Canada’s food guide 2019 – finally science-based healthy eating guidelines!

The new Canada’s food guide is the first that puts the science of healthy eating squarely before politics. Here’s what’s new in the Canadian food guide.

The new Canada’s food guide has generated a lot of buzz. Much of the buzz has focused on reducing the four food groups to three, replacing the “Milk and Alternatives” and “Meat and Alternatives” food groups with “protein foods”. [Read more…]

The non-dairy Canada’s food guide 2019 – it’s about time

Yes, the new Canada’s food guide does away with the “dairy” category. Here’s why that’s a good thing.

I’m a huge dairy fan.

I drink two glasses of milk per day.

Our household consumes more mozzarella than the average pizza parlor. [Read more…]

How to choose a job that will make you happy

There’s more to happiness on the job than choosing what you do. Here are some even more important factors to consider.

We spend a third of our waking hours on the job. If our job sucks, it’s hard to be happy. If our job is great, we have a pretty good chance of being happy.

But what makes a great job. How do you choose one that will bring happiness? [Read more…]

Where digital nomads go to work remotely

In the emerging gig economy, more and more people are choosing to work anywhere they feel like. These are the digital nomads.

Thanks to the Internet, we have a world full of digital nomads. In the days of moat diggers and blacksmiths, it was important to live close to your work. Moats are not transportable, and if you tried transporting a customer’s horse, there was likely a hanging in your very near future. These days, a lot of work is geography independent.

Here are a few of the careers that will follow you no matter where your feet or a plane ticket will take you.  These are generally freelance careers, where you work for a variety of companies and individuals: [Read more…]

The things shoes can teach us

The day I lost my shoes, and how I turned that into an opportunity.

Dorothy lost hers. I forgot mine. My wife broke hers. I speak of shoes, of course.

So why are we all smiling? We each have our reasons, and here they are… [Read more…]

What makes a great fitness logo?

A new fitness business has a story to tell. That story starts with the right logo.

If you are thinking of entering the fitness business, one of the first things you’ll need to come up with is a logo. A logo is the visual representation of your business. It is not your brand. Your brand is what people think of you and how they feel about you. But your logo is a visual representation of your brand. [Read more…]

Room combinations – more space for less money

You get more house for your money when you combine rooms. Here are a few ways to do that.

Home shows on TV encourage us to dream big and imagine that we can have it all. The modern home concept in North America is to have a room for everything. That is, a single room for each purpose.

In fact, we often see several rooms for a single purpose on these shows. This is especially true with bathrooms. There’s the main bathroom, the master suite bathroom, the ensuite bathroom and the other bathroom.  How many bathrooms does one house need? [Read more…]

Unintended consequences of technology

Ooh, we love our technology. But sometimes there are unintended consequences, and here are some of them.

Every new technology has a purpose. Nobody invents things for no reason. But many technologies have unintended consequences. They change society in some way that nobody foresaw, not even the inventors.

The example I often use is air conditioning. What an amazing invention, saving people from withering in summer’s heat. The reason to invent air conditioning was to make us more comfortable. But what else did it end up doing? [Read more…]

Sorry, no customer service after 4:00 P.M.

My real, live experience with “customer service”. If you run a business, don’t do this.

A while ago, I wrote about 8 ingenious styles of customer service that every business should know about, mostly because their employees have been inflicting them on unsuspecting customers.

For instance, I warned about “in your face customer service” and “run for cover customer service”, two equally effective opposites…like pouring too much sugar on your Shreddies one morning for breakfast, and dumping too much cayenne pepper on them the next morning. [Read more…]