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Catch up on Alex’s latest publications and appearances here.
Shambhala centre classes?
Some friends have recommended classes at the Shambhala Centre, which apparently offers both religious and secular versions of an intro to Buddhism program. Has anyone else taken them? What's the review?
MacBook with tag cloud
This week's tagging project: a MacBook cover that displays my del.icio.us tag cloud, thanks to the folks at Pimp My Laptop.
Here's how I did it:
- I used the del.icio.us tagroll feature to customize the look of my tag cloud and make sure it included all my tags ("size" controls how many tags display; max/min font controls the size of the individual tags).
- I hooked my laptop up to a huge external monitor so I could make the tagroll display big enough to create a screen capture that was high enough resolution to print out clearly.
- We took screen captures in chunks (Rob figured out the necessary size to display by working backwards from the Pimp My Laptop specs) so that they'd be even higher res.
- We stitched it back together in PhotoShop until we had an image of the size specified by Pimp My Laptop.
Ta da! I'm now wearing my tag cloud on my (laptop) sleeve.
ChangeEverything is TechCrunched
We're delighted that Change Everything has been noted on TechCrunch as "a nice alternative to the user generated advertising model".
Marshall Kirkpatrick writes:
I think this is a great example of a company making use of Web 2.0 tools to promote themselves in a way that places the ballance of the impact on providing value to users and incurs promotional benefits for themselves as a consequence of that. Though this model may seem less immediately lucrative, it’s also much less likely to face the kind of anti-corporate backlash bubbling up in MySpace and YouTube.
Marshall had a couple of tips for us, too:
Unlike at 43Things, there’s not the option at ChangeEverything to mark a goal as something you have done already or the question of whether a goal is worth persuing or not – perhaps leftists are too Quixotic for such features.
These are both options we hope to introduce on the site soon – so no, lefties aren't too Quixotic (in this respect, anyhow!)
Learning about warranties from London Drugs
London Drugs wins my customer service prize of the month for its speedy resolution of my camera dilemma. I heard right away from their warranty department. It turns out they were about as happy with VAC's warranty progam as I was: they've since brought their warranty...
Hola, Hola Churro!
We just discovered a new favorite spot: Hola Churro on Broadway east of Balaclava. Their Mexican food is delicious, reasonably priced, and offers great options for our special needs team of wheat-free/dairy-free eaters (yum, tamales!) and vegans (yum, mystery vegetarian dish!) Best of all, we discovered that they have free wifi, so we've added them to this list of Vancouver cafes with free wifi.
But there just aren't enough cafes offering that crucial combination of good food, vegan options, cheap convenient parking, clean bathrooms, power outlets and most crucially, free wifi. So if you have a favourite spot that has everything except the free wifi, encourage them to add wifi.
Hey…should we start something that would let us all collectively lobby for free wifi? Maybe we could make print-em-yourself business cards that us would-be-wifi-ers can leave (along wtih a generous tip) to let a restaurant know we want them to go wifi?
How about bylaws that are geared to specific decibel levels?
Because I'm guessing not all motorcycles are as loud as the vintage bike our neighbour restored and used to warm up outside our window at 6 am.
The dirty truth about extended warranties
See my update on how London Drugs resolved this situation. I know, I know...extended warranties are a scam, a way for electronics stores to up the profit margin on consumer electronics sales. But when our Olympus camera blew a pixel after less than two years, we...
5 ways blogging can change the world
By making it possible for just about anyone with a web connection to create their own online content, blogging has radically democratized content creation and personal publishing. More people can now communicate a message to the world than at at any time in human history. But how can that make the world a better place? This post shows 5 ways.
Home owners against the bubble
Miraculously enough, we bought a duplex in Vancouver back when housing prices were merely high (as opposed to their present level, which is absurd). But that doesn't mean we have a stake in keeping housing prices high; if anything, our interest lies in seeing the bubble burst, too.
But wait, you think: don't all us home owners have a stake in keeping prices high? Only if we're planning to get out of the market all together. Speaking personally, when we sell our house it will be so that we can buy another house in Vancouver, so it doesn't matter to us whether we're buying and selling for thousands or millions — we'll end up with the same size mortgage either way.
That's not to say that we're unaffected by the market bubble. On the contrary, high housing prices hurt home owners too. They push our friends into neighbourhoods that are far away, so we see friends less often. They encourage people to move out into the 'burbs, which means more cars on the road and more smog. They push talented people doing crucial comunity service jobs into jobs with higher incomes, so they can afford crazy mortgages.
But the most crucial way that high housing prices hurt home owners is by hurting non-home owners. When our community becomes too expensive for an ever-larger number of people to buy into and put down roots, it pushes many groups of people right out of the Lower Mainland and makes our community ever more homogeneous and boring. Do we really want to live in a community where you have to be a millionaire to have a home? No way.
How much is too much for a hair cut?
I've been getting my hair cut by the same person for years — and I'm very loyal to her (not the least because she once sacrificed her lunch hour so that I could settle my 6-month-old daughter before returning to the cutting chair).
But over the years, her price has gradually climbed; it's now close to $60 (well over, once we factor in tips). If all I'm getting is a trim, what's the point?