Pale Blue Dot

This blog is about perspective.

This photo of what looks like a blurred spectrum is in fact a very famous image known as 'pale blue dot'. You may have seen it mentioned recently on Brian Cox's 'Wonders of The Universe'.

I use this image to help gain a bit of perspective. This is a picture of the Earth taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 and it shows the Earth from 3.7 billion miles away. That's right, 3.7 billion miles away! Bear in mind that the sun is 93 million miles away.

When you pause to remember the shear blip of existence that we actually occupy it can really make you concentrate on those things that are important in life and not get stressed by inconsequential things such as a client taking their time to pay a bill or a member of staff arriving 3 minutes late to work. When you realise how incredibly trivial these things are it will alleviate stress and make you far far more productive.

PS. What is also good fun is to show this image to a Christian and ask them what they think of it. If you're into that kind of thing that is....

I'm on strike!

I caused quite a stir on Linked-In today by complaining about teachers who go on strike. People who I've never even met commented on my post.

I observed that teachers have a 'cushy' job to which I was promptly corrected by several pillars of the community. Of course teachers have a cushy job. I'm not saying anything about how much they should/shouldn't be paid, that's not for me to have an opinion on but if teaching isn't a cushy job I don't know what is. Lots of people from my University course (I did English) went into teaching precisely because it was a cushy option!

13 weeks holidays, no weekend work. Apart from around exam time you always have the option of finishing work at 3:30. How cushy can it get? I'd love to see a teacher try and claim that they didn't have a cushy job to a Nurse, Fireman or Police Officer! We need teachers, they are very important of course but its not exactly hard labour or the most pressured of jobs is it??? Teachers don't have to make life/death decisions on a daily basis do they (unless perhaps they teach at Willowgarth!).

Unions should be there to be a voice of a workforce to ensure fair working conditions. It should not create a line of sheep who walk away from educating children for financial gain.

Right, I'm going on a week long strike now because my boss is just too good looking!

How to shut someone up!

Point a camera at them!!!

I like to consider myself a reasonable articulate and confident speaker but even for someone who could make such a bold claim I flounder and lose the ability to string a coherent sentence together the moment a camera is placed in front me.

I experienced this last year when we were doing the test videos for The VT Network (if you haven't seen The VT Network visit www.thevtnetwork.com and you can see first hand my inability to talk to camera, even on take 46). And in my defence we have people who struggle a lot more than me when we do The VT Network VTs!

Anyway, I've raised the point again because I'm going to be doing some short sales training videos especially for YouTube and I'm currently just figuring out how to use this new camcorder I've bought. There's no one where but I still start every sentence to the damn thing with hmmwwwaammmbbbb... errrrrr....

Gives me a whole new respect for Ant & Dec.....