Enjoy!

“I’ve never seen nor heard of a systematic roundup of pens and coffee mugs before,” Johnson said. “It’s a bit draconian. But the onus is on us now to do a better job of explaining the job and the importance of marketing representatives. Unfortunately there are a lot of cynics in America who want to think the worst.”

You can count me as one of those cynics.  I feel like I am at a sporting event when I go into a doctor’s office.  I once even invented a game called Doctor Office Bingo, whereby you got to cover spots on a grid depending on what marketing junk you saw at the office.  The coup d’etat was, of course, if a marketing rep came in while you were waiting to see the doctor!

Hey, I am not trying to prevent these guys from making a living, but how can you tell me that a company has the right to advertise for things that I can’t even buy without someone else’s permission?  Their mere presence puts us patients in a position of mistrust of our Dr. because we no longer know whose interest they are looking out for, is it mine or their paid junkets?  Mistrust of your doctor is the last thing our health care system needs.

Finally, we as patients aren’t without fault here, either.  We need to tell doctors enough is enough, but we also need to stop asking for prescriptions just because we saw some stupid ad with vague descriptions of problems that can cover a whole lot of diseases.   Furthermore, we need to start taking the time to find doctors who we feel comfortable with and who takes the time to listen to what is going on.  Believe me, they are out there, despite what you hear in the press.  But you have to shop around, just like you would when finding someone to build a house or buying a flat screen.  Don’t just “buy” the first one you find.

I’ve talked quite a lot before about buying or selling links that pass PageRank. Today I wanted to walk through a concrete example of paid posts and show why the major search engines don’t want to be affected by links within paid posts. The problem is best illustrated by a serious example: suppose you just visited your doctor and got a scary surprise: you or a member of your family have a tumor. The doctor is throwing around words like steroids, surgery, chemo, and radiosurgery. Much of what the doctor says washes over you, but you remember the word “radiosurgery” and resolve to find out more when you get home.

Interesting, we all get worked up over paid links, yet we have no, for the most part, no problem with ads by drug companies telling us what prescriptions we need before we even know if we have the disease…  Aaaah, irony.  What would life be without it.

My wife and some other mom’s have gotten together and created a group called Moms I.N.C. (Moms Improving Nutrition for Children) to try to address the obesity and behavioral problems rampant in children these days by working to improve the quality of school lunches and to help educate people on how to eat better.

One thing I like about their approach (I am, of course, biased) is that they are not out to demonize types of food (i.e. cookies are “bad” or ice cream is bad).  Instead they want to improve what is in the food by getting food manufacturers to remove the Fake Five from food and to help people make better choices about when to eat the so called “bad” food.  Believe me when I tell you, you can have good tasting food without MSG, High Fructose Corn Syrup and other additives that add to obesity and bad health.   I emphasize good tasting, because I am  a food snob and don’t stand for bad tasting food, even if it is organic.  There are plenty of manufacturers out there that combine good tasting and good for you (or, in the case of deserts and sweets, better for you than the alternative.)

So, if you are a parent in need of information or support in changing your school’s lunches, I would encourage you to check out their site.  If you have the time,  you can volunteer to help make it better, too.

So, my typical day is something like this:

1. Walk son to bus stop, then go for a run, some where between 3-5 miles (3-4 days per week)
2. Every two hours, starting at 9 am, take a break from working and do: 25 pushups, 40 high quality situps, set of curls or shoulder rows, and a set of goblet squats

It serves a lot of purposes:  it makes me take a break from work and helps my eyes and hands not be strained, it keeps up my strength, etc., it provides a good workout in the span of 5 or so minutes, and it occurs right about the time I typically get hungry, so it reminds me to have a good healthy snack instead of giving into my cravings.  Plus, it doesn’t prevent me from doing my regular cardio type workouts like running, swimming or biking.

Is it really the case that 50% of their costs are related to handling insurance claims? Even assuming they were giving a discount because they get paid right away, I don’t see how they get to a 50% discount.

Anyone have any insight?

Despite the many things I love about the area, one of the things that
bothers me is the amount of waste that goes on here (much like the rest of the good ol’ USA).  Cary homeowners
are constantly being told to conserve water, etc. while the town and
business seemingly use water like it is going out of style.  How many
new subdivisions and strip malls in Cary have nice little water
fountains out front continuously using water (even when it is recycled, it is not 100% efficient)?  How many new subdivisions are clearing trees creating large amounts of waste on a daily basis while I am told I should conserve?

So, here are my top 6 things I think Cary could do to be greener, and I
don’t mean in the tree-hugging sense, I mean, practical, everyday
things.  Some are for the town to do and some are for us citizens to do.

1.   Start picking up chipboard (you know, cereal boxes, etc.) in the
curbside recycling program.  This has to be one of the single biggest pieces of
waste most people produce and I bet most of it is thrown out because you can’t put it in the green bin. While the town encourages you to set it
aside and bring it to a convenience center, I bet most people do
not.  The town says it does not have a enough trucks to manage all of
this, but my solution dovetails nicely with step 2.

2.  Stop picking up yard waste every week in residential areas.  Pick
up yard waste every other week.  Provide people with a container just
like the garbage can to hold it all.  Then in the off weeks in a neighborhood, they
can pick up all the chipboard.  Even better, reduce all pick up
(including trash) to every other week, thus keeping the highly
polluting trucks out of neighborhoods as much as possible.  In order to do this, however,
people would need airtight, odor proof trash cans, lest we stink up our garages.  Think of it as
the Diaper Genie for household trash.

3. Use Habitat for Humanity’s Reuse Center when doing home remodeling
instead of just throwing out the remains of your gutted kitchen.

4. More bike lanes.  Better driver education concerning bikes.  Find
a way to give tax credits or discounts to people who bike to work,
etc.  Perhaps we could have a program where cyclists could swipe a
card at a little station verifying they are riding their bike.

5.  Even better than putting your yard waste out on the corner, start
composting.  Make compost bins available on the cheap.  People spend
all this money on mulch, top soil, cow manure, etc.  when they have
all the makings of the same stuff in their weekly yard waste if only
they spent 30 minutes or so reading on how to do it and another 10 minutes each week tending to the pile.  Composting is
easy and it need not smell bad, either.

6. Rain barrels.  Again, make them
available for cheap.  I paid $100 for two of them, but I bet they
could be even cheaper if the city gave more incentive for people to
adopt them.  In fact, I bet they could find a local manufacturer who
they could buy barrels from cheaply and then they could be easily
converted to be used as a rain barrel.  Also, consider giving incentives to those who, when installing a sprinkler system, also install an underground storage tank to capture rain runoff from their downspouts that then feeds back into the sprinkler system.

Ultimately, I would love to see the Town of Cary try to engage a
manufacturer to make solar much cheaper for a whole community.  Perhaps if
a whole town were to negotiate buying solar panels in bulk we could
bring the price down significantly.  Think about it, Cary, NC — virtually energy independent.  How cool would that be?  What better
thing could there be for home prices than to say that your energy
bills would be next to nothing for the life of the home?  In fact, if the town did it right, it probably could setup a whole power cooperative, ensuring cheap power to homes and businesses for years to come.

OK, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that within the next 10 years this “miracle” pill gets pulled because it is shown to fuel breast (and other) cancer just like the exact same drugs do in women who take them after menopause.

I’m not a doctor, but how can one seriously think completely stopping a women’s period is a good thing? 15 years of science does not make up for thousands and thousands of years of  evolution, I don’t care how smart the scientists are.

Even after marriage to a nutritionist, I hovered around 205. I did have one momentary breakthrough in ’97 when I dropped to 195 thanks to the fact that I was training for the NYC Marathon (3:46 time, btw) and playing pickup hockey for 2 hours twice a week. Never mind that I was running 40+ miles a week, I still didn’t drop much weight.

Now, my wife has, from day 1 told me why I couldn’t lose the extra 15 lbs, but it never really sank in. At least not until I had my son, and I decided that I wanted to be a vibrant dad who is around for a long time and who can be an example. With this in mind, we started making changes. Out with the processed junk food, the extra serving of dinner, in with organic, whole, real food. I simply cut out the chips and other crappy food and substituted in healthy snacks like almonds and fruit and vegetables. We stopped eating things with trans fats and high fructose corn syrup and monosodium glutamate (watch this site for future info on these ingredients.) No lying, I was down to 190 within 6 weeks AND I didn’t change my exercise routine one bit. In fact, I wasn’t even running all that much at the time. Double in fact, I did it while helping take care of a 6 mos. old who kept us up at night. It does not take an extraordinary amount of will power. What it takes is that you read labels and find food that tastes good w/o all the junk in it. And let me tell you it exists. You come over to my house for any given dinner and you will see we eat “normal” food, meat and potatoes, fresh fish, etc. None of that tofu crap or lean cuisine or weight watchers that keeps you on the perpetual cycle of dieting. Real, whole food cooked in an intelligent way and seasoned with fresh herbs and spices that makes you wonder how you ever liked McDonalds before. You want more info, drop me a comment, and I will share w/ you a sample week of eating at the Ingersoll house and you will be amazed at how “normal” it sounds. It will take you back to your childhood when you actually sat down for dinner and good food with family was important. And don’t tell me you are too busy, b/c that is a load of hogwash. My wife and I both work full time, we have a 5 year old in sports and school and we both have a ton of hobbies. It can be done and you don’t have to stress about it. Besides, just go to Whole Foods once a week and pick up dinner. You can rest assured they don’t put any of the fake ingredients in their meals.

Bottom line: people always say weight control is easy for me b/c I exercise so much. Truth is, I never lost the weight until I was 28 and I decided to eat better. Proof is, I recently was not able to exercise for several weeks due to triple hernia surgery. I’m happy to say, I didn’t gain a single pound.  And just so you know, I still have desserts and I still eat some chips, I just eat the “better” kind.  It helps satisfy the cravings from time to time without hurting the waistline.   I can honestly say I am in better shape at 33 than I have ever been in my life.  That fat around the midsection is nearly gone (having no fat, by the way, is not a good thing either, but that is a post for another day!)