September 2011
3 posts
Splitting the bill with my awesome sister
Sister: Bro, I'll pay half
Me: Oh ya?
Sister: But all I have are quarters...
Me: I hope you have a helluva lot of quarters
Do you really need Instapaper or ReadItLater?
Given my lack of current full time employment I am in the privileged position to actually read the bazillions of articles I regularly add to my ReadItLater list but seldom get a chance to peruse.
I don’t have an Instapaper account and always viewed the act of getting it as a nuisance as I already have a ReadItLater account. Additionally, I hate the lack of control Google puts on its Chrome...
August 2011
16 posts
The ongoing death of the pageview metric.
Long, long ago when the Internet was still just a jumble of local area networks (LANs) emerging as the WWW and static websites were being turned out by hand including tags like <blink> people started thinking about site “traffic.”
Presto - we had “hits.” A hit was every request made to a server, one for the page, one for each image on the page, one for any linked...
The benefits of a boss with a digital personal...
As I continue my journey looking for the next place to imbue with my awesomeness I ponder my last job role. Combine that with a rocking conversation on portfolios and such with the epic @kellyshaw and you’ve got me thinking about just how I should decide who I want to work with.
In my last role I proved not only my ‘value added’ to my bosses/owners in terms of tangible produced...
Eagleson's Law
Any code of your own that you haven’t looked at for six or more months, might as well have been written by someone else.
2 tags
Setting your server time. →
“Inner city residents are different from subarbanites eh? I think they think they...”
– My dad driving in the core :)
Organizational ambassadors need to be agents of...
Corporate golf tournaments are my new favourite thing.
Today, I got to go to my first ever corporate golf tournament and let’s just say I’m a pretty big fan. I’ve never done Oil & Gas, heck I have not even done corporate really. So, the fact that everything was “taken care of” was quite a treat. Not only did I get to golf a prestigious course for free, I got to...
“sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2011.03/bin/gem”
– 4 Hours of frustration fixing rubygems!
Healthy Donuts
Sister: I didn't have any junkfood today.
Me: You had a donut!
Sister: Ya but it had strawberries in it
Me: what?! Does that make it healthy?
Sister: Ya
Me: Noooooo, not 'ya' there is no such thing as a healthy donut
Sister: It's healthy because it has real strawberries in it, not strawberry jam.
Me: If you put a banana on a Snickers is it junk food?
Sister: Ya
Me: *hysterical laughter*
Sister: It had white icing and chocolate icing on top of it.
Me: Please go away.
Entrepreneur or small business owner?
Just because you start your own business - does that make you an entrepreneur?
I recently saw a talk given by an “entrepreneur” and it brought me back to a thought I had quite some time ago. His whole career took a fairly straightforward trajectory in one field and then all of a sudden he decided to start his own company. It’s a very successful company and he is very good at...
“We cry out loud when there is hope someone will hear us.”
– Gonna keep this one in mind as I become an uncle
4 tags
Who is more #twitterhip? Calgary vs. Edmonton
For a personal project I am trying to track down some social media numbers by city and thought I would look at Calgary and Edmonton to begin with.
I stumbled on this site originally - http://wefollow.com/twitter that I thought might be beneficial in terms of looking at what who had the most followers in each city:
http://wefollow.com/twitter/edmonton/followers
...
3 tags
Lightwindows - not so hot right now.
Was just looking up a professional I recently met, using the ole Google machine. While perusing the results I decided to open up the main site URL and one a bit below that was clearly the bio for that person.
First, I checked out the site and while not totally terrible it isn’t totally great either but for a big word of mouth company I get it, they probably just wanted SOMETHING up to...
15 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent →
nevver:
1. Zhaghzhagh (Persian) The chattering of teeth from the cold or from rage. 2. Yuputka (Ulwa) A word made for walking in the woods at night, it’s the phantom sensation of something crawling on your skin. 3. Lampadato (Italian) Addicted to the infra-red glow of tanning salons? This word describes you. 4. Luftmensch (Yiddish) The Yiddish have scores of words to describe social...
2 tags
The transitive power of respect - rethinking...
Just finished reading Rory Stewart’s excellent book The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq and was surprised to read the Acknowledgements section.
The first person Stewart acknowledges is the director of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University - our very own beleaguered Liberal from Etobicoke-Lakeshore - Michael Ignatieff for his...
July 2011
12 posts
3 tags
Don't forward me an email thread and leave me...
Digital communication is already rife with misunderstanding as a result of people being in a rush, not understanding how to structure questions or action items and failure to consider how language can affect tone.
That is frustrating enough - but then you get those emails that are a huge thread of other emails, a conversation between other parties, which is sent to you like a riddle.
No hints,...
WatchJohnnie Walker: One helluva story.
3 tags
Thought Experiment: What if you were born with a...
A wee bit random I know but this thought popped into my head a couple days ago as I was making endless trips around my condo, forgetting one thing in my bedroom and then to the kitchen then office and back and forth and on and on.
I thought, what would happen if you were born with (or granted) only a certain amount of steps in your lifetime? How would that impact things? The impetus for this...
“They say…”
– I love how these two words can be used to reference virtually any single or combination of sources the you are conferring authority to to validate what you are about to say.
Friendship.
Me: Thanks for sharing.
Friend: Thanks for caring.
5 tags
WatchBon Iver is simply brilliant. No manufactured sound here, just genuine artistic talent.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”
– Mike Tyson
4 tags
June 2011
5 posts
Miss Guided: The Oxford Comma and My Inheritance →
jodistyner:
My parents are not rich, which means they can be sure we really love them and we’re not just putting in face time to ensure we get a big, juicy inheritance at the end of it all (and it will be the end of it all, because I really love my parents).
Anyway, the fact that I will not be collecting mad…
One social network to rule them all.
Today I tweeted that I was hoping the new Google +1 social media directive would fail. Why? Because as much as I despise Facebook’s handling of privacy and general contempt for their users (not mention the ridiculous over valuations floating around) it is unacceptable to me, for Google to take over that power.
While Google in many ways is a far better steward of our information than...
4 tags
#BanffCompassAHA + @BethanyAWall = Amazing.
Bethany has tweeted so many (SO MANY) great tidbits from the conference I just had to get them for myself to guide and inspire me in future work. I’ve pulled all her tweets from the first two days of the conference and edited out any Twittercentric lingo to make more complete thoughts.
(Reverse chronological order just like Twitter, read from bottom up.)
Apologies to the great many people...
May 2011
5 posts
Cognitive load: tap typing vs conventional writing
With the explosion of touch screen devices and the emergence of the cloud many of us are slowly doing away with conventional notetaking. But can you still “listen” if you are tap typing?
At a recent talk I attended I tried both ways and found that tap typing left me lost when I came back to what was being discussed whereas writing left me (somewhat) connected. I feel largely...
Git command page
Used it twice this week, and so will probably never need it again. Useful.
mawaldne:
I always forget these commands. Here they are for posterity:
Global setup:
Download and install Git
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email email@email.com
Next steps:
mkdir testing
cd testing
git init
touch README
git add README
git commit -m 'first...
The Difference: 50 Words that Make Us Count
On Wednesday night I had the pleasure of attending a book launch put on by the Calgary Drop-In Centre. Michelle Langfeldt, the wonderful woman behind FromWithinYYC a part of the global Inside Out Project based on the JR’s wish as the 2011 TED Prize Winner, had let me know it was going a couple weeks ago, without which I would have been completely ignorant to the whole thing. For that I...
Digital spring cleaning - are you deleting your...
So, you’re out on the web, you’re being a part of the conversation, you’re engaging your “fans” and making a name for yourself, but what are you doing to keep the message clean, to get rid of the noise?
I have been fortunate enough to travel to a lot of countries and meet a ton of great people, my Facebook account could be 500, 600, 700 but it isn’t -...
3 tags
StartupWeekendYYC - Sleep avoided, lessons...
Disclaimer
Before you dive into this not-so-short summary of my weekend at StartupWeekendYYC understand that in parts I am critical of certain elements, even people from the weekend. This is not be negative but it is there to serve as an alternative to all the fanboying that tended to go on throughout the weekend. I can appreciate positive spirt as much as anyone, especially its ability to...
April 2011
20 posts
Do people even realize how fast computers are?
I split my time between a newish Macbook Pro laptop and a pretty loaded PC tower and yet I still experience endless frustration when the computer has to “think.”
Dammit computer why are you so slow?!?!… and then every once in a while I think back to Computer Science 321 - Introduction to Logic Circuit Design and realize just how ridiculous I am being.
This was a course where...
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us...”
– Ira Glass (via nefffy)
“I am starting to find it really interesting while at the same time very...”
– My colleague on her recent interest in business and new media
4 tags
Why Tumblr Won't Dethrone Twitter
I recently joined the LinkedIn Digital Marketing group (an auspicious if not ambitious group name spanning all of LinkedIn) and saw a posting for this blog article on Why will Tumblr dethrone Twitter and Why should you start “Tumbling” by Linus Xavier.
I think Linus made good some good comments about both platforms but missed the point entirely. Twitter is essentially RSS (Really Simple...
“Debt is the slavery of the free.”
– Publilius Syrus, 1st Century BC
“I think that if life separates us, and we end up in totally different places,...”
– Wong Fu, Strangers Again (via)
4 tags
Don't get into bed with crazy people it could ruin...
Friday morning was such a great time at Social Media Breakast #17 at Melrose! I hadn’t been to one in several months but was attracted by the fact that Michelle Berg @elevatedhr would be speaking who is seemingly as close as you get to an HR rockstar. I was coming from another event so arrived just in time to catch all the action but didn’t get any of the, by all accounts, great...
“It could all change tomorrow.”
5 tags
Carinvasion by The Birdshit Architects (Jan Gehl)
Sounds like a pretty awesome band and record right? Well they are separate terms recently acquired while attending Jan Gehl’s great talk at the Calgary Central Public Library on Tuesday evening.
Jan is a witty, not to mention world renowned architect/consultant, speaker who has visited Calgary several times before although it has been 10 years since he has spoke as a guest of CAUSA. He...