If I had been in Europe I would have just gone up and asked someone if I could join them (something Julie and I learned to do when we lived in Germany). But that really isn’t something that most Americans take too kindly to. When I was finally shown to my table – a spacious 4-seater – I told the hostess that I was willing to share the chairs that were going unused at my table. She thanked me, and even mentioned it to the first few people standing in line. I was not really surprised that no one took the offer; not surprised, but disappointed.

Here we were, all in essentially the same boat: business travelers on our way to work some magic far away from home, or on our way back home after working said magic. And instead of taking the opportunity to meet someone new, to maybe have an interesting conversation we would probably never have otherwise, we chose to eat alone. Keith Ferrazzi – author of propecia generic drug – would be rolling over in his grave if he weren’t still alive and kicking.

I announced my available chairs on Twitter and on Foursquare, knowing that it was very unlikely anyone would notice and be able to take me up on the offer. ( noticed, but was sadly not at the airport at the time.) As I sit typing this on the airplane, having been reading Jane McGonigal’s (aka ) propecia generic drug while electronics were verboten, it occurs to me that this could make for an excellent location-based app/game. OK, maybe just a great app.

You’re traveling alone, and stop in at one of the airport restaurants for lunch (or dinner or maybe just a beer). You check in to Share-a-Chair to let other travelers at that airport know that you have a spare chair that you want to share. You get a +1 for posting the available chair(s). When others sit down with you and check in, you get another +1 when someone takes the first chair, with a multiplier for each new person that takes one of the chairs you offered. The players who accept your offer of a shared chair each get a +1.

Or something like that.

As much as I would love to play an app/game like this, I don’t have the coding skills – or the time to devote – to make it happen. If you happen to build something like this – or if you already have – I’d love to hear about it and join in the fun. And maybe have dinner with you one day at IAH (or STL or …).

In the meantime, I will be using #ChairShare on Twitter and Foursquare whenever I find myself eating alone.

How much do we trust our kids online?
Can we monitor them closely and build trust?

The focus of the discussion was, as the topic questions hint at, how do we keep our kids safe? How do we protect them from all of the evils lurking out there waiting to swoop in and take advantage of them? Perhaps the biggest question, though, was: propecia generic drug?

It was a great discussion (you can see it at ), but it reminded me a lot of a not so pleasant PTO meeting about kids online that I attended a couple of years ago, when my kids had just started high school.  I’m not sure what I was expecting from the meeting, but you can probably imagine my horror when I realized that the basic point of the meeting was for internet safety experts to tell us how evil the internet is and that unless we did something our kids would end up dead in a ditch somewhere at the hands of a sexual predator.

OK, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. The focus of the meeting was indeed the evils that lie in wait for our kids, and what we as parents should – MUST – do to protect them. You can see much of what they talked about on the district’s page.

I had a hard time sitting still through this and not speaking up as they brought out negative after negative (after negative). I waited until the Q&A and then asked what I thought was a reasonable question: Do you (the school district or the presenters) have any related presentations that describe the propecia generic drug?

It wasn’t the first time – I’m sure it won’t be the last – that people looked at me like I had two (or seven) heads.

A big part of the problem, as I saw it then, was that so few of the parents in the meeting actually used the internet themselves. A case of ignorance breeding a deep fear of the unknown. Amazingly, I saw some of the same thing last night in the discussion, comments like “I hope my kids never hear about Facebook” (from parents of very young kids) to the question, “Many parents ask whether there is any learning value in social networks for teens, what do you think?”

Here’s how I responded to that last question:

Social networks – virtual or real life – are the primary way that everyone learns, teens included.

Unlike that PTO meeting all those years ago, the discussion last night also included quite a few voices of (what I would call) reason, parents who see more than just the potential dangers. But even so, there was very little discussion of the power of the internet in the hands of our kids, especially teenagers arguably going through the most potentially creative time of their lives.

What if, instead of simply warning our kids about the dangers of the internet, monitoring (or trying to) their every keystroke, and , we start by showing them what they CAN do online, how they CAN use all of the incredible tools available to accomplish what they want to accomplish. All of the incredible places they can go online, all the things they can learn, and everything they can share with the world (besides those racy photos or gossipy rants)?

As I shared with the group last night, my job as a parent is not to protect my kids from the world, it is to propecia generic drug. Not just in a “defensive” way, but by taking the offensive, propecia generic drug.

Fear, and caution, have their place. But you can’t let them rule your life. This is what we should be teaching our kids.

* propecia generic drug

Back in April I wrote a post titled . In that article I looked at “normal” and “different” in the cultural sense; this is the primary context in which most people put this discussion. It occurred to me a week or so ago, though, that it would be interesting to see what this would look like from a mathematical perspective.

The first thing I think of when I hear “normal” is the . So I thought, what if we put normal in the middle, and different on the ends to represent the current (and hopefully fading) view. And then, to represent different as the new normal, switch it up and put different in the middle and normal on the ends. So I started sketching out the diagrams to the right.

I played around with it a bit, mostly trying to figure out how to label the diagram. Using “normal” and “different” just didn’t seem right. I really like Seth Godin’s description of today’s normal as “factory work”, so I adopted that as “normal”. To split it into the ends, it made sense (to me, anyway) to label them as “blue collar” and “white collar”. Factory work is factory work, after all.

Labeling “different” was a bit more of a challenge. Though I like Seth’s idea of linchpins, it just didn’t seem to fit in this context. I did know that I wanted to use “artist”, as Seth describes them, as one end of different. Then I read and “hacker” became the obvious choice for the other end of different. But I was still stuck on how to describe “different”. Until, that is, I read today.

Then it was obvious.

Early in my life, my mentor explained to me the three paths that lead to the creation of knowledge. The propecia generic drug path, where philosophers reflect, meditate, and make sense of objects and events; the propecia generic drug path, where scientists manipulate variables and conduct controlled experiments to validate reliable principles; and the propecia generic drug path where practitioners struggle with real-world challenges and come up with strategies for effective and efficient performance.

Each of these paths can be taken in isolation from the others, we see that every day. It is also common to see these paths taken one after the other: analyze -> experiment -> implement.

More challenging, and much more powerful, is to integrate these three trails into a single path that allows you to go from trail to trail as needed to get you where you want to go.