Archive: Posts from July, 2008
July 21st, 2008, 6 Comments »
AdHack is running a new assignment on Rogers and the iPhone:
Rogers has been criticized for its underwhelming advertising. When the iPhone was announced they had nothing on their website until a teaser appeared. AdHack member Brendan Wilson though the teaser was “lame.” Doesn’t a great device deserve better? We think we can do better. Yeah — we know you can do better!
We call this challenge Assignment #9: Create the iPhone ad that Rogers should have used to launch and promote the iPhone in Canada. You can praise it, you can hate on it. The choice is yours. Remember to tag your submission with “Assignment #9″ when you upload!
Here’s what I came up with:
It references the fact that Rogers promised an early bird breakfast to those standing in line. But Travis says “the only food was granola bars at about 10 or 11 a.m., but only enough for about one bar for every three people”.
Thus far, I’m quite happy with my iPhone. I’ve never had a GPS-enabled device before, and I find identifying my location kind of existentially thrilling. The UI is everything people say it is, and I can certainly type on it way faster than I could text on my old phone. I haven’t really discovered any must-have apps yet. I just read about AirMe, which may become my Flickr uploader of choice.
Complaints? I want a one-tap (the iPhone term for ‘click’) means of returning to the audio I was playing from elsewhere in the UI, or from when the device is in sleep mode. More importantly, the battery life is kind of pitiful. If you’re using data functions on the phone, you pretty much have to plug it in every day. I can live with that, but it’s not really satisfactory.
UPDATE: Rob from Techvibes asked me to pimp his Ad Hack commission.
6 Comments »
July 18th, 2008, 9 Comments »
A couple of Winnipegers are visiting us this weekend. We discussed going for Slurpees, and they unveiled their vast knowledge base of all things Slurpable. Apparently Slurpees are very popular, because it has been the Slurpee Capital of the World for nine years running:
“It’s nostalgic at this point,” said regional market manager of 7-Eleven Canada, Inc., Dale Shaw. “This is probably the only place in the world where it’s a four-season beverage.” Slurpees have been a Winnipeg staple for generations, he said.
Shaw said the best-performing store in the city is at Pembina Highway and Killarney Avenue. “For the province, it’s Steinbach,” he said. The best-selling Slurpee flavours are G-Shock Gatorade and Slurpaccino.
Really? Gatorade and Slurpaccino? That feels like new-flavour marketing to me–those are the flavours I avoid like a the semi-solid plague.
Apparently Alex Perez made a documentary about the phenomenon back in 2006. You can watch a couple of video clips on the film’s site.
9 Comments »
July 17th, 2008, 12 Comments »
I’ve been meaning to write a few posts about my new hometown of Victoria, but other more worldly things keep coming up. There’s a bizarre retail phenomenon in downtown Victoria that deserves mention. On Johnston Street, a busy shopping street in the centre of town, there are three comic book shops within a block of each other. In fact, two of them are next door to each other. Check it out:
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I was reminded of this unlikely confluence while in Legends Comics and Books buying the final issue of Y: The Last Man (a truly superb series). I should have asked the guy behind the counter what the deal was (maybe somebody owns more than one of the shops?). I’ll do so the next time I’m down on Johnson Street.
I know there’s some retail theory about assembling a group of similar shops, and a tide that raises all boats. But this doesn’t feel sustainable. Still, if I remember correctly, there have been three shops on Johnson for years. Weird, eh?
LoJo: Really, You’re Going With That?
Incidentally, there’s a City of Victoria-backed effort to rebrand a few blocks of Johnson Street with the heinous epithet ‘LoJo’. It feels like an awful, desperate attempt to associate that area with the SoHo’s of New York and London.
Informal neighbourhood names shouldn’t come from City Hall–they should be devised by the people in the neighbourhood. Maybe that’s what happened here, but I’d never heard the term before I saw it on a silly banner on a lamppost.
12 Comments »
July 17th, 2008, 7 Comments »
Down the street from our apartment in Victoria, there’s a hilariously dangerous rope swing rigged up in the front yard of a house:
It seems like an invitation for disaster, doesn’t it?
This, incidentally, is the first photo I took with the camera on my new iPhone.
7 Comments »
July 16th, 2008, 11 Comments »
I don’t drink. I did when I was a teenager, but that was mostly for show. I never really acquired a taste for alcohol. Plus, I’m kind of anhedonic. I’m not a teetotaller–go forth and drink up–it’s just not for me.
At various people’s urgings, I have, on occasion, tasted an alcoholic beverage. They mostly taste bad, but nothing tastes more foul to my virgin tongue than wine.
Of course, nearly everybody else loves wine. And that’s fine. I do find the snobby celebration of all things vino quite farcical. The frequent bollocks from wine producers, sellers and consumers gets kind of grating. Plus, I find that anybody who takes a single wine appreciation course becomes a confident assessor of the grape juice, and can hold forth at length about its ‘oaken, fruity frankness’ or whatever.
I’ve always imagined that it was just a twist of fate that made wine the most examined beverage in our society. Why not, say, orange juice? “My, the pulpy tang of this Valencia 2002 really sneaks up on you, doesn’t it?”
I can’t remember where, but I recently read a fantastic article about the moral superiority that now accompanies discussions of food and wine. Like, we’re better people because we eat organic chicken.
That’s a long, ranty introduction to this blog post entitled “How To Be A Snob: Drinking Alcohol” (thanks to Waxy):
Do not speak. Scent is pretty easy to verify, so if you guess wrong then everyone will know what a yutz you are. If someone ventures their own review as to what it smells like, frown as though you’re too busy concentrating on this intense bouquet to interrupt it with stupid words. This automatically gives you the edge, since as a conneisseur you know enough not to discuss anything until the full tasting is over.
I could follow these instructions, and just skip the drinking step.
UPDATE: Boris rightfully points up that this would be the perfect opportunity to pimp VinoCamp at UBC Botanical Gardens. He assures me that “it’s like wine tasting minus the snobbery…or something.”
11 Comments »
July 15th, 2008, 12 Comments »
At some point in my adult life, I learned this rule of thumb:
The monthly cost of housing (that is, rent or mortgage) should comprise less than 30% of your income.
It’s a kind of personal finance benchmark: if you’re spending too much on housing, you’re probably not living an economically-sustainable lifestyle. For example, I recently read that, on average, Montrealers “spent 18.6 per cent of its income on housing and shelter costs in 2006″. On an unrelated note, the median cost of housing in the Montreal area seems shockingly low at $683 a month.
However, I’ve never been clear as to whether they meant 30% of your gross or your net income. I decided to finally figure it out, and write up the answer.
First off, various sources indicate that the correct metric is 30% of your ‘household’ (or sometimes ‘family’) income. So what’s ‘household income’? According to Wikipedia:
Household income is a measure of current private income commonly used by the United States government and private institutions. To measure the income of a household, the pre-tax money receipts of all residents over the age of 15 over a single year are combined. Most of these receipts are in the form of wages and salaries (before withholding and other taxes), but many other forms of income, such as unemployment insurance, disability, child support, etc., are included as well.
So the key phrase there is ‘pre-tax money’. Apparently, then, the rule of thumb applies to your gross income. Does that jibe with what you thought?
12 Comments »
July 15th, 2008, 15 Comments »
About a month ago, we bought a NatureMill indoor composter. It’s a pretty cool device. You load all your food waste (pretty much everything, excepting bones, citrus and fruit pits), it churns it up, and in about a month, you get compost. All for about 50 cents of power a month, according to their website. Here’s a two-and-a-half minute introductory video.
This is obviously a pricier option than the bucket-plus-worms option, but that’s not viable in our current residence. Plus, we’re much better composters when the device is within easy reach. And this thing has an air filter, so it doesn’t smell up the house.
The irony is that we have limited use for the loamy compost that the machine generates. We’ve got some plants, but once they’re filled up, we’re left with only one option: illegal dumping. Of dirt.
I remember talking to Vancouver’s deputy mayor a couple of years ago, and he mentioned that half of all of the city’s waste in landfills is organic. It’s shocking how little garbage we now remove from our apartment. We’re down to, like, one grocery bag’s worth of garbage a week. So, thus far, the experiment is working. Plus, it’s kind of fascinating to watch stuff decompose.
Over-Packaged CFLs and Compostable Cups
Some of that garbage featured the destroyed remnants of some plastic packaging. I thought it was ironic that these eco-friendly CFL bulbs came in this irritating, impossible-to-open, non-recyclable blister pack:
Speaking of plastic and composting, I’ve been spending a lot of time working in the new Serious Coffee location in Cook Street Village. They have some tasty flavoured iced teas. The other day, I noticed some fine print on the ‘plastic’ cup (much like this one). Like a number of cafes and restaurants, they’re using containers made of a corn resin which, while not recyclable, are compostable (not a word, but it should be). I didn’t ask the staff whether they separate the cups out for composting. Instead, I took mine home, cut it into strips and stuck it in our composter. We’ll see if it still looks like bits of plastic in a month.
15 Comments »
July 14th, 2008, 1 Comment »
I haven’t seen No Country For Old Men. It never came to Gozo last year. We don’t have a TV at the moment, and I’m disinclined to watch such a renowned film on my laptop. I’ll wait until we build our theatre room along with the rest of the house, I guess.
Anyhow, while researching ebooks last week, I happened upon this short interview between Cormac McCarthy and the Coen Brothers. An interview with McCarthy is a rare thing (according to Wikipedia, he sat for his first ever TV interview in 2007!), and it’s an enjoyable read:
C.M. But Miller’s Crossing is in that category. I don’t want to embarrass you, but that’s just a very, very fine movie.
J.C. Eh, it’s just a damn rip-off.
C.M. No, I didn’t say it wasn’t a rip-off. I understand it’s a rip-off. I’m just saying it’s good.
It’s about eight months old, but if you missed it and liked the movie, it’s worth reading.
1 Comment »
July 14th, 2008, 1 Comment »
Monique is a keynote speaker down at Portus 2008, a Harry Potter convention down in Dallas. I’ve been enjoying her photos, which provide yet another view into the dorky but lovable world of intense fandom. Here are two favourites. I love that He Who Must Not Ever, Ever Be Named is on a call:
1 Comment »
July 13th, 2008, 7 Comments »
Note: This website is habitually G-rated when it comes to language (okay, maybe 14 Years). By necessity, this post features use of the F-bomb. If that troubles you, skip ahead.
Yesterday I saw Young People Fucking (here’s the trailer), a charming Canadian sex comedy. It’s a highly-structured movie, following five couples through five stages of an evening of sex (from ‘prelude’ to ‘afterglow’). The couples represent a variety of typical relationships–the first date, the exes, the friends, the couple and the roommates.
So, we end up with a movie in 25 short scenes exploring and poking (heh) gentle fun at the foibles, morays and politics of sex. It’s a reasonably witty film, with enough laughs to sustain the formal structure. Despite the title, there’s actually very little nudity in the film–you’d see as much on an average episode of The L-Word. Roger Ebert sums up the film nicely:
No great lessons are learned. There is little high drama. As it stands, the screenplay could supply fodder for countless theatrical companies. It’s…engaging, that’s what it is. These are all essentially nice people. Canadians, you know.
It’s a small sample group, but Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 80%.
The ensemble cast is generally good, with Callum Blue (previously seen in the excellent and gone-too-soon “Dead Like Me”) and Carly Pope (previously seen in “Popular”) standing out. I think Ms. Pope has gotten a bit of a short shrift from Hollywood, she can punch well above her current weight class. Plus, she has terrific eye brows. I did have a trivial complaint about the title. Nearly everyone in the cast is on the wrong side of 30, so I’m not sure it’s fair to go with ‘Young People’. I rather like the shorter title People Fucking.
It’s no great masterpiece, and it’s a bit risque for a first date movie, but I recommend it. The movie had a ridiculously short run here in Victoria, and probably won’t last in other cinemas across the country in the busy summer season. Seek it out or rent Young People Fucking. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
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