award tour

“We started in 2006 with a simple idea – make awesome websites”. I think Envato is living up to their ideals. Every single one of their sites is well designed and usually has great content. I had no idea a single company made Tuts+ (a series of websites which does tutorials and how-tos for things like Photoshop, Illustrator, 3d design, Flash, etc) and Freelance Switch (a site about being a freelancer).

What makes me point them out today is that I came across AppStorm.net which is comprised for 3 sites focusing on web, iphone, and mac apps. Again, the content on each site is top notch. I just spent the last hour reading reviews for all sorts of slick looking apps that I’ve never even heard of.

It’s great to see a company doing such a wide variety of content based sites (and even charging for their premium content on Tuts+). I highly recommend you check them out (if you’re a nerd or a designer).

Amazon.com has applied to open and run its own fulfilment center in Canada. Currently, Amazon outsources all inventory control and delivery to Canada Post because of existing rules on foreign ownership of “book publishing and other cultural industries”. For those who don’t know, Amazon.ca has a very limited item selection compared to Amazon.com and pricing is higher. There’s also no fancy features like Amazon Prime. According to a Globe & Mail article it looks like the Harper government might approve the application. Unforunately, both book publishers and book sellers aren’t crazy about the idea. If Amazon lost its application the only winner would be Chapters/Indigo (which probably owns 90% of the bookstores in Canada) and places like BestBuy.

Personally, I can’t wait. Online retail in Canada is a certified wasteland. The only exception to that is Well.ca.

It usually takes me forever to buy stuff. There’s few things in the world I hate more than buyer’s remorse. Luckily, I knew I wouldn’t be feeling any of that within a day of owning this GenevaSound S iPod speaker. When I moved back to Toronto from Seattle, I immediately knew that my 10-year old Yamaha receiver and speakers were too big to fit in my VW Golf. There was also no need for speakers that can make walls tremble when you live in a 500 sqft apartment.

I had seriously looked at buying a pair of AudioEngine A5’s but I wasn’t that crazy about the look of them nor the need for a separate receiver or buying an Airport Express. Geneva has had much larger iPod speakers out for a year or two but they are quite expensive and, again, are total overkill for a tiny apartment. I saw the S model at Bay Bloor Radio and decided it was a good fit. Turns out they didn’t even have them in stock and I managed to reserve the last unit they had in black.

Overall, this thing has been certified badass. The audio quality is phenomenal. It has an ipod dock (which rotates closed when not in use), a built-in FM tuner, and a audio line-in. The controls fade-out when not in use and are similar to the wheel/buttons of the iPod Classic. It also comes with a simple remote.

After I brought it home I put it on the kitchener counter, dropped in my iPhone and listened to music while making dinner. This was my first occasion of thinking “why did I not buy this sooner?”. The next morning, I got out of bed, hit power, and turned on CBC radio2, and started my morning routine of making a latte and checking email. Again, I wondered “why did I not buy this sooner?” and was also glad I purchased something with a built-in radio (though the CBC Radio2 iPhone app would have done the same trick since there’s no other radio stations worth listening to in Toronto).

Not sure where else you can find one in Toronto other than Bay Bloor Radio. They still had red or white models in stock for $349.

The other day I accidentally put my iphone in the washing machine. I was stripping my bed sheets & duvet cover and my phone happened to get caught in the mix. When I went looking for my phone about 10 minutes later I realized my stupidity and then spent quite some time fishing it out of the washer.

Oddly enough, the phone was on when I put it in the wash and it was still on when I took it out. After shaking it for a bit I could see the water behind the glass screen and soap bubbles starting to dry. I knew trying to dry it out would be pointless.

Luckily, I made an appointment at the Apple Store (which is 5 minutes from my apartment), walked over, skipped the line for the Genius Bar, and walked out of the store with a replacement in about 10 minutes for $250. I also backed up my phone the day before so I had a perfect replica of my old phone within an hour of pulling it out of the wash.

So the federal government overruled the CRTC concerning the foreign ownership of Wind Mobile and Wind might be offering wireles service as soon as Monday in Toronto and Calgary.

Hilariously, Rogers CEO commented that “There’s no question in my mind that Canada cannot support more than three national facilities-based players [...] It’s inconceivable to me”. Hopefully he’s right and that means one of our shitty existing telcos will finally go under. Wind’s CEO also had a great response: “I’m sure somebody told Starbucks that there wasn’t room for more coffee shops”.

Wind also has some pretty funny ads comparing cell phone plans to hot dogs, bike locks, and sidewalks.

Apparel isn’t a regular topic of interest here on awardtour but I thought I should point out these Tretorn boots that I bought yesterday. They’re basically the rubber equivalent of Chuck Taylor’s and they’re awesome. It is cold and rainy today in Toronto and they are warm, waterproof, and comfortable. They would have come in handy in Seattle. If you’re in the US you can find them at Zappos and in Canada Little Burgundy has them (and free shipping).

Kevin Warsh, who is a Governor of the US Federal Reserve did a speech last week in Chicago that had one very interesting sentence…

“I would hazard the view that prudent risk management indicates that policy likely will need to begin normalization before it is obvious that it is necessary, possibly with greater force than is customary”

Oh snap! That was fed-speak for “nice fuck up Greenspan“. But why is this interesting? Well, as someone who thinks they might be obtaining a mortgage in the next year it definitely hammers home that if you can lock down a low fixed rate mortgage, now is the time to do it. There’s no deals to be had on variable rate mortgages at the moment and this announcement really means that the Fed might raise rates faster and sooner than we’ve become accustomed too. I realize that Bank of Canada bank rates aren’t in perfect lock-step with the Fed but, if you exclude the early 90s, you’ll definitely see a pattern.

On this note, The Canadian Capitalist blog had a great post (and follow-up) about how the historic savings of variable over fixed rate might not apply in this time of historically low interest rates.

Ok Cupid, a free dating site has a blog called OkTrends which datamines their user’s response to personal questions. The two most recent posts are filled with pure gold. The first, about optimal message length analyzes the likelihood that someone responds to your initial message based on the message length. For men to women, a longer message helps you out. For women to men, a 50 character message is as effective as a 3000 word message.

The second post is about what words increase or reduce your chance of getting a reply. There’s lots of great examples including that bad spelling (or netspeak like “ur” instead of “your”) is a big turn-off while mentioning that you’re a self-effacing atheist vegetarian is a big win.

Update: The blog just put out another post today about religious matches. The heatmap grid of astrological signs is pretty funny and definitely shows that a person’s “astrological sign has no effect whatsoever on how compatible two people are.” Though the prize quote from the post is this one:

“Jewish men, in particular, have an above average match percentage with every religious group. They even match Muslim women better than Muslim men do, which I find both a hilarious irony and a somewhat sad reflection on the fact that Muslim males don’t seem to be doing very well.”

Norman Borlaug, who is regarded as having saved more lives than any other human in history, died yesterday at the age of 95. The New York Times has a great obituary which I’d highly recommend reading.

Though not a household name, Borlaug is widely credited for the creation of “semi-dwarf high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varietals” which, between 1965 and 1970, doubled wheat yields in Pakistan and India and saved upwards of 1 billion people from starvation. For this, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

I just added one new song to mux.awardtour entitled Sleepyhead by Boston’s Passion Pit. I just love the synth-heavy bridge after the chorus. It’s some catchy shit.

From The Star today: “Toronto jobless rate hits 10%”. From The Star yesterday: GTA housing market hot. The latter points out a a semi-detach home in the Danforth that “sold in May for $715,000 after being listed for $549,000″.

Clearly, the recession is effecting Toronto. Is it just not effecting people who are approved for half million dollar mortgages?

I was listening to the CBC’s The Current podcast last night which featured an interview with Joe Schlesinger who was a foreign correspondent for CBC for 28 years. Yesterday, Schlesinger received a lifetime achievement award from the Canadian Journalism Foundation. I’d really recommend checking out the podcast as Schlesinger has such a captivating voice and is what Ram would call a “hard boiled” journalist.

Schlesinger escaped Nazi controlled Czechoslovakia as child and as this CBC article mentions: “He was in Russia with former U.S. president Richard Nixon, in Vietnam when troops were on the ground, in Tehran when the Shah fell and in St. Peter’s Square when John Paul II became Pope.” In the podcast interview he also mentions stories such as jumping out of a helicopter taking mortar fire in Vietnam, escaping Czechoslovakia for a second time during the Cold War, and being on the “highway to hell” in the first Iraq war.

Listening to stories like that, I’m amazed the guy is alive. Luckily for us, the CBC listening public, he not only survived but managed to tell us the “heartbeat” of the story.

There’s a very large article from this month’s copy of The Atlantic entitled What Makes Us Happy? which is really quite interesting. It talks about a Harvard study that has followed the lives of 268 Harvard men for the last 72 years to find out what makes for a happy and healthy life. The article is well worth reading and points out some of the interesting individuals of the study (which, oddly enough, included JFK). The main lessons: deal with problems maturely, get educated, have a stable marriage, don’t smoke, don’t abuse alcohol, do “some excercise”, and keep a healthy weight. But in summary, “The the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

I also really enjoyed this video which is found in the article. It touches on some of the topics and gives a great overview…

I decided to really mix up my mux tape. Here’s the new additions:

• Phoenix – Girlfriend: Off the soon to be released album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. I’ve found Phoenix’s stuff to be hit or miss but this album is absolute top shelf.
• Lo Fi Fnk – Want U: These guys haven’t put anything new out lately and I don’t even know when this song got released but it’s catchy.
• Ra Ra Riot – Too Too Too Fast: Off their new album “>The Rhumb Line which is a great mix of sounds. This track kinda has a Police/Sting sound to it in the chorus.
• Harlem Shakes – Strictly Game: From their latest Technicolor Health. At this very moment, this is my favorite song.
• The Dodos – Red and Purple: This album came out in 2008 and it took me a while to like it. Now I really like it.

Hope you enjoy.

I made this update a couple weeks ago but forgot to mention it in a post. There’s probably no need to introduce Metric or the lead single off their new album Fantasies (which is set to release in mid-April) because the song is already all over the radio. The other track is a bit older (2007) from the band Fanfarlo and it’s from the self-titled single You Are One Of The Few Outsiders Who Really Understands Us. It randomly came up on last.fm a month ago and I listened to it quite a bit. It’s got that same great big sound as the Marching Band track also on my muxtape.

Also, not sure why the twitter plugin for my blog was posting all those random twitters. I certainly don’t speak Danish or whatever other languages came up.

At one point in time I used to watch just about every TED talk that they posted on their site. Working as a consulting has definitely scaled back how much time I spend reading blogs or trying to blog. None the less, a couple weeks ago I binged one night on a whole backlog of TED talks and I’ve had a draft post talking about the really memorable ones. Since it seems that I’ll never finish that post I thought I’d break it up. Here’s the first…

Doris Kearns Goodwin has a talk entitled “Learning from past presidents in moments of crisis”. Goodwin has written several books on this topic and although the talk initially appears to be about presidents it really points out some clear advice on how to find happiness over the course of a life. This quote really stuck me:

“The richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love, and play. And that to pursue one realm at disregard of the others is to open oneself to ultimate sadness at older age whereas to pursue all three with equal dedication is to make possible a life filled not only with achievement but serenity.
From Lincoln’s life we can take away that to have fierce ambition is a good thing. From LBJ we see the sorrow one has late in life from pursuing only one realm for several years.”

I’m one of those people who never ever backed-up their computer. Never. Didn’t even consider it. I only started because back-ups with Time Machine on Mac OSX was so damn easy that I would have been foolish not to. I’m not someone with an ungodly amount of music or photos or ripped TV shows so I bought a portable USB-powered Western Digital hard drive (WD even has this model up to 750G in size). This thing has been a total gem. I’ve had no problems with it, it doesn’t need external power so it just sits attached to my monitor, and it’s the size of an iPod so if I ever need to share enormous files with someone I just bring it with me.

Then, a few months ago, I started thinking about Time Machine and how I use it: never. I had never actually put Time Machine to use. Every important document I have is on Google Docs, all of my code is stored (with complete history) on github, and my music and photos were archived on my iPod. I really had no need for historical snapshots of my data.

What I did worry about was my computer breaking and needing to work on a loaner for several days or having it completely die, needing to buy a new machine, and spending a full day setting up the machine (In my mind, this event always occurs in the middle of a deadline or while pushing something into production).

Going from a salaried employee to a bill-by-the-hour contractor does a lot of things to you, one of them is always putting a clear dollar value on your time. Losing the ability to bill clients for several days is something I consider “very expensive”. Luckily, there’s a very cheap solution to my problem. It’s called SuperDuper.

The app is simple and phenomenal and well worth it’s $28USD price tag. Every day at noon it starts making an exact bootable duplicate of my hard drive. The first backup took about 90 minutes and daily ones take about 15 minutes. This means that if my hard drive or computer died right now I could plug my external drive into another computer and it would boot up and function exactly the same. It wouldn’t be as fast as my internal drive but it would definitely suffice until I got a replacement drive or computer. Hell, if I was traveling somewhere and I knew whomever I was visiting had a Mac, I could bring my whole computer just by bringing my external drive.

Anyways, I’ve really enjoyed using SuperDuper and thought I’d point it out.

“That chart is the most striking piece of evidence I have that what is happening to us is something that goes way beyond toxic assets in banks. It’s something that has little to do with the mechanics of mortgage securitization, or ethics on Wall Street, or anything else. It says the problem is us. The problem is not the banks, greedy though they may be, overpaid though they may be, the problem is us. We have over borrowed. We’ve been living very high on the hog. Our standard of living has been rising dramatically in the last 25 years and we have been borrowing much of the money needed to make that prosperity happen.”

- Columbia professor David Beim

That’s right, in the United States 100% of GDP is owed by individuals. You can hear the professor utter this passage on the latest episode of This American Life where the guys from Planet Money do a pretty good job of explaining how banks work and what the banking crisis is all about.

Ever wondered how the subprime market got as big as it did and why it made everyone go bust? This 11 minute long video does a great job of explaining it. It’s very much akin to the This American Life episode about the credit crisis entitled Giant Pool of Money. It also has of the best explanations I’ve seen of how a CDO works and what a CDO tranche actually is.

I installed the MLPPP variant of the Tomato Firmware on my standard Linksys WRT router to get around Bell’s DSL throttling. Although I do enjoy sticking it to Bell, the added bonus is that the Tomato firmware is quite awesome. I thought three features were really worth mentioning: (1) real-time bandwidth graphing (using SVG of all things) along with daily/monthly bandwidth logs, (2) a channel scanner to see if other local routers are on the same channel, (3) you can define quality-of-service priority for different protocols (skype, torrents, web browsing, etc).

On that note, I thought I’d make a quick review of my DSL provider, TekSavvy. I’m on their residential dry-loop plan (which means I don’t have a phone line). I went with the Premium plan because I’m pretty confident I’ll never go over 200G of data in a month. I have a pretty crappy line coming to my house so my connection maxes out at 4Mb but I don’t really download enough large stuff to benefit from some 8Mb cable connection. It’s also pretty darn cheap: $36/month and I got my modem off a guy on craigslist for only $30. I’ve only had to call tech support once but a real person answers the phone and they were quite helpful. So all and all, I think the service has been pretty good for what I pay. Though the think the best part of using TekSavvy is the sheer joy I feel knowing that I’m not giving Rogers any more money. I can’t wait for the day when another telco has the iPhone; I will gladly pay any cancellation fee to be done with them.