[Uploaded via flickr by Thomas Hawk]
With Microsoft’s stumbling with the lauch of Vista has come a litany of stories about the demise of Windows as the IT industries richest franchise. However it’s death, if evident, will be slow and painful and will be a result of lots of small cuts, not a wholesale shift to...
Copyright © 2008 Miss604 - Rebecca Bollwitt. If you are not viewing this post through the Miss604.com feed then this content has been republished without permission. Visit the original article at http://www.miss604.com/2008/09/interview-mania.html.Over the last few months I’ve found that my interviewer to interviewee ratio has balanced out. We’ve done fewer podcast interviews however I’ve ramped up the blogger profile series. Also, my TV and radio interviews have steadied (the most recent being Urban Rush in July) while print has almost skyrocketed (with two 24 Hours covers this summer).
With so many projects on the go, and so many people interested in what we do here’s a quick list of recent interviews and coverage since I’d love to promote those who...
I’m not sure how many people noticed, but Clive Thompson — one of my favourite technology and science writers — returned to blogging this week. Clive writes regularly for the New York Times magazine, and his most recent piece was an excellent look at Twitter and the phenomenon of “ambient awareness” that such social-media tools allow, and why that’s a good thing. Clive’s blog Collision Detection used to be a treasure trove of those kinds of observations, drawn from scientific journals and various news articles, and after seven months of absence (which he says he will explain later), he is back to blogging.
In analyzing and describing complicated things, Clive has a great way of humanizing things as well, often with just a simple turn of phrase....
McCain performs well with "workman" like speechAs John McCain took to the stage at the Xcel Energy Center in St Paul, Minnesota, he certainly had an uphill battle to fight.Barack Obama's speech at the Pepsi Centre in Denver, Colorado a week before had been masterful. The Republican faithful were counting on McCain to deliver a speech, if not quite the equal of Obama's, at least one fairly competitive.In his own way, McCain did precisely that. Although he didn't perform quite as spectacularly as many Republicans must have hoped for, he may have done even better in a way few would have expected.McCain had many questions to answer at this, the acceptance of his nomination for President. One way or another, he answered them all.McCain continued his perplexing strategy of moving closer to...
HM PM Prime Minister Stephen Harper has announced that we will be having an election October 14, 2008. I agree with HM PM it will be a tough election. The grits will throw as much mud and puffin feces as is humanly possible. The grits must be busy talking to their bankers. HM PM in his news conference pointed out the HM Government has been in power for more than 2 years and there is no hidden agenda. He says that the grits have an obvious tax and spend agenda. He spoke very well in English and in French. I expect a spirited campaign and at least a minority Conservative government. The grits already have their carbon tax first problem. I urge all of you to work for the candidates of your choice. These are exciting time. The MSM will try all they can to help the grits. We Tories must...
she finds some hope for dion, but lots of negatives. Dion's English is going to be a major problem. The carbon tax is not selling well. I look forward to watching HM PM Harper wipe up the floor with dion in the debates. The Liberal plan is too complex to be delivered succinctly. Time and again, the core message gets lost to technical jargon. That jargon is too dense to pack as much of a punch as the single-minded Conservative attacks on Dion’s carbon tax.Given that, the Green Shift is taking up too much space in the Liberal playbook, crowding out other themes that the party could score on. At a Winnipeg town hall on Tuesday night, more than half the questions dealt with matters other than the environment. The notion that the plan has an economic backbone does not really come...
“I won’t say goodbye! I’ll see you in 5 weeks!”
Thus our fearless leader drops us into our 40th election. I’ve invited Amy, the ASL speaking gorilla to comment on our next round of political postulation. Amy?
Amy good gorilla!
Banana now? No?
Mush face go tv tell us make circle work.
No talk about problems bad now.
Talk about himself. Circle work.
Mustache man make words.
Make good words until one stupid word. Destroy all good words before.
Funny Word Man makes funny words.
Amy scratch head. What? Wait for good words. Words come but work for words.
More of same.
Banana now? Amy good!
Thanks Amy! Stay tuned for 5 more weeks of Elections Canada updates as they happen!...
In
scratch,
political,
banana,
mustache,
Amy,
Elections Canada,
gorilla,
amy amy,
asl,
circle work,
fearless leader,
funny words,
postulation,
stupid word,
word man,
yarns
For years the U.S. Government run by Republicans like John McCain have spent far more than is sustainable, which is neither wise nor particularly conservative(much like our crowd of Rat Bastards) This Friday the FDIC ninjas closed down the Nevada Silver State Bank a small regional operation of 13 branches spread between Nevada and Arizona which will cost the FDIC about $.5 Billion to cover the insured accounts. Depositors in uninsured accounts will lose about $20 million with no compensation.Funny thing is John McCain's son Andrew K. McCain, sits on the board of this bank and its auditing committee. Personally this family penchant for fiscal mismanagement would concern me more than Palin's apparent success in making sure her daughter new nothing about birth control. (the poor girl...
It seems that these weekend posts are becoming a habit. This time around, we’ll announce the contest winners and then get into some money links from around the web.
Contest Winner
Earlier this week I reviewed the book Work The System. As we typically give away a free copy of the book reviewed, this time is no different! Out of the 93 entries, AndyBuck was randomly chosen as the lucky winner!
If you’re interested in these book giveaways, you can have our money updates delivered to your email inbox.
News and Links
The biggest money news in Canada this week was that the Bank of Canada has held interest rates steady. It’s pretty much what I expected but what surprised me was the “expectation” that they would drop rates even further.
Generation X Finance...
The Revealer: My Loveless World
Not long after I published The Family, my account of a network of elite evangelicals in government, military, and business, I received a surprising invitation: Marvin Olasky, about whom I’d written briefly in the book, wanted me to visit him at his Empire State Building office. Olasky, a Jewish convert [...]...
Andrea Mrozek is a Focus on the Family employee in Canada. FotF is a well known domionist religious right organization in the US. This organization is aggressively expanding it’s sales and political operations around the world.
She gets space in The National Post to beat a dead horse in The new face of feminism. Nothing new, [...]...
More photos of Brad Pitt and the cast and crew of Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading premiere at Toronto International Film Festival. Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton and Richard Jenkins are also seen sharing the stage with Joel and Ethan Coen....
Treeset via ongoing September 6th, 2008 at 10:00
Being a photo of the sun approaching the horizon with no clouds
to serve as a canvas for its setting rays. But there’s a little tree.
I went out to take pictures of the sunset and it just doesn’t work right
without clouds. Still, I got any number of ridiculously-dramatic shots of the
ripe prairie grasses in sideways light. I’ll run one or......
On Sunday, Prime Minister Harper will pay a visit to the Governor-General to ask her to dissolve Parliament and call for an election. From that moment on, the election campaign will be in full swing. You all know what this means: blogging will go through the roof. So far, we have all posted our personal thoughts and observations on the various parties and leaders – sometimes in a professional tone, at other times in less-than-professional language. Before I say what I am about to say, let me get just one thing out of the way (because afterwards I won't...
“I can’t find the quote but somewhere Graham Greene wrote approximately this: Americans have taken the noble idea that anyone could become president and contorted it into the alarming idea that anyone should become president.”
Body Check for a Hockey Mom, Globe and Mail, 6 September......
Shad - The Old Prince Still Lives At Home
London Ontario’s MC Shad is playing the Ale House on September......
Counter-branding effort beginsIn the 2005/06 federal election, many people hoped Jack Layton and the NDP would play softball with the Liberals, hardball with the Conservatives, and keep Stephen Harper out of office.Instead, the NDP focused their efforts on the Liberals, shrank the Liberal caucus returned to the House of Commons, and -- some say -- helped Stephen Harper get elected Prime Minister.Of course, Layton understood well what he was doing when he targeted the Liberal party -- he was attracting disaffected soft Liberals to support the NDP instead.Now, less than a day before the call of a 2008 federal election, the NDP has once again chosen to err on the side of the opposition, releasing a new attack ad against Stephen Harper and the Conservatives.Following a trip to the Democratic...
Liberal leader, and severely challenged, Stéphane Dion doesn't even know what car pooling is: OUT-OF-TOUCH DION DOESN'T EVEN KNOW WHAT A "CAR POOL" ISProfessor Dion proves the only environmental action he understands is higher taxes [...] During a visit to Saskatoon, Dion was asked about his opinion on the practice of car pooling. "What is a car pool?" he asked organizers, who enlightened him. "Oh that's good. I'm never alone in my car." Yes, there is a big difference between the Ivory Tower in Paris, France, and the real world here in...
They’ve released their first ad for the campaign that officially begins tomorrow and it hits PMS right between the eyes....
Canadian Blue Lemons has raised Conservatives' hackles yet again. This time he claims to know that the Conservatives will not win a majority. While this may be true, one of his arguments simply doesn't even hold a drop of lemon juice: I can show the math: that the CPC has to win 155 of 200 seats (assuming - correctly I think - that the party will not win a seat in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver nor the safe non-big-city Liberal, NDP & PQ seats). All the latest polls would indicate otherwise, especially in Québec, where the Tories could actually...
These are a few that made me smile and not hit the delete button :)
Sun Microsystem Startup Essentials
Alex sent me a note to let me know about Sun's very cool program for Canadian Startups:Sun Microsystems' new "startup essentials" program which offers its members 75% discounts on Servers, Storage, Web Hosting, workstations etc as well as free software and tech advice to all members. Sign up for the program is completely free, as long as you are a Canadian Startup. We have now signed up over 90 new Canadian companies, and all are very pleased with the program and the deep discounts it offers.
Read more about Sun's Startup Essentials!
Wi5Connect Debuts Social Learning 2.0 Strategy
Josh emailed me about Wi5Connect's LearnSocial product. He apologized for not having a...
I went to see one of the final performances of Evil Dead the Musical. It is a Toronto favourite based on a series of campy, low budget horror movies. I found the play very funny, raunchy and unbelievably campy. It was like a take off on every teenage slasher movie ever made. There were obviously many lines from the original movies, that many in the audience were waiting for. Many in the audience had seen the musical several times before. I was seated just outside the"splatter zone". Just in case I wore a plastic poncho, but took it off a little too soon. All in all , the show was bloody marvellous. I'm not at all surprised it is an audience favourite. The show closes this weekend, but I have no doubt will reopen in Toronto very soon. Here are some scenes from the musical.Here is a trailer...
I just got off the phone with a guy at Telus who told me that I’ve only had a phone with them for two days while I know the real time to be closer to five years.
I admit I am in a bit of an odd position because I changed the name on my account a month ago. Strangely enough, the Telus man readily admitted that I’d been a client since August 8th but refused to believe that I had a cell phone during that time. I tried to ask why I have any reason to pay my invoice for August if he thinks I haven’t been using any services, but he didn’t seem to get my point.
After spending much time trying to convince him there was a mistake on his end, my old phone record “just popped up” on his screen. Lucky for him. Maybe my threat of not paying really did work.
At about...
The Globe and Mail has set up a separate site for full coverage of the upcoming federal election. Here you will find all the latest polls (national and region by region) as well as an interesting blog that features a Liberal (Robert Silver) and a Conservative (Tim Powers). What is more, readers are invited to submit their own political cartoons. It goes without saying that the site comes with full Web 2.0 functionality, i.e., it is interactive and readers can post comments. Also see the special note from the editor, Edward...
Even if you don’t spend a lot of time on FriendFeed, it becomes apparent after not too long that Andrew Baron — the co-founder of Rocketboom, the pioneering video-blog starring Joanne Colan (and formerly starring Amanda Congdon) — has a real hate on for Jason Calacanis, the diminutive and self-aggrandizing founder of Mahalo and former founder of Weblogs Inc. The latest eruption was a post from Baron noting that Mahalo’s traffic seems to have flattened out, according to a graph that he included from Compete.
Baron says: “Can you imagine trying to pretend like your business is successful when it’s not, and then going on to give advice to other people about how you do it?” This isn’t the first time the Rocketboom founder has made such...
by Werner Patels I was brought up to appreciate the value of newspapers. Even as a little boy, I would be the first in my family to go through the morning newspapers. This is something that has stuck with me, and today I read three newspapers every day. For a lover and aficionado of newspaper like me, it is almost heart-breaking to read stories predicting the demise of newspapers. As much as I love the Internet and what it has done for us – this very site would not exist if it were not for the World Wide Web...
Foresight missing in Dion's Green Shift planYesterday, Liberal leader Stephane Dion kicked off his party's national campaign at the University of Alberta.His speech (which will be covered in detail here at The Nexus) was followed by a Q-and-A townhall-style meeting, in which he answered a variety of questions. Some questions -- obvious softballs -- were handled fairly effectively and predictably.Some weren't -- including a question asked about hypothetical post-Green Shift Canada, which envoked a rather perplexing non-answer:First, the question:"If your Green Shift plan is implimented, and is successful, inevitably what we're going to see is a decrease in the taxable greenhouse gas emissions. What I'm wondering is what would a Liberal government do to make up that lost revenue?"And the...
5 experts demystify SEO link building - iMediaConnection.com
Opinions on 6 different questions about link building from 5 experts. Nice tight discussion.
(tags: seo linkbuilding onedegree)...
I have only just learned of this inter-governmental body. I wonder if this mishmash of western states and provinces was factored in when McCain chose Palin as his VP running mate.
The Pacific NorthWest Economic Region (PNWER) is the only regional planning and facilitation organization set up in statute by the border states and provinces to deal with transboundary policy and planning in the Pacific Northwest.
Delegate Council:
Alaska
Governor Sarah Palin
Sen. Fred Dyson
Sen. Lesil McGuire
Rep. John Coghill
Rep. Bryce Edgmon
Alternates:
Sen. Charlie Huggins
Rep. Andrea Doll
Rep. Peggy Wilson
Alberta
Premier Ed Stelmach
Alana Delong, MLA
Kyle Fawcett, MLA
Hon. Mel Knight
Richard Marz, MLA
Len Mitzel, MLA
British Columbia
Premier Gordon Campbell
Harry Bains, MLA
Hon. Joan McIntyre
Hon. Mary...