Tonight I have been invited by the fine folks over at Diamond Estates Wines (on Facebook and on Twitter @DiamondEstates) are launching a new kind of wine along with the NHL Alumni called Hat Trick.

From what they have said in the press release they sent me they tell me that the wine is the result of Diamond Estates bringing together three distinctly Canadian elements for the launch of “Hat Trick’ Wine. Toronto, Hockey, and fine Niagara wines come together to create the perfect hat trick of distinctly Canadian elements to host the launch of Diamond Estates newest vintages “Hat Trick White’ and ‘Hat Trick Red’.

Diamond Estates Wines & Spirits Ltd, one of Ontario’s leading winemaking facilities, has partnered with the NHL Alumni Association to come up with the new hockey-inspired VQA wines. Each three-varietal wine blend has been specifically crafted in collaboration between former NHL stars and the winemakers. $0.50 from each bottle sold goes to the NHL Alumni Association to support various charitable causes and promote the game of hockey. Charity is always good in my books which is why I am all the happier to be supporting this event and this wine.  The event will be talked about on the Twitters using the hashtag #HatTrickWineLaunch.

Also, something which sounds just awesome, NHL Alumni Members will be in attendance to comment on the development process of Hat Trick. Attending members include: Johnny Bower, Rod Gilbert, Mark Napier, Lou Franceschetti, Troy Crowder, Dennis Maruk, Ryan Vandenbussche, Jason Zent, Dave McLlwain and more!

CONTEST!

But, I have also decided that it isn’t enough to just tell you guys about an event I am going to because what the heck is the point of me telling y’all about an event you can’t or didn’t attend? This is why I contacted the folks over at Hat Trick Wines and they have graciously agreed to hook up one of my lucky readers with a prize pack! I can’t say what is in the prize pack because, I honestly don’t know right now but I have been told it’ll be damn good!

CONTEST RULES

So here’s the deal: All you got to do is comment on this blog post below about your favorite NHL experience.

You can only comment once and have it count BUT you can get an extra entry per day if you tweet something like this:

I want to win a  Hat Trick Wine prize pack in honor of  #HatTrickWineLaunch from @DiamondEstates & @TheDanLevy http://wp.me/pVpvJ-1eO

The tweet has to have my Twitter handle, Diamond Estates’, a link to this post & the hashtag to be a valid entry.

Contest is open to GTA residents and is will be open for entry until Saturday afternoon at 5 P.M. Toronto time (as evidenced by my blog’s comment system – if it says you posted before then and you followed the rules you’re good to go!).

WordPress for BlackBerry app screenshot

I have used both a BlackBerry and an Android for blogging on the go especially during my Post-A-Day Challenge. I found it especially useful to do when I was pressed for time. However, there a couple of limitations I have noticed with the apps which should be noted before you go to try and do it for yourself – assuming you want to make your blog post looks as awesome as it can.

Before I go on, I have to mention that although I have not used the WordPress for iPhone app I have heard that many of the same issues exist and so I assume these tips are just as relevant for you iOS users but can’t confidently tell you one way or the other.

WordPress for Android app screenshot

The key thing I have found was to do some planning before you try to blog from your phone. Why? Because it will make your life way easier if you set up certain aspects of the post on a computer beforehand.

There are a couple of reasons for this which will be laid out below.
 

• Pictures (Inserting): It is way, way easier to insert an image on your computer. Mainly because the WordPress app only likes to put images on the top or on the bottom of your post then you have to move them around manually. As well, you can make sure the picture resizes correctly, and it will, of course, upload quicker. Pop the pictures in your blog, name them, and put fragments of thoughts…or even “blah blah blah” between them to show yourself where to stick your content.
• Pictures Resizing: Chances are the pictures you take on your phone are going to be too big for your blog’s theme. Because of this it will end up looking horrible til you get to a computer and fix it OR feel like figuring out the math and manually resizing it by constraining it with HTML code. The image settings within the WordPress app don’t necessarily reflect your theme’s so your best off taking one of your phone’s camera pictures already on your computer and seeing what the length of it gets resized to when you resize it to the width of your blog’s theme. Now go into your phone’s WordPress app’s settings and set the “custom” image length and width to reflect your findings.
• Links: They’re a pain to add in correctly on your phone I’ve found relative to doing it on your computer. Best thing is to, again, plan it beforehand. As well, the WordPress system on the full web gives you a helpful pop-up box which lets you easily reference previous blog posts by just clicking.
• Tags: While links are a pain to add in, technically, tags aren’t. However, if you want your posts to be able to link back to each other and you plan on using tags you’ve already used for a topic make sure you add them in beforehand. Again, the full WordPress gives you a drop down of all the tags you’ve previously used so everything stays nice and neat whereas the mobile app doesn’t do this. It sounds like nothing but wait til you’ve been blogging for a while and have hundreds of posts and have to remember what the exact tags you previously used were: not fun.
• URL: The URL of your post is an important part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). WordPress online allows you to edit the last bit of your post’s URL whereas the mobile app just takes the title of your post.
• Bullet & Numbered Points (aka ordered and unordered lists): These are just annoying to set up and so I again, recommend setting it up beforehand and then loading the very fragmented, nonsensical (to everyone but you) post on your phone and edit from there filling in all the gaps.

In case you are wondering, yes, I used my own tips to write this post. The words “blah blah” were actually used quite frequently in this post before it was fleshed out on the subway and streetcar where I am now. I guess you can sort of accuse me of breaking one main tip (plan ahead) into a bunch of little ones but from all the bloggers I’ve spoken to, not many have considered this method for blogging on the go and ask me how I’ve managed to do it on numerous occasions and still make the post look as good as if I’d blogged from a computer. Now my secret is out.

Anyone else out there try any similar methods? Anyone know any better methods? Let us all know in the comment section below!

Thought I would do some thoughts on reading and this 26 Books A Year or Book A Fortnight Challenge for 2012. You remember, the one inspired by Dave Fleet & Erin Bury I mentioned in a previous post a few weeks back.

I have read a  large number of books already putting me well ahead of schedule but the bulk have been novels. The books I have read thus far are:

1. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
2. TimeRiders: Day of the Predator by Alex Scarrow
3. The War That Came Early: West and East by Harry Turtledove
4. TimeRiders by Alex Scarrow
5. The War That Came Early: The Big Switch by Harry Turtledove

I have already begun a sixth book but I am finding myself wanting to stick to novels more and more. I can say it is because they are all parts of series which makes it more desirable to do but I really have to push myself for more mentally stimulating reading in my opinion. Problem with that, of course, is it is way, way harder! One thing I am really finding out though is the massive amount of importance there is for the more hard data kind of books, or books that make you think, it is all the more important that you find the author with the right writing style. Then again, maybe that’s just me. Have you found this yourselves?

I am sure most Canadians who are reading this blog recognize the logo above. I have taken the actual brand name out but I am aware that most of you will recognize the brand that made these commercials.

The brand name, however, is the only thing I have taken out of this screen shot. As I discussed in my previous post on removing barriers to engagement I have to wonder how it hasn’t occurred to this brand to include some links or information to their social media presences or even their website. Nothing, nada, not a word written. The campaign is called “Made to SHARE” for crying out loud! How has no one suggested to this brand that they actually make things sharable!

Before I go on let me make clear that, yes, I understand the campaign’s point is to encourage people to share the product amongst their friends but the word share has taken on a whole new meaning. As well, the actual ad that prompted this post was based around the idea of a picture of a guy being shared around by his family and friends on different mediums (phones, tablets, and computers) so it is obviously being done via some sort of online sharing even if it is only being done via email (unlikely as that is in this day and age).

This kind of makes me want to bang my head on the wall over and over and I am not an advertising professional. Maybe there is something here I am missing something that is obvious to anyone actually in the business but to me it seems like a massive miss. Not only isn’t any information listed on the advertising spot as shown above, they don’t have a YouTube channel where they can put up for ready access all their “Made to share” advertising spots so people can….wait for it….SHARE THEM! 

Why? Please. Tell. Me. Why. It makes absolutely zero sense to me that they wouldn’t be attempting to convert this campaign by encouraging it go viral. Seems like a pretty obvious move to me but, again, maybe I am missing something.

Media producers and distributors don’t you think it is time you guys joined the rest of the world in the 21st Century and stopped with these silly rules based on geolocation? Honestly, you are just encouraging the very piracy you sit around complaining about. Case in point the image above. My friends and I were talking about re-watching this series from 2004-05 which unfortunately got cancelled after one season. My friend looked for the DVDs and they don’t exist. He looked for it on iTunes, and it is not available to be sold in Canada. What do you think people’s next step is going to be? We look online and see if we can find it pirated. Lo and behold it is readily available online!

Another case in point my friend asked me to recommend some new music. I told him about this awesome new artist I had heard about out of the UK. My friend went to iTunes to look for the artist’s music and download it only to find they only had one or two songs available for download in Canada. Can you guess what the next steps were? (Hint: Exactly the same as above.)

Both of the cases above were people willing and ready to pay for the content but they weren’t allowed to because of a boundary drawn on a map. The first example specifically that content is available FOR FREE on one side of a line and utterly unavailable for any price on the other side of it. Calling it ridiculous doesn’t begin to do this justice.

If content distributors aren’t distributing the content where they have the license to do so then their licenses should be revoked and be given to someone who will or just be distributed by the creators themselves. It is that simple. This is the second decade of the 21st Century and it is time the people who are in charge of getting content out there realized what this means. If you don’t, then I don’t see how you can then turn around and complain that people are pirating your content when you seem to be doing everything you can to encourage them to do so.

As the title of this post implies today we are going to talk about brands and how they expect the consumer/customer to interact with them. I have been seeing quite a few ads and commercials recently where the advertiser wants to show their 21st Century savvy and how they are available on different social media platforms but they do it like you see in the picture above. The announce to the world (or whoever is seeing the ad) that, yes, they are present on those platforms but they seem to think that we all like to play a game of Where’s Waldo with them.

Waldo via Waldo Wiki

 I mean, I loved sitting on trips with my family when I was a kid and opening one of the Where’s Waldo books but that was recreational and something to do when we were sitting in an airport/on a plane/in a car and had nothing better to do. The point of advertising and being present on the various social media platforms is so that the consumer and potential customers can engage with the brand/advertiser. Don’t make it difficult for us!

This shouldn’t be news to anyone either. Heck, I recently was in the the new shop on Queen St West called Community 54 where they have old arcade video games from way back in the day. One of those games, Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey, was from late enough (1996) that they thought it relevant to mention that the game had a site on this newfangled thing called the Internet. But they didn’t just announce this fact, they didn’t put “WE ARE ON THE INTERNET” and expect people to go out and find them. If you look in the picture below you can see exactly what they wrote because I snapped a picture of it.

They told people to “Check out these WEB sites” and then listed them. Done. Consumer can easily interact with those two websites assuming they had computers and access to the Internet. But at leas they didn’t lose them in the potentially interested person having to do any work to engage with the brand.

Some more examples below:

And

To be fair, the second one of the above pictures, from Union Station in Toronto, they did point to the account @unionstationTO on Twitter for us to engage with but they didn’t bother for some reason with Facebook to do the same. My guess as to why this is is because they didn’t bother to get a custom URL for their page before printing up this signage (they have’t, it seems, bothered to register a custom URL even to this day). This is just laziness plain and simple (in my opinion).

In conclusion, this is a message to all Brands, Advertisers, and Marketers: Remove barriers to engagement don’t erect them.

Have you seen similar displays as I pictured above? Have you ever gone out and actually engaged with a brand afterward or did you just say screw it because it was too much work? Let me know in the comments below.

(And in case you are wondering, no I have never bothered looking into the above pictured brand’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. As well, here’s a link provided by the Way Back Internet Machine for Gretzky.com in 1998. I couldn’t get Midway.com because it just redirects to Warner Bros which bought their assets in 2009 when Midway went bankrupt.)

In the neighborhood of Forest Hill in Toronto is a street called Vesta. Vesta starts out from Eglinton and goes south for about 1.5km before ending in a dead end. The reason for this post today is because I have driven down this road numerous times and to this day I do not know what one is supposed to do when driving north or south on this street when it intersects with Old Forest Hill Road and Dewbourne Avenue all in the same intersection. This is because of the weird angle that Old Forest Hill Road hits the north-south Vesta and the east-west Dewbourne Avenue (which ends at this intersection).

Check out the picture above where you are looking south on Vesta towards this intersection. The first stop sign you see is on Vesta Drive where it intersects with Old Forest Hill Road. Now, imagine you are driving south through this intersection, as you drive you pass Old Forest Hill Road’s stop sign. You aren’t quite on Old Forest Hill Road but you are sort of in the middle of no-man’s-land of pavement between streets. As you can see from the aerial view map below theoretically you should never be on Old Forest Hill Road but, nevertheless, when you are driving you sort of feel as if you are running the stop sign on Old Forest Hill Road because of the way the road is set up.

I don’t think we are running the stop sign when we drive south here but I also don’t want to be the unlucky individual who is driving along and gets a ticket from a bored police officer who happens to see me drive through this most confusing intersection. At the same time, it is fairly safe to assume that you do not have to stop at Old Forest Hill Road’s stop sign because it is an All Way Stop intersection so everyone on every corner should be stopping and there should be little chance of a collision. But better safe than sorry right? Well no, not so much. See the problem is if one starts stopping at Old Forest Hill Road’s sign and they aren’t supposed to and other people in the intersection don’t know what the heck you are doing your likelihood of causing an accident just went up exponentially.

It is a weird intersection and I would love to hear anyone else’s opinion on this because if we can’t all come to a consensus on this intersection and how to treat its stop signs maybe the time has come to look into a different method of managing the traffic flow (although what that may be I have no idea).

I am thinking it might also be a good idea to @mention on Twitter @TrafficServices and @311Toronto I would think they would know. (If they don’t I think we are all in trouble, haha!) Also, I am linking Toronto Police Traffic Services http://www.torontopolice.on.ca/traffic/ in this post so hopefully they’ll check it out when they see the linkback.

Map via Bing Maps

Wikipedia shut down for the redirecting people from the regular homepage which looked like this (notice the notification at the top?):

To this:

That’s awesome and I fully support their protest of it because those laws are just plain silly but I think The Oatmeal with its usual irreverence totally won the explaining what SOPA & PIPA are and why they suck game with this animated GIF (a type of image) – also available at http://theoatmeal.com/sopa - on their page:

Wikipedia: You did a damn good job! You made it extremely noticeable and had sharing buttons for Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Sorry though, Oatmeal totally won. Mainly because they used humor for their awesomeness and because they encouraged people to share the humor. I mean that literally, at the bottom of The Oatmeal’s page it says “P.S. Please pirate the shit out of this animated GIF.” Therefore, I think I am doing my part for the move against SOPA and PIPA by putting that image of awesomenss up for all y’all to grab.

If you want to know a bunch about SOPA and PIPA check out this TED Talk below by Internet writer and NYU professor Clay Shirky called “Defend Our Freedom To Share (Or Why SOPA is a Bad Idea)”:

Here is the direct link to it http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/en//id/1329.

I recently read about the release of a special beta of the new Facebook Messenger for Windows. This program for Windows 7 is standalone (it does not require your browser to be open) and yet leaves your Facebook Messenger open. Facebook Messenger aka Facebook Chat is honestly one of the primary reasons I still keep Facebook open on my computer and in my browser and this new little program gave me one less tab open in Chrome which I must say excited me. Immediately I went to https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-for-windows and downloaded this application for my computer.

One huge thing – which seems simple but this is a program which solves a pure #FirstWorldProblem – is that because the program sits in your Windows 7 taskbar (at the bottom of the screen between the “tray” – where the time and date are – and the Start menu button) it responds like any other opened program or application. It lights up yellow (or whatever color your theme defines) and you can actually really notice it and find it easily. As well, I am a huge fan of Windows shortcuts. One of my main go to Windows shortcuts has always been ALT+TAB to quickly switch between running programs. Because my Facebook Messenger is now an entirely different entity running on my computer in of itself I can now quickly switch between, say, writing a blog post like this one and chatting all without touching the mouse! So much more efficient I love it!!!

If you are running Windows 7 and the messenger/chat is one of the primary reasons you use Facebook I highly recommend downloading this program.

In his poem ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ 19th Century English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote:

‘Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

But this post is going to dispute that when it comes to corporate communications on Twitter. Well, OK, not really out and out dispute it because I wasn’t in love with the brand I am referring to in the tweet about (which you can find here) but I felt a little bit of poetry would class up the post.

What I was referring to in the tweet above is a brand who engaged with myself and a friend when we started talking about an article I read in LifeHacker. I thought this was one of the most brilliant things I had read that day and planned to give it a try when my friend told me about a product that does just this and she uses it all the time. I tweeted at the brand who makes the product in question – which as far as we knew was not available in Canada – and asked if it was available in Canada and the replied fairly quickly and told us that, yes, it was available in Canada.

To say we were happy is an understatement. I quickly went out to try and find this item at one of the chains mentioned and came up empty. I checked the chain’s online web catalog and came up empty. Each time I made a step following the advice of that brand I tweeted back at them what I was doing and the results. They never answered. It has been the better part of two weeks and still, they haven’t answered. In that time they have tweeted 15 times, the last time being on January 14th and not one time did they respond. (The first time when they did reply and tell us some info it took them about 12 hours.)

It would be one thing if they had never replied in the first place to our tweets, I would be totally fine with that because not every company and brand monitors all aspects of their social media presence, preferring to register their name and just leave it. This is the reality of the world we live in and no harm no foul if that’s the case. It would also be, sort of OK if they only came on once a month to respond to queries and hadn’t been online since the day they told me and my friend their product was available at Chain X and weren’t present to see my response. But they have been available, they have been present, they have been not only tweeting but interacting with other Twitter users and ignoring me is just bad for business. Doing this makes me feel as if I were talking to the Volcano Insurance Salesman that Peter dealt with in an episode of Family Guy from a long while back (best quality I can find.)

Do you think pretending not to be there while answering and interacting with other people is really going to have a positive response? It won’t. You’re just pissing potential customers off and ruining any relationship you may have had with them.

I have waited a while (more than 10 days) to write this blog post because I wanted to give the brand a chance to redeem themselves. They haven’t.

Better to not be doing it all than to be doing it wrong.

My friend Jon sent me this link when I told him about my previous post about religious extremism and how it hit really close to home because it involved a good friend of both of ours. (Jon was actually in the email chain that our friend replied to me to stop sending him NSFW stuff, haha.)

In case you’re wondering, no I don’t agree with everything he says in his video but the key thing is that he does a much, much better job representing the majority of Jews today. I think it is problematic to say the least when people don’t speak out against extremist lunatics which is why I am taking this space to once again talk about this issue. It is a great video but you can, if you so choose jump to a minute in because he doesn’t start until then and if you’re like me, you find the opening of showing a ton of pictures as a collage boring (and I’m Jewish!).

Some Notes

• I don’t speak Yiddish
• I dislike Phish and all jam bands but I know it is a Jewish stereotype.
• “Adon Olam” is a prayer song sang at the end of prayers on Saturday morning. It is traditional for a child (8-12 years old in general) to get up in the synagogue and be the cantor for the entire congregation for it.
• I have only seen “Don’t Mess With The Zohan.”
• “Torah” is the word which in different contexts can mean the Pentateuch (aka 5 Books of Moses); all Jewish law and thought which has been published; and the parchment scroll which is read from in synagogue, is handwritten, and contains the Pentatecuh.
• “Yarmulke” is another word for skullcap and another word for it is “kipah”
• I think gefilte fish is pretty damn good.
• My dad also wasn’t a lawyer, he was a doctor. My brother and uncle are lawyers.
• I don’t have an IDF sweatshirt, never did. I don’t have a chai around my neck either but I do have my name written in Hebrew letters in the shape of a Star of David.
• “Chalah” is a type of bread. On the Sabbath it is covered while the benediction is made over the wine before the meal.
• “Shekel” is the Israeli currency. The red strings he refers to are sold at holy places around Israel and are supposed to be good luck or ward of evil spirits…I can’t remember which it may be both.

I have seen it time and time again on Twitter in people’s bios. They are all attempting to cover their butts and say that the things they tweet are their own and personal and nothing to do with their work. I hate to say it and burst many people’s bubbles but you’re wasting a bunch of the 160 characters that Twitter gives you to write your bio.

The BBC published an article about a court ruling early in 2011 that a woman claiming she had a reasonable expectation of privacy and that her tweets were not for public consumption (except those who followed her) was wrong.

I have asked people who are labor lawyers (in Canada) if such a disclaimer would actually protect someone if they said something objectionable on Twitter and the consensus has been a resounding no. I am not a lawyer and as far as I know this exact case has never been adjudicated in Canada but I have been told such a disclaimer would be completely useless. As long as you are employed somewhere you are going to be affiliated with your employer. Your views, no matter how personal you think they are, when you express them in public they become public and a part of your online identity. If that identity includes any link to your employer – or if your employer knows about your Twitter account – then I hate to be the bearer of bad news but it won’t matter when your boss calls you into their office if you have that disclaimer up. It won’t make it any harder for them to fire you. It is about as legally effective as the coat check sign which insists they aren’t responsible for your items when you leave them with the coat check – they are and you are. I have yet to hear of a case where someone wrote something objectionable online and they were given a pass by their employer because they had that disclaimer up.

Why can’t we all get along? I think the answer is the fanatics. I really do think they are the root of some many of the problems we see in the world today. As I have made pretty clear in previous posts I am Jewish and what I am going to center on today are Jewish religious fanatics in Israel right now. However, I do think that this problem is happening all over the world (and has been for centuries) with all religions and their extremist and fringe groups.

Slate.com and the BBC and the USA Today, the New York Times, and CBS have all covered the issue of an 8 year old girl in the central Israeli town of Beit Shemesh who has been spat on and called a whore by Hasidic Jews who also live in Beit Shemesh. This poor girl is scared to walk the under 1,000 feet to her school in the mornings because of these crazed individuals. What has this girl done that has her in the center of an uproar? Apparently her sleeves aren’t long enough to the satisfaction of the Hasidic Jews across the street. It isn’t as if this girl is flaunting anything in front of these people – she doesn’t even know what it is to flaunt sexuality she is EIGHT! It also isn’t as if she is dressed particularly immodestly by most people’s standards as her family are Orthodox Jews themselves, they are just modern Orthodox Jews who use the internet and watch TV and movies and don’t dress the same way as if they lived in 18th Century Eastern Europe.

Oh, and to be clear, this story strikes close to home because I know this poor girl’s father. I have known him for almost 20 years and I know he is a fully practicing Orthodox Jew and so is his wife and children. (Trust me, he once got pissed off at me when I sent him an NSFW email!) This girl is walking to a single-sex Orthodox school where they, too, would not tolerate her being immodestly or improperly dressed. I remember in my private Orthodox Jewish day school days we weren’t allowed to have our shirts untucked, had to wear collared shirts, weren’t allowed jeans, and could only wear baseball caps during when we weren’t in the classroom (like at recess or lunch or after school).

This isn’t a clash between Ultra-Orthodox Jews and women in bikinis (although I have no problem with women in bikinis and encourage it) this is a clash between two sets of Orthodox Jews one who has decided that the other isn’t “Orthodox enough.” If these people are so dedicated to being Ultra-Orthodox Jews what the heck are they doing standing on the sidewalks when this girl is going to school anyway? Shouldn’t they be praying or studying or going to work?

-

These people’s rabbis are, in my mind, nothing more than cult leaders as they seem to forget some basic tenets of Judaism when teaching their followers. In my youth there was one concept of Judaism which was commonly beaten into my head as an all important thing: Don’t desecrate the name of God. Basically, Judaism teaches that because Jews are God’s Chosen People anything they do reflects on God and therefore acting in a way that is perceived negatively by people is bad PR for God. It is something taken so seriously that we are told that neither regular repentance, repenting on the Day of Atonement – Yom Kippur, or suffering can fully effect atonement for a person transgressing this sin. (Source here.) If I had to guess I would assume that this story and behavior like this puts Jews in a pretty bad PR spot but I can check with some of my friends in marketing and PR to make sure.

It says in the Talmud (Bava Metziya 58b-59a if you’d like to take a look) that a person who makes someone blush in public (humiliates them) it is as if they shed blood. Not only that, but the same passage relates that there are only three sins which forever prevent someone’s soul from leaving “Gehenom” (best way to describe it is Hell but it isn’t, it is a different concept but it is where one goes after they die to be cleansed of their earthly misdeeds). Two of those sins are:

1. Making someone blush
2. Coining a derogatory nickname for someone.

Ya, that’s how seriously Judaism takes publicly shaming someone else.

They go on to talk about cases from the Old Testament which show how serious an offense it is to shame someone in public and there is a big discussion about it. Funnily enough, given the circumstances of this issue in modern day Beit Shemesh, one of the case studies that the rabbis of the Talmud discuss which shows how serious a sin this is and how righteous people of the Old Testament went to great lengths to avoid this transgression is the story of Judah and his widowed daughter-in-law Tamar a lady who was ready to be thrown into a furnace for the sin of prostitution rather than shame Judah in public. The reason I say it is sort of funny is that this story which Jews are supposed to learn the importance of not shaming someone in public is the story about a woman seen to be a prostitute and what are these Hasidic crazies calling this poor 8 year old girl? A whore.

If you want more evidence of how messed up the viewpoint of some of these people are just read the comments on this blog post: http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/……8-year-old-girl-234.html.

One of the loonie toons who wrote a comment in the above linked post says that maybe it is really a young looking 18 year old girl sent by demons to tempt the young men to sin OR maybe a demon has taken over her body and because of this she was trying to lead men astray. Yes, this person seems to be completely serious. They also suggest that we are not fit to judge the whole situation because we are not big rabbinic authorities and only they are apparently suited to deciding if it is OK to verbally abuse an 8 year girl and spit on her for showing her forearms in public.

Extremism in any religion is not a good thing. It doesn’t matter if your Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or any other religion. We can all coexist if we accept that there are other schools of thought and religions and belief systems and we cannot control what other people do and shouldn’t even be considering trying to unless it impacts us in a harmful manner.

/rant

Tonight I am heading to a party celebrating the Season 2 premiere of “Museum Secrets” on History Television Canada.The point of the show is to reveal the stories of 6 irreplaceable treasures (in each episode). As an example they give the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel, and the golden mask of King Tut. Museum Secrets probes familiar legends and assumptions, using cutting edge research and technology to investigate the unknown. They get to (and bring you the viewer along) beyond the public galleries, into hidden places visitors are rarely allowed to see. When a story of an artifact moves outside the museum, the team – and by extension the viewer – follows. They have gone to the grounds of a medieval French chateau to recreate a fatal jousting accident, and down into a 50 foot hole in the Egyptian desert to stand inside the tomb of Ramesses the Great.

The show premiers tonight at 8pm on History Television Canada and they have told me to encourage tweeting using the #MuseumSecrets hashtag, which we at the party will also be doing. In fact, there’s already quite a bit of buzz going on around that hashtag so you can check it out right now.

The Museum Secrets team is using the twitter account @MuseumSecrets, and they told me they want to encourage chatter between them and the TV audience which I think is just awesome and forward thinking and such 21st Century amazingness. The show is produced by @KensingtonTV for @HistoryTVCanada and I have to find out if it is aired anywhere else (or if they make it available to stream online outside of Canada).

They told me to feel free to promote the upcoming episode, by embedding their behind the scenes vlog on my blog so here it is:

Looks cool but personally I was hoping for some cutting room floor footage of the museum – can’t have everything right?

The website for the show is museumsecrets.tv and they assure me that soon they’ll have plenty of new webisodes like this one there: Ancient Tattoos. You can also check them out on Facebook at Facebook.com/MuseumSecrets/.

This season, I am told, will include a trip to St. Petersburg with a young Canadian professor (from Toronto) as he completes his homage to ancient Scythian mummies’ body art, after reading of their discovery deep below the permafrost of Russia. One thing I am definitely looking forward to finding out about (and it will b in tonight’s episode) is about how one early technology* improved Catherine The Great’s sex life! Maybe she had an early variation of a telegraph hooked up so she could summon men for late night trysts? Hooray for historical booty calls! (I completely made that up with absolutely no research).

*To be revealed during the show, they wouldn’t tell me beforehand.

This whole thing looks very cool and I am pretty excited to see it as a history geek – I make no secret about that and you all already know the level of my history geekiness. But I want to be clear that although I had never heard of the show before they contacted me to attend their Season 2 Premiere Party if someone had told me about this just randomly I probably would have checked it out anyway. More than likely I would have eventually come across it flipping channels and been enraptured by it but I don’t want to pretend like I am pushing this show because I fell in love with it last season because I didn’t. But you’re reading the thoughts of a guy who reads alternate history, was a history major, and for a good couple of years spent the majority of his pleasure reading time reading biographies and auto-biographies. Also, I’ve seen pretty much every episode of Cities of the Underworld so this seems like a good natural step for me to go to.

Let me know what you think of the episode. I think I know what I’m going to be doing this weekend – watching Season 1!

Sports drinks we all know them and love them and are encouraged to drink them when we are doing any strenuous activities like playing sports (duh!). The purpose of them according to Wikipedia is ”designed to help athletes rehydrate when fluids are depleted after training or competition. Electrolyte replacement promotes proper rehydration, which is important in delaying the onset of fatigue during exercise.”

Now I am sure there are many of you who drink them, like me, on a hot summer day when you’re sweating (or ladies, perspiring) and many of us also know that they make a great hangover drink. If you didn’t know about this then I refer you to above statement about electrolyte replacement. The reason this is so key is because alcohol dehydrates us and that is one of the key aspects which causes a hangover.

Now, my idea…or theory if you will…if you use a sports drink as your mixer for alcohol and drink them together then theoretically it should be the ultimate in hangover prevention! I know people advocate using water as a mixer to prevent hangovers but the fact is that sports drinks should do a better job because they replenish the electrolytes – something water doesn’t do – which are lost when you drink heavily.

Has anyone ever tried this? Maybe Mythbusters should do an episode about it. (Have they?) Even if they have done one I think I am going to have to do it in the name of science…and an excuse to drink mass quantities of alcohol. I’ll let you know how it works out when I try it.

Image via Microsoft Office.

I have recently decided that I would like to further my education and increase my value to any employer. As such, I have been looking at continuing education programs from some Ontario Colleges* and in order to apply to any college you have to go through the centralized ontariocolleges.ca a site which you can use to to apply to all of Ontario’s colleges and makes the whole process streamlined.

*Side note for American readers: In Canada people who go for their B.A. go to university and a college is a place for further education after high school and a training institution that awards trade qualifications. Info via Wikipedia entry ‘College’

While signing up for an account on the site I was confronted with this as the password requirements:

• Minimum 8 Characters
• Uppercase Letters
• Lowercase Letters
• Numbers
• Symbols (e.g. @, #, $)
• Passwords as entered match each other (you have to enter it twice to confirm)

As I sat there making up a password I thought to myself “Isn’t this a little bit ridiculous already? I mean I get it that a lot of private and personal information is going in to these accounts but quite frankly my bank has less requirements for how I make my password to get into my online account than this website does. I mean, there is a point of diminishing returns for passwords where we are more and more likely to forget them because they have become so complex that we have to write them down somewhere and then what was the point of these long intricate passwords?

I get it that brute force hacking means that the hacking computer is more likely to get the password the more complex it is and complexity is arrived at by adding more characters which makes it exponentially harder to guess the password but the addition of the extra characters into the mix just makes it all the harder for us as humans to remember the password. Beyond that, I promise that a large number of us, me included, end up just telling our computers to remember the passwords for us. If we don’t do that, we write down these insanely complex passwords and if someone is really that dedicated to getting my password don’t you think they’re likely to just try and break into our houses where we’ve written these bewilderingly difficult and complex passwords down because there’s no way we are ever remembering them?

I am fine with setting up a 15 character password. I can do that and remember it with certain mnemonic devices – maybe I’ll teach you my favorite one in a later post – but for me the capitalization aspect is what kills me. At the very least sites that require such intricately constructed passwords could give us all a hint, specifically listing the password requirements below the entry dialogue, and then I won’t be so likely to hit the “Forgot Password” button on a regular basis whenever I visit the site. The funny thing is, I find the sites that require these specifically formatted passwords are always the ones I barely ever use and am more likely to hit the “Forgot Password” button whenever I visit.

Maybe it is time we move to fingerprint or retina scanning on our computers? Maybe Google/Android can share their facial recognition technology with all of these sites so they can make all of our lives way easier…everyone has a webcam nowadays anyway, right? What do you think?

Password image via Microsoft Office.

A friend called me today to ask me for help with his BlackBerry. He said his Text Messages icon had disappeared from his phone and the text messages themselves were nowhere to be found anywhere on his phone. At first I thought he must have hid the icon so I told him to “Show All” and he said it didn’t help so the next thing I told him was to restart (aka reboot) his phone. Minutes later my friend sent me a BBM message:

Him: Yooo

Me: Yo

Him: Restart fixed it thanks

Me: Hah no prob

Always first step when any computer acts wonky

Reboot

Him: lol

Me: I’m serious

–End Conversation—

He didn’t respond to my last message aside from laughing about something I was being completely serious when relating even when I said that I was being serious. No “OK,” no “I totally will next time.” And there’s the thing – I know that he will call me again when he has a tech support issue and one of the first questions I will ask will be “Did you reboot?” and he will, of course, say no and I will, naturally, get frustrated with him wasting my time (which I am giving him for free). Then, he will wonder why I am getting so annoyed with him…we’re friends after all aren’t we? Shouldn’t I want to help him? Except he won’t remember this conversation when I did help him and did give him this magic bullet solution to a lot of his technology/gadget issues.

Seriously folks, even if you work in an office that has an IT Department paid to cater to your every whim before you call them about your computer/device/phone issue, restart it.

This is not something that anyone who even has a passing understanding on how to use their electronic device should have any trouble doing. There is no secret code to do it and no hidden menus to accomplish this feat. It is simple, it is easy, and it fixes an astounding number of issues for computing devices. Even if you aren’t having any computer issues I always recommend giving your computer a restart every day if you can. Doing this clears the RAM and is just overall a good thing to do for your computer and it is amazing how many people don’t bother to do this. This also goes for iPhones, BlackBerrys. Android devices, iPads, PlayBooks, Android tablets, Macs, PCs and even the PalmPilot your dad still insists on using even though Palm stopped supporting it in 2001 because it still does everything he needs it to do and he has no reason to upgrade.

In 2009 LifeHacker.com published this awesome flowchart in the article Tech Support Cheat Sheet Reveals The Secrets Of Troubleshooting which they pulled from popular webcomic XKCD and which can be found in its original here. To quote LifeHacker when they posted the article:

‘The only thing missing is the “If you haven’t already, restart your computer and try again” entry.’

See! Even they commented on it!

I promise you if you restart your computer/device before calling IT or your friend who consider “a computer person” or “a technology person” you will immediately earn tons of respect from them when they ask “Did you reboot?” and you say “Yes, I did, but it didn’t help.” They will also be 1,000,000,000 times less likely to respond to your queries in a passive aggressive manner, get annoyed with you, or be slow to respond when you call for help the next time you need it.

Images Row of Computers & Computer Help Key via Microsoft Office.

Tech Support Cheat Sheet via XKCD .

Today I was a partici-pantsless member of the 2012 Toronto No Pants Subway Ride on the TTC. This was my 3rd year in the past 4 years being a part of the fun prank which started in New York City 8 years ago and has grown internationally ever since, this was the 5th year they did it in Toronto.

We were lucky that this year we got to ride on the brand new TTC Rocket train when we got to Museum Station where we started off (still wearing our pants). As we each in turn took our pants off at prearranged intervals between stations and then departed the TTC Toronto Rocket we showed our fellow transit riders that riding the TTC pantsless in January is “The Better Way.” We then got on the next train and rode all the way to Eglinto Station where we turned around and went back south to Museum Station.

Good times were had by all for this good, clean fun. We made plenty of people smile which was the goal. A couple of people asked me what the heck was going on and my response was that I’d “forgotten my pants at home and was on my way to an important meeting I couldn’t be late for.” (I don’t think they believed me because they all just chuckled and stopped questioning it.) I even heard someone ask another partici-pantsless if we were doing a school project!

Even the media showed up for the event. CTV, CityTV, and CP24 were all there…but they all kept their pants on.

Every time I reach into my car’s glove box and look for something my hand brushes my trusty flashlight. This flashlight is so trusty because it operates without batteries. I know I can always rely on it for this very reason which makes it the perfect thing for me, and indeed anyone, to have in their car. It is all the more important to have in your car in a place like Canada where our winters mean 14 hours of darkness every night and it gets very cold. A flashlight that you can leave in your car could be oh so important to signal a passerby on a dark road if you get stuck somewhere at night.

“How does it work without any batteries?” you ask. Well, as the name ‘Shaker’ implies it requires you to vigorously shake it and it uses a linear generator which is a sliding ‘rare earth magnet’ moves back and forth through a a spool of copper wire as you shake it. A current is induced in the loops of wire by a process known as Faraday’s law of induction each time the magnet slides through them. This current is used to charge
an ultra-capacitor which takes the place of the battery. The ultra-capacitor is used instead of a standard rechargeable battery because it doesn’t wear out like a battery making it ideal for long term storage. Because the flashlight uses an LED the light also requires a lot less electricity to work than a standard light bulb. Of course it isn’t perfect as one minute’s worth of shaking only generates a couple minutes of usable light but when it’s dark and you have nothing else for light you’ll be thankful you made the investment to keep one of these guys around.

I know for certain that this is all true because I have had this flashlight in my car for years and years and barely have ever had any use for it, thankfully. More often than not someone will come across it when looking for tissues or something in my glove box, try it out, tell me it’s broken or out of batteries and I’ll have to explain to them by example how it works. That’s actually how I ended up thinking about it to write this post today.

Do you have something like this in your car or house in case of a power outage or something of the like? What do you keep in your car – just in case – for the winter time?

When I was writing the blog post about the Barbara Frum Library the other day I didn’t feel as if I was really getting across the way it was set up with the picture I had attached so I decided when I went back I would get a better picture and explain it all better. To give you a point of reference the picture in the previous post was taken from the left hand side of this picture looking toward the librarian/clerk desk from across the room.

As well, I looked to see if there was any large and prominent signage indicating where everything was and there absolutely was not anything of the sort. The closest thing to signage was right above the actual return slot there was an 8×11 piece of paper hung horizontally with the word RETURNS in a large font. Because of the pillars and the size of this sheet of paper ir was completely invisible from the front doors of the library which is the point where any rational person is most likely to be looking for the returns slot.

• Purple Arrow Entrance guarded by RFID detectors like you see in stores.
• Red Arrows (Left) 2 self checkout stations. (Right) 1 self checkout station.
• Green Arrow Librarian and clerk desk.
• Blue Arrow Badly signed return slot.

Hope that gives you a better understanding of the remodeled main floor of the Barbara Frum Branch of the Toronto Public Library.