Author: dave Page 58 of 75

So I arrived back from Victoria on Wednesday, with a relatively effortless flight back. The plane was a wide-body and there weren’t many people, so we all had lots of room.

I left Victoria at 11 am and arrived back in Toronto at 7:20 pm. I was home by 8, for a “real-time” commute of about 6 hours.

Then this morning, I left the house about 6 am (morning came really early) but didn’t get into the office until about 9. Add in another 3 hours of travel time to get home again tonight (at least, since the commute home is always longer) and I’ll end up spending as much or more time travelling back and forth from work today as I did yesterday to go from one end of the country to the other. What a screwy way to spend my time.

Anyway, the weather in Victoria was beautiful — sunny and warm. As opposed to the freezing rain I’m looking at right now here in beautiful downtown Scarborough. But the lasting impression I’m left with after touring around Victoria is — We’ll never be able to afford a house!

The housing market in Victoria is red-hot right now. Which is nice, if you already have one, but not so good if you’re looking to buy. Heather is staying in a nice place right now that reminds us a lot of the house we used to own in Regina. Unfortunately, it’s probably worth about $1 million or more in Victoria. We could never move into that neighbourhood.

We spent some time looking in the part of town we hope to live, near where Heather’s practice will be. While the houses are more “affordable” there, we’re still looking at paying twice what we’ll be able to get for our Hamilton home, just to get something with a roof. If we want a basement, or a back-yard, or anything else, we’ll be looking at a lot more than that.

It was certainly a reality check. It underscored for me that I need to ramp up my consulting business considerably in order to pull my weight in the mortgage department. And if we decide to rent instead of buy (which is looking likely at this stage) it will be tough to find a place that will welcome our two dogs. Most of the rentals we saw listed were decidedly pet-unfriendly.

Oh well — we knew we were starting a new, grand adventure. This trip merely clarified just how grand it’s going to be. I can’t wait to get started.

I’ve been in Victoria for most of last week and the first part of this one. So I haven’t been blogging (as you would have noticed if you’ve been visiting.)

I had hoped to show you some pictures from around here, but I’ve been unable to get decent connections to the Internet, so I’ve been passing on worrying about it and concentrating on enjoying myself.

My wife, Heather, has been out here since just after Christmas and we’ve been having fun looking at potential sites for her new practice office. It looks like she and her partner are close to signing a lease for an ideal location. It’s all very exciting.

As for where we are going to live when we’re out here, that’s a different story. We know the area we’d like to be in, but we’re not sure that we’ll be wanting to buy another house when we arrive in the summer. So we’re looking at renting, but having two large dogs limits the market considerably!

Oh well, these are the things that make moving so much fun, right?

I’ll be back in Hamilton later this week and I’ll resume regular programming then. In the meantime, Go Canada!

It would appear that all those naysayers and conspiracy theorists who argued that the United States didn’t really put a man on the moon back were right.

Check out this footage, if you don’t believe me. The camera doesn’t lie, right?

(Warning — Don’t be tempted to click any of the other links on the page. Or at least, don’t tell anybody if you do!)

You know I love my IPod. I’ve talked about that often enough here.

But as a communications consultant, I’m always looking for ways that new media can help businesses. So far, I haven’t had a lot of luck convincing companies that podcasts are something that they can turn to their advantage. But the business reasons for including tools like blogs and podcasts in your communications toolkit are slowly piling up.

Now, here’s another cool tool.

Introducing ITunesU. Apple has unveiled this specialized version of its popular ITunes online music store that universities can sign up for. It gives them all the tools they need to create their own online content.

Here’s a blurb:

iTunes U* is a free, hosted service for colleges and universities that provides easy access to your educational content, including lectures and interviews 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

It’s the most powerful way to manage a broad range of audio or video content and make it available quickly and easily to students, faculty, and staff. And it is the only application that supports the overwhelmingly popular iPod. iTunes U also offers you the simplicity and mobility you expect from Apple because it is based on the same easy-to-use technology of iTunes Music Store.

While this service is aimed at universities, it’s easy to imagine that large companies would be interested in adapting this technology to their own in-house communication activities. They could deliver all kinds of audio and video content right to employees.

There are a lot of opportunities here and I expect we’ll see this kind of application leaping into the commercial area. The revolution continues…

“Gravity. It isn’t just a good idea. It’s the Law.”

If that phrase sounds familiar, it might be because you’ve seen the Gravity Poster, which features it.

It’s sort of a cult item and the guy that created it, Gerry Mooney, has set up a really neat page that tracks The History of the Gravity Poster.

It’s interesting to see the progress of the phrase, which Mooney originally coined in 1977, through the years. As I pointed out a couple of days ago, tools like Google make it easier for us to track down references to things like a particular phrase.

It’s an interesting story. And it’s cool that Mooney has put the story into a format that anyone can follow. But the brilliance of what he’s done is how he then links back to the original Gravity Poster. I bet he ends up selling a lot more of them, thanks to his little story.

It’s a nice use of the Internet and it’s something that has no real counterpart in the non-Web world. What do you think?

-Thanks to Seth Grodin for the link

In the wake of Canadians electing another minority government, there hasn’t been as much talk recently about our “first past the post” electoral system.

That’s probably because the current system seemed to work this time, at least in terms of kicking out the Liberals, but not giving the Tories an unlimited mandate.

But what if we had proportional representation?

If you’re interested, you might want to check out fairvote.ca. They’ve looked at the results from Monday night and figured out what our electoral map would look like if we had proportioned the seats to the percentage of popular vote. It’s interesting to look at the winners and the losers in that kind of a system.

Of course, if we really had PR, we might have voted differently.

There are still several provinces considering some form of PR. But in the last year, BC and PEI voters voted against the proposals in referendums. So it looks like the future of this initiative is in question.

There are those who think that the biggest obstacle to the acceptance of PR is that those who benefit the most from the status quo (the elected politicians) are the ones who will have to make changes. And so far, that hasn’t happened.

This could be an interesting year. In the meantime, read some of the stuff on fairvote.ca and make up your own mind.