“Always be a first rate version of yourself
instead of a second rate version of somebody else.”
– Judy Garland
I used to think office ergonomics was for wimps — as long as I had a desk, phone and chair I would get right to work.
Worrying about the distance between your laptop screen and your eyes or what angle your back is when leaning over your portable device seemed trivial. I held this belief until one day the Human Resources department at my previous job insisted I use an ergonomically friendly chair. I honestly didn’t understand how a new chair would help me do better at my job, but I was given no choice. So I opened the box and pulled out all the parts. While bending over to tighten screws with an Allen Key I pulled a muscle in my ribcage and missed a day of work, but I digress…
My new chair did make a difference — and so did the tips on how to work on my laptop in an ergonomically-friendly way. Whether at the office or at home, your comfort is important — being unproductive because you’re neck and back aches from hours of bad posture is no help to anyone. Here’s some inexpensive and easy tips for working on your laptop:
Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.
Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.
– Daniel Hudson Burnham
Thousands of Grade 12 students are probably standing in front of a mirror practicing how they will deliver the traditional prom invitation.
Gone are the days when a guy would nervous
ly go up to a girl, when her friends aren’t around, and meekly ask her out. We’ve even (thankfully) moved on from popping the question via text message. That doesn’t mean there’s any less pressure though. In fact grads are upping the ante — or maybe it’s the antics — when it comes to delivering the invite.
Teens are now taking their cue from elaborate wedding proposals and as a result a new word is being introduced to our language: Prom-prosal.
There’s YouTube prom-proposals, serenading young ladies and even planes that fly over schools towing a banner with a message on it for a particular student. One student even got down on a bended knee and pulled out a box with a ring in it at the end of the school play. The audience gasped, thinking they were witnessing a marriage proposal.
“An election cannot give a country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names but are as alike in their principles and aims as two peas in the same pod”
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
How many sheets of paper towels do you use daily? You use paper towels almost every day to dry your hands off but does it ever cross your mind how much paper you’re wasting? Joe Smith demonstrates the perfect technique of drying your hands with only one sheet. We can conserve 571 million pounds of paper each year if we all just kept to one sheet. Two simple words. “Shake” and “Fold”.
You’ve heard the slogan “Let Your Fingers Do the Walking?” Soon your finger is all you may need to register to vote in Canada. 
Already other countries are leveraging technology to help streamline voter registration, including fingerprint technology. Gahana’s general elections are taking place and biometrics like fingertip scanning will help verify the voter’s identity. Other countries in Africa, including Nigeria, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo, have already implemented similar voting procedures. These countries share Ghana’s frustration with disputes about election results, which come largely due to problems such as people voting multiple times.
Using fingerprint technology to verify identity would give elections iron clad security in that it would ensure that those who can vote are voting, and that they do so only once. But technology doesn’t resolve all the issues and in some cases presents new ones. For instance, some people fear these high-tech tools cause cancer, which was quickly refuted by Ghana’s Electoral Commission (EC).
It’s those fears that prompted election officials to expand their social media presence. In an effort to inform voters on biometric voter registration and the registration process in general, election officials are posting messages on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr daily until the election ends on May 5.
Checkout the hashtags #iRegistered and #GhanaDecides to see how Ghana is informing its citizens and encouraging more people to register as voters. And if you want updates on online elections and software check out our twitter feed.
Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.
Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
- Gloria Steinem
“When I have to choose between voting for the people or the special interests, I always stick with the special interests. They remember. The people forget.”
– Henry F. Ashurst
