April, 2009:

Cats in the Cradle

Do you remember the song Cats in the Cradle by Harry Chapin? It tells the story of a father who is too busy to spend time with his son and when his son gets older he becomes just like his dad. He becomes too busy to spend time with his father.

I was reminded of that song while I was at the movies with Emily and James on the weekend. We went to see Monsters vs Aliens. A great animated flick.

A guy with a son aged around 6 or 7 sat next to us. While it was nice to see that he was taking him to the movies on a Saturday morning it was disheartening to see that he was on the phone at least three times during the movie. Admittedly he kept his voice very low and wasn’t really disturbing those around him but it made me so sad to think that he couldn’t switch his phone off for just a couple of hours to totally enter into spending time with his boy.

I wonder what kind of message that was giving the boy. Dad’s willing to take him to the movies but he’s not really interested in the things that interest his son. Dad will sit next to his son but he’d rather be talking to someone else.

The shocking truth is that I’m not the perfect parent. In fact I’m nowhere near being the perfect parent but some things are fairly obvious. If we want our children to feel loved and accepted we need to spend time with them. We need to give them our undivided attention. We need them to know that they are vitally important to us and that there are few things that are more important than spending time focussed on building relationship.

Just as in the song, a day will come when we want to know that we’re important to our children. When that day comes they’re likely to treat us as we’ve treated them. That’s either a frightening or comforting thought depending on the messages we give our children when they’re young.

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A step back in time

Apr 5th, 2009

by Rodney Olsen.

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A lot has happened over the past year. I won’t bore you with all the details but there have been some fairly major changes and life events within twelve short months.

We’ve lost two close family members. Both died way too young.

The radio station I work for has moved across the city.

We decided to move house and are still going through the ‘sell one house buy another’ process.

Our ten year old son James spent five weeks overseas with Pauline’s mum.

There have been plenty of other things happening, most of which can be found in my blog posts from the past year.

On this day last year I was getting ready to leave Perth for an amazing adventure. Below is some of what I wrote early on Saturday morning the 5th of April 2008. At the time I really had no idea what was going to happen.

I’m the only one up in my house at the moment but very soon we’ll all be sharing our last breakfast together for ten days.

I have to be at the airport at around 9:45 to fly out at 10:45. Between now and then I need to put all the clothes my Pauline has so wonderfully prepared for me into my case and then double check that I have everything I need. (I just know I’ll forget something.)

Over the next couple of days I’ll fly from Perth to Sydney then to Los Angeles then Miami and finally on to Haiti. I’ll be in Haiti for around a week before I repeat the entire process in reverse.

I feel totally unprepared but I’m sure that’s what long flights are all about. The flights will give me time to finally stop and soak in the information that I haven’t had time to process so far. I’ll read about Haiti and find out a little bit more of what to expect, I’ll read the instructions to my audio recorder to make sure that I know what I’m doing when I start interviewing people from Compassion and those they serve.

That was the start of my journey with Compassion Australia to see the amazing work they do in developing countries.

Little did I know that I’d only spend a couple of days in Haiti and that we’d have to enlist the services of an armed police escort to get us to the airport to leave the country as fires and violent protests took over the city of Port-au-Prince.

Over the next few days I’ll re-visit some of that trip and look at the highs and the heartbreaks.

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School's a Yawn

Apr 3rd, 2009

by Rodney Olsen.

2 comments

The first week of April is always an interesting time as stories of April Fools Day pranks start to filter through.

I remember many years ago trying to think of practical jokes on the 1st of April. Most of the time it was only ever thinking about it. I don’t remember carrying out too many pranks.

I read this morning that an Albanian high school class managed to execute a somewhat dangerous April Fools Day stunt on their teacher. It seems that they all took sedatives and fell asleep in class.

All 20 students of a class in a school in Saranda, on Albania’s southern Adriatic coast, swallowed one or two Diazepam pills. They obtained the drug, similar to Valium, in a pharmacy, reports said.

When the teacher saw his entire class had nodded off, he got a little bit frantic and had all his students taken to hospital, where the story behind the joke unravelled. The school director apparently described the prank as “collective idiocy”.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend any stunts like that. Mind you there were several classes I can recall from my student days where I wouldn’t have needed any kind of help to drift off to sleep.

Did you ever manage to pull off an April Fools Day prank at school? Did you get ‘stung’ this year?

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Never lose your footy again

Apr 1st, 2009

by Rodney Olsen.

2 comments

What a brilliant idea.

Are you going to rush out to buy a gBall?

This weekend around the country, the gBall(BETA) will change Australian rules football as we know it.

Building on our core strength in search, Google was approached by a number of Australian rules football leagues to apply our technology in their search for new talent. In response, Google, in partnership with the official supplier of matchballs to the AFL, Sherrin, has developed the gBall. Incorporating specially developed Google technology, it will be used in all school and amateur competitions – and will go on sale to the public – this weekend.

Users can plug in and register their gBall online, using a simple interface. The gBall contains inbuilt GPS and motion sensor systems to monitor the location, force and torque of each kick. The data is interpreted by a new curvilenear parabolic approximation algorithm developed in Google’s Sydney office, known as DENNIS (“Dimensional, Elastic, Non-Linear, Network-Neutral, Inertial Sequencing”), which plots the ball’s trajectory, accuracy and distance.

If you want one, you’d better move quickly. I don’t think they’ll be available tomorrow.