The 3,000th ideas Revolutionary post

Wow, this is the 3,000th blog entry! That means, good or bad, I have written and posted 2,999 entries before this one. Many blog entries are short and take minutes (sometimes 10-20 minutes) to research, write, and post. Mind you, even the short blog entries are meant to meet the same writing standard I laid out here. Some entries take longer to research and add some cool audio/video contents. And I’ve known to spent hours on doing the needed research to write just one sentence with proper supports/grounds.

Take my yearly trip to report on the happenings at Banff World TV Festival and nextMEDIA (which I’ve tagged with “bwtvf-nextmedia”), it means driving for a few hours out to Banff and staying in Banff for a few nights to report. Of course, I enjoy every moment of it! Special moments like listening to Oscar winning writer/director Paul Haggis tell his chair story and how he broke into TV was priceless. And I had a ton of fun interviewing Ron Moore (Battlestar Galactica) and attending Doug Ellin (Entourage) insightful chat. Plus even doing some legislative reporting re Bill 44 with Minister Lindsay Blackett.

Another priceless bonus in my blogging is the many new friends I’ve made as a result. I have not had the pleasure to meet many of these blog/virtual friends yet. But I have talked to some over Skype/phone. And then some, through my work in interviewing them, have become closer friends.

Thanks to my blog friend Eva’s suggestion, I have created a video for this post. Allow me to sandwich the video between two quotes I love. I hope you will enjoy the short video and the quotes.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw

“To me young has no meaning, it is something you can do nothing about. Nothing at all. But youth is a quality, and if you have it you never lose it.” — a comment made by Frank Lloyd Wright in an interview with Mike Wallace

Thanks a lot for your support for my first 3,000 entries and I look forward to your future support. As usual, feel free to leave your feedback/suggestions/ideas as comments or email me.

Have a great day! And here is my virtual high-five to you!

Go Canada Go !!!

“You might be an economist if you refuse to sell your children because …”

I found the following WSJ article and forwarded it to my economist friends as I found it pretty funny. I highlighted a few interesting bits and added some comments. Enjoy.

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Secrets of the Economist’s Trade: First, Purchase a Piggy Bank

By Justin Lahart (WSJ)

Academic economists gather in Atlanta this weekend for their annual meetings, always held the first weekend after New Year’s Day. That’s not only because it coincides with holidays at most universities. A post-holiday lull in business travel also puts hotel rates near the lowest point of the year.

Economists are often cheapskates.

The economists make cities bid against each other to hold their convention, and don’t care so much about beaches, golf courses or other frills. It’s like buying a car, explains the American Economic Association’s secretary-treasurer, John Siegfried, an economist at Vanderbilt University.

“When my wife buys a car, she seems to care what color it is,” he says. “I always tell her, don’t care about the color.” He initially wanted a gray 2007 Mercury Grand Marquis, but a black one cost about $100 less. He got black.

Some of the world’s most famous economists were famously frugal. After a dinner thrown by the British economic giant John Maynard Keynes, writer Virginia Woolf complained that the guests had to pick “the bones of Maynard’s grouse of which there were three to eleven people.” Milton Friedman, the late Nobel laureate, routinely returned reporters’ calls collect.

Children of economists recall how tightfisted their parents were. Lauren Weber, author of a recent book titled, “In Cheap We Trust,” says her economist father kept the thermostat so low that her mother threatened at one point to take the family to a motel. “My father gave in because it would have been more expensive,” she says.