The secret to a clean ceramic tile floor

The secret to a clean ceramic tile floor: cover up the chip marks!, originally uploaded by shersteve.

Getting up real close to the floor on Friday, I found out why Dolores was complaining about the floor. It has chip marks. Something dropped on the floor and chipped the ceramic tile. The beige coloring has been replace by a dark mark. So even after washing the floor, you stand there and see all these marks on the floor. Such that you want to bend over and pick up the piece of dirt or whatever it could be.

One solution is to find a color match with some enamel paint. A little dab here, a little dab there. Now when you look at the floor, it does truly look clean and just washed.

I had done this treatment to a few chips on the floor some time ago. I guess I could have done it sooner. However, there is no time like the present to do what needs to be done.

Do you have a secret to share on making a job well done really noticeable?

Lessons from floor washing

These pictures were Twittered on Friday as I took breaks in my floor washing. The breaks were brief respites. You should celebrate success periodically. Celebrating small successes helps to renew the energy to tackle the next phase of work, whether it is floor washing or whatever.

Preparation: it helps to remove the major items that can be moved to clear the floor



Execution: now down to the hard part



Alternatives: I'd rather do windows than floors, easier to stretch my legs



Completion: Can't forget to do the entry hallway, it is really all the same flooring



Next up, the secret to really making the floor look so clean there is no question on what was done.

tertiary education: advantages of amnesia??

... Google's enormous reserves of user information, stored in dozens of secretive data centers across the world, and the literally photographic memory of the Internet Archive, which preserves billions of defunct Web pages for posterity, are enough to leave anyone rattled. New forms of memory are permanent and accessible from anywhere. As their reach grows, scholars are asking if now - perhaps for the first time in human history - we need to find ways to forget.

"We used to have a system in which we forgot things easily and had to invest energy in remembering," says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Now we're switching to a system in which we remember everything and have to invest energy in order to forget. That's an enormous transformation."

and this:

The personal costs of this reality are clear, but there may be broader social costs as well. "What a lot of people forget - no pun intended - is that forgetting is hard-wired," says Mayer-Schönberger. "Cognitively and sociologically, we've never had to develop the capacity to forget or to put things in temporal perspective, because forgetting was built in biologically."

So trying to memorize the times table is a waste of time?

Are we going to need to spend some time in school and do homework to practice forgetting?

Read the full article in the Boston Globe and decide for yourself.