The Power of Negative Blogging

Designing homes isn’t as easy as Mike Brady made it look ever week. It’s not just sketching out floor plans and calling it a day. A lot of negative thinking is involved for it to work.

First you need to know the lay of the land. What will the landscape support, what it can’t support? How deep do you need to put the foundation?

Then you need to focus on the area the house will exist. What are the right materials, what are the wrong materials? What is the climate? Are you designing a structure that can withstand cold weather?

Then you look at the budget. How much is everything going to cost? What is the best material for the price? The most expensive materials are not always the best. How long will it take to build?

Does it not only look good, but does it funtion? What might be an issue with the design? How can it be improved?

You can’t just create your dream house, you have restrictions. Negative thinking allows you to work within those restrictions. Understanding what you can’t do is just as vital as what you can.

Making mistakes is a part of life. Learning from them is what’s important. Some people do and some don’t.

For example:

Word of the rattlesnake bite panicked Hunter’s neighbors at the Midpoint Place I condominiums more than his friends, who say the “Cobraman” has suffered vicious bites in the past and survived to tell about them.

When you play with snakes, you’re going to get bit. Obviously, this gentleman, or as I like to call him, “idiot”, didn’t learn from his mistakes. I only need to get bit by 1 rattlesnake to know that you don’t need one for a pet. Anti-venom shouldn’t be something you regularly keep in the medicine cabinet. But “Cobraman” was proud of his mistakes.

This is hardly the first time a snakebite has sent the Cobraman to the hospital. Hunter’s website, cobraman.net, chronicles his past bites with photos of himself in intensive care and close-ups of his own fingers, gnarled, swollen, discolored and bloodied from the bites of vipers, cobras and rattlesnakes.

He even states as clear as day on his website:

The one side effect of self immunization that is least desirable is that it tends to make you a bit complacent while handling (as those of you who know my bite record would attest to).

At some point you need to recognize you’re consistent mistakes as inability. Inability is actually okay. You don’t have to be good at everything. “Cobraman” obviously needs some more negative thinking in his life. Hopefully, before he ends up dead.

But even big companies, entire industries sometimes get stupid. Look at this from CNN.com:

What’s more, consumers and the people who market financial services to them may not have learned their lesson. Klaus-Peter Müller, CEO of Germany’s Commerzbank, told Fortune he was stunned on a recent trip to the U.S. to see TV ads still aggressively touting no-questions-asked credit.

If you continue to give credit cards to people who can’t afford to make the payments…they remarkably won’t pay. WHAT?! HOW CAN THAT BE?! Because they want people to miss payments so they can jack up the interest rates, so they poor schmuck who can’t pay, has to pay more. But they can’t PAY!! Thus, we have the potential for a scary credit card meltdown.

But sometimes, the general population doesn’t get it either. They won’t learn from mistakes because they want cheap products. That’s why we keep hearing about all the scary things coming from china.

Chinese Toys

Halloween items

Dog Food

I’m sure we’ll hear about something else the Chinese have tainted and we’ll be outraged, for a little bit. Then they’ll have tube socks for sale and we all forget.

And just because I didn’t do a media Monday yesterday, News organizations make mistakes as well. Mistakes like thinking this is news (From CNN.com):

In my line of work, I often deal with people who have (or claim to have) ghosts in their houses. Inevitably, most of them ask me what they should do about it. Should they move out? Should they talk to the specters, or just ignore them?

But the most common question I get is whether or not they should contact a ghost hunter to come to their houses and investigate.

Let me answer this one: No. You never have to pay a ghost hunter anything. Do you need to pay for Bigfoot hunters to search the woods near your home? Or alien hunters? Or someone to find the Loch Ness monster in your tub? No.

Making mistakes is part of the learning process. Repeating mistakes is what gets us into trouble. Never fear mistakes. But please learn from them when you do. Take a second to see what went wrong as well as what went right.

If you don’t, you’re making a BIG mistake!

As a life long member of Red Sox Nation I’d like to say thank you to the 2007 Red Sox.

2 championships in 4 years might make us spoiled but the Patriots showed that we can handle it.

Sometimes we make simple mistakes. We forget something or overlook a step in a process. It happens. Sometimes it leads to trouble. Other times…

From Idea Finder:

The year was 1903. Benedictus climbed a ladder to fetch reagents from a shelf and inadvertently knocked a glass flask to the floor. He heard the glass shatter, but when he glanced down, to his astonishment the broken pieces of the flask still hung together, more or less in their original contour.

On questioning an assistant, Benedictus learned that the flask had recently held a solution of cellulose nitrate, a liquid plastic, which had evaporated, apparently depositing a thin coating of plastic on the flask’s interior. Because the flask appeared cleaned, the assistant, in haste, had not washed it but returned it directly to the shelf.

Now this would not be tolerated in today’s super strict, safety conscious laboratories or at least I hope not. But always be on the lookout after a failure. Be open to the failure and the information it will give you. You might just invent something that will save millions of lives. Or it will, at the least, remind you to wash chemicals from beakers!

I’m sorry. I don’t want to report about the monkey menace every day. This is the 2nd posting about monkeys this week alone. I wish they would behave and mind their manners. But things are taking an ugly turn in Kenya.

From the London Daily Telegraph:

Gichuki Kabukuru, a spokesman for Kenya Wildlife Service, said it was well known that monkeys and baboons have a penchant for harassing women rather than men…”

“That is quite true. I will not be able to give you a scientific explanation but it has been observed in the past,” he said. “Even in our camps, when men are out on patrol and the monkeys see women and children, they will become very naughty and make lewd signs at them.” According to locals, the animals have become so aggressive that women have taken to dressing up like men, wearing trousers and long-sleeve shirts.

I think a line is being crossed. What must we do to stop the growing gorilla gropers (I know they’re not gorillas, but I like alliteration!)? Monkeys are literally manhandling innocent women and we do nothing?

This is truly a sad day.