“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”
— Confucius
Let’s face it. It’s sleek. It’s one of the fastest browsers out there for OS X. It syncs with my .Mac account, so I have a seamless browsing experience on all of my Macs. But, alas, I have a love/hate relationship with OS X Safari. I come back to it every once in a while for a few weeks, have a great time, and then things start turning sour. And by sour, I mean bitter, nasty, and hair-pullingly difficult.
When I get to these moments I invariably go back to Firefox. Firefox and Safari are different in as many ways as they are the same…
I used to have this on my network server somewhere (it’s about 3 years old) but this is something that needs to be shared with the world.
I keep forgetting to blog about this, or perhaps it’s because I’m ashamed of my wardrobe and bad hair day, but FindFindr did a far-ranging video interview with me on a rooftop in Gastown. I did my best to be interesting. They did their best in the editing room later. Enjoy!
Guess what? I’m a real person. I’ll be at the blogtropol.us lounge @ the Web 2.0 Expo for the next couple of days. Come and meet me and the boys from Something Simpler.
No stick or puck required.
If I had a category on my blog called “cautionary tales for bachelors”, this would be the headliner story. It informs the wisdom of an increasingly common practise, whereby when you meet some reasonably attractive yet complex member of the opposite sex, you’re tempted to Google her name and/or look her up in Wikipedia.
According to Valleywag it seems that Jimmy Wales, creator of Wikipedia, has entangled himself where so many have been entangled before: in the gaze of the just slightly right-of-Hitler Rachel Marsden. While few of us were paying attention, Marsden happens to have vaulted her career from falsely accusing SFU’s swim coach of harassment after allegedly stalking him for months to a brief but uninspiring career at Fox News.
How the man smart enough to give us the crowd-sourced encyclopedia of everything was dumb enough to become caught in this web is beyond me.
Note to Jimmy: dude, you’re the starchild of Silicon Valley’s tech culture — lots of smart, good-looking women will probably sleep with you, I’m sure of it. There’s no need to dip into the looney bin.
We’ve finished version 1.0 of RosterBot, our RSVP system for sports teams… it’s generic enough to do league hockey, shinny, Ultimate, or any sport… but functional enough to make management of your team(s) easier. I’ve described it in the past as being “.. like eVite for sports teams”.
It’s a pretty simple system: You can paste in the email addresses of all the players on your team, input dates of your upcoming games (which is even easier if it’s a recurring event) and the system does the rest to figure out who’s coming and who’s not.
Please do try it out: http://www.rosterbot.com
There’s now a mailing list for Vancouver Goalies hosted at Google. A great way for goalies to find spares and talk about whatever. Why didn’t I think of that?
Doh.
I have often (as have all of us, I’m under no grand delusions here) suffered at the hands of the ineptitude of large companies. I understand the rhetoric of the executive class when they say things like “expanding our relationships with small business” and being “customer responsive”. I’ve been there, I’ve written the press releases. I know that nobody at big companies actually mean such hokum.
I have now been attempting to buy a number of DELL 24″ flat-screen monitors for the staff here @ Something Simpler for nearly a month now. My first order was placed via Dell Canada’s web site on January 5th.
Here’s my letter to Dell:
If you’re listening, Dell, which I doubt, my first order, #196489702, was initially delayed for credit card verification, which I provided, and then was spontaneously dropped with no explanation or notification. It wasn’t until I called after two weeks of no word or sign of any shipment that I discovered what had happened (sort of)…
Apparently I’m one of the “People to Watch” on the Vancouver tech scene for 2008. As if it’s not easy enough to look into my townhouse from the street already, you people have to watch me working as well?
Kidding aside, it’s great to be listed among such folks as the RainCity crew, Danny Robinson, and Mozilla’s David Ascher. Missing from the list are folks like David Gratton, Boris Wertz, and Dick Hardt. Their enterprises are I think poised for big things this year, and success on their part will do much to bolster the tech scene in Vancouver in general.
