I don’t pretend to know much about the policies of Ron Paul – I’ve heard both good and bad things about him – but when it comes to the economy, his words ring true to me. This video, which liberally quotes his words, seems almost prophetic when you look at where things are at right now.

I’m pretty cautious about buying into Internet-hyped stories that I recieve from others over email, but this one looks quite legitimate: this 20/20 video explains the dangers of old tires. Like most people, I assumed the only danger in old tires was one of tread – as in, if your tires are so old they’re losing their tread, you shold replace them. This story explains how tires lose the elasticity in the rubber, and that can lead to some catastrophic results. I wasn’t able to find if Canada is any better than the US in terms of laws protecting consumers from buying old tires – though I did discover that Quebec has made it law that car owners put winter tires on their cars this year. The reason for this law? 38% of cars involved in winter accidents in Quebec have all-season tires on. Logic says then that if tires are the contributing factor in these accidents – and I think that’s a pretty big leap in logic – having better tires will reduce the number of accidents. I’ll be interested to see if that’s really the case. I’m in support of anything that saves lives and makes the road safer, but I’m not convinced winter tires are a magic bullet to reducing accidents in the winter months. The biggest problem I’ve seen with winter driving is simply driver idiocy: people who try to go the same 10 kmph over the speed limit regardless of the weather, and they tend to be people who drive trucks or SUVs, thinking that the heavier weight of their vehicle somehow makes them immune to the weather. Staying safe in the winter while driving is 80% driver IQ and 20% vehicle.

Both the USA and Canada have an election coming up fast, and when my buddy Todd posted this on his blog, I thought it was worth re-posting here: it’s a great video. I have a pretty simple attitude about voting: unless I vote, I don’t have a right to complain about things that the government does, because if I don’t vote, I give up my right to do so. So Canadians, Americans, vote! It doesn’t matter to me who anyone votes for, but voting as an act should be a non-negotiable act for anyone living in a democracy.

UPDATE: The CD and MoGo Mouse have been claimed.

I’m cleaning up my office and I found this CD – I managed to end up with two copies of After This I’ll Show You My Rock Collection by The Back Row. It’s a great a capella CD; they do a particularly killer cover of What Hurts The Most by Rascal Flatts. Anyone want it?

I also have a MVP-branded MoGo Mouse BT that’s doing nothing – it looks like a PCMCIA version. Any takers?

Use the comment form to send me which one you’d like – first come, first serve. If the first person who contacts me wants both, they get ‘em both.

About a year ago I, posted a facetious request asking the Americans reading my blog to do something to improve their economy. Well, it took a year for the effects of that request to come to fruition, but I’m pleased to say that whatever you all did seems to have worked: today I converted $482 USD into Canadian funds and got $503.74 for it. That’s a 4.51% exchange rate in my favour – it’s not quite up to the 4.9% exchange rate the other way I was complaining about a year ago, but hey, what’s 0.39% between friends? Keep up the good work my American readers – let’s shoot for 10%! Papa needs a brand new bag…and by “new bag” I mean whatever gadget I happen to need next. Like an MSI Wind in black with a 6-cell battery…

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, but I’d like to get back at it. Life has a way of getting complicated, whether you want it to or not. The past few weeks have been pretty stressful for me, the primary reason being someone close to me was in the hospital for some exploratory-type surgery. Things are looking positive though, and I can feel my stress levels slowly decreasing.

Today I started a cleanse with Ashley; it’s called the Wild Rose Herbal D-Toxландшафт. Since returning from Japan in March, I’ve found it really difficult to be consistent with going to the gym. Leading up to our trip to Japan, I was very consistent, hitting the gym for 60 to 90 minutes four or five times a week. The result? Not a single pound dropped, or any inches off my mid-section. I’m sure I gained a bit of muscle mass, but in terms of “inches lost”, no results worth mentioning. There are lots of reasons why, but the primary one is that I didn’t really alter my diet. I thought I was eating “pretty good” but the more I looked at my diet, the more I realized I was putting more garbage into my body than I was burning off of it with my workouts. It’s disheartening to go to the gym and work hard, then see no results from it.

April, May, June, July…I might have hit the gym once or twice a week on average. There was a period there where I didn’t go to the gym at all for a month! There’s nothing quite like paying $38/month for a gym membership and never using it to make you feel like a complete idiot. August has been a little better, though not by much – I started doing push-ups and sit-ups at home, but I found that my arms/wrists started bothering me a lot more than normal. I think it’s the push-ups; my RSI problems were aggrivated by the stress the push-ups placed on my wrists. I’m going to switch to the clenched-fist method for the push-ups and see if that helps.

Why the herbal detox? Doing a cleanse is a good way to reboot your system, and I feel badly in need of a reboot. Going off sugar is going to be the hard part – knowing the cleanse was coming today, I ate an unhealthy amount of sugar over the weekend…chocolate bars, a bag of 25 cent candies, and a large Dairy Queen Blizzard. Today I feel a bit tired, tomorrow or Wednesday I’ll be going through sugar withdrawal and will be extra grouchy. You’ve been warned!

[image found on Carbon Offset Solutions]

Don’t ask me where I heard this, but for my entire life I believed that starting a car used up the same amount of fuel as an idling car used in five minutes. So for as long as I’ve been driving (which is inching up on two decades now), I thought the “smart” thing was to leave the car idling for a few minutes rather than turning it off. Turns out I was completely and totally wrong according to this article. Idling for 10 seconds uses the same amount of fuel as starting a car in the first place. Idling a car for 10 minutes can use as much fuel as it takes to travel 5 miles. And even on the coldest days, idling your car for 30 seconds is all you need before driving away – the car will warm up faster on the move rather than idling (though the article says not to accelerate hard or drive at high speeds for the first 3-5 miles…which isn’t exactly practical advice in all situations).

I’m generally one of those types of people that thinks he’s right most of the time, but I try to keep myself open to correction and further learning…and I’ve just been schooled on the issue of idling.

I’ve noticed that a number of people, pretty much on a weekly basis, are deciding to link directly to images on this blog rather than copying the image to their own server. I’ve watched it happen for quite some time, but after seeing a few spam blogs do it, I decided it was worth putting a stop to: so, from now on, if you want to use an image on this site, please copy it to your own server or blog. Thanks!

Raise you’re hand if you’re a procrastinator. What’s that? You’ll do it later? Yeah, exactly. I used to think that I wasn’t a serious procrastinator, but at the end of a given day when I can’t shut down Firefox on two computers because I have six different site posts started by not finished…I can’t argue with that. One look at my overflowing desk of review items also confirms that I say yes to things but have a hard time meeting my obligation to review them in a timely fashion. Those two particular problems are things I’m constantly working on, but I also have a different type of procrastination issue: not wanting to do tasks that are particularly onerous, whether for reasons of time-consumption or reasons of pain-in-the-butt-ness. Yesterday morning I decided to tackle a couple of the issues that had been sticking in my side for many months…

Selling my time-share in Mont Tremblant, Quebec, to my company: Thoughts Media Inc. is going to use it for a one-week giveaway prize in an upcoming Pocket PC Thoughts contest. Selling it involves paperwork, and I hate paperwork, but yesterday I bit the bullet and started the process. And, in a stunning move, I had the paperwork faxed back to the timeshare company on the same day I received it (thanks to my wife). So, scratch one task I’ve been putting off for, oh, 14 months.

Getting a new microphone clip: this one was more me being stubborn than anything else, because I felt like “the system” beat me and I hate that. I bought a NeXXtech tie clip microphone (not exactly the version I have, but close) that connects to my Canon GL2 camera for use in doing video reviews. When I bought it, the first day I tried to insert the microphone into the clip, the one side of the clamp on the clip snapped off. I was really gentle inserting the microphone, so I was completely baffled. A few weeks later I went back to The Source (formerly known as Radio Shack) and exchanged it – the guy popped open the other package they had in the store and gave me the clip from that one. I went home, gently inserted the microphone into the clip again…and it snapped. I was so incredibly angry that I shoved the whole thing into a corner and ignored it for a few months. I then decided to call NeXXtech support, and they informed me that a new clip would cost $23 CAD including shipping. WHAT?!? Keep in mind the whole microphone is only worth $60, and the part in question probably cost them 10 cents to make.

I declined being ripped off and they told me that the local Source stores provided warranty support so I should go back there. I went back to The Source store I bought it from to see if I could find some sort of satisfaction – I was convinced NeXXtech had released defective clips. The sales drone listened to me explain the problem, went and got a new package from the shelf, and guess what? It had my broken clip in it from months ago. He said he could order one in, but it would take about a month. I declined and went to another Source store, and they didn’t have the product in stock either. The manager on duty listened to me explain my problem, and he said he’d order in the part for me – and was vague on whether or not I’d be charged. I agreed, at this point willing to pay whatever it cost to get the stupid situation resolved, and he said he’d call me when the clip came in. That was back in February. So yesterday, after three months of waiting for the store to call me, I decided to call NeXXtech support and pay the $23. The money isn’t the issue, it’s the fact that I felt like the system beat me. But you know what I’m doing to do? I’m going to take that fresh clip into the Source store, and ask one of the employees (hopefully the manager) to insert the microphone into it for me. That way, if they break it, I’ll hopefully have some recourse. This goes without saying, but the NeXXtech tie clip microphone is a product best avoided.

Replaced a Headlight in my Car: Relatively minor, but it’s awkward and frustrating replacing the headlights on my Mazda Protege 5. I have a long history of headline problems with this car, so again I felt a high level of frustration that I was having to replace it at all (I lose a headlight every 4-6 months). But I gritted my teeth popped the hood, and spent a good 20 minutes fighting with the clamp trying to get it inserted and secured. Turned on the power, tested it – it worked! But my other headlight, which was working perfectly an hour earlier, wasn’t working. @*#&@#&(@*#&(@#(@. I’m convinced there’s an electrical problem with my car, but the only way Mazda will fix it is if I go back to them, let them install two factory headlights, and then I can’t touch it, and we see what happens. This morning I’m booking an appointment with them to get that done – I’m sick of being Mr. One Headlight.

Editing Japan Photos: Getting back from Japan meant returning with over 2000 photos in RAW format, and coming back to thousands of email messages and a pile of work. I got photos from days zero through five processed while I was in Japan, then I hit a wall with over 800 photos from Himeji Castle and couldn’t get through them while on vacation. Then the thought of having to deal with so many photos really put me off dealing with it – Captain Procrastination flies again – so I ignored it for more than a month. Earlier this week I finally blasted my way through them, publishing our day six photos earlier this week. Yesterday, on a roll, I finished our day seven photos as well (I just need to add the comments, then I can publish them). Chaaarge!!!

Now if only I could get through that big pile of technology…I’m going to try and do a couple of unboxing videos today. Here I go!