The story is based on the 2009 book The Vegetarian Myth. I’d just like to say that I don’t have anything against vegetarians or vegans. I understand why they do what they do.

I haven’t read the book yet, only the article, but it seems that the author is really interested in delving into the nature of the modern factory farming agricultural system. Lierre Kieth, a former vegan, suggests that the vegetarian path is not going to accomplish the goals that most vegetarians seem to have. These reasons include tend to revolve around health, protecting animals, helping feed the hungry and not participating in factory farming.

All those are honourable goals, but is being a vegetarian really going to accomplish them? Avoiding meat for health reasons, particularly if that meat is coming from the factory farm process, is quite sensible. I’m not going to go into those reasons, but I certainly understand them. I would prefer to consume naturally raised animals instead of genetically modified, steroid and anti-biotic injected, confined and often diseased animals.

I would also prefer to eat fruits, vegetables and other food products that aren’t genetically modified, coated in pesticides and herbicides or contaminated with harmful bacteria such as E. Coli. Is that too much to ask? Apparently to factory farmers, it is.

Keith covers a broad range of topics in her five-page summary published in Mother Earth News, dealing with food security and factory farming. I tend to agree, from the reading and research I’ve done in the past, that these are far more serious issues that being a vegetarian is not really going to adequately address.

It is not easy to break the factory farming cycle, but we’re beginning to see rumblings among citizens that indicate people are becoming fed up with the crap we’re being fed, both from agribusinesses and politicians. I certainly don’t blame the small farmer who’s being driven to the edge of bankruptcy by what is a fundamentally corrupted food system.

The popularity and awareness of farmers markets has really increased in recent years. I’m not sure if gardening has as well, but I hope it has. We really do need to examine the relationship between what we eat and where it comes from to our personal health and the health of our land.

If you’re interested in your health, your family’s health and the health of agriculture, this article would be a good start. I’m definitely going to be picking up the book.

If you thought this was going to be a consumer guide, or that I even know what I am talking about on this topic, you may be disappointed. I wrote a stream of consciousness piece on books, ebooks and e-readers. You’ve been warned!

So the iPad has now been officially released in Canada. Great. Now what? I’m certainly not going to rush out and get one. In fact, I’m not really eager to rush out and buy any e-reader right now.

While I may be a high tech worker of sorts (I do wear the clean suit in my office you know) I still like many old ways of doing things, because they work (and are just better). I love social media, but I’d still rather meet people in person, as much as possible.

I know all the advantages of e-readers, particularly the iPad. I’ll eventually get one, once they’re cheaper. At the price they are ($549 base) I can get a decent laptop that’s much more capable. Yes, it’s heavier, but I can do more.

I like the Kindle, but it’s still overpriced. As an e-reader, it’s better because the screen can be read in direct sunlight. I want to sit on my patio and read when it’s nice out.

I like the portability of books and the fact that it can sit on my shelf for years before I read or reread it. I am concerned about electronic books in a number of ways. With all the concern over copyright and digital rights management, I think one thing has kind of slipped by everyone. What about the author?

I would be more inclined to pay the $10 or so for an ebook if I knew the bulk of that $10 went to the author. Instead we have Apple and Amazon, as well as the publishers, taking a rather large cut. I seem to remember reading something about these devices not allowing an ebook to be able to be moved from one platform to the other. That’s like saying I can read in the living room, but I can’t read the same book in the bathroom.

With my wife taking classes at the University of Alberta, we’ve discovered that many textbooks have an electronic option too. What’s the downside? Well, the license expires after a short period of time and you’ve got no work to refer to afterwards (in some cases).

I still have textbooks from my university days, sitting on my shelves and actually referred to on a reasonably regular basis.

What would happen if my iPad were to die but I don’t want to buy another one? Do I lose all of those? And what about garage sales? How am I going to buy an ebook there? How would I lend a book to my friends?

That’s not to say there’s no advantage to e-readers at all. They’d be great to sit somewhere and read the newspaper or whatever. I often find myself watching something like the Discovery Channel and want to check out something I’ve seen on a show like Daily Planet.

An iPad would be nice for that.

My concerns really revolve around permanence and ownership. I would much rather have a book in my hand. I know it’s there and I don’t have to worry about it disappearing.

I sometimes wonder if the companies that make these things think more about people buying “their” ebooks and getting them locked down in their platform and think less about a useful, universal device that has no issues with data portability. What am I thinking? Of course they’re more worried about locking them down.

I think the ongoing license model can work for some products but I don’t want my books to be that way. For books related to my work (search engine optimization) that would make sense as things change, yes.

My ideal e-reader would allow my books to be lent out, switched from an iPad to a Kindle (or whatever), could be read in direct sunlight, is waterproof (because people still like to read in the bath), reasonably shock resistant, doesn’t use much power and would allow me to surf, email, etc. Oh, and it can’t weight too much. And allows me to use Flash.

Is it out there? I don’t know. I haven’t researched it too heavily. It’s not a big worry. Perhaps some of my concerns are already addressed. Not too worried.

Author benefits

I think that authors could potentially benefit greatly from ereaders, iPads and such. This is the one bright spot in the whole debate about this emerging technology.

Instead of having to go to publishers to get their books published, they can self-publish, and it’s almost as easy as finishing it in the word processor and publishing it immediately. That’s obviously simplistic, but not far off.

So why would the author need the publisher? Why do they need the book store? Why not publish it from the author’s own website? Cut out the middleman and the author makes a hell of a lot more money.

Chapters and Amazon can still play a role, but take a much smaller cut. Hell, why not publish your book as an app through Apple? What does Apple take? 35 per cent? The only issue there is that it’s not portable. I need an Apple device, but it’s one option.

Publishers should be worried

Authors should be fighting to have open standards so they can sell their books from their own site and have them read on any ereader out there. I doubt the big players like Amazon and Apple want this. I’m not sure if the iPad or Kindle will read PDFs at this point. I thought I’d heard they do.

Authors obviously want to make sure they are protected though. I don’t know how they can make it so their book is portable but can’t be copied. They really ought to get the full credit for their works. If you’re going to read it, pay for it. They ought to price the books such that people will think they might as well pay for it, especially when the author is getting most of the money from the sale.

What would that number be? I’m sure authors aren’t making $5 a book now, but if their ebooks were $5, why wouldn’t you pay for it?

Every time a new communications medium comes along, it brings with it claims about how the existing communications methods will die. Most of them are still with us: books, TV, radio, etc. Ebooks will add to the mix of media in their own way, and we will still be able to buy the paper versions. They may become rarer as time goes on, but I doubt they’ll ever disappear.

I’m curious to know what you think. Got an iPad you’re in love with? Kindle DX? Something else? I will buy an e-reader eventually, so I would like to know what other people think.

Dr. Riki Ott, a marine toxicologist, just happened to be living in Cordova, Alaska at the time of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. What are the chances of that? Rather inopportune for Exxon and now for BP.

She spoke this morning about the long term effects on the people who cleaned up the Exxon Valdez spill and is warning that the same process is unfolding in Louisiana. Have we learned nothing from past oil spills? It would seem that our governments and oil companies haven’t.

Dr. Riki Ott’s interview is in Hour One. It’s just under 28 minutes long and worth every minute.

She’s also written a couple of books on the Exxon Valdez oil spill: Sound Truth and Corporate Myths – The legacy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill and Not One Drop – Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez oil Spill.

I'm alleged to have bought an ugly coffee table which may or may not resemble this one.

Do you ever have weird dreams? My wife informed me this morning she had a weird dream last night.

I was out at Tech Wing Wednesday at Hudson’s last night (for real) and apparently I had too much to drink (she dreamed). So, instead of calling her for a ride, I located a late-night furniture store (in dreams, stores have convenient hours) that was willing to deliver me, my new $650 butt-ugly coffee table and my scooter back to my house.

We had a good laugh about that this morning. My wife left early to go to work for a 1.5 hour course on how to enter her time sheet.

She didn’t look in the garage before she left.

I’m definitely 30+

While sipping on my coffee I picked up one of the many books lying around my house.

I cracked open Old Shite’s Almanac to a short piece:

Accepted indications you’ve reached the age of thirty

• You leave clubs before the end to “beat the rush.”
• Before going out anywhere, you ask what the parking is like.
• When sitting outside a pub, you become envious of their hanging baskets.
• Before throwing the newspaper away, you look through the property section.
• You buy your first t-shirt without any writing on it.
• You always have enough milk in the house.
• Instead of throwing out an old pair of trainers (shoes), you keep them because they might be good for the garden.
• You are unable to resist the lure of self-assembly furniture.
• You find yourself saying “is it cold in here, or is it just me?”
• Instead of tutting at old people who are slow getting off the bus, you tut at schoolchildren’s lousy grammar.
• You wish you had a shed.
• You have a shed.

I’m not guilty of all of them, but a good number! And, I do have a shed. I’m happy about that, but even better? I have a garage. A double garage!

Why haven’t I been blogging?

As you can see, my blogging has been rather sparse so far this summer, something I can attribute to a large amount of work on my plate. I had thought the summer might be slow for me, but it’s been anything but!

So instead of sipping Coronas on the patio, I’ve been in front of my computer all summer. Don’t take it as a complaint! I have added several new SEO and copywriting clients lately, which have contributed to what I think has been a good summer, but not in the traditional sense.

Will autumn be slower? I hope not, though I do hope I can take a bit of a holiday at some point. At the very least I promise to blog more on exciting topics such as Michael Jackson’s death and the healthcare debate in the US. I do have some blog posts in the works that should be good for a laugh as well.

That’s what it takes if you want to master something. Almost anything I guess.

This comes from a new book written by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers: The Story Of Success. It’s actually being released today and it sounds like one I need to get a hold of.

From the excerpt I read, Gladwell seems to be saying that there are two things at work when it comes to success: time and a bit of luck. Luck is one of those things you can’t really control. Time is one you have a certain degree of control over. You’d think that genius would be one of the factors that contributes to success, but Gladwell digs into “genius” and suggests it’s not as much of a factor as you might think.

I’ve read Gladwell’s other books: The Tipping Point and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. I like his writing and ideas. He’s definitely not one to stick to conventional thinking.

We’ve always heard “practice makes perfect” and according to Gladwell seems to be the case.

This idea – that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice – surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

I can’t say I’ve spent 10,000 hours mastering anything. Sleep maybe. I’ve found a career now that I feel I can stay with for the rest of my life, and I’m well into my journey to 10,000 hours. I’ve had some luck along the way too, but some might say that’s positioning.

If you were to put in eight hours per day mastering any skill, it would take you 1,250 days to hit 10,000 hours. That’s about three and a half years. Every day. How many of us can devote a full eight hours every day to anything? Even at work your day is broken up by lunch, coffee, meetings, etc. How much of your day is real work where you can master your skill of choice?

Let’s say you get three hours per day really mastering your skill. That translates into 3,333 days, or about 9 years. But, that’s every single day. Seems like a big task, doesn’t it? I have tried to teach my kids that hard work matters more than genius, and I hope they’re learning that. Of course you need to have a normal level of intelligence, but after that, it’s hard work that really counts.

I think mastery is a goal worth working towards, whether it’s work-related or some other pursuit like art, music, writing, carving, etc. So, what skill are you working to master with your 10,000 hours?