. If you are walking down a sidewalk and are approaching a group of loud and apparently intoxicated males, cross to the other side of the street immediately. If anyone tries to start a fight with you, the first step should be “choke them with heel dust”.
6. If your gas grill won’t start….walk away. Never throw gas (or other accelerant) on a fire.
7. Never dive into a pool or body of water (except in a pool diving area marked 9 feet or deeper after you have checked in out feet-first).
8. Never get on a ladder to clean your gutters, or on your roof to hang Christmas lights. Do not cut down trees with a chainsaw. I have seen too many middle age males (with a bug up their ass to get something done) die from these activities. In general, any house or lawn work that you can hire for an amount equal to or less than your own hourly wage is money well spent.
9. If you are retirement age and plan on moving to a new home…think twice. The stress pushes many seniors over the edge. If you do, buy an existing house. I have lost count of the number of retirees that have died of heart attacks while going through the stress of custom-building their retirement dream home.
10. If anyone tries to force you into your car or car trunk at gun point, don’t cooperate. Fight and scream all you can even if you risk getting shot in the parking lot. If you get in the car, you will most likely die (or worse).
11. If you are in any personal or professional relationship that exhausts you or otherwise causes your recurrent distress, then end the relationship immediately.
12. Don’t play the lottery…you might win. Any unearned wealth, or wealth that is disproportionate to the objective value you provide will destroy you. Lottery winners and Sports/Movie stars share a common bond of disproportionate rates of depression, addiction, and suicide.

Via BodyByScience