I usually don’t like getting into retrospection too much, but given the end of a decade I’m feeling a little nostalgic. I find myself being born on the turn of a decade, way back in 1980, probably gives my life a certain symmetry that others might not feel when a change of decade comes along. I’ll be turning 30 in February and it definitely feels like life is in the midst of turning to another page.

There is currently a Twitter meme going around called #10yearsago, reflecting on what people were doing a decade ago as the year 2000 approached. To tell you the truth I can barely remember. I had just finished my first semester at Durham College in their design program. I remember my friends and I had a house party at Les’ like we usually did, and as I recall nothing terribly remarkable happened. We used to have big parties with lots of craziness going on all the time, so it seemed almost ironic that kicking off a new millennium we had such a vanilla party.

As a recap to the decade I’m going to do some quick summations of what I actually remember of each year of this decade without doing any deeper research then off the top of my head.

2000
I remember that in 2000 I finally got my driver license. In my teenage years I never really could be bothered and had lots of friends who drove, so it was never a priority of mine. I spent most of my time partying and hanging with friends in the early part of the decade.

2001
I think like most people 9/11 definitely sticks out a one of the defining points of the year, and of the decade but I don’t need to get into that. I also finished my last in school semester of college.

2002
I got hired on at Thompson Printing in Paris to do my co-op semester and was subsequently hired on full time. I graduated from college with my diploma in Graphic Design. I stopped updating my long running website OasisCentral.com, which I had been running since 1997.

2003
I bought my first car, a standard 1999 Hyundai Accent in dark green. So I had to learn to drive stick. This was the year I met my future wife Corina. We met through an online dating site that was called eMode in August and have been together ever since.

2004
I started off this year off with a bang, getting in a car accident and writing off my aforementioned Accent. I t-boned an old lady who jumped a stop sign. I hit her going roughly 70km/h and luckily nobody was hurt. I walked away without a scratch, which led me to buying a silver 2001 Hyundai Accent with the insurance money. I also started this very blog way back in 2K4.

2005
The previous year my parents had given me a move out deadline, my 25th birthday. So as I turned a quarter century old I moved into my first apartment, a 1 bedroom place in Paris. I had lived on my own when I went to college, but living in residence really wasn’t the same as having my own place. This decision to strike out on my own wasn’t necessarily popular with Corina, but I felt the need to assert some independence. It lasted until July when Corina and I decided to move up one floor in my apartment building to a 2 bedroom place. I also tore the anterior cruciate ligament in my left knee while playing soccer. This resulted in surgery and an 18 month recovery before I was back playing soccer.

2006
I can’t recall too much about 2006 aside from the tail end. In December I got hired on as a web designer with Geosign. Also that same month I proposed to Corina in Simcoe, Ontario, 4 days before Christmas. So these 2 events pretty much setup the whirlwind what was my life the next year.

2007
In January I started commuting to my new job in Guelph, which resulted in Corina and I moving to Galt, as I wasn’t too fond of the 50 minutes drive from Paris. This was a big step for me, actually leaving Paris, which I had called home since 1994. We decided to get married on September 29th, so that gave us roughly 10 months to plan and execute our wedding. I worked a whirlwind 5 1/2 months at Geosign before the company went down in flames and I was let go along with half the company. I was unemployed most of the summer, then got hired on to work for Claris Law in Guelph in September. We had an outdoor wedding at Corina’s parents place in Clyde, with the reception held in a tent in the backyard. Weather was sunny and 25 degrees at the end of September. We drove to Massachusetts, then to the Baseball Hall of Fame for our honeymoon. As all this was going on our rental in Galt was being sold which necessitated us moving again, this time back to Clyde and Corina’s old basement apartment.

2008
2008 was another slow year. Basically we hosted the Beer Olympics in Clyde and saved money for a down payment on a house. In December we had our offer accepted on a house in Preston, capping a couple month search for our first home.

2009
In March we moved into our new house. Finally having a house of our own Corina and I decided to adopt our dog Chance, who is also affectionately known as “The Dude”. In June I was let go from my job with Claris. As crappy as that was it gave me the motivation to actually start my own business, SlideawayMedia. It was something I had always wanted to do, but as with most things I usually require a kick in the pants to get started.

While the last year has been tough, I’d say overall I was pretty happy with the 2000’s. I look back at the time and think back to where I figured I’d be at 30. I think the thing that excites me the most is being my own boss and being able to almost pick my own destiny. Who knows, maybe I’m a success, maybe I’ll fall on my face. Either way it is pretty invigorating. I think having a job that you can sleepwalk through everyday really does dull the senses. Working for yourself keeps you on your toes.

My friend Carmen got this video of the Olympic Torch Run going through my hometown of Paris, Ontario. Apparently the lead truck clipped an OPP vehicle. You could say there will be a lot of photographic evidence of what happened for a police report.

As I’m sure many people have read, Facebook recently made changes to their privacy policies that have got people’s knickers in a knot, and understandably so.  The long and short of what Facebook is trying to achieve is to monetize your content you create via search engine traffic.

On the web traffic is currency and Facebook has a lot of it.  The problem that is inherent with the concept of monetizing Facebook’s traffic is how their user base was built.  Facebook didn’t become this omnipresent internet juggernaut overnight.  They built up from a small site targeted toward university networking to the megalith of a site we know today.  And they did this by building a walled garden community.

Stuff that happened on Facebook is inherently public, but it wasn’t necessarily of public record.  You could always prune back your walled garden, delete content and nobody would be the wiser.  This isn’t the case with the rest of the internet.  Things can get indexed in Google almost as soon as it’s published.  Once it’s published it can be cached by numerous sites, creating a backup should you ever decide to delete your content.  All the images you post with your content end up in Google or Bing image search results.  I find I get a pretty large amount of traffic to my blog looking for images, so I know there is definite value in the hoard of images on Facebook.

Facebook users signed up to use the service under the impression that the site was essentially a personal social network.  This wasn’t a site where you had a public profile, online aliases or anything else to obscure your identity.  The web had long been built on a foundation of obscuring facts about yourself for the sake of personal privacy.  Facebook essentially allowed you to let your guard down and reconnect with family, old friends and acquaintances.  You could share email addresses and phone numbers with your network knowing prying eyes shouldn’t be able to access this information.  You could share pictures of parties or vacations knowing that it is being shared with people you actually know and not online strangers.

The biggest issue at hand here is what I view as a betrayal of Facebook’s 350 million users. The service has essentially reached a crossroads.  They have a very large userbase, but more then likely their growth will have plateaued, given everyone’s Moms/Dads/Aunts/Uncles/Grandparents are now using the service.  Now they’ve reached the point of saturation, the rules are changing.  No longer does Facebook want to be a closed website, they want to take all these notes, wall posts, photos and shared links that you have posted onto the site over the years and turn them into avenues to generate revenue.

The reality of this situation is that it’s not people like myself that are going to get screwed by these changes, it’s the less computer savvy that Facebook has spent years courting.  I went through yesterday and locked down my profile so that there is next to nothing showing up on my profile page.  I have it so that my page doesn’t appear in search engine results.  I had to individually change the permissions of each photo album to be friends only.  You can no longer see who my friends are anymore.  Here’s an article on how to secure your Facebook profile.

I wrote this article mainly to make friends aware of what is actually going on with the new changes.  Log into Facebook and make sure your information is secure.  If you previously hadn’t bothered with your privacy settings it is entirely possible that the new changes may leave certain personal information exposed.

Things are about to get interesting in the mobile phone market in the next couple of months. Industry Minister Tony Clement disclosed today that he would be overruling the CRTCs decision to not allow Globalive to operate in Canada. The CRTC had ruled in September that the company did not meet the Canadian ownership requirements, a ruling that was heavily influenced by the incumbent mobile carriers Rogers, Bell and Telus.

This could viably be great news for Canadians as we finally have a new competitor to stir the pot in an otherwise stagnant market. The Canadian mobile phone market is what I would call “duopoly” in much of the country. Sure we have 3 big providers, but when you boil it down any choice to be made when picking a mobile provider, Rogers or Bell. Telus’ stronghold is in the West, so they don’t quite stack up to the top 2 companies. The problem with this duopoly is that there is little to no competing going on. Both of these companies are more then willing to pad their fat bottom lines instead of actually compete.

Just look at the recently launched iPhone on Bell and Telus. While it heralded a new day for choice of iPhone providers in Canada, it offered little to no incentive to consumers looking for a break on phone and data plan pricing. All 3 companies were more then content to just have the hottest handset on the market instead of actually competing for customers.

It is the hope that Globalive and their Wind Mobile brand will breathe some new life into a very stagnant market place. Canada is drastically lagging behind other countries when it comes to the cost of running a smartphone. With Vodaphone in the UK I can get a phone plan with 500megs of data for less then $35 CDN, taxes in. In Canada a plan like that is practically unfathomable. And

We can hope that Globalive is able to stir the pot a bit and actually able to bring competitive phone and data rates to Canada. Globalive is backed by telecom giant T-Mobile, so this isn’t a company that is coming into the market as nobodies. And if this leaked info from May is anywhere close to true, Canadians might finally have a true alternative to Bell and Rogers.

As a frequent user of Twitter I noticed a lot of people starting to use the service Ow.ly to shorten their links. As you can see Ow.ly puts a CSS styled frame(not to be confused with old-school HTML frames) at the top of any page you share. Now this concept got me thinking. I share loads of links on Twitter and am essentially promoting someone elses URL shortening service in the process. Ow.ly is getting a visit to their website every time someone clicks on an Ow.ly link, regardless of the destination. Why couldn’t I do that for my blogs?

After doing a little searching I discovered that Pretty Link for Wordpress will do exactly what I was looking for. The plugin serves as a URL shortener, but also has a feature that enables you to create a framed version using the “Pretty Bar”. This functionality is pretty much identical to what Ow.ly is doing, only now you can now brand it with your own website.

Now if you install this plugin you’ll notice the the Pretty Bar function isn’t quite as nice as what I’ve got running on my site. That is because I modified the template to the plugin. Now I caution you at this point, if you modify the Pretty Bar template you will need to be careful upgrading to subsequent updates of the plugin, as odds are they will get overwritten. So be careful to backup your changes.

With that said, here is how you modify the template. The Pretty Bar template is located in the Pretty Link plugin folder, handily named prettybar.php. All the CSS and and HTML for the output is located there. I changed quite a bit of the layout and function of the display by messing with things in that file. If you’re handy with CSS/HTML you should be able to easily customize things to your liking.

If you’re not handy with template hacking, there are customization features available under Options > Pretty Bar Options that will allow you to change the colour scheme of the Pretty Bar to match your site.

Once you have it all styled you should be ready to start sharing things. One handy thing that Pretty Link allows you to do is add a javascript link to your quick bookmarks, allowing you to easily create a bookmark. To do this, go to the Pretty Link menu and select tools from within Wordpress and follow the instructions. They even give you instructions on how to use Pretty Link from your iPhone, which is neat. Then when you are on a site you’d like to share, simply click the bookmarked link and Pretty Link will spit out a shortened URL like http://www.modsuperstar.ca/dja for you to use on Twitter.

I find when I share my links through Twitter I remove the “www.” from any link I’m sharing. That keeps my links below the 30 character limit Twitter has before it chops down the length of a URL. So far I’m happy with the results, though there are a couple of things I want to figure out going forward. Ideally I want to add links to my most recent posts into the Pretty Bar, but that’s a task for another day.

Edit 1: To get your links to show up with the Pretty Bar by default, under Options > Link Option Defaults change the Default Link Direction Type to Pretty Bar.

I’ve had access to Google Wave for awhile now, receiving an invite a couple of weeks after it launched.  I’ve kinda held back on making any comments for awhile, figuring that things with the service seemed to be starting slow and that the genius of the service would gradually show itself.  I found that with Twitter.  Initially I just didn’t get it.  Over time I watched things evolve and eventually found reasons why the service was right for me.  All I can say is that Google Wave hasn’t reached this point for me.

What Google is trying to do with this service is remedy some of the larger issues that are inherent with email.  Here’s a good explanation of the issues Google Wave solves.  This video also visualizes what they are trying to achieve as well.

The biggest problem I find is that Google Wave is pretty much an island onto its own at this point.  The only way I interact with Wave is by going to wave.google.com, which from my point of view sucks.  Pretty much every service I use on a daily basis has a way of breaking out its website constraints.  I have Twitter clients on pretty much every platform, I have notifications when a message is sent to my Gmail account.  I get notified if someone comments on a status update from Facebook.  Sure these things are probably coming to Google Wave through future API uses, but the fact they want people to start using this as a communication tool, yet there is no external way to interface with this service seems pretty silly.  The web these days is all about cross pollinating one service with another.

The whole thing with this service is that I can see where they are going with it, they just aren’t there yet.  I think in the ideal world this becomes Gmail instead of being its own separate service. Essentially this is Google trying to reinvent the wheel. It’s just going to take people a long time to get their heads around the concept, at least in its current iteration.

With all that said, who wants some Google Wave invites?  Leave a comment below or email at the address in the sidebar and I’ll hook you up.

I signed up for the new beta of the new Rogers on demand service yesterday morning to see what all the hub-bub was about. I had heard some buzz starting last week that Rogers was launching a Hulu type service available to Rogers customers. I got excited as I’m a Rogers phone and Internet customer, so I figured this would be pretty awesome. Canada has long been tailing behind the US in our ability to watch TV content streaming online for free. If you’re like me and expected Hulu for Canadians, then you’re in for some disappointment.

Rogers On Demand beta service

Content
Rogers has built a website on the same platform on which Hulu was created, but that seems to be about where the similarities ends. Since this is a beta the content is limited pretty much to Rogers properties(CityTV, Sportsnet, G4), mixed with a smattering of Canwest Global(Slice, Food Network) and Corus Entertainment(YTV, Treehouse) channels mixed in as well. Aside from the stuff from CityTV, there really isn’t any big network shows available on the site. There are a smattering of full length movies as well.  I don’t want to bag on the content since the service just launched yesterday, but knowing how the Canadian content providers are at odds with each other, I’m not holding my breath on whether the channel selection will get better.

Tiered system online
Where things really go off the rails is when you try to access content from channels you don’t subscribe to. As a non-cable subscriber, I have access to very little of the content on the site. If I want to watch an episode of Slice’s Til Debt Do Us Part or any Sportnet content, I’m out of luck with RoD. I can go to the Slice.ca and watch every episode from season 1 – 8 for free, but I can’t watch the 3 old episodes available on RoD because I don’t subscribe to that channel. To me this is essentially Rogers attempting to create a tiered “cable television 2″ online.

As a person who has abandoned cable and satellite in lieu of paying for loads of crap I’ll never watch, you would figure Rogers would be trying to court people like myself to use their service.  Maybe their intent is to simply create a value added service for their cable customers, but if that’s the case, don’t compare the service to Hulu. Hulu is probably the one thing that the MPAA and television networks have done right when it comes to bringing their content to the world. Content providers actually working together to provide a valuable service to end users in an easy to use format.

What Rogers has built is essentially a platform meant to exclude satellite subscribers and those who don’t subscribe to either service. 6 months down the line we’ll probably have a similar website for Bell Expressvu, which will only compound the problem as Bell will keep all the CTV content and this will become the next frontier of the Rogers versus Bell battle in Canada.

To Canadians this has to be frustrating. Rogers seems to have a reasonable start with this website, built using a proven technology. The site is usable, aside from the horrible navigation. The video that is available is pretty good quality.  I have often heard the refrain of Canadian users about being envious of US only Hulu site and we’ve now waited over 2 years to get something similar.  Ideally Canadians deserve better.  Guess we’re back to waiting for hulu.ca.

This Halloween costume is one of the best I’ve ever seen. This guy fabricated an entire Tauntaun in painstaking detail for his costume. The part I find crazy is that he’s on at least a 2 foot high platform inside the costume.

As more and more people become connected using smartphones like the iPhone and Blackberry it has become even more important for websites to feature mobile portals that make it easy to access websites. Here’s a list of the major Canadian news outlets and how they’ve fared with each of their offerings. I’ve tested each of these on my iPhone, but they should viably work on Blackberry, Android and other smartphones with a decent browser.

CBC.ca (http://cbc.qwapi.ca/)
CBC’s mobile website probably has the most visual style of all the sites I’ve looked at. They pack the most content onto the page, though that comes at a price. A lot of the links are just on the cusp of being too small to comfortably read from a distance, especially on the content pages where the text isn’t bolded like the links of the same size. Adjusting from portrait to landscape on my iPhone does help the size, but I find reading the complete width left to right on the screen to strain my eyes a bit at that size.

Toronto Star (http://www.thestar.com/iphone/)
The Toronto Star’s mobile site strikes a good balance between being functional while having a little bit of visual flair. The design works well both portrait and landscape modes. Their start page offers 2 lead stories from each main topic, then a link to more stories.

National Post (http://www.nationalpost.com/m/)
I find the National Post’s offering seems to come off as the most pedestrian of all the sites. It’s not bad, but doesn’t seem to do anything with any flair. The only thing featured on the start page are the top stories, with all the links to the rest of the sections buried at the bottom.

Canada.com (http://www.canada.com/mobile)
Canada.com is the news portal associated with Canwest Global. This site is presented well and features some nice usability tweaks. There is menu dropdown at the top that allows you to quickly access the major sections. As well the footer has links to all the major sections, plus collapsible menus allowing you to quickly down into further subsections of content. The footer also has home and back to top buttons which are handy. I think these tweaks come as a trade-off too as the site seems a little slower then some of the other sites.

Canoe.ca (http://m.en.canoe.ca/)
Canoe is the news portal for Quebecor Media, which owns The Sun chain of newspapers. I would say their mobile site is easily the crappiest of all these media sites. There seems little to no effort put into styling the content for the page. The other beef I have is that they paginate the content. My iPhone can easily render more text on the page, making me load a new page every 6 paragraphs is annoying. They definitely have a long way to go to catch up.

Globe and Mail (http://m.theglobeandmail.com/)
The Globe and Mail’s mobile presentation isn’t the flashiest, but it features probably the nicest typography of all these sites.  The part I like about it is that it does load quickly and gives you plenty of links from the various sections.  It also allows you to sort by top stories and most recently posted.

Ever since the iPhone was released, along with the iPod before it, it seems companies have constantly released devices that have been labeled as Apple “killers”. Devices that aim to finally knock Apple off their pedestal as market leader. To date there has yet to be an “iPhone killer”, yet that doesn’t stop the media from ramping up the hype for the next upcoming device.

I was recently at a monthly meetup of designers and developers in Waterloo and a representative from RIM was there presenting on the merits of the Blackberry as a development platform. At one point during his presentation he mentioned how Apple was very good at articulating what they are good at, yet Blackberry does a crappy job of this very thing. To me this isn’t something that is exclusively the realm of Blackberry. Pretty much every smartphone manufacturer has the same problem when competing with Apple.

After seeing this new Verizon commercial yesterday, this served as a perfect example of what handset manufacturers are doing wrong. It’s a quaint and clever concept that I’m sure Verizon paid a boatload to get the rights to using the Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer characters. But after watching that video, what handset got the most facetime in that commercial? While it wasn’t the actual iPhone in the commercial, the viewer saw Verizon’s iPhone stand-in on screen for 20 seconds of a 30 second spot. The Verizon handsets only show up between 23 seconds and 28 seconds of the video. So 66% of the commercial featured the iPhone, and 10% was spent talking about the products they sell, then the other 24% spent talking about Verizon and their network.
Message: The iPhone is useless because AT&T has a crappy network. Verizon has an awesome network. Buy this Windows phone, or buy this Google Android phone.

Contrast that ad with an Apple ad selling the iPhone. Nothing but the phone and its function are shown for the first 23 seconds. 1 second devoted to app store logos, 2 seconds for iPhone logo, 2 seconds for carrier logo and 2 seconds for Apple logo. So 76.6% of the commercial was devoted to showing the product and 23.3% was used for the of branding various partners. Apple didn’t once mention verbally the network or the carrier.
Message: Look at all the cool stuff you can do with your iPhone

Can you see the disconnect here? A new device like the HTC Droid hits the market within the last 2 weeks. It’s supposed to be a real contender to the iPhone throne. Yet the handset is relegated to 2.5 seconds of face time in this Verizon commercial. Do we know anything that the device is capable of? About the only info you get is what smartphone OS the phone is running and the price. Apparently the only reason to get one of these 2 phones Verizon is offering is because their network is better.

Apple’s device has been on the market for over 2 years now, yet Apple focuses on the positive. They show you what cool things the iPhone empowers you to do. They maximize the amount of time you see the product on screen and keep the message simple and on point. The carrier is an afterthought.

This is where Apple has diverged from all other handset providers. They control how the iPhone is sold and marketed. They don’t allow it to be lumped in with a bunch of other similar looking phones in the carriers marketing. Essentially they are selling a phone, they don’t care about the network or the carrier, they allow their product to sell itself instead.

When talking to the RIM rep I commented to him about Apple’s carrier relationship and marketing contrasted with how Blackberry and the rest of the smartphone makers. He mentioned that BB spends a lot of time managing and working their partnerships with carriers, helping them implement things like carrier branded app stores. While I’m sure they do great business together, Apple has done it differently. They only need the carrier for their network and retails sales channels. Apple handles pretty much everything else. The carrier is an afterthought.

You would figure that Apple’s way of doing business would have carriers running the opposite way, yet as seen in Canada recently, nothing could be further from the truth. Bell and Telus, after losing large chunks of marketshare to Rogers and their exclusive iPhone arrangement, spent billions of dollars to build an HSPA+ network in part to accommodate the iPhone. Now that Rogers exclusivity agreement with Apple is over rivals Bell and Telus will also be offering the iPhone as well. This after Bell spent the summer mocking the iPhone in their Palm Pre ads. It will be curious to see how Bell and Telus will market the iPhone, given Apple controls the advertising and they won’t be able to play the my networks better then your network card against Rogers.

Handset manufacturers will never create this “iPhone killer” if their device is always playing second fiddle to the carrier.  By allowing the carrier to handle promotion of their devices they are shooting themselves in the foot with every new handset they release.  While Apple’s iPhone stays in the spotlight, the latest RIM, Motorola, Palm or Samsung device just becomes part of the crowd because carriers don’t market one smartphone any differently then they do the others in their lineup.