By Felicity Clarke, Senior Contributing Reporter,

Originally Printed in the Rio Times Online, on Mar 30th, 2010

RIO DE JANEIRO – Like all food cultures, Brazilian cuisine is at its best when its cooked with love and served at home. For those looking for an insight into Brazilian food and culture, what it’s about, how it developed and most importantly, how it’s done, Cook in Rio’s cooking classes provide an afternoon of tasty Brazilian flavor.

Students enjoying the fruits of their labor after class, photo by Verônica Mirian.

Since September of last year, Carioca restaurateur Simone de Almeida has led the Cook in Rio classes. “It started with teaching Brazilian cooking to friends from other countries who visited and grew from there,” says Simone. “Cuisine is a way for people to get together and if you want to know about a culture go to the kitchen. Different cultures have different approaches to cooking and from that you can better understand the thinking.”

Cook in Rio’s classes are held in Simone’s Portuguese tapas bar restaurant Tasco Do Lido on Rua Ronald de Carvalho in Copacabana. The cozy colorful space with a mural ceiling and open kitchen bar has a instantly warm and welcoming atmosphere making it a great venue for a lesson in Brazilian home-cooking.

Simone starts with the first vital step of a good cooking endeavor: the cook’s drink. Although there’s a generally relaxed attitude to measures when it comes to Caipirinhas (what else?), Simone gives guidelines of one lime per person and two dessert spoons of sugar muddled with ice and a generous dose of quality cachaça and makes sure all the students get involved in the making.

Sipping on classic Caipirinhas, Simone goes on to get the class making rice, banana farofa and deep fried aipim chips. While everyone makes the side dishes together, Simone explains a little of the history of the national cuisine. “Brazilian food is essentially a big melting pot mix of Portuguese, African and Indian flavors. It has its roots in slave food because it was them who cooked for the rich Portuguese colonials and influenced the cuisine with African flavors and techniques.”

Lively and animated, Simone is typically Carioca in her assertive friendly manner and is skilled at ensuring everyone is at ease and involved. In contrast to other cooking classes where each participant has a station and cooks individually according to a series of strict demonstrated steps, Cook in Rio classes are an informal communal effort.

Cook in Rio class starts with a Caipirinha, photo by Verônica Mirian.

The main dish of this particular class was the Bahian fish stew moqueca, although other class menus include feijoada. As the sliced green peppers and onion fry in the nutty African palm oil, Simone answers questions and continues to dispense tips and insights into Brazilian food.

Advice such as always buy the cheap palm oil (“look for the ugly bottles”) because the small producers are the best, and be polite with the chili sauce and leave it for people to add themselves (“Bahians like their food spicy but Cariocas don’t”).

Everyone sits down together to eat the deliciously rich coconut fish stew washed down with a pineapple Caipirinha. With gentle teasing and a light social ambiance, the home-cooking is matched by a relaxed homely atmosphere.

Conversation turns to cooking classes and Sam Rivello, a traveling computer software consultant from California explains that he loves to take a class in every country he visits: “It’s a cool way to learn about a culture. I don’t care so much about remembering exactly how to do the cooking but it’s having the opportunity to ask questions about the culture, food and language,” he says. “It’s social as much as it is fun and educational”

By Kevin Purdy, Originally written for Life Hacker.

The right kind of sound can relax your mind, hone your focus, drown out distractions, or get you pumped to kill your to-do list. We’ve assembled some research and free resources to help you create your own best workspace soundtrack.

Does music really make you more productive?

The answer falls somewhere between “Listening to Mozart makes you a genius” and “Just be quiet and work.”

The most well-known research into the question of music’s effect on the mind involves the so-calledMozart effect, which suggests that listening to certain kinds of music—Amadeus Wolfgang’s classical works, in particular—impacts and boosts one’sspatial-temporal reasoning, or the ability to think out long-term, more abstract solutions to logical problems that arise. The Mozart effect has been overblown and over-promised to ambitious parents and would-be creative types, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some science behind the idea of a great work-boosting playlist.

The Workplace Doctors site details both sides of the question. In one study, University of Illinois researchers found that listening to music in “all types of work” increased work output 6.3% over a control group. In another study (dissected at MetaFilter), 56 employees working on basic computer tasks were found to be more productive when there was no music playing over the same period tested with music.

So the real answer turns out to be, unfortunately, “it depends.” It depends on whether your office or workspace is noisy enough that a good kind of noise or music is preferable to the natural cacophony. It depends on your personal attention span, and how likely you are to fiddle with controls versus letting a music stream trickle past your ears. Though many of the final answers to studies of music at work conflict, the general consensus seems to be that people can be boosted at work by music, if they’re willing to be.

If that sounds like you, here’s a few suggestions on where to find music that others have found helpful in their own workspaces.

The classical route

How it works: The ornate instrumentation and composition of Baroque classical music gets a lot of attention for its possible mind-boosting effects. Eight radiologists were asked to go about their day while listening to Baroque-period tunes. They mostly self-reported better mood and productivity, except for one worker who said the music had a negative effect on his concentration.

Followers of Getting Things Done and productivity writer David Allen note in forum posts that the man himself seems to dig Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto #3, and other Baroque tunes as mood-setters for tackling tasks like a weekly review. A key suggestion from a David Allen forum poster—look for tracks paced at about 60 beats per minute:

It’s the beats-per-minute required to get the brain up to optimal revs. David has a segment about it on GTD Fast – I also came across it at a speed-reading class. It seems to cause a “bright and breezy” frame of mind where thinking and creativity are easier. I find it works.

,strong>Where to get it: Being often hundreds of years old and a niche interest these days, classical music is relatively easy to find online. Wikipedia hashundreds of freely-licensed files, and public domain search sites like Musopenoffers a lot of good stuff, too.

If the Baroque sound doesn’t quite do it for you, Lifehacker commenter Catalystsuggests the Vitamin String Quartet, which covers pop tunes in string quartet/chamber music style. It’s not the same kind of down-deep arrangement as traditional classical work, but the Quartet’s work takes away distracting lyrics and soothes out pop music’s more annoying edges. Here’s a sample:

The ambient/techno route

How it works: The label “ambient” has been applied far too broadly to be of much help to anyone but record store owners. Still, at it’s core, all ambient music is designed not to jump in your face, but still keep your brain engaged at a lower, subconscious level. Pioneers like Brian Eno developed ambient music as an experiment in composition, allowing algorithms, randomness, synthesizers, and whatever sounded neat replace the standard pop music needs of melody, direct harmony, and rehab.

A modern varient, chillout, and its categorical cousins downtempo, ambient house, and certain varieties of IDM, or Intelligent Dance Music, grew out of a need for dancers and partiers at techno clubs to take a break, relax, and recover from their efforts, along with whatever else they needed recovering from. Like the original ambient music, much of it is designed to relax the mind and allow it to roam, while providing just enough stimulation to register as inspiration.

Where to get it: Both Gina and Brian Ashcraft at our gaming-focused sibling blog Kotaku find Eno’s Music for Airports to be superior music for deep tasks and serious studying. It was designed, after all, for actual airports, to put passengers at ease in an often stressful situation, right before getting on a tube that some consider their worst fear.

Gina and many, many commenters dig the Groove Salad stream and other stations, like Drone Zone and Secret Agent, provided by Soma.fm. Half as many recommend the ambient offerings at Digitally Imported, and often flip between it and Soma.fm for fresh streams. Both sites provide free audio to most any music player that can tune in web playlists or radio.

If you’re a fan of streaming recommendation site Pandora, or like the minimalist, “glitch,” or seriously ambient side of techno, commenter maczter recommends a playlist created by a Pandora employee, Ovals, that he describes as “minimalist elemental glitch.” I tried it out for an afternoon writing session, and found five out of six tracks to be unexpectedly calming and helpful in the task—with the exception of one rather jarring, high-pitched interloper.

The noise route

How it works: If music is too distracting for your tastes, but your chatty co-workers, office machinery, and general clamor are even more distracting, colored noise might be a worthy addition to your audio repertoire.

Noise generators, usually grouped into groups of white, pink, or brown/red, cover a range of your ear’s audible spectrum with generic sound to mask or lessen the distractions of other sounds. Wikipedia’s entry on sound masking puts it best:

Imagine a dark room where someone is turning a flashlight on and off. The light is very obvious and distracting. Now imagine that the room lights are turned on. The flashlight is still being turned on and off, but is no longer noticeable because it has been “masked”. Sound masking is a similar process of covering a distracting sound with a more soothing or less intrusive sound.

Where to get it: If you can install desktop software where you work, we’ve previously recommended Noise for Mac OS X and Chatterblocker for Windowsas great apps for covering up sounds. Noise creates more straight-up sound waves, while Chatterblocker can recreate office environment noise to fill in notable gaps or introduce other ambient-type sounds, like guitar chords and nature, into your mix.

On the web, we’re also partial to Zendesk’s Buddha Machine Wall, which randomizes and loops relaxing sounds that you choose from among random buttons and speakers. For a more pure white/pink/brown noise generator, trySimplyNoise.

Lost in a sea of random speaker crackle? Editor’s tests have found that pink noise generally simulates a waterfall effect, while setting the brown/red noise in SimplyNoise to a low volume, while allowing the volume to fall up and down, or oscillate, provides a soundscape similar to waves hitting the shore off in the distance.

Other routes

We asked our readers to share the music that helps them get things done, and they showered us with responses. There are a lot of specific artists, albums, and genres listed in the comments of that post that might inspire you to re-seed your own playlist, but a few had some unique ideas on what helped them listen while stay productive.

four12 wrote that listening to radio stations in foreign languages “effectively drowns out the office noise, but because I really don’t understand what is being said (though I am learning), my brain tunes even that out.” In his case, France Info radio provides the news-but-not-really-news he needs.

wowser808, on the other hand, goes with a more traditional, and heart-warmingly geeky, pic: the Blade Runner soundtrack.” He notes that Vangelis’ ethereal tunes “got me through every single essay at university.”

We are still more than open to your suggestions of what music, noise, random sounds, or audio hackery makes for the most productive environment. Tell us your picks in the comments.

By Donald Latumahina (follow me on Twitter)

The 4-Hour Workweek has created quite a buzz recently in the blogosphere. As you might have known, the book focuses on lifestyle design, which is designing your dream lifestyle with the least possible effort. It’s not necessary to wait until your retirement to live the lifestyle you want. In fact, doing so might waste 20-40 years of your life. Instead, you can live your dream lifestyle much, much sooner. Of course, you can do so only by having the right attitude, strategies, and tactics.

In this post, I extract 63 life-changing quotes from the book. They will serve as reminder for you to apply the principles in the book. Be selective and apply what are useful for you. Tailor them to your own needs and situation.

Here they are (with minor wording adjustments):

1. Life doesn’t have to be so damn hard. It really doesn’t.
2. People don’t want to be millionaires. They want to experience what they believe only millions can buy.
3. Reality is negotiable.
4. Three ingredients of luxury lifestyle design are time, income, and mobility.
5. Options – the ability to choose – is real power.
6. Each path begins with the same first step: replacing assumptions.
7. Less is not laziness. Focus on being productive instead of busy.
8. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.
9. Ask for forgiveness, not permission.
10. Emphasize strengths, don’t fix weaknesses.
11. Relative income is more important than absolute income.
12. Risks weren’t that scary once you took them.
13. Conquering fear = defining fear.
14. Define the worst case, accept it, and do it.
15. What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.
16. Inaction is the greatest risk of all.
17. Doing the unrealistic is easier than doing the realistic.
18. The opposite of happiness is boredom.
19. The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”
20. Tomorrow becomes never. No matter how small the task, take the first step now.
21. The most important actions are never comfortable.
22. Being busy is often guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
23. Believe it or not, it is not only possible to accomplish more by doing less, it is mandatory.
24. What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it.
25. Find your inefficiencies to eliminate them and to find your strengths so you can multiply them.
26. Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference.
27. Lack of time is actually lack of priorities.
28. Identify the few critical task that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.
29. Simplicity requires ruthlessness.
30. Ask yourself: “Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?”
31. Increased output necessitates decreased input.
32. Practice the art of nonfinishing. Stopping something is often 10 times better than finishing it.
33. Learn to be difficult when it counts.
34. Do not work harder when the solution is working smarter.
35. People are smarter than you think. Give them a chance to prove themselves.
36. “No” should be your default answer to all requests.
37. Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees.
38. Eliminate before you delegate.
39. It is more profitable to be a big fish in a small pond than a small undefined fish in a big pond.
40. The so-called expert with the most credibility indicators is the one who will sell the most product, not the one with the most knowledge of a topic.
41. Don’t ask people if they would buy – ask them to buy.
42. Our goal isn’t to create a business that is as large as possible, but rather a business that bothers us as little as possible.
43. The biggest timesaver of all is customer filtering.
44. Those who spend the most complain the least.
45. Perceived size does matter.
46. It isn’t enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.
47. The new mantra is this: Work wherever and whenever you want, but get your work done.
48. Getting what you want often depends more on when you ask for it than how you ask for it.
49. Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner.
50. Don’t confuse the complex with the difficult. Most situations are simple – many are just emotionally difficult to act upon.
51. There are options. There are always options.
52. Fortune favors the bold.
53. Learn to slow down.
54. The biggest risk in life wasn’t making mistakes but regret: missing out on things.
55. For big questions, if you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.
56. There are two components that are fundamental to enjoy life and feel good about yourself: continual learning and service.
57. Service is an attitude.
58. Slowing down doesn’t mean accomplishing less; it means cutting out counterproductive distractions and the perception of being rushed.
59. Recapturing the excitement of childhood isn’t impossible. In fact, it’s required.
60. Mistakes are the name of the game in lifestyle design.
61. Focus on great for a few things and good enough for the rest.
62. Happiness shared in the form of friendships and love is happiness multiplied.
63. Life is not a race. Do take it slower.

and… 63.5.  Daily Journaling is the best way to take stock of your wealth and change your life forever.

by Lubna Kably, originally written for Books On My Shelves.

Much has been written about this book “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari” by Robin Sharma and I am not surprised. You can either like this book or hate it, but you cannot ignore it. Before I begin this review, I must honestly admit that I am skeptical of self-help books which harp about “Leaving things to the forces of the Universe”. Yet, if one reads such books with an open mind, there are lessons that one can adopt, even as one chooses to ignore certain things that don’t make practical sense. The Monk who sold his Ferrari is one such book. I can almost call it spiritual pop. But, yes, who says that you do not have the freedom to pick and choose and adopt those ideas that do make practical sense and can turn your life for the better?

This book begins with the story of Julian Mantle, a successful lawyer who quite simply suffers a burn-out. He survives a heart attack, drops out of the rat race, sells his possessions – including his Ferrari and sets off on a journey (albeit to India) to find out life’s true meaning. Years later when he returns and meets his former associate, another advocate, he is a changed man – both physically and mentally. He has learned some valuable lessons from mythical Himalayan sages which he shares with his former associate (and the readers).

Julian tells his former associate a parable. How can a garden, a lighthouse, a sumo wrestler, a pink wire cable, a shiny gold stopwatch, fresh yellow roses and a winding path of diamonds be interlinked? Well they are.

Much as I hated the naïve dialogue in this book between Julian and his former associate, the best part of this book are the action steps provided at the end of each chapter. Now let us turn to the mysterious objects and find out how they are linked and how they can make our life more meaningful.

The Garden: The garden, in this book is the symbol of the mind. The key lies to banish all negative thoughts, to concentrate on definite meaningful objectives and to remove inner turbulence. Like most other such books, this chapter adds, find your real purpose in life then act on it. It even suggests that you can take risks and give up your profession for something you truly love. I guess, this is not always possible, even as one can try and attain a work-life balance through some sacrifices on the work front and find time for their passions, be it music or painting or writing or family time.

The gems that one can take away from this chapter is to learn to focus on the present, to keep negative thoughts at bay, imagine yourself as you want to be and to run your own race.

Practical tips: “A worrisome thought is like an embryo. It starts off small but grows and grows. Soon it takes on a life of its own”, explains Julian. He wears a necklace around his neck. Whenever, he is unable to shake off a negative thought, he removes one bead and puts it away in a cup. This reminds me of the “Worry dolls” traditionally made in Guatemala. According to folklore, the doll is thought to worry in the person’s place, when placed under the pillow at night. This permits a person to sleep peacefully and wake up without their worries, which have been taken away by the dolls during the night. Yes, this habit of banishing negative thoughts is worth a try, because endless worrying saps energy, it prevents us from focusing on our dreams and attaining it.

The Lighthouse: “The purpose of life is a life of purpose” says Julian. Clearly defined priorities and goals in every aspect of your life will serve a role similar to that played by a lighthouse, offering you guidance and refuge when the seas become rough. You should clearly know what aims you wish to achieve over the course of your life, be they material, emotional physical or spiritual and you must then manifest this vision into reality by consistent action.

From a practical point of view, this begins with goal setting. Julian says that accomplishing little feats will prepare us for realizing the big ones. There is nothing wrong with mapping out a full range of small goals in the process of planning your bigger roles. Above all, he says: Stay spirited, joyful and curious.

Practical tips: Julian explains the steps as below

1. Have a clear vision of your outcome;
2. Create positive pressure to keep you inspired (something as simple as telling your best friend that you want to lose 5 lbs by the end of the month so that he/she can encourage you towards this goal);
3. Set precise doable time-lines to your goals;
4. Commit you goal to paper. Prepare a “Dream Book”. You can have different sections for different goals – viz: physical fitness, financial, personal empowerment, relationship/social, spiritual. Fill it with pictures of things you desire, of people whom you wish to emulate;
5. Stay with your goal for the first twenty-one days and soon it will become a habit (for example: an early morning walk).

The Sumo Wrestler: The Sumo wrestler is a constant reminder of the power of kaizen, the Japanese word for self-expansion and progress. Here the key take away is that we must learn to live out of our comfort zone to realise our fullest potential. “The only limits on your life are those that you set for yourself. When you dare to get out of the circle of your comfort and explore the unknown you begin to liberate your true human potential” says Julian. This chapter then goes on to explain ten rituals of radiant living – from spending some time everyday in solitude, to vegetarianism, to getting up early, to reading.

Practical tips: I think the concept of stepping out of your comfort zone is an important point. It could be something as simple as conquering one’s fear of public speaking. It need not be something as drastic as giving up your career to pursue something else. Even as the author says, that if you truly believe that an alternate career will bring you joy, go for it. Thus identify your fears, chalk out how you can conquer them and work on them everyday. For example, if you are scared of public speaking, join a study circle which also includes several of your friends, participate actively in that, and then move on to a wider audience.

A pink wire cable: The sumo wrestler had donned a pink wire cable. It denotes the power of self control and discipline in building a richer, happier and more enlightened life. Alone, each strand of wire is very weak. But a cable which comprises of several strands of wires is tough and strong. To build up an iron will it is essential to routinely perform tiny acts and build up an abundance of inner strength. Inner strength enables you to tackle whatever life throws your way.

Practical tips: Start up doing the things that you know you must be doing, or which are good for you, but you find it difficult to do. Like waking up early and going for that morning walk. Small victories lead to larger victories. Once a bench mark has been attained, raise the benchmark higher. Soon you will be doing things you never knew you were capable of doing with an energy you never knew you possessed.

A shiny gold stop watch: This was a symbol of our most important commodity – time. Time mastery in short is life mastery. Julian reiterated the well known phrase that: 80 per cent of the results we achieve in life come from only 20 per cent of the activities that occupy our time. Julian called for a holistic system of time management that encompassed not only life at the work place, but life per se. He advised that we should keep away from time thieves who for flimsy reasons eat into our time. It is also essential to simplify our life and to savor each and every moment as if today will be our last day.

Practical tips: Time management may sometimes necessitate saying -No. When someone calls for an idle chat while you want to finish your report, learn to say No. When dragged in all directions, prioritize. Keep time for yourself, for your family. Build a time table which includes everything, not just the client appointment, but the trip to the doctor, or the parent-teachers meeting. What is high priority is something you alone can decide for yourself, use time judiciously; after all, no one has more than 24 hours a day.

Fresh yellow roses: A Chinese proverb says: A little bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gave you roses. When you practice random acts of kindness daily, you enrich yourself. Think less of yourself as an individual and more as a member of the universe to which you belong. Julian brought out the true meaning of inclusiveness and friendship in this chapter.

Practical tips: Cultivate richer relationships. How about taking the new joinee to the lunch room? Or helping the technically challenged colleague to help fix the printer? Or volunteer at the local NGO during your spare time? In short, help others smile, and they shall smile back at you.

A winding path of diamonds: This signified ‘enlightened living’. Julian explained that: Happiness is a journey. We can either marvel at the diamonds along the way or can keep running all day chasing that elusive pot of god at the end of the rainbow that ultimately reveals itself to be empty. In other words, we need to live in the now!

Practical tips: Practice gratitude and live in the now. Perhaps you could keep a journal where you note down daily whatever you have been grateful for during the course of that day. The size of your car, or your house, or for that matter your bank balance cannot buy you happiness. The size of the gratitude that you experience everyday can.

Conclusion:

Although I cannot give this book my highest rating, Julian in one of the chapters says: “You need not apply every strategy to make your life work. Try the techniques and use those that feel right to you”. This makes a lot of sense, even as not everything in this book does.

You may well ask, what was the reason for bringing in the Sumo wrestler or the pink wire cable, or for that matter the lighthouse? Well, these were just mind clues. The more bizarre a clue, greater are you likely to remember it, and perhaps even practice it. So take those baby steps, towards a better YOU.

by Alex Harling, originally printed for The Observer.

You know how people say that when you travel alone, you aren’t really alone, because strangers become companions or some such lame nonsense?. Well in St. Lucia, adventure and the Grim Reaper were my travelling companions.

Well on one fine morning, I hired a rental car to explore as much of the island as the 200 mileage limit and an 800cc engine would allow. The island is beautiful and I was boldly going where no man, with my exact name, had gone before.

Hell, this was going so well, I even calculated how many extra miles I could afford at the penalty rate of 40 cents per mile. About three miles on my wages.

I had the loose aim to hunt down hummingbird birds in the wild and gawk at the twin Pitons, St. Lucia’s well-known rocky hummocks.

Things were proceeding normally in a way which would not scare an American from the Bible Belt, although they scare me, when all of a sudden, I found myself at a fork in the road not sure which way to go. So I pulled over to read the map.

The spectacular view from a luxury resort.

A spectacularly worrisome-looking gangster limped over to the car idling in neutral, just like my brain, beacuse suddenly I found myself agreeing this man’s proposal that I give him a lift to Castries, where the Pitons are. As my brain slipped the clutch so did my brain. Both my car and I moved into first gear and I realised that it had just heard the worst-disguised request ever to act as unofficial tour guide for the day. Too late – the right to rescind this contract could only be exercised upon pain of pain.

He introduced himself as Robert. But with his deadly serious, bloodshot eyes and ripped-scruffy clothes, surely he was known as Killer or Mad Dog to his friends.

His overall appearance was of a drug-dealer with low will power and a need to avoid reality. As my panicking brain fought to grasp the last twig at the end of the Branch of Reason on the Tree of Impending Danger, it convinced itself that everything would turn out alright. Because Robert was well-spoken and seemed knowledgeable on St. Lucia’s touristy wonders.

Over the next half hour, he directed me to stop at the bay where Dr. Doolittle was filmed and two little trinket-selling huts sat on the side of the road, strategically placed at tourist trap-pretty viewpoints.

I had mentioned that I was hunting humming birds and Robert was adamant that he knew a place where they would be. I was sceptical because everyone else I had spoken to that morning told me I wouldn’t see any on account of not having got up at half past five in the morning when they are most active.

Then we pulled over at a garden where I assumed he was simply breaking into. But he said it was owned by his friend. Immediately, there were about six or seven humming birds zooming around. I got some shots I was happy with. If you squint, little blurred smudges can be seen in the corners of shots.

Whilst we were lying in wait for the hummers, I asked him what he did for a living. Without hesitating he said, “I grow and sell drugs”.

“Oh right,” I said.

I comforted myself that after I had been de-armed and de-legged by a machete, my body would at least be laid to rest in the picturesque hills above Castries, overlooking the Petons.

He then waited patiently like a coiled cobra, I told myself, for about an hour. He insisted on carrying my rucksack and camera bag, presumably to leave no signs of me and no evidence, whist I mooned around flowers, photographing fast blurry birds. He suggested I walk in front of him, camera at the ready, so he wouldn’t scare the birds away and also so as to distract me and clobber me on the back of the head with his machete. All went disquietingly well.

Anyway, I made it out of the trespassed garden with the drug dealer in tow, who at the next stop informed me, yet again, to ensure that the car was totally locked and that nothing was left on display. Hmm. Thoughtful for a murderer, I pondered.

Like in all films, the condemned man, knowing he was going to die, decided to ask more about the drug thing.

Robert apparently grows marijuana plants, which take some nurturing you know, if they are not to produce a bitter taste. Then harvests them and sells the stuff locally for which there is apparently high demand, and also runs a boat to St. Vincent and Martinique semi-regularly.

I still thought that maybe he was just talking big, although he looked the part, until he told me that the second time he had been caught in Martinique, he was spent four years in Martinique jail.

That was it. I didn’t care anymore. The air tasted sweeter. The light played a little dance on the gently undulating ocean and life had never seemed better or shorter.

Next in his bag of ‘scare the crap out of unwitting, gullible tourists’ was to tell me that there were snakes in the hills we were driving through. To stop me simply running away into the bush with my wallet, I reasoned.

“Maybe we’ll see a boa constrictor or a cobra round here,” he said.

“Yeah right, big-talker, you’re just full of crap,” I thought.

A minute later, I was taking a photograph of a man with a boa constrictor in his hands. It seemed that Robert was a straight-talking man of his word, which was worrying.

The locals
Robert’s next trick was to take me to see the locals.

We drove around Castries, where he informed me on five occasions, not only should I not take photos of the locals, but do not even look like I might be doing it. Otherwise, they will get angry, smash the camera, and possibly me too.

He really had a thing about not wandering too far away, photographing the “ignorant” locals, as he called them and not straying too far. I was quite glad to get back to the car.

Until he directed me along the shoreline, past a more evil looking load of people than any Pirates of the Caribbean film. One man walked purposefully straight down the middle of the road towards the car with an angry ‘I’m going to mess you up white boy’ expression until he saw Robert and immediately smiled.

“Did you see how his expression changed,” said my mass murdering chaperone.

“No, even my eyes were frozen in terror,” I thought.

“Yes,” I squeaked.

In order to keep my heartbeat below 150 beats per minute, we avoided the new main road and proceeded up a very steep, very rutted gully to the chosen burial ground. It turned out we were going via an old un-used road to the luxury resort between the Petons, but he had to lie to get us in.

We parked at the top of the hill and he instructed me to say I was going for a drink. So we talked our way in, headed down the long steep hill in the resort grounds, took some more photos, were repeatedly harassed by security guards and left.

To give you an idea of how scary looking Robert was, we hitched a ride back up the steep hill out of the grounds. A man who mistakenly stopped was so overcome that he said, “Err, I’m not going to the top of the hill.”

There were no turn offs and the road only led to the top of the hill. His lie was awful. We got in and his wife assumed a look like she had just been kidnapped. Presumably, because she thought she had actually just been kidnapped. She tensed up and said not one word. Her husband will have got in some serious trouble with her after me and my killer had got out.

Breaking and Entering
The breaking and entering trick was performed at the next luxury resort on the top of the next hill.

I had to buy Robert a drink at that one, because the security clouds were gathering. I have to say though, he got me to some breathtaking places, which I wouldn’t have dared to try and get into on my own. At this second luxury spa-style resort he talked to the staff in Creole patois, which seemed to calm them down a bit.

From then on, it was all smooth, heart-calming ocean views and no drama. Until the ‘Episode’.

We arrived at a viewpoint on the main road overlooking a small fishing village. I duly took photos next to a gathering of other tourists.

Robert directed me off the main road into the village. He performed his lock the car, hide all valuables and stay close nerve-calmer and we walked over to the beach.

It was here that I met the supplier of his drug-running boat.

Riding a wild-eyed horse, the supplier galloped through the beach-front stalls, kicking up sand, like the deranged stable boy for the Four Horseman in the Apocalypse.

We were all being monitored shiftily by a number of other worrying-looking locals, who were obviously trying to work out why a sheep would willingly wander, in a carefree manner, into the centre of their pack of wolves. When, after ten minutes photographing fishing/drug smuggling boats and a gaggle of machete waving traders haggling over snapper, I wandered 20 feet up the beach away from Robert, he shambled quickly over to me and nervously asked me “How much further down the beach are you planning on going?” before telling me that the correct answer to that question was “back to the car, now”. There were apparently some young guys in the group, who would do very bad things to me, mainly to get my camera, but also just to brag to their mates about how they killed me for no particular reason. He was worried, which had the effect on me of seeing visions of the grim reaper, politely asking me to duck-rapid compliance.

Robert took the only sensible option, leaving via another vertigo-inducing steep, rutted back-alley gulley, ensuring a maximum escape speed of four miles per hour. The spotty teenage beach gangsters wouldn’t even have had to break into a run to catch the car. This turned out to be the ‘hood’ he grew up in. It was during this slow speed getaway that he appraised me of the total number of murders in St. Lucia, a whole lot per week, and lamented the loss of the gallows, giving people the easy option of ten years, which many people he knew would be quite willing to serve, After giving me a piece of brain liquefying news as was his habit, he insisted on stopping and talking to a group of dodgy-looking characters, while I sat in the car with the engine running. We were apparently safe for now as we were no less than 300 metres from the trophy-seeking tourist dispatchers.

All that then remained was to knock over a cash machine so I could pay Robert. Once again, he insisted on shadowing me, like a corrupt FBI agent, skulking across the street, watching for his competing muggers.

When I emerged one minute later, having got my cash fast, he came running, asking was I was alright? Who was following me? Was everything okay?

“It was before you tuned my already high-pitched stress levels to E-sharp, you convict,” I thought, but I could not bring myself to speak the words out loud.

Wondering if he was ever going to kill me or flee, we did the deal on the money, touched knuckles.

He checked if I was “irie gwan de hotel”.

“Yes, thanks Robert,” I said.

And then I made my escape, after a day long reign of terror and loads of fun.

By BRAD STONE

Karl and Dorsey Gude of East Lansing, Mich., can remember simpler mornings, not too long ago. They sat together and chatted as they ate breakfast. They read the newspaper and competed only with the television for the attention of their two teenage sons.

That was so last century. Today, Mr. Gude wakes at around 6 a.m. to check his work e-mail and his Facebook and Twitter accounts. The two boys, Cole and Erik, start each morning with text messages, video games and Facebook.

The new routine quickly became a source of conflict in the family, with Ms. Gude complaining that technology was eating into family time. But ultimately even she partially succumbed, cracking open her laptop after breakfast.

“Things that I thought were unacceptable a few years ago are now commonplace in my house,” she said, “like all four of us starting the day on four computers in four separate rooms.”

Technology has shaken up plenty of life’s routines, but for many people it has completely altered the once predictable rituals at the start of the day.

This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.

“It used to be you woke up, went to the bathroom, maybe brushed your teeth and picked up the newspaper,” said Naomi S. Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University, who has written about technology’s push into everyday life. “But what we do first now has changed dramatically. I’ll be the first to admit: the first thing I do is check my e-mail.”

The Gudes’ sons sleep with their phones next to their beds, so they start the day with text messages in place of alarm clocks. Mr. Gude, an instructor at Michigan State University, sends texts to his two sons to wake up.

“We use texting as an in-house intercom,” he said. “I could just walk upstairs, but they always answer their texts.” The Gudes recently began shutting their devices down on weekends to account for the decrease in family time.

In other households, the impulse to go online before getting out the door adds an extra layer of chaos to the already discombobulating morning scramble.

Weekday mornings have long been frenetic, disjointed affairs. Now families that used to fight over the shower or the newspaper tussle over access to the lone household computer — or about whether they should be using gadgets at all, instead of communicating with one another.

“They used to have blankies; now they have phones, which even have their own umbilical cord right to the charger,” said Liz Perle, a mother in San Francisco who laments the early-morning technology immersion of her two teenage children. “If their beds were far from the power outlets, they would probably sleep on the floor.”

The surge of early risers is reflected in online and wireless traffic patterns. Internet companies that used to watch traffic levels rise only when people booted up at work now see the uptick much earlier.

Arbor Networks, a Boston company that analyzes Internet use, says that Web traffic in the United States gradually declines from midnight to around 6 a.m. on the East Coast and then gets a huge morning caffeine jolt. “It’s a rocket ship that takes off at 7 a.m,” said Craig Labovitz, Arbor’s chief scientist.

Akamai, which helps sites like Facebook and Amazon keep up with visitor demand, says traffic takes off even earlier, at around 6 a.m. on the East Coast. Verizon Wireless reported the number of text messages sent between 7 and 10 a.m. jumped by 50 percent in July, compared with a year earlier.

Both adults and children have good reasons to wake up and log on. Mom and Dad might need to catch up on e-mail from colleagues in different time zones. Children check text messages and Facebook posts from friends with different bedtimes — and sometime forget their chores in the process.

In May, Gabrielle Glaser of Montclair, N.J., bought her 14-year-old daughter, Moriah, an Apple laptop for her birthday. In the weeks after, Moriah missed the school bus three times and went from walking the family Labradoodle for 20 minutes each morning to only briefly letting the dog outside.

Moriah concedes that she neglected the bus and dog, and blames Facebook, where the possibility that crucial updates from friends might be waiting draws her online as soon as she wakes. “I have some friends that are up early and chatting,” she said. “There is definitely a pull to check it.”

Some families have tried to set limits on Internet use in the mornings. James Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that deals with children and entertainment, wakes every morning at 6 and spends the next hour on his BlackBerry, managing e-mail from contacts in different parts of the world.

But when he meets his wife, Liz, and their four children, ages 5 to 16, at the breakfast table, no laptops or phones are allowed.

Mr. Steyer says he and his sons feel the temptation of technology early. Kirk, 14, often runs through much of his daily one-hour allotment of video-game time in the morning.

Even Jesse, 5, has started asking each morning if he can play games on his father’s iPhone. And Mr. Steyer said he constantly feels the tug of waiting messages on his BlackBerry, even during morning hours that are reserved for family time.

“You have to resist the impulse. You have to switch from work mode to parenting mode,” Mr. Steyer said. “But meeting my own standard is tough.”

Excerpt from the book jacket:

In his role as human guinea pig, Jacobs fearlessly takes on a series of life-altering challenges that provides readers with equal parts insight and humor. (And which drives A.J.’s patient wife, Julie, to the brink of insanity.)

I loved The Guinea Pig Diaries, by A.J. Jacobs. It came into my life just yesterday – I spotted it while out shopping and couldn’t resist the title, especially since Jacobs’ The Know-It-All had been highly recommended by Carrie from Books and Movies (The Know-It-All is currently sitting in my to-be-read pile).

It’s rare that I decide to read a book on the day that I receive it; I’m such a moody reader, and my mood has to coincide with a book’s genre, plot and theme first. But late in the afternoon yesterday, I was feeling a little down, so I decided to read an essay or two from The Guinea Pig Diaries because I just didn’t feel in the mood for a novel.

What a ride those first few essays were! I couldn’t stop at just two essays; I ended up reading the entire book last night.. Did I say “feeling a little bit down”? It’s hard to stay down when you’re laughing out loud, and laugh out loud is exactly what I did while reading this book.

The charm of the book doesn’t stop there, though. Jacobs is very funny, but his words are more than pure comedy. He takes his experiments seriously, and writes about the insights he’s gained during the course of each experiment. Each essay ends with a Coda that talks about how the experience of the experiment itself has altered his life, for good or for bad.

And the experiments run such a wide range. There’s his outsourcing experiment, where he decides to spend a month outsourcing both his work and his personal life to a team out in Bangalore, India:

I had [Asha] call AT&T to ask about my cell phone plan. I’m just guessing, but I bet her call was routed from Bangalore to New Jersey and then back to an AT&T employee in Bangalore, which makes me happy for some reason.

Then there’s the month he decides to give Radical Honesty a try. Radical Honesty isn’t just about not lying; it also requires you to remove that filter from your brain and your mouth, so that you’re always – and that’s always – saying what you think:

One other thing is also becoming apparent: There’s a fine line between Radical Honesty and creepiness. Or actually no line at all. It’s simple logic: Men think about sex every three minutes, as the scientists at Redbook remind us. If you speak whatever’s on your mind, you’ll be talking about sex every three minutes.

There are other experiments, too. There’s the month he decides to live his life according to George Washington’s 110 Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation; the month he gets a taste of what being a beautiful woman is like when he persuades his sons’ nanny to let him handle her online profile at a dating site; there’s the time actress Mary-Louise Parker agrees to write an essay for Esquire about what it feels like to pose naked (with an accompanying photo), provided Jacobs agrees to appear in the magazine naked too; and there’s the time he appeared at the Academy Awards disguised as a celebrity, for his “240 Minutes of Fame”.

My favourite piece, though? It’s a toss-up between “The Rationality Project” and “Whipped”. During Project Rationality, Jacobs decides to eliminate all cognitive biases from his brain for a month:

As one scientist puts it, we’ve got Stone Age minds living in silicon-age bodies. Our brains were formed to deal with Paleolithic problems. When my brain gets scared, it causes a spike in adrenaline, which might have been helpful when facing a mastodon but is highly counterproductive when facing a snippy salesman at the Verizon outlet.

What I liked most about “The Rationality Project” was the aftereffect Jacobs experienced as a result. There’s something that’s so appealing to me about letting go of the assumptions we make all too readily about various situations in life, and Jacobs highlights some real long-term benefits of his experiment.

In “Whipped”, Jacobs decides to go along with readers’ suggestions that he make it up to his wife for all that she has  had to put up with during the course of his quirky quests and experiments:

I need to pay Julie back in a more appropriate fashion. I need to spend a month doing everything my wife says. She will be boss. I will be her devoted servant. It will be a month, they say, of foot massages and talking about feelings and scrubbing dishes and watching Kate Hudson movies (well, if Julie actually liked Kate Hudson movies, which she doesn’t).

How could I not enjoy reading about that? Jacobs was figuring that his wife would get bored of being in charge. Do I even need to say it? That didn’t happen.

I loved The Guinea Pig Diaries. It was funny, yes, but each essay also made me think. And to me, that’s essay writing at its best.

I’m very eager now to read Jacobs’ The Know It All – or at least, I would be, if it weren’t for the fact that he misspelled Wayne Gretzky’s name in that book (and that is an inside joke you’ll only get once you’ve read The Guinea Pig Diaries).

BOOK
http://www.amazon.com/Guinea-Pig-Diaries-Life-Experiment/dp/1416599061

INTERVIEW
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il-LKT0dvSU&feature=player_embedded

Despite weeks in the cities of South America (Chile & Argentina), I finally retreated to the wilderness of Chile’s central regions for a month…. (more to come…)

Happy New Year, folks. To wind down the year, my last post gave my picks for the top work/life balance stories of 2008. Today, I’m giving my predictions for the biggest work/life balance stories we’ll see in the year ahead:

1. The continued rise of flex work. Realizing that you can’t do the same amount of work with less people power, companies with common sense will choose flexible work arrangements over layoffs. Instituting telecommuting, shorter workweeks, and job sharing as cost-cutting measures not only keeps your people employed, it keeps their morale up during difficult financial times. Layoffs, of course, have the opposite effect.

2. The “working” retirement. Lewis Lin, a Seattle-based interviewing coach, wrote in with this one, and I couldn’t agree more. Increased life expectancy and cost of living have already contributed greatly to more and more people working well into their golden years. Fifty- and sixty-somethings who saw their retirement funds shrink by 40 percent or more in recent months will have to think twice about walking away from work any time soon. Many simply won’t be able to afford it.

3. The accidental small business owner. Those with means who’ve been laid off from a floundering industry (banking comes to mind) might find it easier to start a low-overhead business than find a job with a salary comparable to the one they lost. In October, business strategist Rhonda Abrams argued in USA Today that a recession is actually a fine time to start a low-overhead business. For one thing, the competition is likely weakened. For another, customers are hungry for cheap alternatives. (Entire article here.)

4. The reluctant freelancer. Take it from a long-time freelancer, if you have a service to sell, it’s easier during a recession to find organizations to hire you for project-based freelance and contract work than it is to find organizations to hire you for a full-time position. Why? Because it’s far less expensive for companies to farm out the work sporadically than to open a salaried position. Any time the country slips into a recession, you’ll find leagues laid-off writers, designers, programmers, admins, and project managers turning to freelance work to make ends meet.

5. The marriage of convenience. In a 2007 poll conducted by leading health policy research group Kaiser Family Foundation, 7 percent of Americans admittedly to marrying so they or their partner could get on the other’s health insurance plan. Given the high unemployment figures right now, I’d be shocked if more couples didn’t step up their nuptial plans for financial reasons.

6. The putting off of parenthood. Those pint-sized bundles of joy cost a small fortune. As the Chicago Tribune reports, the annual cost of raising a child in a middle-income, married-couple, two-child family was about $11,000 or $12,000 a year in 2007, depending on geographic location. Then there’s the whole matter of the college fund. If ever there was a year not to incur those added expenses, it’s this one.

7. The never-ending fascination with the Obamas’ family life. This young, history-making political family appears to have it all: beauty, brains, power, heart, education, ambition, compassion, connections, the world’s rapt attention, and the world’s seemingly infinite problems resting squarely on their shoulders. How can we resist gawking and seeing what we can learn from them?

and…7.5. You are amongst million of people newly interested in Work/Life balance.  Fast becoming a top Google trend “Work/Life” balance is increasingly fashionable.  As nervous breakdowns and mid-life crisis’ exist and so do people who want to avoid them, balance is a hot hot topic.

I will be exploring these in depth in future articles.  This serves as a placeholder.  This is my personal list of ‘Simple Habits to Make Your Life Better’.  Leave a comment with your favorites.

1. Live within your means
2. Get regular rest.  Fyi, If you are tired, you aren’t rested.
3. Pay bills online, pay none in person
4. Get regular haircuts
5. Plan your life in increments of endless dreams, 3 goals, 3 tasks per goal, 7 days per task.  Live your life in 7 day increments, allowing goal-time, personal time, leisure time, & learning time, etc…
6. Exercise your body 30 times per week for 20 minutes, or more.
7. Watch no regular television.
8. Watch no televised news (if you must get news, get it from the least sensationalized sources, i.e. NYTImes (But even that’s not great.)
9. Avoid talking about taxes and politics

and…9.5. Reflect on the negative, dwell on the positive.