Timmy B's Blog

A New Father's Mother's day Poem

2010-05-10T19:42:00.003-04:00

Watching my wife with our first son start from zero,

I'm starting to understand, every mom is a hero

Babies show up with a bang and a boom and some groans,

yet mother's embrace birth with grace … and weird hormones

Once a baby shows up, it needs constant attention,

which Mothers take on with a little apprehension

They're scared that they won't get it all right,

but push on anyways, usually late into the night.

They lose the ability to think about anything other than breastfeeding,

forget about TV, baking, exercise or garden weeding.

And then there's those crazy baby bodily functions.

I watch on and think "Is there a malfunction"?

Pee and poop and puke and drool,

all over those *little* clothes that are so cute and so cool

I stop to think, "was I ever this way?

Helpless and crying and in need of a toupee?"

But Mothers see so much more than the trouble!

They see love, giggles, toys and soap bubbles!

Moms' love comes from some crazy endless love pit

So thank you, I love you! (oops, let's clean up some spit)

One thing I almost missed, my Mom's a Mom too,

that's two Moms to deal with, oh no, what to do!

So I wrote this poem, 'twas late by one day,

My solution: TWO mothers days, they deserve 182.5 times that anyway!

Will the iPad sell more Blackberries?

2010-01-29T22:00:00.007-05:00

If you get an iPad, then the iPhone isn't the right phone for you.

The reason is, the iPhone is great at what it does, but it is crippled in a lot of ways (compared to a Blackberry). Which phone you choose is basically about which priorities are more important. Many reviewers when comparing the two say the solution is simple: Get both (Boy Genius, Crackberry).

Of course that's not a good solution for the rest of us, so that's where the iPad comes in. Allow me to explain.

I own a Macbook and a Blackberry. I use both for work extensively. Having a Mac as my computer, I've been thinking... "maybe I should trade in for an iPhone". Why would I want to do this? Two main reasons: 1) Seamless Integration with my Mac for iTunes and iMovie and 2) the App store.

Reason 1 is more of a convenience issue that I can work around. For example, my Blackbery records video in 3GP which isn't compatible with iMovie, so I have to convert it first. Also, I have to sync my music through the Mac Blackberry desktop instead of iTunes, which is just another step in the process. Not problems I can't work around, so not a reason alone to switch to the iPhone.

The App store on the other hand, may be worth the price of admission. Now, all of the biggie apps you can find on both the Blackberry and the iPhone (Google Maps, Yellow pages, audio streaming apps, Twitter Apps, Shazam, Weather, etc...). Blackberry even has a few biggies that iPhone doesn't have, like a dedicated gMail app, Latitude, and Google voice (for Americans, not available in Canada yet).

But where the iPhone really shines is in the "App for everything" category, and the fact that any software I have for my Mac seems to have a corresponding app for the iPhone. Fox example, I use the todo manager "Things" all the time - which only has an iPhone app. Also, the apps are way slicker on the iPhone in general (There are about a half dozen GPS running programs for BB, but they all look like MS DOS programs). I would hardly define Blackberry apps as graceful or fun to use. Also, forget about finding any games that are actually fun to play on the Blackberry. Oh, and the browser is lame.

But what holds me back from an iPhone is two issues: 1) It's slow at the core smartphone tasks and 2) Apple seems to intentionally cripple it. Let's dive in.

I'm a bit of a blackberry ninja and can whip through a pile of messages in no time, one handed, and can use the keyboard without looking at the keys. If you know your shortcut keys on the BB it is a really efficient machine. I played around with an iPhone for a bit and ran into the following issues:

Why does it beep in my ear all the time when on a call? What do you mean I can't customize that setting?
What do you mean I can't run Google latitude while I type an email, what's the point then?
What do you mean I have to open every email account, SMS account, phone log, instant messaging app separately to get my messages?
Why does it take me 10 seconds just to open the first email message?
Why can't I take a picture from the camera app, and send it to Facebook in one click?
When I pick up the iPhone, why does it only show me the last message that was received?
How can I tell that there is a message if it's sitting across the desk (i.e. where's the blinky light)
Where is the flash on the camera?
Why do I have to stop what I'm doing and pay so much attention to this thing just to make sure I hit the right keys?!

These are all basic smartphone features that the blackberry has had (And does well) for years. It seems sometimes like many iPhone users put up with it because they just don't know any better. When Apple does eventually release these features, every iPhone user will jump and shout for joy that their advanced phone gets the basic features that they should have had from day one. Last year's big features were (drum roll please) copy and paste, video recording, search and sort-of-push technology. Well, kill the fattened calf please, what a miracle. Colour me underwhelmed. Oh, and for Americans, you're stuck with crummy AT&T (In Canada you get the the iPhone on like 6 carriers now, so no issues here).

In comes the iPad, essentially a big iPhone. Why get one if you have an iPhone? Well... it's bigger. It's fun to surf the web on. OK reasons, but I don't think iPhone users are going to rush out to buy an iPad when their iPhone can do most of what an iPad does.

However, for the Blackberry user, the iPad offers the opportunity to have the best of BOTH worlds. You can use all of the cool apps available in the App store (and now the iBookstore as well) AND have the efficiency of a Blackberry.

Without the iPad, choosing between the iPhone and Blackberry is a toss-up depending on your priorities. If you had an iPad and had to choose one phone, I think that the choice between Blackberry and iPhone is easier ... choose the Blackberry.

Apple Magic Mouse Review

2009-10-30T22:18:00.008-04:00

When Apple announced it's new "Magic Mouse" this week, a new mouse with a trackpad on the surface of it, I was quick to order one. It arrived this evening and I've had about half an hour to play around with it.

First impressions are, "cool looking mouse". It's very slick indeed, aerodynamic even (as if that were relevant for a mouse). It is a bluetooth device, and synced up easily with my Mac, although I had to download a driver and restart before I could use the advanced features.

Two major negatives on the "second impression":

Even at the fasted speed setting, this mouse is sloooow. I couldn't make it from one end of my screen to the other without lifting it up. If you are going to buy this, installing this mouse speed increaser is a must.
Despite it's aesthetic appeal, it's definitely form before function. It's really small, made for a small girly hand. There is no way you can rest your hand on this like you would with a regular mouse.

Problem number 2 is fairly typical with Mac hardware, so I'll let that slide. But issue 1 has a huge impact on usability, and I don't understand why Apple would let that issue make it out the gate.

The surface of the mouse is touch sensitive, kind of like a track pad. You can swipe up and down, left or right, like you would on an iPhone to scroll on a webpage. This is definitely it's coolest feature, as it even includes momentum in the scrolling (again, like the iphone).

Also, you can move forward or back in a browser or in iPhoto with a two-finger swipe, which is also handy.

One problem with this though is that if your fingers are at all sticky, the swipe motion is very unnatural and doesn't work very well. I found a few times where my fingers gut stuck while trying to swipe, then I accidentally clicked the mouse and opened something I didn't want to open.

I couldn't help but feel like Apple didn't make the most of the touchpad though. It would be nice if there was a multitouch method to activate expose, spaces or the dashboard. Also, I would like to see a way to zoom into a picture or rotate it built into the mouse.

This mouse had the opportunity to be a revolutionary input device, but I think in it's current form it falls far short. I would recommend this mouse as a "laptop bag" mouse for it's slim wireless form factor rather than an everyday mouse (although I am going to try and give it every day use and see if I can get used to it.)

It is worth saying that this mouse is far and away better than the old "Mighty Mouse", which had trackball problems, travelled too slow and has useless squeeze buttons that made it impossible to pick the mouse of the table while dragging something (a problem amplified by the slow travel speed).

For the next iteration of the magic mouse, what I'm hoping for is a mouse that is ergonomically shaped (i.e. about 3 times the size), a slipperier track pad surface, a few more gestures, and a method to activate expose from the mouse. Hopefully Apple will do this eventually, but I'm not holding my breath.

Picketpockets take a flying elbow to the ribcage!

2009-03-19T11:18:00.002-04:00

I am in Togo West Africa for the second time, (last time was for about 6 months in 2004), and I had never encountered anybody with intentions of stealing from me or hurting me. All that changed today as we were walking through the Grande Marche in the capital city of Lome.

My wife was following behind me as we walked peacefully. I jostled through a slighly busier section when suddenly BAM, my wife throws her elbow into this guy's chest and starts yelling at him. She saw him reach into my pocket and before he could pull anything out she intercepted him.

My wife the superhero. Since the name "Wonder-Woman" is already taken, I'm now going to refer to her as "Great-Girl".

Apparently what happens in the market is a group of guys will swarm you so that you are crowded on all sides, and while you are distracted one of them will pick your pocket. (but not with Great-Girl on the lookout .... KA-POW)

When slow is better than fast

2009-03-16T09:22:00.002-04:00

We just came off a whirlwind tour of Ghana. We visited Accra, Cape Coast, Elmina, and Kumasi. We did all of that in just under a week, covering probably 1000 to 1500 km of ground. Now, that might not be too much in Canada, but in Ghana many of the roads are soooo bad that you are only moving about 20 km per hour.

I don't think I would recommend that, as the appeal of Africa is less about it's sights, and more about it's culture.

Since we arrived in Togo a few days ago, we have been taking it very slow and soaking it all in, which is a much better way to go. It takes time to get to know the people. So, that is when slow is better than fast.

On the other hand, internet connections are painfully slow. Add that to the fact the keyboards here in Togo use a different layout (AZERTY vs QWERTY), and typing out a simple blog post becomes quite a painfull affair. This itty bitty post you are reading just took me 30 minutes to write... meanwhile I think my lunch isn't agreeing with me so I gotta jet!

Africa: Things I remembered, things I forgot

2009-03-10T16:27:00.003-04:00

A few years ago I spent 6 months volunteering in Togo. I had a girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife. I've made her suffer through hearing many of my stories many times, so now I've brought her back to experience it all with me!

As soon as we arrived, it all seemed eerily familiar, the sights, the sounds, the places and the people. I've fallen quickly back into negotiating for price, finding my way around what is truly a massive maze of a transit network with taxis and Tro-Tros, eating foufou & and reducing my sense of self-preservation while adapting to the bonkers driving techniques of taxi drivers.

One thing that I had forgotten that quickly came back was the smells. Things generally smell quite different here, not bad (usually), just different. The dirt and trees and water and buildings all just have a bit of a distinct scent that I had completely forgotten.

We picked up a cell phone for roughly $40, and then put on $8 is phone credit to use for texting, which should do fine for us for must of the trip. (BTW: Feel free to text us at 233-2400-46347). What a great deal... and this is in Africa of all places. And all I have to do to check my unused credit is text *241# and it immediately tells me my remaining balance! Rogers... you've got some learning to do.

PS: One of our relatives that will remain unnamed sent us the following txt: "Love you too smo glad you are vddejl wel5 6 ok igive vp". Glad to see somebody try to break away from their comfort zone just to get a hold of us, that's true love :)

Don't clean your lint tray

2009-02-13T11:06:00.004-05:00

I used to be an apartment dweller, and there was a sign at the dryers in the basement that said

"Empty the lint tray when load is done!!!"

Seems like the courteous and fair thing to do, empty out the lint you made. (The triple exclamation marks emphasized just how important an issue this was ... made me feel like there was a cop watching me when I did the laundry)

The problem is, not everybody does it. When a courteous person arrives at a dryer where the lint HASN'T been emptied, then they have to empty it twice, once for the guy before them, and once for themselves.

The only people this system words for is the guys who don't empty their own lint tray. That doesn't seem very fair to me.

We should all come together and agree that NOBODY empties their own lint tray, just empty it when you arrive. That way, everybody only has to empty the lint tray once.

The guys who don't empty the lint tray only have themselves to blame when they get lint-filled laundry.

Who's with me?

Also applies to:

Milk bags
Toilet seats in a men only environment, such as a dorm.

Definitely does NOT apply to:

Dishes
Golf turf divets
Garbage on tables in fast food restaurants

Al Gore's desk is messier (more messy?) than mine

2009-02-11T13:39:00.000-05:00

I stumbled across this photo of Al Gore on his blog.

And here i thought my desk was a mess ... I've got nothing on Al Gore. A lot of trees have been killed in those reports on his desk ... all for the greater good I'm sure.

At least he looks like he's working hard to save the plantet...

New Mac User - Day 398 - The "dock" just isn't doing it for me

2009-02-11T09:33:00.005-05:00

Last year I posted a "new Mac User - Day 1" entry on my blog with my first impressions. Well, it's been 398 days since then, and I know a bit more about the mac now and figured it was time for a follow up.

I suppose it's more like, one year later now...

Topic: The Mac "Dock"
It's the one thing that right away, when windows users look at, they say "what the heck is that?".

It's Mac's equivalent to Windows taskbar, and it works a bit differently. The Mac universe seems to love this thing ... I don't really understand why.

First, the good:

I really like that when I want to open up a certain app (say, firefox or iphoto), the button that opens it, whether it's open or not, is always in the same spot. Very handy (whereas in windows, apps resort themselves on the taskbar whenever they get opened.)

Now, the bad:

The doc takes up way to much screen real estate, especially on modern widescreens. It may have made sense with the traditional screen aspect ratio, but it doesn't on my little macbook pro screen (even worse on a macbook). GAH.
Windows can only be resized by clicking the bottom right hand corner of them... but sometimes large windows get stuck BEHIND the dock and I cant get at the re-size button without accidentally opening another application. ARGH.
Minimizing windows to the doc is pointless because unlike the windows taskbar, you can't clearly see what the minimized application is, it's too small. BLECK
As a result, I don't ever minimize these days, I just let my desktop get all cluttered up and find my apps with expose (which, is super handy BTW)
The dock get's really confused when the same app has multiple windows associated with it. My biggest pet peeve is with firefox. Lets say you downloaded something at somepoint in the day, and you have minimized your firefox window. Later on in the day, click on firefox on the dock and it opens up your list of downloaded files, with firefox itself nowhere to be found. I click like mad on the firefox button, and nothing pops up but this silly download list (until I close the download list). YAR.

I get the feeling that the "dock" is there on the Mac simply because it is "different", not because it's particularly functional. I have moved my dock to the right side of my screen instead of the bottom to get it out of the way, which makes it a bit less obtrusive (but makes minimized windows even more impossible to figure out).

Paris Hilton ruined my planet

2009-02-10T10:30:00.003-05:00

Imagine how hard it would be to stick to a budget in a store with no prices. Well, that's pretty much how we buy electricity today.

from the Official Google Blog: Power to the people

Apparently Google is going to work towards making the information from power "Smart Meters" (Not installed in MY home yet) easily available. So you waste less money. So you pollute less. So you save the planet!

For example, lets say somehow I get sucked into watching "Paris Hilton's Best Friend Forever" reality TV show. Google could help me understand that not only did I completely botch 1/2 an hour of my precious life, but I spent $32.6 cents in energy that I could have used to buy organic carrots instead of plunging our planet further into a carbon death spiral.

Groovy. Now if only Google could tell me how much I'm spending on my cell phone bill before it shows up on my doorstep...

Free cable TV legally

2009-02-07T17:25:00.004-05:00

I have only had cable periodically since I started university. Two degrees and two jobs later, I still don't have cable. I don't really miss it as most of what's on TV is complete trash, but there are a few shows that I really enjoy and like to keep up on, usually of the drama/sci-fi type.:

Battlestar Galactica (dumb name, great show)
Lost (Has a great "mythology" and some of the best fiction writing ever)
Heroes (about to fall off my list... it was pretty bad last season)

I was hooked on 24 for a bit after getting the DVD box set in my hand, but it turned into the same horrible plot-find terrorist-accuse-the-wrong-person-get-tortured-torture-somebody else-save-the-day lather rinse repeat cycle a few time each season, so that show fell off my radar.

The thing I like the least about cable is having to schedule your life around it, or sitting down and watching something totally dumb that you never meant to watch and losing your whole evening.

... and... after spending a lot of time watching seasons of shows on DVD, it's REALLY hard to go back to getting interrupted with commercials.

PVRs help with that, but the thing I don't like about those is... paying for them.

Fortunately the internet is here to help out. Get yourself a good super-high speed internet connection and you can actually get some really good FREE TV these days. (The Americans have got it better than us Canucks, but we can still usually find the shows we want).

All the shows I like are available online, and in pretty good quality too. They can be found here:

It's completely free, legal, and no hassle. The only downside is that you have to watch a few commercials, but the commercials breaks are only 30 seconds long instead of 2 minutes.

I hook my computer up to my TV and sound system so I can watch it from my couch instead of crouched around my computer.

Zero gravity would make me happy

2008-12-04T17:16:00.004-05:00

Remember when you were a child, and all you wanted to be was an astronaut so you could go into space and flow?

Well, Rick Mercer reminds us exactly why we had that childhood fantasy. Rick does a zero gravity flight, and by the look on his face it looks like the most fun thing ever.

Seriously, have you ever seen ANY grown man look like he is having as much fun as this guy?

I'm so jealous.

Welcome to Winter

2008-10-21T17:40:00.002-04:00

I've got some winter pictures here that I took not last year, but about 10 minutes ago.

It's October 21st for Pete's sake, not even Halloween yet! It's been years since I've seen snow stick before Christmas.

I guess that's what I get for moving to Barrie :)

iPhone-ish Blackberry revealed prematuraly ... in a bad way

2008-09-10T08:25:00.007-04:00

Arguably the most anticipated phone after the iPhone is the Blackberry version of a full screen phone. Do a Google search on "Blackberry Thunder" and you'll see rumours back to April or so.

Today the first ever Blackberry Thunder video was leaked on youtube, showing how it works. It is indeed very "iPhone-ish". Some guy with a really annoying voice has a turtle neck pulled up around his face to conceal his identity (poorly). Skip directly to minute 2:55 to see the Blackberry Thunder portion of the video.

Normally, this kind of pre-exposure can actually fuel the hunger for this type of device as it circulates wildly around the internet.

However, this problem is, the introducation of this phone comes not with excitement and praise, but with the words: "I don't like it".

Ouch, RIM has to find some way to counter this bad PR and fast. The intro to the iPhone was like a shock and awe campaign, while RIM gets "I don't like it".

Listen up RIM, your phone may not be ready yet, but you've got to hold a press conference on this thing pronto with a bit of fanfare before the words "I don't like it" become the primary marketing slogan for your phone!

I found a Facebook security hole... sort of

2008-09-08T10:00:00.003-04:00

I think I just stumbled upon a fairly big security hole in Facebook.

The other day I mysteriously started receiving these really bizarre text messages on my phone along the lines of the following:

Facebook msg from Jimmy-Joe Bobkins
(Espanola High School)
Subj: hey

"yo homeslice
tried calling you
maybe your out with the boy :D
haha"

"Wierd" I thought. I chalked it up to some dude in Mexico trying to send out mass txt messages to see who would reply so he could scam them. I ignored it.

The next day the messages continued with content like:

"sooo anyways preetty bored , wondering what you were up to, anywayss call
me, lover"
"Umm not that i no of"
"Umm perhaps"
"Lmao"
"sorry"
"Haha no"

Clearly there was some sort of conversation going on there that I was not a part of... but somehow was landing on my phone. What the heck was going on?

I looked up Espanola high school and lo and behold, it wasn't in Mexico at all but rather in a nearby little town. Why would a mass txt message spammer/phisher be based out of Espanola?

Then it hit me, I moved recently and had signed up for a new phone number. I must be getting these facebook messages from whomever had this phone number before me!

Then I realized that if somebody got MY old cell phone number, they would be receiving MY facebook messages!

I quickly logged onto facebook, and changed my profile to update my cell phone number for forwarding txt messages. That should stop somebody else from getting my txt messages. I think it will also stop me from getting these mystery text messages, because I could no longer get the second half of messages when I replied with 'n' to get the remainder of truncated messages.

So, if you use facebook and you change cell numbers, lookout, somebody might be reading your mail!

Cool "who won the olympics" widget

2008-08-26T08:51:00.005-04:00

Thanks to "morejamesmore" who pointed out this medal counter after reading my last post. It will calculate medals won per million people, and medals won per trillion GDP.

The results seem to come up a bit different than mine, so I don't know what's up with that, but it's pretty cool.

Olympic medals per capita

2008-08-24T16:11:00.005-04:00

We've all seen the Summer Olympic 2008 medal count, with China and the United states and Russia dominating the top spots, and everybody else way behind.

Canada sits at either 19th or 14th place, depending on if you think the rank is by the number of medals, or the number of gold medals.

Well, this doesn't seem exactly fair to me, as the US has 10x the population of Canada, and China has nearly 20% of the world's population!

So, I decided to waste a significant portion of my afternoon to determine who won when we consider the population of the country. So, I looked up all the medal rankings and the population of all the countries, and used "medals per 100M people" as my metric.

If you're a sucker for detail, the full results can be found here, but I will try to summarize them.

The results are as follows (Out of 87 Countries that won at least 1 medal):

1. Bahamas - 604 medals per 100M people
2. Iceland - 331
3. Slovenia - 248
4. New Zealand - 218
5 Norway - 216
6. Australia - 215
7. Cuba - 210
8. Armenia - 199
9. Belarus - 195
10. Estonia - 151

35. Canada - 54
36. Russia - 50
45. USA - 45
68. China - 7.5
87. India - 0.3 (Out of 87 countries that won a medal)

So, for Canada there is some good news/bad news here. Overall, we actually rank WORSE on a per capita basis, but we did beat the top three countries of USA, China and Russia, so that's kind of nice.

But wait a minute here, the Bahamas, Iceland and Slovenia won the olympics?! Bahamas and Iceland have populations of just over 300,000, but won 2 and 1 medals respectively. These small populations kind of throw the statistics off a bit.

So, lets say to "qualify" to be in the top ranking group, you have to win at least 5 medals.

The ranking then change slightly (Out of 41 countries that won at least 5 medals):
1. Slovenia - 248
2. New Zealand - 218
3 Norway - 216
4. Australia - 215
5. Cuba - 210
6. Armenia - 199
7. Belarus - 195
8. Georgia - 129
9. Denmark - 128
10. Croatia - 111

25. Canada - 54
26. Russia - 50
31. USA - 45
39. China - 7.5

A few interesting things to note:

I thought Canada might do better on a per-capita basis, we actually do worse. In the end we are somewhere in the top third.
China is almost dead last on a per capita basis.
Georgia, which is currently in a state of quasi-war, managed to still be one of the best performing countries.
Slovenia is a tiny country of just over 2M people that managed to pull off 5 medals. Kudos.
Of the top 20 countires, all but Australia (21M), Cuba (11M) and Belarus (9M) have a population under 5.5M.
Cuba beat the USA. That's funny to me.

After going through this, it got me thinking, what other insteresting ways might there be to determine who "won" the olympics?

Break the countries into divisions based on population. (I.e. "heavyweight" division would include China, India, USA, Russia, etc..., "Middle weight" would include Canada, Netherlands, Malaysia, Australia, etc... "Lightweight" would include Iceland, Slovenia, Bahamas, etc...)
Who won on a medal-per-GDP basis?
What's the per capita ranking of the G8
To account for the amount of "summerness" that each country has , what is the per capita ranking when grouped by distance from the equator?

Mac + Vista + Parallels + Bootcamp + Virtual Machine ... Just don't do it

2008-01-29T20:42:00.001-05:00

I'm in week 2 or 3 of my new "Mac" life now, and definitely appreciating some of the finer points of owning a Mac.

However, I do need some windows apps on a fairly regular basis, so I decided to load Windows on as well. There are a few options available to those who want to run windows on a Mac:

Use Max "Leopard's" built in "Boot-camp" feature that lets you boot into Windows. This feature is fairly solid, as it gives you a reliable version of windows that uses the full power of your Mac's hardware. The obvious downfall is that you don't have access to your Mac applications unless you reboot into the Mac OS. ALSO, you can't install Windows XP if it's only service pack 1. Bummer, because that's what I had a disk for.
Use a program like parallels or fusion to create a "virtual PC" and run windows. While running your Mac. This is great because you can run everything at once. The downside is that your computer takes a bit of a performance hit, particularly since you have to "allocate" a certain portion of your RAM and video ram to the windows partition. So if you're running Vista, unless you have at least 2 GB of RAM, you're going to feel the pain. You can also run ANY version of windows, even windows 95 or DOS if you feel particularly nostalgic. Also, unlike boot-camp, you don't have to repartition a portion of your hard drive and allocate it to windows.
Parallels has a feature where you can use Boot-camp AND a virtual machine, so that you can run a version of windows while running your mac, OR if you want to go full speed, then you can ALSO run the same image of windows in Boot-camp. Presumably, this would give you the best of both worlds.

I was ambitious and opted for running boot-camp & a virtual machine, with Vista. I thought it would be great.

I was wrong.

The reality is, you lose a lot of the benefits of a virtual machine when you do it off of a boot-camp image, such as being able to "pause" the VM, take "snapshots" of the VM (easy backup), being able to "hard reboot" windows and sharing the same files on the desktop and "My documents folders".

So, when Vista would crash or freeze or slow down or run out of video memory (which would be fairly frequently), it would bring the Mac down with it, and I could reboot my mac. ARG! All the benefits of windows, but all it's problems too! This is accentuated by the fact that VISTA is a memory hog, so to try and get it to run better, you have to give it more RAM, which in turn makes your Mac run slower.

Another problem is that if Windows crashes in VM mode, then you can't reboot it in boot-camp mode, and vice versa. You have to reboot it in the mode that it crashed, then turn it off again and reboot to go into the mode you wanted.

My final solution: I'm going to keep running vista, because it's kind of nifty and apparently it's the "future", but only in boot camp mode. If I come across any processor hungry apps (games maybe?) that require windows, then I'll boot into Boot-camp Vista.

I will run my copy of windows XP in VM mode only. It's less of a memory hog so I shouldn't see too much of a hit on my system performance, and I'll be able to run all of my windows apps while in my Mac.

My biggest problem with this solution is that I'm going to have to install all my applications twice. This will be a problem for any apps that have single computer validated license keys (such as business versions of MS Office).

I'll let you know how it goes.

An interesting note: I started installing XP when I started writing this article, and it just finished now. That took about a quarter of the time it normally takes to install XP on a PC!

New Mac User: Day 1

2008-01-10T19:09:00.001-05:00

After a year of internal debate, I finally jumped ship to a Mac yesterday. I ended up with a Macbook. After my first day, here are a former PC-er's first impressions:

The Good

An amoeba could set up a wireless network connection
It's shiny
Mac's way of selecting from all your open windows (expose) is WAY better than Vista's fancy but useless cascading windows feature
Really easy to set up my bluetooth devices
Configuring the system is fun and straightforward (there's no "Apply" button)
Built in apps are much much much better than their built in windows equivalents (mail vs. outlook express, itunes vs. media player, imovie vs. movie maker, iphoto vs. windows file system, dashboard vs. MS widgits, spotight vs. buried search)
Macs extra apps are nifty (garageband & photobooth are fun, calendar can import web calendars, time machine is much more than a "backup" program)
Surprise surprise, MS Messenger IS available on the Mac

The Bad

The keyboard isn't quite responsive enough
Macbook pro get's REALLY hot
Right clicking doesn't work until you change your system preferences
You can only resize your windows with the bottom right-hand corner of the window
Safari browser... Why bother when there's Firefox?

The Confusing

File menus show up at the top of the screen, not the app. I couldn't figure out how to find the settings on any of my apps for the first two hours of ownership.
What's with the "squiggly key"?
File system looks like my iPod... weird.
.dmg files vs. .exe files and "Mounting" programs as devices instead of installing them
My regularly used shortcut and navigation keys are all different

As "easy" as the mac is purported to be... it definitely takes some getting used to for someone born and bred with a PC, but it is fun. It's kind of like learning to ride a bike again. I'm sure I'll have it figured out soon.

Is New York the natural "disaster-movie" site?

2008-01-03T22:45:00.000-05:00

I just finished watching "I am Legend", a movie which features the total destruction of New York (and borrows heavily from 28 days later, castaway & Signs) and realized that I've seen a lot of "destroy New York" scenes in the movies and TV.

You might think that in a post-911 world, the annihilation of New York would be off-limits, but not so. The practice of destroying New York was fairly fashionable pre-911 and today it seems even more popular.

I believe that there are a few reasons for this:

Landmarks include times square, the empire state building and the statue of liberty, what other city can match that? (Maybe London and Paris...)
The city is really a symbol of man's power in the world, thus it's destruction represents man's weakness
Emotional resonance: you either live there, or have at least one relative/friend who does
The arch-rival of Los Angeles (i.e. Hollywood)... is New York.

Here's a list of "New York Destruction" flicks I could come up with, am I missing any?

Pre 911

Deep Impact [Asteroid]
The Siege [Terrorism]
Independence Day [Alien Invasion]
AI - Artificial Intelligence [Global Warming]
Planet of the Apes [Smart Apes]

Post 911

The day after tomorrow [Global Warming]
An inconvenient Truth [Global Warming]
Heroes, Season 1 [Nuclear Explosion]
Heroes, Season 2 [Deadly Virus]
I am Legend [Deadly Virus]
Cloverfield [destruction method unknown] (not yet released)
United 93 & World Trade Center [Terrorism]
War of the Worlds [Alien Invasion] (Well... it's in New Jersey, but that's just across the river)

Honorable mentions for partial destruction:

Godzilla, King Kong, Gangs of New York, Armageddon, Ghostbusters I & II

Forbes.com completely misses the point about what killed the "CD Market"

2007-12-30T21:37:00.000-05:00

I stumbled upon a completely nonsensical article in Forbes.com, a supposedly reputable business analysis site/magazine that shows just how ignorant business-people can be sometimes:

The iPod [ has ...] a proven record of disruption, with customers bypassing record stores to tap into illegal distribution networks, along with Apple's iTunes music store, to fill the up their devices.
The result: Sales of CDs fell more than 30% to 614.9 million units last year from a peak of 881.9 million in 2000, according to the Recording Industry Association.

It should be obvious to anybody that there are many root causes to the demise of the CD industry, but the iPod is not one of them, it simply did the best job of capitalizing on the opportunity. The real causes are:

The ability to store music in MP3's, a small (reasonably) high fidelity format that could be downloaded in a few minutes over the internet.
Napster, the first truly successful peer-to-peer music sharing network
The fact that the studios would release CD after CD with one good song, and 12 fillers, and charge $18 for the privilege

With these root causes, even without the iPod, CD sales would have fallen dramatically. Forbes is blind not to see this.

To place the demise in the hands of the iPod gives Apple far too much credit.

Forbes goes on to say that shortly Apple will do the same thing to movie rentals that they did to CD sales, and kill blockbuster. However, there are a few key differences:

Unlike music, movies take a long time to download, and take up a lot of hard drive space
Watching movies at home is moving towards High definition, and even when compressed, the files are huge. Lower video quality movies (the kind that look fine on an iPod) will be of less appeal to many consumers who own an HDTV
"Bandwith caps" on internet connections though the major internet providers are becoming pervasive, which may actually make it more expensive to download than to rent if you go over your cap.

Forbes goes on to claim that:

[The rental stores'] days might be numbered: The iPod has killed before. It will kill again.

I just have a hard time believing that this will be the case.

Is the paragraph dead?

2007-12-29T10:32:00.001-05:00

This morning I was doing my regular online news circuit, and reading a printed magazine copy of "Canadian Business", when I noticed an interesting difference for the first time: Online news & blogs don't use periods to end sentences any more, they use paragraph breaks.

I opened up an article about the Bhutto assassination, and found that 24 out of 34 paragraphs had only once sentence, the remaining paragraphs had two.

Meanwhile, my Canadian Business magazine had 3 - 5 sentences per paragraph, with no spacing between them.

3 - 5 would be in line with what I was taught in grade school about writing, however that was pre-internet.

I suspect that the reasoning for doing one sentence per paragraph is that it makes it easer to read in narrow 600 pixel columns, and you don't have to worry about extra paper costs like you would in print.

There are a number of other ways that writing style "rules" have been changed by the internet since I was in grade school:

Referencing authors is no longer required, simply provide a hyperlink
There's no such thing as a word count, use as many or as few words as it takes to get an idea across. When I started reading blogs, my mind had to get around the idea a 100 word blurb might be just as valuable as the 600 word one-pager in a typical magazine article.
Feel free to completely omit any background details on the topic you are discussing, even if it is very recent news. If your reader wants to know more, the answers are just a Google search away.

I find it interesting that by modifying the media (from print to screen), that the rules of grammar and writing style get modified as well.

$85,000 phone bill? Shame on you Bell...

2007-12-13T08:47:00.000-05:00

Sometimes the cell phone industry is just too easy to slam, as is the case with Bell recently charging a customer $85,000 for their cell bill. As reported in the Globe & Mail:

When their son called Bell Mobility, however, he received more bad news. The bill had since climbed to $85,000 because the company was charging him on a per-kilobyte basis.

In what Bell Mobility calls a “goodwill” gesture, it offered to reduce the charges to match the best data plan available for using cellphones as a modem, according to Bell spokesman Mark Langton. He said the outstanding bill now totals $3,243.

This is of course, absurd. What makes it extra-odd is that these types of stories about cell companies seem to come out with a certain amount of regularity, and makes the telecoms like Bell look very very bad.

All it would take to prevent a PR nightmare like this would be to send a daily text message to customers giving minutes used, data used, and current running total for the month.

But of course, they won't do this, because they love making as much $$$ as they can by tricking their customers into spending more than they know they are spending.

UPDATE: Even the American news over at news.com is picking up on this story. Global humiliation for Bell, they did it to themselves.

Competition for the Canadian Cell phone... finally

2007-11-28T21:54:00.001-05:00

Next year Canada will hold an auction for 105 MHz of the wireless spectrum, and 40 MHz of it will be reserved for "new entrants", opening the floodgates of competition.

All I can say is... it's about time.

In addition to this, regulators will force existing networks to share their towers, allow roaming at commercial rates, and other consumer-friendly bonuses.

This blogger has ranted against the Canadian cell-phone establishment on a few occasions. What is interesting to see, is how this auction compares to the upcoming US spectrum bid.

In the US auction, Google is offering to bid on the spectrum simply because they want to open it up to competition (because the more people that use data on cell phones, the more mobile search services it can offer). As a condition to bid, Google tried to push the US government to adopt a number of consumer-friendly regulations for the auction.

The government decided to adopt... "a few" of the measures.

Meanwhile in Canada, the regulators a diving in head first, pushing rules that are way beyond even what Google was trying to push the US to do.

Of course, the environment in Canada is different in the US. While competition in the US among Telecoms is scarce, competition in Canada is non-existent.

With only 3 oligopolistic bedfellows (Rogers, Bell, Telus), consumers are paying the price. The regulators had to do something.

And indeed they have done something. Let the war for consumer loyalty based on service value instead of penalties begin!

Stéphane Dion slashes children... according to the Globe & Mail

2007-11-09T14:45:00.000-05:00

I fell off my chair laughing when I saw a headline in the Globe and Mail today:

Liberal Leader says his government would slash the number of children living below the poverty line over five years.

Read it the wrong way and it sounds REALLY messed up.

Why is Stephene Dion slashing children? Why pick on just the poor ones? And why is he going to do it for 5 years!?

What a big mean-ee.

Rogers, Bell, Telus snub Canadians... again.

2007-11-06T07:53:00.000-05:00

Yesterday Google announced that they are releasing an open source operating system (sort of) for mobile handsets, called "Android". They are partnering with over 50 handset makers and service providers across the Globe. The system will be open source, making it easy for developers to work with.

The objective of the project is to make the cell phone internet market more "open", kind of like the way it doesn't matter whether you use a Compaq or a Mac to view the web. Currently service providers in North America are HIGHLY restrictive of what they let cell phone users put on their devices. They also try to control all of the data content (ex. Rogers provides music streaming to your and nobody else if you own a Rogers phone. If done right, this could be very good for consumers.

Not surprisingly, all the Canadian Cell phone providers turned down this partnership opportunity with Google. In Canada we still don't have the iPhone, and once again the Canadian Telcos are demonstrating their monopolistic anti-consumer practices by turning down Google's Android.

Fall photos on the map

2007-11-05T20:05:00.000-05:00

I FINALLY got out and did a fall photo shoot last weekend. I use Picassa 2 to do most of my web editing, mainly because it's quick and easy.

I was playing around with the "Web Albums" part of Picassa, and found a really neat new feature, you can post your photos on a map! So, I tried it with my fall shots, take a look here. This would be a great way to keep track of vacation photos.

Tipping point for Apple?

2007-10-28T18:25:00.000-04:00

Back in June I predicted that this back-to-school season would be a phenomenal one for the iMac, signaling a change from small niche player to the beginning of something much bigger. This week my prediction proved true, as iMac sales grew at a rate (30%) twice as fast as the industry. Half of those sales were to first time iMac owners.

Tim Cook, Apple's Chief Operating Officer stated to the press that:

Students helped account for the surge in Mac shipments, during a quarter that Cook called "the most successful back-to-school season we've ever had."

As of Friday, Apple's new operating system (Leopard) was released. I think that as of this week, Apple's little iMac has reached a "Tipping Point" in the PC industry.

In the business world, the term "Tipping Point" is used to refer to point at which a product reaches a certain level of popularity, and conditions are just right, that what were previously gradual sales begin to take off.

And the conditions are right for Apple, Consider the following:

Windows Vista owners have played with their new computers, and are either underwhelmed or wildly dissatisfied with the upgrade. They are telling their friends.
Mac OS Leopard just came out, users will love it (I just played with it for an hour at the Mac store). They will tell their friends.
With the advent of browser based applications (Web 2.0), the web browser is becoming more relevant that Windows, making switching easier.
You can run your Windows applications on a Mac.
Brand awareness is at an all time high, thanks to the iPod.
As of this week, we are no longer waiting for Apple to release products (the iPhone and Leopard have arrived).
Microsoft is distracted with the Google threat instead of focusing on it's core business, software.
In the hit show 24, the bad guys use PCs, the good guys use iMacs.

If I were a betting man, I would venture to say that by this time next year, the iMac will realize a growth rate 5x higher than that of the computer industry.

There are only two things left that are holding them back:

Price - Still really high compared to a PC
Distribution - It's hard to find an Apple store (In Canada), and the big box stores hide iMacs in the back, keeping the PCs prominently on display

Rogers is trying too hard to be cool

2007-10-28T12:26:00.000-04:00

I just received the following text message on my Rogers cell phone:

Rogers msg: What's ur opinion? Tell us w/ Txt Ur 2Cents & dwnld content 4chance 2win a laptop & more! Reply WIN b4 Nov28 4info. 2opt out of mktg msgs reply STOP

Wow, what a load of drivel. Rogers is trying to "be cool" by using SMS shorthand, which is used generally by teenagers as a way to quickly send out messages on a cell phone that doesn't have a full keyboard. It is very cumbersome and time consuming to send out a full message on a cell phone.

The Rogers marketing department on the other hand, has all the time in the world to write out a proper message. It probably not even sent from a cell phone.

I can see in my mind, a bunch of Rogers' "suits" sitting around a table saying "hey, if we use SMS shorthand, maybe the kids will think we're cool, and then they'll pay us more money!"

Rogers, you are over-compensating for something (could be your high prices, terrible customer service, locked phones, etc...), and it definitely makes you more "uncool".

WORLD TO TELCOS: The way to be a "cool" company in today's age isn't through cheesy marketing hype... it's by listening and responding to your customers needs (a la Apple & Google)

Online newspapers missing the point

2007-10-27T12:34:00.001-04:00

Have you ever noticed that newspapers that publish their newsprint content online don't publish links in their articles? Take a look at any article in the Globe and Mail and you will see that they refer to reports and facts, but NEVER provide a link to the source (except in their special web-only blog section).

Huh? Haven't we had 15 years to figure out that links are the backbone of the web?

Compare this to a news site that doesn't have a print version such as News.com or even most parts of MSN which will always have an external link to another web page when referring to other reports or statistics. Blogs are usually the best at referring to source material. To the reader, these are the sites that have the most value, because being able to check up on an author helps keep them honest, and the reader can expand their knowledge if they so desire.

Some websites such as CNN or IGN take a different approach, they include links but only to other articles within their site. They never refer to external sites. This removes value from the site, which acts as though it is the ultimate authority and knows all.

No one site on the web will EVER be the ultimate resource for everything, news sites should embrace that and start linking.

Anti-Piracy Expectations

2007-10-17T15:49:00.000-04:00

This week Google finally announced some new anti-copyright measures for their video-sharing website, Youtube. In a nutshell, the technology creates a "fingerprint" video clips uploaded by the content owners to Youtube, and then compares them against any new clips uploaded.

The major problem with this approach is that it puts quite a burden on content owners. HOWEVER, it is the most advanced tool available for video protection. Content protection online is difficult, because there are simply so many ways to break the rules. As such, we should expect that content protection mechanisms will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary (i.e., we can't solve this problem all at once).

What's interesting is some of the silly criticisms have been arising about this issue.

Boehm National Legal and Policy Center Chairman (U.S) Ken Boehm made one of the silliest comments I've read...

"We think it's too little, too late [...] Google is the most technologically advanced search engine company in the world and in all this interim time when they could have set filters of some sort in place, they chose nothing rather than something that may be not perfect."

Lets break this arguement down:

Too little too late...: But then he criticizes Google for doing what would have been even less, but earlier ("some sort of filter"). It's also the most anybody has done to protect content.
Google is most technologicall advanced... : Yes they are, AND they now have the most advanced piracy technology technology. Boehm then uses this as a foundation to critisize Google for using techniques that are NOT advanced (... set filters of "some sort" in place). Huh?
Chose nothing rather than something that may not be perfect.: Actually, they did choose something, they willingly took down content that copyright holders deemed infringing... and it wasn't perfect.

Seriously Mr.Boehm... there are indeed problems with Googles approach, but a little bit of intellectual honesty would be nice, your arguments aren't consistent.

I think a good idea might be to allow copyright holders to flag videos online that violate copyright, then Google would fingerprint those videos and use them for filtering. In this case, the copyright holder wouldn't need to upload nearly as much content, making the process much less onerous.

Don't believe the beavers

2007-10-14T10:29:00.000-04:00

Frank and Gordon, those mildly amusing yet irritating Bell Canada mascots would have you believe they are a fun and consumer oriented company. I recently tried to sign up for Bell home phone and internet, and wow, do they ever have poor customer service.

I spent over a MONTH trying to get subscribe to internet with them, and ran into the following problems:

I had scheduled SIX appointments with their service reps before they showed up.
Their service reps were scheduled to come "sometime between 9am - 5pm", and couldn't be any more accurate. I waited all day for them at home on a few occasions.
You can't call them after 7:00pm on weekdays, or at all on weekends.
Their customer service lines are in India, and they are not allowed to do anything helpful. I had a problem with my phone not ringing. When they tried to fix it, they asked me to call my line to test it. But I was on my second phone line with them already. When I asked them why they didn't call me, they told me they (a TELECOM company!) weren't allowed to make outgoing calls.
After spending 5 "business" days to set up a phone line, then it takes another 5 "business" days to set up internet (for a total of 2 weeks). That's if nothing goes wrong. If something does go wrong, you're looking at a month for internet.
They are more expensive than everybody else.
I couldn't pick up a DSL modem at a Bell store, I had to get it mailed to me
My DSL Modem didn't arrive on the day it was scheduled to arrive

Eventually I switched everything over to Rogers, because it was such a hassle. Interestingly enough, my DSL modem arrived AFTER I switched to Rogers. Go figure.

So, I've come to the conclusion that Bell Canada is pretty much the worst run company in this country, and I have no intention of EVER purchasing ANY service from them again. I throw popcorn at the screen whenever those stupid beavers show up on the commercials.

Somebody, please make them stop defaming our national animal.

UPDATE (Oct 15 2007): We were supposed to finally get internet set up with Rogers today. It didn't work though, because Bell STOLE the phone account without our authorization and switched us back to them. They actually did this a day after they called us trying to get us to switch back to Bell. Someone please... make the incompetence stop!

UPDATE (Nov 6 2007): I finally am set up with Rogers as my internet provider, but Bell slapped me with $120 bill for service they never provided properly since September... and I was SUPPOSED to have over $300 in credits. I told them I'm not paying, now I'm being "investigated".

How to make millions with the perfect movie

2007-08-20T23:07:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking about the business of making movies, and I've come up with the perfect movie... well... at least a movie that will make lots of $$$. I'll take all the things that are really popular right now, and put them together in one movie! It will be called:

Captain Prehistoric Penguin Man - Part Second

Captain: Because every kid will be dressed like captain Jack Sparrow on Halloween
Prehistoric: Dinosaurs are always cool
Penguin: The ladies dig penguins these days. This will give the pirate loving boyfriends an excuse to bring their "I love small cute animals" girlfriends to the cinema.
Man: Every super hero under the sun is getting a movie right now. Even if the movie is really bad (I'm looking at you Electra and Ghost Rider), all super hero movies still manage to make a decent amount of money due to what industry calls the "fan-boy built-in audience".
Part Second: Sequels are cash cows, so I'm just going to skip the first movie and go right to the sequel. Furthermore, its called "Part Second" instead of "2" because that helps differentiate it from all the other sequels (in the spirit of "Hotshots part deux", "Shrek the 3rd" and "X2").

It will star Matt Daemon who will have a secret identity, memory loss, and he will beat the tar out of Tom Cruise. The love interest will be Julia Roberts, playing a woman who is strong-willed but eventually shows vulnerability by breaking down into silent, gross-looking tears.

It will also have either a Will Ferrel or Christopher Walken Cameo.

I'll think about the script later, it's not really important. The black suits at Fox Searchlight pictures are going to be eating out of my hand when I pitch this to them. How could I possibly go wrong with such a perfect formula?

Use case this!

2007-08-20T22:34:00.000-04:00

Can engineers realistically be expected to think of everything that could go wrong with a system they design? Skype customers seem to think so. This week Skype went down for a few days, and on their company blog Skype offers the following interesting explanation:

The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.

So, essentially, everybody logged on to Skype at the same time after Microsoft made them reboot, and took the entire Skype network down with it. Interesting. This seems like a rather obscure chain of events that would cause a system outage, can Skype Engineers be forgiven for not thinking of it ahead of time?

One of the fundamental activities that any designer (be it software or any type of system) does is to perform "use cases". This basically involves putting a "user" of a system through a number of scenarios to test how they react to the system, and to test how the system holds up.

One of the first "use cases" I remember hearing in about Engineering class was the operation of a surgery laser where if you typed the operation codes in too fast, the safety mechanisms wouldn't engage and instead of targeting cancer cells in controlled bursts, it would fry you something fierce and cause a cancer way worse than what you started with. The argument is made that if the designers had spent sufficient time putting people through expected "use cases", the this would not have happened, thus the Engineers failed.

Could Skype have predicted this situation? They certainly couldn't have tested for it (how do you get 9 million people to log on simultaneously?). The jury is out on this one, but I'm willing to give the engineers some slack... mostly because the service is free, so who am I to complain?

(As a side note, much of the blog-o-sphere finds Skype's explanation too far-fetched to believe)

Rogers' 7 deadly sins of wireless

2007-06-20T22:06:00.000-04:00

I recently went through an upgrade process with Rogers, where they signed me on to a new 3 year contract in exchange for a few goodies. While they were very nice to me on the phone, let's get one thing straight, Rogers Wireless in NOT a consumer friendly company.

Lets just get this out there: all Canadian wireless carriers are bad. They do so many anti-consumer activities, it boggles the mind. Since I am a victim of Rogers Wireless, I will use them as my example of choice (but don't look so smug Bell, you've got many issues of your own)

Sin # 1: $35 "set-up" fee
Rogers tried to tell me that they would waive my so-called $35 set-up fee if I renewed with them over the phone, as though I should thank them for this. Since Rogers uses SIM cards, they literally have to do NOTHING when I start using a new phone. I could pop my SIM card into a new phone right now, and Rogers wouldn't know any different. So... what value am I getting exactly from this $35 set up fee? (And no Rogers, I am NOT going to thank you for waiving a fee you should not be charging me in the first place).

The reason they do it: Rogers slaps on the $35 activation fee to discourage you from activating with resellers like Wireless wave and The Source (i.e. little kiosks that you see all over the mall these days). They will miraculously decide to waive the fee if you register with Rogers, which Rogers like because then they don't have to pay the enormous "finders fee" to the kiosks. It's anti-competition, plain and simple.

Consumer friendly solution: No set-up fee

Sin # 2: Locking phones
If you buy a phone through Rogers, it only works with Rogers (unless you may some shady guy in the back of a discount computer store $50 to unlock your phone).

Why they do it: This doesn't even make any sense, because Rogers is the only country wide GSM carrier in Canada, so their phones couldn't work on Telus or Bell even if you wanted them too. So by locking their phones, all Rogers is doing is saying: "Don't move to another country and try to take your phone with you", which is kind of stupid really. One area where it is slightly justified is in the high end phones, where if you were to purchase the phone and then cancel it right away and pay the $200 cancellation penalty, you would actually still be paying less than the sticker price for the device, so this kind of practice is prevented.

Consumer Friendly Solution: Don't lock the phone.

Sin # 3: You have to be a fortune teller
We can buy a 100 minute plan, or a 200 minute plan, etc... and then when we go OVER, we have to pay at a higher rate, and when we go UNDER, we don't get our money back nor do the minutes carry over to the next month. I'm really not sure how they get away with this, because in any other industry, the more you buy, the less you pay per unit, period.

The reason they do it: They know you can't see the future, so they are trying to get you to buy as many minutes as possible, and then scare you into using as few as possible, widening their margins but making consumers angry. Furthermore, having a number of different confusing plans adds the illusion of "choice" to the industry.

Consumer friendly solution: Get rid of this whole "plan" nonsense entirely. Charge based exclusively on usage, where the price decreases the more you use. For example:

10 cents for the first 100 minutes
7 cents for the next 400 minutes
5 cents every minute thereafter

This is simple, understandable, consistent, and makes sense. If plans must continue to exist, make the unused minutes from one month transferable to the next.

Sin # 4: They keep your usage a secret
Rogers is pretty good at telling you at the end of the month how much you have to pay them, just like the utilities do. However, all of the information is kept digitally and accessible at a moments notice, but there is no way to find this information out. How close am I to my 100 minute limit? Have I used to much data? Stories about of people who find out that they used $300 worth of data but had no idea they were doing so. The technology is there to do it, but Rogers refuses.

The Reason they do it: If you use less then your allocated time, they make extra money on you. If you use more, you pay through the nose. Either way, unless you guess the exact amount of time you've used on your plan, you lose, Rogers wins.

Consumer friendly solution: Be able to look up your usage online at any time, and send an SMS message alert to the phone when it's on it's last 20 minutes of airtime for the month.

Sin # 5: Charging for voice-mail AND airtime
If I pay Rogers $5 a month to give me voicemail (they only allow 5 messages), then the only way to retrieve my messages is to call a specified number and spend more of my airtime minutes to check the message. They are double dipping, and completely ripping off the consumer in the process.

The Reason they do it: Oligopolistic greed. If there was real competition, this wouldn't happen.

Consumer friendly solution: Charge EITHER a fixed rate for voicemail, or offer voicemail for free and charge for airtime, don't do both.

Sin # 6: Per minute billing
Lets say the following conversation occurs:

Jim calls me: "I'm going to see Spiderman, wanna come, its at 7." "Sure, I'll see you at the theatre". Total call time: 38 seconds
Jim calls me again: "I made a mistake, it's at 6:30, better hurry". "Ok, I'm just finishing dinner but I'll be there." Total call time: 22 seconds.
I call Jim: "I'm going to be late, please pick up a ticket for me". "Sure, no prob man". Total call time: 15 seconds.

Now, the total conversation time was 1 minute and 15 seconds, but Rogers would charge you for 3 minutes. This adds up very fast if you are in the habit of making quick calls. Rogers needs to go back to school to learn to add.

The reason they do it: As if it wasn't difficult enough already to guess how many minutes you've used, it becomes even more difficult when the number of minutes you use is actually more than the amount of time you've talked on the phone! And the less know you know... the more Rogers makes off of you.

Consumer friendly solution: Per-second billing

Sin # 7: Crazy expensive Data Rates
Thomas Purves has posted an interesting chart showing how obscenely expensive our cell phone plans in Canada are, especially when it comes to data rates:

Rogers is 39 times more expensive than New Zealand... need I say more?

The reason the do it: Oligopolistic greed. If there was real competition, this couldn't happen.

Consumer Friendly Solution: Charge a data rate that somebody making under $200,000 a year can afford, then maybe people would start using data services.

Well... Rogers wireless actually has more than 7 sins, but it messes up my blog title if I make more... so I'm going to pretend that it's just seven...

Sin # 7 + 1: Crappy phones:
The good phones are in Asia/Europe, and don't arrive here until years later.

Why they do it: Unlike overseas, the carriers control the distribution channels and bundle phones with plans, taking away your choice. This allows them to wait until the prices for phones are cheaper (for Rogers, not for you). This also prevents you from getting all kind of nifty features that might prevent Rogers from stealing more of your money. An excellent example is Wi-Fi access. Why pay for internet service through the cell network, when you might have access to a free Wi-Fi network at work, home or a coffee shop? If you could do this, less $$$ for Rogers, even though phones like this are available overseas.

Consumer Friendly Solution: Allow phone companies to sell directly to consumers without going through Rogers.

Sound Off: What ticks you off about our lovely Canadian wireless carriers?

The September of iMac?

2007-06-19T22:11:00.000-04:00

Apple is now the epitome of cool, but we all know that they are still a small player in the computer market with something like 10% - 15% of the installed computer base. Call it a hunch, but I think that 2007 will be Apple's true breakout year, and that the tipping point will happen in September.

The reasons are simple:

The iPod is absurdly popular
The iPhone is absurdly cool (even though it can't reach even close to the popularity levels of the iPod because of it's $500 price tag), and it's coolness will rub off on the Mac brand as a whole
I (a person who, addicted to the flexibility of the PC, previously swore I would never get a mac, and actively poked fun at those who owned one) am actually thinking about getting a Mac, because I am just plain tired of my PC not working as it should, so I could infer that a lot of other people are thinking the same thing.
You can now run Windows applications on a Mac, so compatibility has become a non-issue.
September is when School starts.

I would be very curious to walk down a dorm hallway, and see how many new iMacs are in the student dorms, I would put my money on 40% - 60% of all new computers in the hallways being Macs... and if there is a major shift in the dorm rooms, it's only a matter of time before everybody else falls in line.

How to get a Blackberry Curve in Canada

2007-06-13T22:18:00.000-04:00

Do you want to get the sleek new Blackberry Curve, but you're Canadian so you can't find it? The curve so far is only available on GSM networks, and Rogers is the only GSM carrier. However, if you go looking for it on the Rogers website list of available blackberries, as of the day of this writing you will not be able to find it.

HOWEVER, that does not mean that they won't sell you one! If you go to the RIM homepage and visit their Blackberry Curve homepage and dig around a little bit, you will find a link that says "where to buy", and will then lead you to a list of providers. Lo and behold, Rogers is on the list! Click through and you will be brought to what seems like a secret page where you can buy the Blackberry Curve from Rogers.

Last Friday I was speaking with a Rogers rep over the phone, and he had never heard of the Curve. I found this quite surprising, as it is the hot new kid on the block. I directed him towards the RIM homepage, where he went and looked at the specs and proclaimed "Wow, that's a pretty neat device, I'm glad you showed me this sir". While looking at the page, I found the "where to buy" link, and proceeded to show the Rogers rep that I could indeed but the Curve from them. The whole process took about an hour, but my Shiny new Blackberry curve arrived in the mail today. Given that you can't even find it on the Rogers homepage, and the reps don't seem to even know it exists, I'm betting that I'm one of the first in Canada (other than RIM employees) to own one. Cool.

Will it blend?

2007-05-27T13:57:00.000-04:00

My wife recently posted a blog entry about a little "will it blend" adventure that we had (we mistook a screw for a blueberry and tried to make it into a smoothie). So, this little adventure got me visiting one of my favorite sites, www.willitblend.com, where they successfully blend everything from an iPod to a golf club.

They have recently topped themselves with "will it return" where they try to return a blended video camera. It's one of the finer pieces of home video I've seen in a long time.

Apparently Best Buy made them pull the video from the willitblend.com website. But of course, censorship or attempts to manage your corporate image too tightly only serve to make what your trying to hide even more popular in today's internet age, so here is the video a-la youtube.

Video Camera Part 1 - Will it blend?

Video Camera Part 2 - Will it return?

Top 7 Bad Songs ... and how they fell

2007-04-06T15:30:00.000-04:00

There are enduring bands whose music will last forever like the Beatles, U2, Rolling Stones, Nirvana etc... Then there are some bands that reach such an undeserved level of popularity so fast that when the listening public finally realized they've been duped, the music and band disappears forever.

These songs were incredibly popular, but will never be played on oldies stations 30 years from now. Their artists reached such heights, but then disappeared suddenly. Ask a DJ to play it today, and they'll look at you like you've been on a construction site without your hard-hat a few too many times. Here are my top seven:

7. Mmm Bop - Hansen
Kind of Jackson-5-ish, but as soon as one of these boppers hit puberty, it was game over.

6. The Bad Touch (Do it like the do it on Discovery Channel) - Bloodhound Gang
This song dominated the air waves for a very brief period of time with it's one line joke:

You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals
So let''s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel

Unfortunately, they repeat this refrain 8 times throughout the song, so if it was funny the first time you heard the line, the joke was old by the end of the song. If you heard the song 5 times, you've heard the joke 40 times and would probably just switch the radio station.

5. Jump - Kriss kross
These two kids inspired teenage boys everywhere to wear their jeans backwards...

...who gave up on the idea after trying to use a urinal.

4. If you want to be my lover - Spice Girls
I truly have yet to meet anybody who actually liked Spice Girls, and am convinced that some marketing company just tried to spend tons of money to get them on the radio in hopes of duping the listening public that they had good music.

Their career ended the moment the trailer came out for their "Spice World" movie.

3. Can't touch this - MC Hammer
I think I can put my finger on the moment MC Hammer lost all credibility... see video below

It's so bad it's good.

2. Ice Ice Baby - Vanilla Ice
I think I also found out when Vanilla Ice lost it...

So bad it's good.

1. Hanging Tough - NKOTB (New Kids on the Block)
Ever notice that the acronym for these guys has just as many syllables as the full name? (that is, unless you pronounce it N-KOT-B). Ever girl who was a teen or pre-teen can still name off all five of these guys.

As for when it was over for these gjuys, i'm noticing a pattern here. Note to self: if I ever become a rock star, don't sign a Saturday morning cartoon deal.

So bad... it's just bad.

What are your top "once great/really bad" songs?

Absurd Navigation

2007-03-13T16:04:00.000-04:00

You may or may not be aware that Microsoft has released a new version of Office (Office 2007) that dramatically alters the user interface. It is supposed to make it easier to find buried options.

I run MS Outlook 2003 at work, and although I haven't tried 2007 yet, the need for it smacked me in the face today when I tried to do something as simple as uninstall a simple little add-on. I had to go through SEVEN menus. The menu names were as follows:

Tools
-> Options
-> Other
-> General
-> Advanced Options
-> Add-ons

The really funny thing about this menu path is that NONE of the sub menu contain descriptive titles... options, other, general, advanced options!?! Who came up with this ridiculous scheme?

A note to software designers: You should never use a non-descriptive word such as "other" or "general" for a menu, because it just becomes a dumping ground for the many features you haven't thought about how to structure. It will always end in absurdity.

What "Google Level" are you?

2007-02-23T23:40:00.000-05:00

In case you haven't noticed, Google seems is gradually taking over the Internet. Therefore, if you're not with Google, you're falling behind the times. Also, the company has managed to garner an almost religious following and commitment to its products.

Many people think of Google as just search, but in reality they offer many many more services. I've noticed that people adopt certain sets of Google services in waves (i.e. you spend a few days "discovering" a certain set of Google's offerings).

People start by learning a certain "set" of products, then wait for a while, then eventually, they will learn another set of products. These products have a natural grouping, and there is a natural progression to learning and using them.

What "Google level" are you?

1. Seeker
You've just discovered the Internet. You are probably pretty old if these are the only features you know about.

Search, images

2. Dabbler
You have experimented and had fun with some of Google's most accessible offerings.

News, Maps, Earth, Finance, Scholar, Picassa

3. Disciple
As you use Google you have started discovering some very nifty, useful and fun features. It has started changing the way you work on the computer and on the Internet.

gMail, Blogger, Personalized home page, Desktop
Nifty search bar tricks
FireFox (not actually Google... but usually goes hand in hand with Google)

4. Committed
Google is at the center of all your online activities. Even if there are better services available for some things, you are likely to use the Google version anyways... because it's Google.

Calendar, Talk
Reader, Web Alerts, News Alerts
Page Creator, Groups,Notebook
Web Accelerator, Google extensions for Firefox

5. Monk
You and Google are one. You don't need a personal hard drive anymore, your entire life is online. You probably work on multiple computers and can reformat your computer on a whim.

Docs & Spreadsheets
Google Apps for your domain

6. Evangelist
You believe and promote Google, and try to make more Googlers. You actively participate and contribute to the Google community.

gBase, API programming, Google 3D, Code Search

Also of note...

Quirky
This category of tools doesn't really fall into the ordered list. You may use them anywhere along the continuum, but you may not be using these even at the highest levels of Google enlightenment.

Orkut, Music trends, Transit, SMS, Search by location

Tiffany's Falls, frozen photo album

2007-02-19T20:11:00.000-05:00

Did you know that Hamilton has over 70 waterfalls? I paid a visit to one of the this weekend (Tiffany's Falls) to take some frozen waterfall pictures. Click on the picture below to go to the full album.

Tiffany's Falls

Enjoy!

Death is killing stories

2007-02-18T20:57:00.000-05:00

Why is it that the big event in "stories" these days is "who's gonna die?". Somehow, we have become pre-occupied with who might die in today's stories, that the rest of the story takes a sidestep.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but normally in life we don't know ahead of time when somebody is going to die. So, why reveal these kind of things ahead of time (even if we don't know who) in books and on TV?

Let's take three examples and explore; Harry Potter, Lost and Heroes.

Author J.K. Rowling said two characters will die in the last installment of her boy wizard series, and she hinted Harry Potter might not survive, either. (CBS News)

The Potter books have become the absolute worst in making the entire story about who is going to die. In the last three books, Rowling revealed before-hand that key characters were going to die, then the discussion boards swirled trying to figure out who was going to die. Now, in the 7th and final chapter she reveals that two characters will die. My opinion of the previous book (Half-blood prince) is that it's sole purpose was to set up the death of one key character, which could have been accomplished in maybe 2 chapters, rendering the remainder of the book unnecessary.

The TV series Lost is also a big offender. Every time a so-called "major" character is killed off the TV stations run a major advertising campaign telling you ahead of time that "somebody will die". Then, it ends up being either a minor character or a character that was so annoying that you won't miss them anyway (I'm thinking of you Shannon).

This week, the show Heroes did the same thing. The preview at the end revealed that "somebody will die", so now I'm supposed wait in suspense all week trying to guess who is going to die.

I've heard talk radio pick up these stories as if they are big events, so I guess the publicity stunt works well.

Sorry, I'm not going to play along. I really wish that they could just go ahead and kill the character without telling me ahead of time. Often they end up killing a minor character and I think, "they were making a such a big deal that guy?", and end up a disappointed viewer.

Writers please, just go ahead and kill the character warning me ahead of time, and I will be a happier viewer/reader.

Viacom vs. YouTube , bold business move, I like it.

2007-02-09T11:48:00.000-05:00

Media companies have long hated the way that YouTube profits from their copyrighted material. However, for the past year all they have done is yelp and complain, and occasionally take down clips. This was self defeating of course, because these clips actually promoted and popularized a lot of shows.

Viacom is the first company to finally fight back with a real solution: Their are making their own youTube.

Viacom moves on without YouTube | CNET News.com: "The company recently began offering so-called embed code that allows fans of popular programs such as the The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to post clips to their MySpace.com pages or blogs. That embed code duplicates one of the more popular features of YouTube: the ability to easily post videos on other Web sites and blogs."

While the site cannot possible be as popular as YouTube, it is very forward thinking of Viacom. In the absence of a deal with YouTube, this is the best business decision you could make. Kudos to you.

YouTube is missing out on this opportunity. They have the chance to form strong partnerships with big media companies, by hosting copyrighted content and sharing ad revenues.

Unfortunately, both sides lose out on this scenario. Content would certainly be more valuable on YouTube than on the Comedy Central site, and YouTube doesn't get to share any revenue.

Music industry fires back at Apple

2007-02-08T15:15:00.000-05:00

Steve Jobs has asked the big media companies to remove the requirement for DRM (Digital Rights Management) licencing from music downloaded from iTunes and other online music stores. This is basically the technology that makes music purchased from iTunes only playable on iPods, limits the number of copies, limits the number of computers it can be played on, etc...

Jobs said eliminating such restrictions would open up the online music marketplace.

This is probably true. The interesting thing about downloading music legally online is that it is actually less valuable than pirated MP3s, because you can play MP3s anywhere, anytime. As such, it can reasonably be inferred that there are people who would be willing to purchase music from iTunes (myself included), but have no interest in owneingcrippled music. If there were no protection, more people may actually be willing to pay for the convenience that iTunes provides.

The Music industry struck back, declaring Apple's hypocrisy in that Apple is not willing to licence out it's technology to other media players or music devices. Fair enough. Steve Jobs would argue differently however:

globeandmail.com: Music industry fires back at Apple: "In his essay, Jobs said Apple is against licensing 'FairPlay' as an alternative method for making iTunes accessible to all portable players, because making the technology widely available would make it easier for hackers to figure out how to bypass it."

Come on Steve, you're a good guy and all, but this is not a valid argument. The argument breaks down in that hackers have already broken Fairplay, rendering your point moot. In fact, you don't even need to be a hacker to break it, all you have to do is burn iTunes music onto a CD and then rip it back onto your computer as an MP3. You lose a little bit of quality in the process, but few people really care.

Please Steve, don't treat your customers like idiots, all we ask is a little bit of intellectual integrity. The labels are right, play fair and licence out your DRM to others.

And to the music industry, Steve also has a good point about opening up the market. It is a fallicy (ad hominum) to say his argument is wrong simply because of Apple's hypocrisy. Get with it and get rid of DRM.

You're both right, and you're both wrong. Little children, shake hands, say your sorry and get on with it, or I'll send you to your rooms.

Finally, a good wiki summary

2007-02-07T12:59:00.000-05:00

For a week or two now, I have been trying to explore and understand "enterprise-wikis". It is quite easy to find high-level philisophical discussions about the importance of wiki adoption at the enterprise level, but it is HARD to find honest reviews about various wikis.

The reason this is frustrating is because I am trying to choose an enterprise wiki for deployment at my place of work. Heck, it's even challenging to find a list of different wikis and what they are good for.

Finally, I found a good article here. It is written from a non-geek perspective, and he gives an accurate summary of the key criteria is a good enterprise wiki:

is beautiful
is easy to use
integrates with our corporate authentication system
allows users to "email to a page"
has rock solid WYSIWYG editing (including tables!!)
can absorb Microsoft Word's messy HTML without barfing
has great management tools for pruning and gardening the wiki
allows for attachments of files
includes great threaded conversations on a page
is hosted but can also be used in an appliance inside the firewall
has granular user & group security privileges (ideally tied into Active Directory)

My list of criteria is pretty much exactly the same, and I thought that this criteria was pretty obvious and self explanatory. Lo and behold, when I started exploring different wikis (socialtext, confluence, PBWiki, stikipad, zoho), and found that that all fell short on many of these criteria. The biggest offence was usually against the "rock solid WYSIWYG" (not all WYSIWYG editors are created equal) and "great management tools for pruning and gardeing the wiki".

He argues that confluence is the best, and based on what I have observed I would tend to agree. However, even confluence still fails in the two key criteria I listed in the table above. Yes, it's got WYSIWYG, but it's table layout functionality is very inflexible, and until you've figured things out it's not intuitive where you are saving pages.

"Incent" is not a word

2007-02-01T13:22:00.000-05:00

While doing my MBA, there were many occasions on which I would be writing a report that included an element about how important it was to incent your employees properly. I was always confused when MS Word's spellchecker flagged the word, and was convinced that the dictionary was wrong because we used the word so often in class.

Today I learn that according to Paul Brians' book, "Common Errors in English Usage", the term "incent" is not a verb, or even a word for that matter.

Business folks sometimes use “incent” to mean “create an incentive,” but it’s not standard English. “Incentivize” is even more widely used, but strikes many people as an ugly substitute for “encourage.”

I suppose I should have known this. However, this brings up a philosophical question; if the word is "commonly" used and understood, then is it really an error at all?

iPhone lawsuit, don't believe a word

2007-01-31T22:05:00.000-05:00

Make no mistake about it, the iPhone from Apple is the quintessential in cool technology. This much is undisputed.

However, Apple has an interesting situation on their hands with a lawsuit coming from Cisco, who actually owns the trademark to the name "iPhone". Interestingly enough, Steve Jobs of Apple came right out and decided to call his phone the iPhone as well, despite not owning the trademark.

Gutsy Steve, gutsy.

However, I don't buy it. You can bet your bottom dollar that this is a marketing stunt.

Lets look at the facts:

Apple has been in "negotiations" with Cisco for a few years over the iPhone trademark.
Cisco released an "iPhone" only two months before the launch of Apple's iPhone, even though they have owned the trademark for many years.
Apparently, The companies left the negotiating table at 8 p.m. the night before the iPhone announcement, with only a few points left to negotiate.

Lets analyze this situation for a moment, what does each party have a stake here?

The iPhone trademark is not really worth much to Cisco as their iPhone is only a marginal side business. There are plenty of other "i____" products that are knock-offs of the iPod line, and Cisco's product will fall in that category of products in consumers' minds. Over the long term, the iPhone name means nothing to Cisco.
The iPhone would be nice to have for Apple, but Apple could call it the iPumpkinHead and still not lose any sales.

My skepticism arises from the fact that the current situation is not in favor of anybody, despite the parties having ample time to negotiate. Furthermore, Cisco's "explanation" of why negotiations broke down doesn't hold water:

Fundamentally we wanted an open approach. We hoped our products could interoperate in the future. In our view, the network provides the basis to make this happen—it provides the foundation of innovation that allows converged devices to deliver the services that consumers want. Our goal was to take that to the next level by facilitating collaboration with Apple. And we wanted to make sure to differentiate the brands in a way that could work for both companies and not confuse people, since our products combine both web access and voice telephony. That’s it. Openness and clarity. (Cisco Blog)

Apple is NOTORIOUS for being NOT open. They build their entire platform around a core philosophy of non-interoperability with their hardware/software mode operandi.

In other words, to ask Apple for interoperability in exchange for a silly name is just
absurd. It's not negotiating in good faith, and Cisco knows it.

Here's what I think actually happened. Cisco is trying to extort an absurd amount of money out of Apple for the iPhone name. Apple, knowing that the name is worth nothing to anybody but Apple, called Cisco's bluff. Then, Cisco realized that there is more to gain by riding on the Marketing coattails of Apple, and agreed to go into a drawn out, public war with Apple over the name.

This costs Apple nothing, and Cisco get the kind of advertising that money can't even buy.

I think they have already come to a deal. They will just publicly "pretend" to reach a settlement the day before the Apple iPhone release.

Am I cynical? Maybe... but this is the only scenario that makes any business sense, and at the end of the day it's still all business.

Movie Review : Army of Darkness

2005-01-21T23:59:00.000-05:00

Rating: Worth my while
Reason: Army of darkness is one of those movies with a small cult following. It is the third installment of the "Evil Dead" series, and was directed and written by Sam Raimi (Same director as Spiderman and Spiderman II). I have to say, I think that Army of Darkness is a great movie. Now, it is very campy, but it does campy so well. At the start, our hero "Ash" gets his hand replaced with a chainsaw, a la Freddy Kruger claw style. Who has a chainsaw for a hand!?

I chuckle to myself just thinking about it.

Furthermore, Ash has this wicked "don't mess with me, even if you're a demon possessed she-bat" aura about him. I can't think of another movie where the hero has so much attitude. He would pretty much spit in the face of the devil himself if he had the chance (You'll understand if you see the movie). Army of darkness won an Oscar for best special effects long ago, and boy, it must have been a long time ago. But, the "oldness" of the special effects kind of adds to the alure of the movie. Technically, I suppose it is a horror movie, but is screams "don't take me seriously" so loudly that you'll certainly being doing a lot more laughing than screaming. As such, "Army of Darkness" was worth my few hours and a bag of popcorn.

Alternate Rating: Made me dumber
Reason: If you can't handle extreme intentional cheesiness, then you're not going to like this movie. It's not cheesy in the same way as say, Batman & Robin (let us never speak of that movie again), but more so in an almost Monty Python type of way. As such, there will be a lot of people who won't get this one, and that's just fine. To each their own.

The merit of a cat

2005-01-19T22:50:00.000-05:00

Well, my girlfriend asked me to write about "the merit of a cat". So, here goes my best shot. Let it be known that I am not a "cat person". So, I don't have the same "appreciation" that some do. So here is the merit of a cat, from my perspective.

Cat's merit being not as fun as dogs. They're like... The high-maintenance teeny-boppers with ten mirrors in their room. Dogs on the other hand, are like the class clown, always ready to entertain.
Cat's merit being thrown off low roofs by young children. Sorry, it had to be said.
Cat's merit cleaning a house of mice.
Cat's merit being good source material for the "Puss'n'Boots" character in Shrek 2 (coughing up hairballs, licking themselves, "kitty kat eyes")
Cats merit being cool, as in "Cool Kat", but it has to begin with K, not C. I guess that makes "Kit Kat" bars cool by default. But it is kind of a self proclaimed coolness... I'm not sure if its "real coolness".
Cat's do merit making kind of a cool purring effect... when they decide to sneak into your room and sleep on your head.

There you have it, "the merit of a cat". Comments are welcome. :)

Movie rating system

2005-01-17T21:56:00.000-05:00

Rating systems for movies have long been a beef of mine. Do you use a four star system, five star system, ten point system, thumbs system, it's all over the map. And what does two stars mean anyways? The time for these ambiguous rating systems has come to an end, and so I propose a new, definitive rating system as follows.

Movies can be broken into 5 categories:

Spectacular
Worth my while
Passes the time
disappointing
Made me dumber

There are a few rules to reviewing a movie based on this system:

They are not numbered, but they are ordinal.
A movie cannot fall between categories.
When presenting an opinion along with a movie rating, one must also present one alternate rating, that describes why another person may rank it differently.

To illustrate, here is a sample movie review abstract for TROY

RATING: Disappointing
REASON: Troy, plain and simple, is an avenue for the female population to drool over Brad Pitt and his 2 second naked scene. Half of the movie is spent simply holding the camera on Brad's face with his hair blowing in the wind. Brad's character "Achilles" is not well developed, which ask to fact that this movie is simply all about this pretty boy's presence. In fact, despite the fact that the movie has two love stories (one of which is Helen of Troy, a love-story that brought down a kingdom), neither of the love stories are believable or compelling. The only thing that saves this movie is that the war story and execution is actually fairly well done. This movie does not simply build up to one final battle like most movies do, but rather plays out the events of a war over the entire course of the film, working the human elements into the battles nicely.

ALTERNATE RATING: Spectacular
REASON: Girls will go googily. Visit rotten tomatoes, and you will see that the masses are divided 50/50 on this issue. Interestingly enough, fresh tomatoes were usually given by female reviewers, and rotten ones by male reviewers.

Me, check out my African site.

2005-01-16T23:04:00.000-05:00

Hello there

This is my first post. My name is Tim. I have alot of interesting stuff about a trip to Togo West Africa that I took at www.berezny.com/tim/Togo. Check it out.