Month: August 2010

Alberta Securities Commission Notice of Hearing for Varun “Vinny” Aurora, David Humeniuk, and Dave Jones

Wondering what happened to Varun “Vinny” Aurora, David Humeniuk, and Dave Jones? The Alberta Securities Commission has something to say. I quote:

“The Alberta Securities Commission (ASC) has issued a Notice of Hearing alleging Calgary residents Varun Vinny Aurora, David Humeniuk and David Jones breached Alberta securities laws by acting as dealers without being properly registered, making serious omissions and misrepresentations to investors and distributing various Concrete Equities Group entities’ securities using offering documents not in compliance with Alberta securities laws.

In the Notice of Hearing, ASC staff allege that Aurora, Humeniuk and Jones, as directors and officers of Concrete Equities and multiple related companies and limited partnerships, made several serious omissions and misrepresentations by failing to fully disclose material, non-arms length contracts connected to the securities being sold and failing to disclose Humeniuk’s lifetime withdrawal from the Real Estate Council of Alberta to investors.”

The appeatence to set a date for the hearing will be held on October 13th, 2010, at 1 p.m. in the ASC Hearing Room on the 6th Floor, 300 – 5th Avenue S.W., Calgary, Alberta. I’m pondering going myself – I wonder if it’s open to the public? The full notice of hearing document can be found on the ASC Web site, but I’ve also mirrored a copy of it here. Continue reading Alberta Securities Commission Notice of Hearing for Varun “Vinny” Aurora, David Humeniuk, and Dave Jones

There is No Ground Zero Mosque

Being Canadian, and not American, there’s only so much right I have to speak to the issues I see happening to the south of me – but this issue of the “Ground Zero Mosque” has really gotten ridiculous. I’m a right-leaning, conservative Christian person, but the things I see the right doing in the US make me shake my head. I have less and less in common with the radical, polarizing crazies who try to turn everything they touch into something politically explosive. This video sums up my feelings on this issue quite nicely.

The Wedding Slideshow: Brent & Rowena

I whipped up a photo slideshow of the recent wedding photos I took of my friends Brent and Rowena, and it turned out pretty good (make sure to go full screen and click the HD button if you watch it – the regular version looks sorta’ bad). The music is “To Show You My Love” by Mike Schmidt from the album The High Cost of Living (A Love Story). Slideshow created in Proshow Producer.

Busting Bandwidth Bugaboos: Troubleshooting ISP Speed Problems

Figure 1: What is this, 1994 all over again?

Whenever bandwidth is discussed, there’s always lots of finger pointing because there are so many variables, and players involved, that it’s rarely a simple issue. My particular bandwidth bugaboo this morning? I was ticked off that Dropbox [referral] was only uploading at 10 KB/s. I left a 900 MB transfer running all night and it wasn’t finished in the morning, and that’s when I discovered the awful speed. My first instinct was to point a finger at Dropbox, thinking there was some sort of bandwidth throttling going on. I did a speed test with a tool my ISP provides (speedtest.shaw.ca) and was shocked to see 1.7 Mbps downloads and 107 kbps uploads (Figure 1). It’s normally 20x that on downloads and 10x that on uploads, so I knew something was wrong beyond just Dropbox. Continue reading Busting Bandwidth Bugaboos: Troubleshooting ISP Speed Problems