Want to improve your mood? Turn the sound up and watch this, preferably in high-quality mode: Matt Harding traveled the world doing a goofy dance, and somehow it became an uplifting video, spotlighting both differences and similarities around the globe. Yes, it’s sponsored by a chewing gum company (who have only a small mention at [...]
Off topic for Column 2, but hey, it’s Friday. For those of you who have never seen Canadian government at work, it can be pretty entertaining sometimes, and never more than when there’s a lively debate going on during Question Period. Our big debate now is the newly-introduced copyright bill, which blatantly panders to the [...]
I’ve heard a lot of criticism of Earth Hour over the past few days, mainly that it was a token public effort by people who aren’t really committed to any permanent change. Whether that’s true or not can’t be determined from last night’s behaviour alone, although I have read that some local businesses were using [...]
All week, the local tech community has been buzzing around the news that Bell Canada is throttling P2P traffic — specifically the widely-used BitTorrent protocol — for not only their direct Sympatico subscribers, but also for anyone who buys their supposedly unlimited DSL from a Sympatico reseller, such as TekSavvy. For those of you new [...]
I’ve been heads down in work for the past couple of weeks since I last attended a conference, and although I seem to find time to read and comment on a number of blogs, I haven’t written much. I did find time, however, to be involved in a small video project with my talented photographer [...]
I travel a lot these days, and couldn’t do it without all of the great tools available: As I’ve written previously, if you’re applying for a Canadian passport, do yourself a huge favour and fill out the form online; that reduces the actual visit to the passport office from about 1.5 hours to about 15 [...]
Ha! My favourite comic does process improvement:
Sometime after 7pm Eastern tonight, Google decided to do some maintenance on my kemsleydesign.com email account, which is hosted on Google. Some notice would have been nice, instead of getting errors through Outlook, then attempting to access the webmail to see this: 24 hours?? I guess this is how they get us to move from [...]
For those of you who know what a non-athletic person I am, don’t get too excited: I’m not running a marathon, I’m not even running. However, I am walking 5km to raise money for the Fort York Food Bank on September 30th, a charity to which I’ve donated in the past due to the diligent [...]
Hope that everyone here in Canada had a great Canada Day weekend, and that everyone south of the border has a great 4th of July tomorrow. Blogging will be light this week, since I expect that half of my readers are on vacation.
I was in San Francisco this week for a vendor conference, and the gala event was 750 of us heading off to AT&T Park to watch the Giants play the Colorado Rockies. I’ve never been in this stadium before, and one of the first things that I noticed was this juxtaposition of Yahoo’s ad and [...]
This meme has been floating around for a few months on the web, and it’s time for it to die. I was tagged by Neil Ward-Dutton, and I promised to respond although I’m not passing it on from here. Time for a new meme! So here goes, five things that you (probably) don’t know about [...]
My other half didn’t quite make it to the card store — although I understand that a spa day is in my future — but TIBCO remembered me on Valentine’s Day (click on the image): I have to say, they have some of the most playfully eye-catching marketing graphics in BPM.
A cool map that you can create of the countries that you’ve visited. Here’s mine: create your own visited countries map When I look at it, I’m more amazed by the places that I haven’t been (nothing in South America? or Asia?) than the 29 countries that I have.
I received an email from James Taylor today, and on second reading, I noticed the following in small print at the end of his signature block: Despite not being sent from my Blackberry, this email may nevertheless be terse and contain spelling and grammatical errors. As a very sympathetic Blackberry user, I’m still laughing.
The past few days, I’ve been listening to Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as read by Mark “the Brooklyn Bluesman” Forman on his Getting a Leg Up blog. Forman’s not a great reader — or maybe I’m totally spoiled, having just listened to Stephen Fry read the last Harry Potter book [...]
It’s not even mid-month, and I’ve been a total techno-geek. To wit: 1. I hooked up my new video iPod to my TV so that I can play video podcasts on the big screen, without using a proprietary Apple cable. 2. I installed Blackberry Messenger so that I can IM on my Blackberry. As if [...]
I received one of the new video iPods as an early Christmas present, and I’m loving it. Although I loaded up a bunch of music that I’d ripped for my previous MP3 player, I mostly use it to listen to podcasts and audio books. There are a few video podcasts that I’m watching on it; [...]
This was a birthday present (well, at least he doesn’t buy me kitchen appliances), and it’s great to have a super-fast CD and DVD reader and recorder that — in theory — burns the DL (double-layer) 8.5GB disks. Ripping an entire music CD using iTunes takes less than four minutes; writing a 4GB data backup [...]
I admit it, I’m a Crackberry addict. I have been for years, since I bought my old 957 and started having access to my email wherever I went in North America (well, almost everywhere: since it ran over the digital pager networks, there were some large holes in rural areas). After more than four years, [...]
