My Mindless Ramblings on Things Tech

Hey get you mind out of that gutter. I am going for something a bit crazy here. I am going to try to “bring” a lunch to work for 3 of 5 days each week. This will be a challenge for several reasons such as:

1. I don’t have food at home.
2. I am very picky and don’t eat left-overs so I will have to make this each morning
3. I don’t eat pre-made food, so I will have to somewhat assemble my lunches at work
4. And what do I do with www.tweetsoneats.com for the days that I bring a lunch?

In any case I am doing this to see what kind of impact this can have on my residual money at the end of each month.

The easy thing to do would be to just sell more appliances!

I found this article after getting a link to a questionable, yet entertaining site. This just made me happy, mostly because I wrote it.

Eco-Sexual? For fucking real?

So here I am trying to get going after a weekend of burning tires, dumping used motor oil, and general shit I do, and I come in to this crap:

“VANCOUVER – It’s hard to believe that using “eco” to describe your sexual bent will help you land true love, but “green” is the latest trend in niche dating.”

Well this did nothing short of make my blood boil with hatred for these fucking hippies. It is now all but impossible for me to do anything without someone telling me how a) I could be doing it more “green” b) how their product/service is “green” FUCK THAT NOISE! I have had enough. Never before have I wanted to go dump oil in a stream, cut down a tree, run over a fucking hippie that is stopping rush hour traffic to tell us drivers how our commute to work is killing the earth…it just makes me think that if these people had jobs (would require lots of bathing, cutting of hair, and pruning of body hair) that they would have less time to waste my time.

So reading about these crazy fuckers talking about how they now want to date only “green” eco-conscious, like-minded folks, and they have their own websites for dating, got me thinking; how can I fuck with them?

ANSWER: I am going to play along. Thats right. I am going to create a profile, and sign up for this freak show. I will create the ultimate catch for these finger painting fools, and setup some great dates… Great for me and you the lucky folks who will be able to watch the footage I capture. My goal is to have a date that will go against everything they stand for. Stating with picking them up in an oil leaking 4×4 to killing our own dinner…

I hope to be able to capture the entire thing on film (either hidden cameras, or under the guise of a documentary or news bit on green dating), of just the audio. If audio is the only option I GUARANTEE to have it nice and spicy.

So stay tuned here on whoreshit.com to watch/read/hear the tale unfold.

..humm if it is in the right time of year I could offer to take them clubbing baby seals.

Editor in Chief,

XXXXXXXXXXXX.comn

Of the countless things that make me not like Vancouver I think I have found the one that may be leading to many of the others. Several times each day I am forced to face this one and it gets harder and harder as a day goes on to not just lose it. What is it you ask? Well if you were somewhat smart you might have already picked this up from the title of this post, for those who have not you are most likely the ones that are pissing me off! This constant pain in my ass is the, what should be simple rules of using a sidewalk and crosswalk.

You see in Vancouver the sidewalks can get quite busy, and it is every man/woman/transvestite for themselves. Now when you get to an intersection this becomes the point where most proper self-centered Vancouverites take it to a new level. This often reminds me of the old ICBC ads “you would not walk like this so why would you drive like this?” did they miss something?

To outline my issue I have done a rough diagram (exhibit a):

How to use a Crosswalk/sidewalk combo

Now this may look complicated at first but it really is quite simple. This issue revolves around who should be in the area marked by the GREEN X at what time, and here it is:

If you are heading NORTH, looking to cross the intersection at “Crossing B” and your light is green, or the walk indicator is says go, then you are free to cross over the green X area. Persons who are heading West (in this diagram) would then have a RED light, and the walk indicator would say DON”T CROSS. Then these idiots should then stop at, or before, the area marked with the GREEN X.

When all of the idiots try to be in the same place at the same time, well what the FUCK do you think happens? When I am crossing the road, say South on “Crossing B” and people heading west are standing the the “No Stand ZONE” I can’t complete my crossing.

So lets all give this a go and see how it works.

It has been a LONG time since I last posted here. The ironic thing is that when I decided to launch CareerCrusher.com I made an oath to myself that I would post regular (and often). Well that went to hell in a hand-basket.

I have been spending more and more time with my camera. That line really should have read “I am now spending more and more MONEY on my camera now”. I am looking for a wordpress plugin that will help share my Flickr Photostream here. If anyone has any experience on this please let me know.

Wow, it has been a while since I have made a post. This lack of effort started last month when I decided that I was all too plugged in. I noticed that nothing was happening fast enough for me, and there was just too little information/news for me to ingest.

This issue came to light one night when I was sitting on my couch watching a TV show and realized that I was flipping from channel to channel, while browsing online, and twittering, on my iphone, all while queuing up torrents on my laptop. This was all too much, and I needed to slow down.

I decided that I would stop being “online” other than for work for a one week period. This was very tough at first then I began to really enjoy the time I had. As I stretched this on for a few weeks I noticed that I was now back filling my time with other, some may say more useless, things.

So here I am! back online and committed to not going anywhere that my keyboard and touchscreen can’t take me.

And crap do I have some new fun things I am doing! Keep you posted.

Marc

Well, after a few days of using a hack around to get Skype running on my iPhone I decided to see if there was a better way to go about doing this. A chat with a fellow in my office, and a little google search showed me how I can run the official application with no issues.

All that is required is you create an Itunes App Store account, based out of the US. This is made easy as you can do this with out having to use a credit card (which is typically the way they weed us out).

For more deails please see this post that worked for me: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2534

Thanks,
Marc

So I am having a little fun around the office today. First I changed the display on the HP printers to read “Insert Coin $.25 per page, I have CONFLICKER”, I then took the paper out of the printer to ensure that people see the message. I then I put tape over LED/Lasers on every mouse in the office.

Next I found anyone who left their computer unlocked and put this in their browser address bar: javascript: for(i=1; i!=0; i++){ alert(”youve pressed enter “+i+” times!\nkeep goin!”);}

Please feel free to share either what you did, or someone did to you, for April Fools!

Once again we here in Canada are being let down by the very laws/regulations that are designed to make things better. This time it is Skype for iPhone. For those of you who do not know what Skype is “how did you ever end up here?”, it is a program that allows you to make phone calls, and text chat, using your internet connection and computer. Well I should add that in MOST of the world you can also do this on your iPhone.

But our regulations say that a telco provider must also provide 911 service. In this case this is an outright case of telcos fearing for their profits (which are some of the highest in the world), and not wanting us to find ways to get “free” service. The odd thing here is that in order to use Skype you must first have a smart phone, which in Canada will have a 3 year contract to go along with it, and a data plan, which we pay WAY to much for in the first place. Skype has also taken the measure of only allowing voice chat when the phone is connected via WIFI, so to NOT eat in to the carriers money.

So what do we do in Canada now? Well we hack the phone and steal the service. If your iPhone is jailbroken (http://blog.iphone-dev.org) you only need to download two programs from Cydia, or Installer. These are: Fring, and VOIPover3g. These two together will allow you to not only use Skype, but to use it over 3G as well.

On a side note, we pay more for our wireless service than anywhere else in the world.

Marc

Here is a great start-up from Canada, that is blurring the lines between reality and social networking. I think the great thing here is that these people share the vision that today’s online activity is really about you, and your real life, so it should only be natural that there is no line between the two.

The concept is awesome;

The “reality” based portion of the game is  card/activity focused. A player starts with a deck of cards that have things to do on them. These things to do can range from “sending drinks to a couple in love” to “Donate an hour of your time”. When you complete the task you do two things; pass the card along to someone involved in the activity you just did, and second move to the online portion.

The online portion, from what I can see from the outside, looks pretty slick. The idea is that you log the activity that you had completed and receive the associated Karma points, and track the history of the card’s activity.

I think I will have to order a deck of the cards now.

Marc

Hello All (well just me for now I guess, and hope more to follow),

This is my first post here at www.careercrusher.com. What is this site about you ask? Great question and I hope I too can figure it out soon.

Who am I?

I am a life-long geek, who grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. I have always sort of been right in between the two and never really went in either side with full commitment.

My geek side has lead me to what most would call and addiction to technology. I must always have the latest in tech, and toys, but always break them apart and try to see how they could be better, or how they could change to have a wider market adoption (there goes my other side). I am competent enough in technology to get deep in hardware, and do some basic coding, but my strength really lies in knowing what is possible with technology, and why it matters.

My entrepreneur side is what I think really drives my geek side. Most of my geeking out derives from not getting why; everyone else is not using X like this, or why the company who made X seems to have missed the marketing boat by miles. Since I remember sitting in the bridge of one of my father’s (I only have one father, but he has had many companies) ships (in the 80’s he ran, with this father, a cruise line, as wells as a freight line) thinking that it sure must be nice to run all of this, I have constantly been coming up with business ideas, and creating plans for most, and stopping there. This has been the CRUX of this side of me.

Well no more I say. I have had an AH-HA moment recently, and I have come to see that my mutant genes of half tech, and half entrepreneur, is a good mix. I now see that I can both take my ideas and form a team around me to launch them, or help others take their ideas and propel them to reality and success.

What are you going to do about it?

In the past few months I have decided that I can continue to work at the great start-up where I work (www.strangeloopnetworks.com) and try my hand at launching a few things. I will post some details about these “things” as they move forward.