What $130/barrel Gas Means to Me

The cover of this week’s Macleans magazine depicts a man with a gas nozzle pointed at his temple. Pretty good visual, as far as instilling fear in the hearts of Canadians.

But really, gas prices are going to impact my life in a pretty significant way.
The changes:

1. Goodbye Grocery Gateway - it’s off to NoFrills for me, and only for things that I know I’m going to eat in the next few days.
2. Goodbye regular weekend cottaging. It’s going to be hard to justify $200 in gas for 2 days of relaxation. Just thinking about the expense is going to make it hard to relax. I’m going to need that extra $400-$600 come winter.
   
3. Goodbye 69 degree thermostat. I think we can learn to be thrilled with 65 degrees in the winter.
4. Goodbye silly purchases. Gone are the days of excess and spending. The one good thing that may come out of gas prices - people are going to actually start thinking about what they are wasting their money on. Oh - and those excessive kid birthday parties - gone, gone, gone. Back to the good old days of inviting 2 friends over to a sleepover with homemade Birthday cake.
5. Goodbye Fancy Fruits - this one is going to hurt. I’ve recently become infatuated with Asian Pears. Sigh, the relationship was doomed to fail.
6. No more Commuting. Say, this could be an upside
   

There *is* an upside:

1. Home vegetable gardening is making a comeback. Already I’ve bought cucumber and tomato plants. I’ve also planted 4 more trees this year. Not bad for a lot that’s only 50 by 120. :-)
2. Fleamarket shopping is going to explode.
   
3. People will begin to find more enjoyment in *being at home*, and figuring out all sorts of things to do *at home*. Heck - maybe you will even meet your neighbours ;-)
   
4. The internet is going to be even more powerful - with spending curbed, entertainment is going to come in many forms.
5. You will have nice big trees in 10 years. Who know - you might end up needing them to keep you warm in the winter!
   

Technorati Tags: gas, commuting, environment

TV Rule of Thumb: White-board Appropriateness

Over the past few weeks, the Wiz and I have come to realize that the best shows on TV right now are ones where there is the appearance of a white-board, or where a white-board appearance would not be out of the question.

This all came about after my eleventh exclamation that “I’m going to die if I don’t get a clear, see-through white board and a juicy white board marker”.
The Wiz reminded me, for the eleventh time, that see-through whiteboards are just just for TV. So the camera can capture the actor, for visual effect. No one in the real world would use a see-through white-board, because you would never easily be able to see what you were working on. The see-through white-board is a creation of TV. Sort of like the super size frying pan that Coppertone used to fry models in.

The White-board rule of thumb can apply to almost all TV shows right now.

Awesome shows with white-boards, or the potential for a white-board to make an appearance:

1. Regensis
2. House
3. Shark
4. Medium
5. Dexter
6. Nip Tuck
7. Ghost Whisperer
8. Blood Ties
9. Numbers
10. CSI
    

Shows that don’t have a hope in hell of having a whiteboard (and thus have *good* odds of being *very bad*):

1. American Idol
2. Dancing with the Stars
3. Survivor
4. Wife Swap
5. Anything on The WB
6. Any Reality Gameshow
7. SuperNanny
8. Next Top Model
9. Mama’s Family
10. Everybody Loves Raymond
    

See…. it really works - the white-board rule of thumb. Go ahead. Try it. You know I’m right. ;-)

MTS Goes it Alone in Wireless Auction?

You know me, I couldn't not write just a wee blurb about the news last week of the MTS wireless alliance melting in the early pre-auction hours. The Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board and Blackstone Capital backed out, or were prodded out of the trio, leaving MTS to go it alone in the new wireless spectrum auction coming up this week.

So many questions, so few answers. Does this open up the option for Google to partner with MTS? We know that they are looking south of the border at different spectrum opportunities, now that the US auction has completed. Does Google have the same designs for Canada?

:-)


MTS wireless alliance dissolves

A consortium headed by Manitoba Telecom Services Inc. that planned to bid on wireless spectrum in Canada has fallen apart, just five days before the federal government starts to auction off the new airwaves.

Building Corporate Bridges with Social Networks

In the coming years, it will become easier and harder to do business with companies, based on their investment and adoption of social media.

Full Stop.

Already, applications like LinkedIn and Facebook are bringing customer and corporation closer together. Blogs are breaking down the *corporate* barriers. Folks are using their social network to find solutions, products and people to improve their own business requirements.

Last week I asked for a Bell contact who knew about local switch translations via Twitter and Facebook. I'm now LinkedIn to customers that I collaborate with on a regular basis. It's good to see the *real life* of people you work with. When time and space are working against you, it's easy to forget the *realness* of people. This is true for co-workers as well as for customers. I've got a few customer-peers in the UK, and I know that I'll never likely meet them, but having them as part of my social network almost makes up for that fact.

Most of my own team isn't in my province, but that hasn't stopped me from seeing their kitchen renovations, their side projects, and the hiking they did last weekend. Social networks resolve the space-time barriers that real life throw at us.

If you've got folks in your social network who work in a specific industry that you require services from, aren't you more likely to turn to those folks more often, rather than calling a 1-800 number for sales? Of course!

Who's in *YOUR* social network.

Mesh 2008: From The Cheap Seats in Richmond Hill

It was one of those years when the stars just didn't line up, and I missed out on snapping up tickets to Mesh 2008, one of the neatest Web 2.0 un-conferences in North America (it's held in Toronto).
That being said - I've been able to keep up with the conference today, the dialogue, the presentations and the speakers via a myriad of live blogging tools.
It's been amazing.
Dave Fleet has been live blogging virtually word for word. He's using a tool called Cover It Live. I'm mesmerized!
There's a Mesh Swarm that is capturing almost everything from Twitter.
Scribble Live is another live blogging tool that folks are gravitating to....
If you need a handle on content and social events? Matthew Ingram's got it...

And one last thing - you can gather together all the twitters from mesh08 with Summize....

It's almost as good as real life. :-)
Technorati Tags: Mesh, Mesh 2008, Live blogging

Who You Gonna Call.... When Your House Needs TLC? Homestars!!!!

It's such a risky business, trying to figure out who to call when your house needs repairs that are beyond your scope of expertise. Aside from canvassing neighbours and friends for referrals, what are you going to do?
Wouldn't it be neat to be able to find recommendations for plumbers, handymen, electricians, landscapers and flooring companies from folks in your area who you don't necessarily know?

Homestars, a web 2.0 Canadian Startup offers just that! A quick search for recommendations in the Richmond Hill area resulted in some really neat results. Folks are really embracing social media mechanisms to provide worthwhile content. In my area, over 1200 companies have been reviewed in the past 6 months! That's amazing!

Sure-Loc Interlocking in Mississauga received negative reviews, but Elite Designed Concrete were raved about!!! There's nothing more powerful than a handful of negative or positive comments to drive behaviors.

Now it's just a matter of figuring out what I want to do next with the house! :-)
Technorati Tags: Canada, Homestars, referrals, home repairs

Handcuffs of Corporate Collaboration

It's the 21st Century, and the relationship between customer and business has changed. I work with customers on designing solutions, creating support documents for both organizations, even FAQs and diagrams so that they can do their own internal training. All of this digital matter is shipped back and forth via email. A lot. Many times. Many revisions. Did I mention many times? I've got one document that I've been working on with a customer out of the U.K. for the past 6 months. Every once in a while, his boss in Singapore wants to see it, and a project manager located in the US wants to have a look as well. I have 18 revisions. Imagine how lovely it would have been to create a mini-secure wiki. Or any sort of shared space, out on the internets to make the collaboration easier. I love the idea of the pbwiki - with their slogan " It doesn't have to be hard to use to be hardened".

Or how about huddle, which let's you manage online identities, create shared visions, all in a secured environment?

It's easy, you say - companies set up extranets all the time. No, no they don't. Not when they are multinational corporations with a security policy that has more pages than a Wired Magazine. Not when you've got to *e-bond*, trade firewall secrets or get bio-scanned.

It's just too painful to collaborate securely with most customers. There are days when I wish I was a free-lance consultant, and could be responsible for my own security, and leverage some of the cutting edge collab tools available on the internets. Alas. I'm going to email version 19 this morning.

:-(

Technorati Tags: huddle, pbwiki, secure collaboration

Dreaming of the Perfect Lens

I’ve been lamenting the fact that I’ve got a hole in my lens collection. I need something that squeezes nicely between the 50mm that I try and use with some regularity, and the 17-40 that I don’t use enough. I need close, I need big aperture. I need this……

I’m dreaming about the

Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM Standard Zoom Lens



In my camera bag………

Canon EF 50mm f1.4 USM Medium Telephoto Lens


Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L USM Telephoto Zoom Lens


Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM Ultra Wide Angle Zoom Lens




Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM SLR Lens

Aliant Beats TELUS

...... in the Facebook Hockey Pool, silly.

:-)

8 Weeks to Saving the Planet : Week 3 : Thoughts On Where Things Go

This week, and all the activities have done, has got me thinking about where things go, and what happens to them. Of course, this then lends itself to the question of "how bad are the things that *leech* out into the environment? As usual, I've got more questions than answers.

1. Where do the chemicals go that I've used to colour my hair? What are the impacts of them in the environment? If pregnant women aren't supposed to *chemically colour* their hair, because of risks to their fetus, what are the chemicals doing to the wee DNA in our frogs?

2. It used to be that you would be very careful with what went down the drain at the cottage, because you were using a septic tank, as opposed to a municipal sewage system. Now, with the overtaxing of municipal sewage, I've got a feeling that the same habits I've got at the cottage need to be carried home to the suburbs.

3. Human drug concentrations in water: You've seen the reports on CNN: an increase in human medications being found in urban water supplies. Water treatment plants have never had to think about treating water for pharmacological additions. How do we get that *out* of the water? So much for flushing old prescriptions down the toilet.

Each day in Ontario, residents and businesses flush 5.7 million cubic metres of sewage down their toilets and drains.⁴ Many of the different materials that make up sewage pose environmental and health risks. Paints contain toluene, a compound that affects speech, vision, and hearing, as well as phenols, which are poisonous if absorbed or ingested.⁵ Oven and drain cleaners contain sodium hydroxide, a compound that is also poisonous by ingestion and may irritate the skin.⁶ Human waste can contain disease-causing agents such as bacteria and viruses. While scientists generally know what risks each individual element in sewage presents, they know less about what new dangers arise when the components are all combined. A hazardous compound may be altered to pose greater health and environmental risks when combined with other compounds. The reaction of two ingredients may produce a new product that poses an even greater threat to the environment than each ingredient held on its own. Clearly, sewage is a dangerous product of human activities and so the handling and treatment of this mixture is a very serious matter.
From: Environment Probe

Now, what are you going to be thinking about this week? :-\
Technorati Tags: water pollution, ontario, prescriptions, Environment Probe

Update on Friday, May 9, 2008 at 07:58AM by jules

I just found out where my sewage waste goes…. eventually it makes its way to Lake Ontario. I’m not even kidding.

Facebook, Privacy and Rolling the Dice

And while Facebook says it advises its users to “employ…precautions” when downloading applications, any Facebook user will tell you that most applications simply won’t work if you don’t agree to give the developer access to your information.

Office of the Privacy Commissioner

It’s articles like this, from the Privacy Commissioner of Canada that makes me regularly delete Facebook apps from my profile.   A slim Facebook profile is the new black.

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Tags: Facebook, Privacy, Canada

Neat New Wireless Feature: Roam to Home

Telecom Trends

Rogers is continuing to leverage its GSM infrastructure advantage to launch innovative devices ahead of its competitors. Tomorrow, Rogers will be formally announcing its first fixed-mobile converged handsets - allowing customers to roam from mobile onto WiFi networks - and Rogers will announce its Fido Uno and Rogers Home Zone rate plans.

You knew it was just a matter of time. Fixed Mobile Convergence.As a Plus - the service works with any wifi - it doesn't have to be Rogers Red.
Technorati Tags: Rogers, Roam to HomeThe downside: calls started wireless and roam to wifi are billed, even if 90% of your call happes via wifi. Calls that start wifi and roam to wireless are free for the whole duration.

Sugar Cube

PBS Junkies: Overmedicating Children

The Wiz and I are genuinely addicted to PBS. Frontline in particular.
Over the weekend, when not watching Nature shows, we caught a particularly interesting segment: Medicating Kids.
The premise is that with over 1,000,000 kids being medicated for psychological disorders that may or may not be diagnosed accurately, what sort of future are we creating, and what impacts are being had on young brains.

For the longest time, pharmaceutical companies had never tested the effects of adult drugs on children, and it was only when President Clinton *bribed* them with patent extensions, that drug manufacturers ponied up for the tests.

Now today, Fox news has an interesting article about a study that indicates US kids take anti-psychotic medicines at 6 times the rate of UK kids.

Questions come to mind:

1. Is there a relationship between the capitalism of US healthcare and the inappropriate proscribing of medications?
2. Is there a relationship between parenting and overmedicating? In the PBS show, they followed 3 families - 2 of the 3 looked like they'd been spending a considerable amount of time in the shallow end of the gene pool.
3. Is medicating a child a cop out for lazy parenting and even lazier medical specialists?

One of the girls chronicled in the PBS special was given anti-psychotic medication simply because she had *illusions of grandeur* and talked of things *not consistent with reality*. She was 4. A 4 year old girl was medicated because she had an imagination.

I'm looking for comparable stats for Canadian Children. If anyone has seen any - leave a comment!!
Technorati Tags: PBS, FoxTV, Medicating Children

testing of Scribefire

for the past week - scribefire hasn't worked.Does it work now?Did the last update fix something?

Forget the Wallet, Bring Your Finger

TNS surveyed 4,500 consumers in Canada, the U.S., Britain, China, France, Germany, Japan and Spain in February. Forty-one per cent said biometric fingerprint identification has “high appeal.”

Canadian shoppers forsee fingerprint scanning > Identity Management

I would relish the idea of fingerprint scan instead of debit card.  The ease of it all, especially in this day and age when any greaseball can pop a card reader on a bank machine or debit reader and poof, all your savings are gone.   Just a few weeks ago, a friend of mine lost over $700, right in Ontario, because of a scam like this.  Fingerprint and PIN.   Easy as snapping your fingers.:-)

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Tags: fingerprintscanning, debit, shopping

Hell Hath No Fury.... Like a Telecom Scorned

Senior bureaucrats were called upon to defend the way Peel tenders out contracts on Thursday after several telecommunication firms accused the region of unfair business practices.

Imagine that you’ve lost an RFP (request for proposal) to provide services to one of your customers.Now imagine that you decide to accuse your customer of unfair business practices. Publically, officially, and likely with some measure of prejudice. That’s exactly what Black Box Network Services and Allstream have done with the Region of Peel over the proposal of a new telephony system for the municipality. 

Avaya Canada was awarded the contract, but both Allstream and Black Box Networks are calling foul with regards to the decision making process.  Let’s take a step back:  What sort of message does this send to Allstream’s or Black Box Network’s customer base?   What sort of damage does this action have towards other relationships with municipalities? Perhaps one good thing will come out of this: structured decision making criteria.   Shame on the region of Peel for not providing it, and shame on the bidders for not demanding it. :-)

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Tags: Allstream, Avaya, Region of Peel, Black Box Networks, telecom

8 Weeks to a Greener Planet: 50 Ways to Help the Planet

50 Ways to Help the Planet  To supplement my 8 Weeks to a Greener Planet, I thought I’d share 50 easy ways to greening.  Chock full of common sense ideas, 50 Ways to Help the Planet is easy on the eyes, provides options that are easy on the expended effort to *greenify* your life. 5 ideas I grabbed:

1. Don’t pre-heat your oven
2. Turn off your computer at night
3. Go vegetarian once a week (no, this isn’t suggesting that you *eat* a vegetarian!)
4. Banning bathtime in favour of showers (i’m already working on this one with the chickadees)
5. Buy second hand - I’m going to publish a list of neat second hand places that you might not be aware of in the region in the coming days.

So - go easy - go green!

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Tags: Environment, Planet, Green

Pizza Pizza vs Pizza Hut: Head to Head

About 7 months ago, I wrote about being plagued with bad pizza, and bad pizza on-line order tools.I've got an update: Pizza Hut now has a reasonable on-line order tool. Well, perhaps I'm being too kind - but atleast NOW they've got an online order tool. The first time I ordered, I utterly screwed up, and ended up with 2 extra large, cheese only pizzas. :-) The entire household looked at me as if it was my first day on the internets ;-)I'm still blocked by Pizzaville, so they are still out of my bookmarks. But now I've got options for dinner :-)

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Tags: PizzaHut, Pizzaville, PizzaPizza

Plug In Cars: Just in Time

With gas prices hovering at $1.20/litre, it's a little tingly to read about what automakers are finally doing with cars, technology and the environment.  Today's Globe and Mail has a neat announcement about California pushing the industry into the 21st century - a la plug-in cars.It's a bold move - California mandating the minimum number of hybrid, or plugin cars that manufacturers have to have sold - starting 2012.By then, gas will be at $2.50/litre ... and we will be looking for some sort of respite in travel.

This week, auto parts maker Magna joined the race to build a plug-in hybrid and said it plans to have a prototype on the road next year or in 2010.

globeandmail.com: globeauto.com California jump-starts the plug-in race

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Tags: California, Plugin Cars, Hybrids