Santa Claus Is Coming
Holiday season brings the perennial return of Santa Claus. According to traditional lore, St. Nick flies around the world on his reindeer-powered sleigh. He lavishes gifts upon the good children of the world, and as for the naughty youngsters…well, they can expect lumps of fossil fuel in their stockings. This jovial, rotund old fellow provides a magical experience that enriches the lives of children. Right?
Well, not necessarily.
Parents often recount their childhood stories as cherished memories and want to recreate the same experiences for their children. Unfortunately, parents’ good intentions may actually lead to mixed messages that may be harmful to childrenand there is no magic in that. After taking a closer look at how the Santa “fantasy” really affects children, you’ll realize that it’s time to give the traditional Santa fantasy a modern makeover.
You Better Not Pout….
“He knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.” The song “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” provides an example of the mixed messages associated with the traditional Santa Claus myth. In this song, the take-home message for many children is: “Santa is watching you, so you better be good. If you are not good Santa won’t bring you toys.”
Adults, in some cases, take advantage of this message to control children’s behavior. A department store employee once boasted that she had the perfect way to keep customers’ children under control. Whenever children became unruly, she would warn them that Santa had cameras all over the store, and he could see them being bad. If they didn’t stop misbehaving, the clerk warned, they wouldn’t receive any toys on Christmas. She took great pride in the fact that this trick worked every time.
What a creepy idea: Santa watches and judges you, and worse, he may even punish you. Youngsters believe that if they don’t perform in acceptable ways, Santa won’t bring them toys. This reward/punishment scenario encourages children to be good for the sake of a reward, and even worse, it instills a sort of “Big Brother is watching” feeling. So be good to get toys, and be good because someone’s watching you. What happened to be good for goodness sake?
He’s Gonna Find Out Who’s Naughty or Nice….
Another harmful message implicit in the Santa myth is that material objects reflect quality of character. In this faulty logic, if being good leads to toys, then receiving toys signify good behavior. Take, for instance, the following examplea true story.
After the holidays, several children discussed the exciting gifts Santa had brought them. One child claimed that she had been so good that Santa brought her the bike she had really wanted. Another little girl, who had suffered parental abuse and neglect, listened to the first girl’s story. Later, in a very meek voice, she asked her caretaker a heartbreaking question: Since she had been good, when was Santa going to bring her bike?
In this case, and unfortunately in others, the Santa myth sets children up for disappointment and self-doubt.
I’m Telling You Why….
At about age five children begin to question the Santa myth by asking such questions as:
- Is Santa Claus real?
- How can he make it to all the houses in one night?
- How can he fit down the chimney?
- We don’t have a chimney, so how can Santa come to my house?
- How can this be Santa when we just saw him at another store?
- Do reindeer really fly?
For each of these questions, parents must extend the fantasy (i.e. generate more lies) to keep the myth alive just a little longer. While these adults think it’s okay to deceive children when it is for their own good, it may actually harm them.
Whether they finally figure it out for themselves or their parents confess the truth about Santa, children experience sadness, regrets and often, a sense of betrayal. Their parentsthe adults whom they had trusted the mostlied to them. What good is a short-term fantasy if it damages a child’s core sense of trust?
Santa Claus is Coming to Town
Parents need not do away with the Santa experience all together. A fun and emotionally safe alternative to the traditional myth is the Santa Claus Game. In the Santa game everyone pretends that Santa is real. This enables everyone to enjoy all the activities that others enjoy. The main difference is that your children understand that Santa is just pretend.
You can introduce the game during the pre-school years. Of course, at this age children are too young to truly understand the difference between pretend and real. But you can take them to visit Santa and do all the Santa related activities children like to do. From time to time you can say things like, “This Santa game is fun!” You can even put out milk and cookies for “Santa,” again explaining that it’s just pretend.
As the children get older and want to know more, explain that in this pretend game Santa has magic and can do all the amazing things that people talk about. Talk about Santa in a fairytale, magical kind of fashion. The fact that it is a game will not detract any pleasure from the child’s fun.
By the time children are five and six, you can stop the emphasis on the pretend factor. At that age they will still be excited to visit Santa and sit on his lap, even though they know it is all pretend. When the children are ten and eleven years old, they can still get presents from Santa and many will still want to put out milk and cookies. The difference now is that they will have that “special twinkle” in their eyes when they ask, “What kind of cookies would Santa like this year?”
Eventually you won’t have to talk about it being a game anymore; you’ll simply have fun. And isn’t that what the holiday spirit is all about?
Children are excellent at pretend games and enjoy them immensely. Even though the Santa game is make-believe, it differs from the traditional myth in a crucial way: All the players know it is a game. Adults may then tell children that not all families play the game and that some children don’t know it is a game. This information explains why Santa doesn’t come to all families, and why some children think Santa is real. It also clears up why some children don’t get what they want from Santa, even when they have been “good.”
Children who learn the Santa game equally enjoy the magic and excitement that others receive from the traditional Santa experience. Most important, though, they don’t suffer the disillusionment and sense of betrayal of discovering that Santa isn’t real. So keep in mind that when you sing, “You better not lie, I am telling you why”a child’s trust and happiness is at stake.
About The Author
Dawn Fry is the founder and CEO of Helping Our Children Productions, a publishing company that provides educational CD’s giving practical help to families and childcare professionals. Ms. Fry has more than 60,000 hours of professional experience working with children. For more information, visit www.DawnTalk.com.
www.dawntalk.com/PDF/2004-PressKit.pdf
NOTE: This article is copyrighted! (c) 2002-2004 Helping Our Children Productions & Dawn Fry. All rights are reserved. Limited use and reproduction is allowed within the permission guidelines listed below.
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Perhaps the biggest mistake people make when building their computer(s) is to underestimate the importance of the hard disk drive (HDD). In our modern society, bigger is synonymous with better, so when you go to buy a hard drive you look at how “big” it is, its data capacity. But is that all you should be considering when buying your hard drive?
Like every other component of your computer, the HDD is far too complex a system to describe in any sort of detail here, but hopefully by the end of this article you will know what to look for when you go to buy your new hard drive.
There are 4 primary aspects to look at in a hard drive (in order of importance):
- Rotational frequency and average seek time
- Buffer size
- Internal/external transfer rates
- Capacity
Rotational frequency has become a large selling point (5400/7200/10000/15000RPM) recently, so you shouldn’t have too much difficulty finding out what the rotational frequency of your HDD is when you go to buy it. Now of course the faster it spins, the faster it can read from the disk (there are other advantages also), but be aware that the faster it spins, the more wear is put on the drive, and the more likely it is to encounter errors and malfunctions later in life. Hard drives are pretty much the only systems within your computer that have moving parts (CD-ROM, floppy disk drives, and fans also have moving parts, but they’re all cheap and if they break you won’t lose all the data you’ve accumulated over the course of owning your computer, be sure to back up your data regularly!).
If you know anything about physics or engineering, then you know that moving parts produce friction and wear, and a faster spinning platter (the part that holds the data and spins) means more friction, and therefore more wear on your drive. Of course the faster it spins the faster it can read data from the platter. So what can you do? well again you backup your data as much as possible and you get the fastest spinning drive money can buy (which is 7200RPM for ATA devices (the sort you are buying) and 15000RPM for SCSI and some Serial ATA devices (you might get Serial ATA, that depends on your motherboard)). So look for a “7200RPM” label on the drive you’re thinking of getting, it’s important!
The “buffer” I’m referring to is the transfer buffer that temporarily stores data to read from or write to the hard drive. The reason for this is that the bus (data channel between the hard drive and the motherboard) can only handle so much information at a time, and it takes a long time for the data to be found and retrieved from a platter (random seek time), so it takes a big chunk of the requested data and stores it in a very fast data buffer to be sent at the bus’s convenience. So with a larger buffer you can queue more data for transfer over the bus without having to keep sending requests to slowly find more data from the platters. Some newer drives come with as much as 8MB of buffer capacity, but it is more common to see 2 or 4MB. Usually a drive with a large amount will use that as a selling point and print it on the box/website, otherwise you can assume it has a 2/4MB buffer. My advice is to find one with as much as you can afford.
Now for the transfer rates you’re going to need to do some searching, the best way to find these numbers is to go to the manufacturer’s website and look at specification sheet for the model you’re looking to buy (actually this is the best way to get all the information I’ve talked about so far). One thing to look out for is that you may read something that says 133MB/s or ATA/133 or SATA150 or 150MB/s, and these are not the numbers you are looking for, those numbers describe the bus connecting the hard drive to the motherboard, and are theoretical peak numbers, which tell us virtually nothing. Also, if you are buying a Maxtor, don’t bother looking up actual transfer rates, as Maxtor is apparently afraid to release such information. Not to say Maxtor’s are bad drives, actually Maxtor has risen to the top in terms of technical support and they are much more willing to replace broken drives than some other companies, which is important since some ridiculously large amount (something like 10 or 15%) of hard drives are either dead on arrival or die within the first few weeks of use. As with the last two points, when looking at transfer speeds (if you can find them) always try to pick the one with the highest numbers you can afford.
Notice that the first three of the 4 major aspects were all speed related? That was done intentionally to give you a sense of the importance of speed in the hard drive, because they are very very slow creatures, and for your gaming experience you don’t need an enormous hard drive so much as a fast one. To increase speed substantially more you can set up a RAID, which is a network of hard drives which (in RAID0 mode) share portions of the same data, such that accessing data takes 1/n time (n = number of hard drives attached) compared to 1 hard drive. To do this you really need a hardware RAID chipset, which are commonly included on higher-end mainboards.
Finally, capacity is an unnecessary nicety. The smallest hard drives you can buy today that are still within those higher speed classes are all about 30GB, which is more than enough for your games. But since games are not everything, and if you happen to be an iTunes member or like to download anime then you will really want some extra space. So I would recommend getting something between 60 and 120GB, any more and you’re going to be paying through your teeth, any less and you might be looking to buy a supplementary hard drive in a couple years. And, oh yeah, 300GB hard drives from Maxtor are out, but they are comparatively slow, so I wouldn’t recommend getting one for gaming, I like to stick to single platter drives (40-100GB usually), as they produce less heat and are less likely to break down on me.
That is really all you need to know in order to make a good choice when upgrading your hard drive or buying one for a new computer. Of course there are many other resources on the web if you would like more detail on the inner working of hard drives.
About The Author
J A Carpunky http://www.computer-gaming-system.com - visit our website for further information.
In recent years property values have soared, while investment
returns have been modest. This has created a situation where a
lot of seniors are finding themselves in the position of being
house rich and cash poor. These cash strapped seniors are
looking for ways to increase their retirement income while
continuing to live in their homes. These retirees find that
their options are limited, and in most cases require them to
risk their home. Enter the reverse mortgage, which can provide
many advantages over these other less desirable options.
No Payments With Reverse Mortgages
The biggest advantage of a reverse mortgages is not having to
make payments as long as you continue living in your home. In
fact, this is the number one reason that seniors choose to
borrow reverse mortgages. Almost 80% of reverse mortgage
borrowers use a reverse mortgage to pay off their current loans
in order to eliminate their house payments. Let’s say you owe
$50,000 on your first mortgage and borrow $80,000 with a reverse
mortgage. This would pay off and eliminate the payment on the
first mortgage and provide you with $30,000 to use as you please.
Live in Your Home as Long as You Like
The second advantage of reverse mortgages is the ability to live
in your house as long as you like. The great thing about this is
the amount you owe on the reverse mortgage can never be more
than the house is worth. Let’s say you live to 115 and have
selected to recieve a $300 a month payments for life from the
reverse mortgage. The amount received from the reverse mortgage
payments could be substantially higher than the value of your
home, yet the amount owed will still only be the value of the
home. In this situation, FHA insurance will cover the difference.
Reverse Mortgage Withdrawal Options
Another advantage of reverse mortgages is the different
withdrawal options that a you are able to choose. These options
include lump sum distributions, line of credit, monthly
payments, or any combination of these three. So if you were
eligible to borrow $100,000 on a reverse mortgage you could
select to receive $30,000 up front to cover current expenses,
and hold the rest as a line of credit that you can use whenever
you need it. This flexibility of reverse mortgages can
significantly improve you financial independence during
retirement.
Tax-Free Nature of Reverse Mortgages
Another advantage of reverse mortgage is the tax-free nature of
the loan proceeds. The American Bar Association guide to reverse
mortgages advises that generally the IRS does not consider loan
advances to be income. This means that all the money from the
proceeds of the reverse mortgage end up in your pocket.
With these features, reverse mortgage are definitely an option
to consider if you are looking for ways to supplement your
current income. As with any financial decision, you should seek
the advice of a trained professional, a reverse mortgage
counselor, to evaluate and determine if a reverse mortgage is
right for your situation.