A new appreciation for kneepads: The right tool for the job

A while back, my house was damaged during a big wind-storm. My neighbor had a trampoline in their back yard, and the wind picked the thing up, flipped it, and deposited it two stories up on my roof. Once it was up there, the wind ripped it into a mass of heavy aluminum pipes and springs attached to a wildly flapping tarp, and then took the opportunity to beat said pipes and springs against anything within reach.



I'm really lucky that window didn't break.

But all of that banging around cracked the siding, and helped the wind to rip out some shingles and damage several more.

So this past Wednesday, I climbed up there with a load of shingles and some nails, and started working.

Replacing damaged shingles is actually pretty easy, once you get the hang of it. Use the pry-bar to break the seal of the shingles around the one you're replacing, pull out the nails, slide in the new shingle, nail it down, reseal the older shingles and boom, you're done. Well, you're done with that shingle anyway.

Something I realized, after kneeling on asphalt shingles for over an hour, was that I really should have had some sort of kneepads. I was wearing jeans, but I still managed to rip up my knees pretty painfully. I have a pair of kneepads for rollerblading, but they're hard plastic, and designed to let me slide on pavement without damage rather than cushioning my knees and keeping them from sliding off the roof to my doom. (Doooooooooooooom!)

Something else I realized, was just how well the pry-bar that I was using worked for this job. I could easily slip it between shingles to break the free from the row above them. I could pry out nails from underneath shingles that I'd never be able to reach with just a claw-hammer. It even has a slot along the shaft to slip over the head of the nails and lift them out from way back under the other shingles. If I hadn't had this tool, the job would have been much more difficult, and would have been more time-consuming and probably more painful.

So having the right tool for the job made all the difference. And that allowed me to do take the time to the job right the first time. And *that* is a huge important thing to me. I've done too many rushed repairs in my life, and as a result seen too many crappy-looking poor quality fixed that I wasn't happy with and had to redo later. And I wasn't going to do a shoddy job on something this important.

While I was up there, I noticed that a house down the street from mine had a whole crew of workers on the roof doing the same things that I was, but on a much larger scale. The thing that I observed from that was that "the right tool for the job" for them was a pneumatic nail-gun. :) That sure would have saved me a bunch of time and nail-tapping.

Anyhoo, I got everything done and it looks great.

This tickled my funny bone

Link to original.

Speaking of Barriers

So that article about Passive Barriers has got me thinking... about the barriers in my own life, and the ones that I see around me.

I work as a consultant for a tech company (read temp) and after reading the article, I called up my employer asked if they had a 401k. It turns out that they do, and even though it's non-matching, I signed up to drop about 13% of my income into it. I got to that number by calculating how much the first hour of every day at work would get me.

My barrier to having done this before was thinking that a "temp" agency wouldn't have a 401k available for their consultants. Turns out I was wrong.

Another barrier that I run into a lot is the "What if someone sees me?" question. I'm not talking about the kind of thing that would end up with the police getting involved... more along the lines of people seeing me doing something silly or foolish looking. In this case, doing "Burpees." I found this blog where folks are working on their 100 burpee challenge, and it has inspired me to start doing that too. Whether or not I can make it to 100 days remains to be seen, but I can at least start.

So I was walking around the building I work in during my lunch, and it occured to me that I could just go ahead and do a burpee or two right then and there. But I looked around and saw that I was next to an office building, and there were windows where people could see me, so I didn't do it.

Thinking about it after the fact, I realize that the odds of anyone actually seeing me do two burpees was actually pretty slim.

Then I realized that even if someone actually did see me, the odds of me caring about their opinion was even slimmer.

And even if it turned out that someone that I knew, and who's opinion I cared about saw me, I could tell them about the exercise that I was getting and they'd congratulate me. So there's really no barrier at all. I intend to do my burpees as I walk to my car once I'm off work.

So where else does that particular barrier apply? How often do I change my behavior based on the imagined opinions of a possible audience? And where did that one come from in the first place.

... and then there's the question of how can I use this to my advantage, or change it into something more useful? :)

reboot?

I just finished reading a really good article over at the Get Rich Slowly blog about the Psychology of Passive Barriers. It's basically about how inconsequential, easily overcome obstacles can stop us from doing the things that we want to do, or keep us doing the things that we don't want to do.

For example... not posting to a blog just because the things that you're thinking about don't have anything to do with hypnosis.

So here's an idea. If this was going to be an exclusively about hypnosis blog, I would have called it "HypnoBlog" or something of the sort. Since it isn't, I'll just post whatever gets stuck in my head.

Three cheers for happy, posty goodness.

Happy 4th of July

A tip for folks who drive at night.

When you're driving at night, most folks have a tendency to look directly into the headlights of oncomng traffic. It's a pretty natural thing to do. Something bright and shiny is moving in your field of vision, so it draws your eye.

It also tends to kill your night vision, leaving you seeing spots, and not seeing the road as well as you did before.

A little trick that I was shown is to not look directly at the oncoming lights. Instead, look down and to the right, and watch the line on the right side of the road.

The oncoming lights will still dazzle your eyes, but instead of dazzling the center of your vision, they'll get the far left side, and leave you still able to see the road just fine.

Pay attention, or else

"Sleepnosis" is a way of doing hypnosis where the hypnotist simply repeats suggestions over and over while the subject is asleep. There's some discussion about just how effective this really is, but for the most part, people studying this seem to agree that there is some effect. They also show that the more often the suggestions are repeated, and the more nights they are presented, the more effective they can be.

This makes me wonder about the people who go to sleep with a TV on.

If you don't actively pay attention to the information and opinions that are being presented to you, then those "facts" and opinions get to sneak in past your filters and take up residence in your brain.

As we wander through our day, our senses report an incredible amount of information to our brains. So much information, in fact, that we can't actively process all of it. Our brains just don't have the bandwidth available to consciously sort through it all. So we end up tending to ignore most of what's going on in the background around us... consciously, anyway.

But the subsconscious part of our minds is always listening and always paying attention to everything that our senses report. Part of it's job is to alert our conscious to things of interest that we might not be actively paying attention to. Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night because you heard a weird, out of place noise, even though you were sleeping when you heard it? Ever been in a crowded room, carrying on a conversation, and suddenly picked out someone saying your name through all of the background chatter?

That's your subconscious, doing it's job. It's perfectly capable of taking in massive amounts of sensory input, making sense of it, and sorting it, all without the slightest bit of input from your conscious. It's always on and always listening, even if you're not paying attention. And that's where the problem starts.

The conscious part of your mind is what you use to "pay attention" to something, and is the part of your mind where your logic exists. It's the part where you'd think something like "That guy is certainly passionate about this topic, but if you actually listen to what he's saying, he's full of shit." When you do that, your subconscious can classify that information as "fulla shit" and file it appropriately. Things can get more interesting if you're not actually paying attention to what's being presented.

When that happens, your subconscious gets to make the classification decisions on its own, and it doesn't have access to logic. All it has to make judgements with are your memories and your emotions. Without access to logic, it can only judge the validity of incoming information by comparing it to your past experiences and the emotional states you were in at those times. It's the part of your mind that might think "That guy is certainly passionate about this topic. The last time I felt like that, it was something that was pretty important, so this information must be pretty important too!"

So suddenly, anyone on TV, from douchebags on the news spouting hate and bile, to the advertizers trying desperately to get you to buy something, have a way to get their messages into your head unfiltered and unedited. And that's not a Good Thing.

It's also works to a certain extent if you're awake, but not paying direct attention. Again, repetition and repeated exposure reinforce the message.

So if you're going to watch TV, watch it and then turn it off. Don't just leave the thing on in the background, and whatever you do, don't fall asleep in front of it.