It just occurred to me that four years ago I wrote a blog entry about Tony Robbins, a fairly negative one. I don't remember listening to his course on CD, but the entry makes the experience sound extremely negative.

I guess over the intervening 4 years, that negative experience has been largely forgotten. I recently read a book co-written by Bill Zanker, founder of The Learning Annex. In it, he talks about sending a friend to see Tony Robbins speak at TLA, and how his friend described it as "life changing". I always have a slight bit of envy whenever I hear about an experience being life-changing, as I've never had a life-changing experience to speak of.

Then soon after, I heard an advertisement for Tony Robbins coming to Toronto. I decided it would be interesting to hear him speak in person - to possibly get some of that famous energy and motivation. To give myself the chance of having a life changing experience.

When I go to register however, I discover the price for this 4-day seminar. $895. NINE HUNDRED DOLLARS to see Tony Robbins live.

Now it IS four days. Certainly most multi-day courses, seminars and conferences have that type of price tag. But for an individual, not paid for by a corporation, to go to this type of event, it's a lot of money. I was even thinking it would be good to bring my wife along - so that any life changing experience to be had affects us both. If I would end up changing careers, or changing my diet, or doing other radical life changes, your spouse definitely needs to be on board for it to succeed.

I wonder how many tickets they have available for sale. 1000? 2000? At $900 per ticket (up to $1600 per ticket for front row seats), that has to be more than $1 million. Perhaps even $2 million for a weekend's work.

Tony Robbins is raking it in. (Good for him. But wow.)

I just watched a rather interesting program called Debt Trap, by the show Global Currents on Global TV. You can watch it online here.

The program outlined a number of families and people who have gotten into debt problems. The program slotted the problems into a few major categories:

1) People being offered more credit than they could ever expect to be able to repay

2) Getting into a tight financial situation and using credit cards as a safety net

3) Payday loan companies

4) Student loans

There were more, but those are the four that I have something to say about.

About (1), I do believe its a bit ridiculous the amount of credit the banks offer to people in the form of high interest credit cards. Yes, I do believe in personal responsibility, but having a $10,000 credit card in your pocket when you only make $30,000 per year is excessive. How easy it is to use that card out to dinner, and to book a weekend out of town. And just filling your car with gas. In only 6 months that person can max out their card, and then what? They're paying 1.5% monthly interest on that month after month after month. The credit card companies are happy, and the consumer is miserable. There should be improved laws around this, particular on the amount of high interest rate credit compared to personal income.

On (2), the consumer has to take a large amount of the blame on this. We all lose our jobs unexpectedly. It's how we react to that. On the show, there was a man who had been looking for a job for 10 months. He actually said he's only found "short-term contracts" or jobs that only paid what he made in 2000! You know what? Grow up. You have a responsibility to your family to get a job. If you were making $90,000 before, chances are you might not be able to make that much again. My advice is to take the contract to make some money, and keep looking for a job. Take the lower salary job and keep looking for a job. Money is money. You've been off for 10 months - get off your ass and get moving!

On (3), those payday loan companies should be put out of business. They are loan sharks - pure and simple. Those $60 fees on $200 loans are clearly illegal. As for the family that borrowed from one loan shark to pay the other. And now find themselves owing $1000 on a loan of $300... largely your own fault. Quite frankly, that's just stupid what you did and now you're paying for it. Why can't you come up with $1000??? Seems like you could take on a 1 week short job and pay that back.

On (4), I'm of mixed opinion. On the one hand, why do we burden our students with $50,000+ in loans from their first day on the job. On the other hand, I have NO SYMPATHY, NONE, for that woman featured who has been in school for more than 10 years and is now being hounded to pay back her $100,000+ in loans. What have you been doing for 10 years? How about you take your masters, and go to work. Start saving money. Start paying back your loan. And in 5 years go back for your PhD? There is no constitutional right for you to be a doctor. And if you were smart, once you got your PhD and your $100,000 student loans, you'd move to another country and skip out on your loan. She sounds like she's avoiding her responsibilities - not calling back the government, or calling them and swearing at them.

The loan business in Canada needs an overhaul. Lower the maximum interest rate from 30% to 20%. Get rid of payday loan companies. Force banks to reduce the credit limits on everyone so that consumers don't get themselves into trouble. And people need to wake up and smell the awful stench of debt and want to get rid of it.

Anyways, end of rant. Time for lunch.

Web 2.0 - the term has been used and abused so that it has many different meanings. (And of course O'Reilly thinks they own it, which is ridiculous on its face. That's a rant for another post I guess.)

Is it a web site with big fonts and pastel colors? Is it web sites that use Ajax? Web sites that rely on users to submit content (crowd sourcing)? Web sites that don't charge money but simply rely on advertising? It's many different things I suppose.

One thing I've noticed about Web 2.0 is the idea that you have "friends". On twitter, I have followers. On digg, I have friends and fans. I have facebook friends and secondlife friends. People subscribe to my RSS feed of this blog. And it goes on and on.

One unexpected consequence of this is watching the natural decay of friends. That is, you start losing friends. Its a weird phenomenom. But one day you think to yourself, "Gee, I wonder what's up with Sally? I haven't heard from her in a while". And then you go onto Facebook to see her profile, and realize she's not in your friends list any more. She's defriended me!

I myself trim my friends list from time to time. For instance, I met someone at a conference once. They added me as a friend on Facebook the next day. I accepted. And then a year later I haven't heard from them even once, and they Facebook profile is largely empty (abandoned even). I then decide to remove them as a friend. Someone I met once, who could have become friends with but didn't, doesn't need to see my family picnic pictures on Facebook.

But I have elementary and high school people I haven't talked to in 20 years adding me to Facebook as well. So obviously there's a different standard for those people being "friends" versus people I have talked to only once.

It's an interesting culture of online friends we are living in. You can track who considers you a friend, and notice when they no longer consider you a friend. Quite brutal actually.

We love to turn people into heroes. Sports figures are popular people to turn into heroes. If you've ever watched the opening credits for Monday Night Football, you'll see this phenomenom in action. On every team, there are one or two key players, each of which have overcome some incredible tragedy in their life just to get to this very game which is the most important moment of their career so far. Of course, you could turn the story of my life (or your life, or anybody's life) into this same sad tale of being knocked down, and getting back up, and overcoming adversity, and proving the nay-sayers wrong.

Roger Clemens was one of the best pitchers in baseball. Headed for the hall of fame. He had a comfortable life ready for him in retirement, and could just ride off into the sunset with a good solid name in the publics mind. But not any more. He entered a fight he had no hope of winning. And lost.

It all started I think with BALCO. BALCO was a drug laboratory that sold performance enhancing drugs to some of the world's top athletes. The U.S. government came down hard on BALCO one day, mostly for tax reasons of course, and investigators found a gold mine of evidence including names of athletes. This became excellent fodder for the news media, and athletes such as Barry Bonds and Marion Jones got intense scrutiny. Jones lost 5 olympic medals because of the controversy. Bonds is currently charged with perjury for denying his involement and is awaiting trial. Bonds home-run king totals will forever have an asterisk next to it because most people believe he has been using steroids. And certainly if you see a 1990's picture of him next to a 2000's picture, you'll see that he does not even look like the same man physique wise.

The BALCO controversy, and the dozen or so big-name athletes caught up in it and ultimately destroyed by it, created a media frenzy over drug use in sport. Politicians in Congress aren't blind to the publicity of this, and called many athletes and trainers in to testify. One of these trainers accused Baseball great Roger Clemens of using steroids, claiming to have personally injected him. And what does Roger Clemens do?

He sues the guy for slander.

And now? His former team mate Andy Pettit says he also heard him talking about steroids. He's been called before congress a couple of times. And he's been linked to having illicit affairs with 3 women, including one who was only 15 years old when he met her. And he's apparently admitting to one or more of those affairs with a public apology today. And its not over for him, is it?

Poor Roger Clemens. May have never even used illegal drugs, but when you're fighting against the media, you're always going to lose. What are you going to do? How can you prove your innocence? You can't.

Last year I climbed the CN Tower (which means going up the 1776+ stairs).  I never really told the story of what happened, but basically it was a difficult mental and physical test. I had to take quite a few rest stops on the way up to catch my breath. In the end, I had a lousy time of 44:56. I am sure I can do better.

How bad is 45 minutes?

http://www.wwf.ca/HowYouCanHelp/CNTowerClimb/2007/results/resultsPublic-overall.txt

I finished 4023 out of 4222 total climbers. Or 1911 out of 1964 male climbers. Oh my god.

One thing that slowed me, I'm sure, was climbing all the way to the top with a partner. Now my climbing partner is in better shape than I am, but she had more difficulty as we got to the top whereas I wanted to keep going.

Two people climbing together is not just as slow as the slowest member, its a lot slower when one person wants to stop and the other person doesn't. I changes the momentum, turns what could have been 20 minutes of intensity into 40 minutes of alternating intesity and rest, which is a different workout. I'm sure we both could have done a lot better if we just met at the top.

I'm planning to do it again this year. But I will climb solo and do it in under 30 minutes.

My account is temporarily unavailable? Why just me? It'd be fine if their whole site was down for maintenance, but they're saying "my account" is not available. Facebook hates me.

The U.S. election process has always struck me as a bit odd. Not sure if I can entirely explain what's specifically wrong with it, but there are a few symptoms:

• A U.S. Presidential election lasts about 2 years (18 months of non stop campaigning by the candidates) for a term that only lasts 4 years.
• An unpopular second-term President is considered a lame duck, and not much work gets done for 2 years.
• The job "President" has very little responsibility, but is for some reason worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars on getting.
• A successful politician (a U.S. Senator, say) is always fundraising. Every week, every month, every year he is in office, he's also trying to raise money for the next campaign. If some of those Senators spent as much time focusing on passing good laws as they did on fundraising, the U.S. would be much better off.
• The national job of President is fought "state by state". And candidates routinely drop out of the race if they don't do well in Iowa and New Hampshire, of all places.

So why is this so messed up? That's harder to pinpoint.

I think the design of Presidential elections - the delegate process - is partly to blame. Let me ask you this - what would happen if you gave the candidates 60 days to campaign and that's it. And at the end of 60 days, you held one giant national primary to elect the party representitive? The person with the most votes represents the party at the Presidential election.

Hey, you can even give people second and third choices so that votes for unelected candidates get shifted to a more viable candidate instead of getting wasted. That would be more democratic than this one primary per week nonsense.

And hey, while we`re at it, 60 days after the nation primary, you hold the national election. Again, most votes determines the winner.

Well, two things would happen. For one, every person in the country involved in party politics would have a say in the candidate chosen. As it is now, the early states tend to pick the one or two choices for the rest. And the second thing is it would take a LOT less money to be a Presidential candidate. As it is, Clinton has already spent $40 million on her campaign, Obama $45 million, Romney $53 million, Giuliani $30 million, McCain $28 million... And how many states primaries have been held? 7. Yes, out of 50 states, 7 primaries are over and $200 million has already been spent!

The other thing to consider, is how little say people really do have in electing the President. One of the startling things to me was the Gore-Bush election in 2000. Bush beat Gore by winning Florida - we all know that. But the vote counting came down to one or two precincts in Florida a few hundred disputed votes. Hanging chads. What to do about votes who had only indented the voting card but not punch a hole into it? And that decided the election. A few hundred votes in 1 or 2 specific places in Florida. Why weren't votes in other states challenged and recounted? Because even a 100,000 vote difference in California doesn't matter, but a 100 vote difference in Florida does!

That was a close election. But there needs to be a better way to count these things such that recounts don't dramatically change the outcome. One vote per person.