Inadequate Endowment

So, I am slowing down on the blogging for a bit. Not that I ever really sped up. I will be back with other projects to hone my writing skills, but for now, I will say farewell.

So, American Politics trumps Canadian Politics again.  This time, with Hip Hop. I didn’t see any Harper songs anywhere…

Obama ‘08 - Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.

I have been watching a lot of Arrington posts on Twitter over the weekend. It seems there is a fight brewing between Microsoft and TechCrunch.

I am not pretending to know the details or really have an informed opinion about any of this, but Arrington just posted something that seemed a bit wrong to me: “TechCrunch: Microsoft asked us to live stream a Ballmer talk after the PDC. Accepted last week, just canceled. We have better things to cover.”

That just doesn’t seem right to me.

So, I think it is time for a blog redesign again. Maybe something a bit… nicer.  Maybe something a bit less… grandma’s wallpaper.

Sorry for the large assortment of links lately. I will be backon writing original pieces soon. For those of you who don’t want to read my writing anymore… thanks for making me cry.

This is the best library ever. I can only hope that one day a company that I run becomes successful enough for me to build a room this astounding. The article even uses the word ziggurat, how much better could it get!

So, this is probably the funniest thing I have seen on the internets for a long time.  I am not just talking about the one internet everyone knows… I mean all the internets, even the secret ones.

View, digest, enjoy “Sad Guys on Trading Floors“.

PS - this is the best one

So, I managed to sprain my finger. I am having a hard time typing today. I don’t really know how it happened, I just know that playing Dodgeball last night did not help anything.

Sadly, I am playing sports where I have to throw a fair amount (Dodgeball and Waterpolo) so I may have to miss a game or two to heal my finger.

Update - Done.

So I have been thinking about Marketing fairly frequently lately. Marketing is common sense for the most part. Everyone can do it. It doesn’t take any special skills unless you are doing something incredibly specific. I am a trained marketer and I feel like I could add more value to projects if I had some concrete skills as well: a large personal network, programming skills, design skills… etc. What do I bring to the table that say, a programmer couldn’t accomplish.

I was talking to Mike about this and he made one of his classically brilliant analogies. Drink this in:

“Ryan, You sound like… well a paladin can tank so I don’t see the point in me [playing] as a warrior”

If you know World of Warcraft… cue laughter.  If you don’t… this will make no sense, and I will leave you to question what you have been doing with your life (aside from being social in an off the Internet kind of way).

So, I am a bad Canadian. I watched more of the Vice Presidential debates than the Canadian debates last night.  Whoops!

The worst part about it… Palin didn’t even say anything hilariously stupid. Don’t get me wrong, she said some pretty weird things, but nothing hilariously stupid. I was hoping we would learn more about the time when Dinosaurs and cave men co-existed 6000 years ago or she would let slip that she has read “THE INTERNETS” since she has already read every newspaper… all of them.

The City of Calgary is in the process of replacing all of their traditional parking meters for “parking stations”. Normally, this would not be an exciting event, luckily there is an upside. During the transition between the two systems, 90% of the existing parking meters are broken and you can’t tell they are broken until you try to put coins into them.

This is hilarious for many reasons.  While I walk to work every morning down one of the busiest streets in the city I see many people trying to plug coins into parking meters. There are a number of reactions to these predominately broken meters:

1. Fury - the parker will plug a few coins into the meter… wait for a few seconds and immediately start bashing the parking meter with the palm of their hand. This happens the vast majority of the time. I guess driving in Calgary traffic is stressful.

2. Mortification - the parker will plug a few coins into the meter… wait for a few seconds and start looking around. They start to act horrified that the meter doesn’t work. They are completely overwhelmed and confused as to why the world is against them. I can’t imagine someone like this dealing with a real problem, yikes.

3. Acceptance - this is the best. The parker plugs a few coins into the meter… waits for a few seconds and immediately throws their hands up in the air. They think that you can’t get a ticket at a broken meter. If you are very lucky, you might even catch this person later on in the day trying to explain to the parking authority that their meter was broken and you can’t get a ticket at a broken meter.  It never works.  I like to think this causes the “Acceptance” stage to progress to the “Fury” stage.