Category: Rants & Raves

“Andrea Smith recently received a Facebook friend invitation from someone she went to junior high school with – 23 years ago. “I found it kind of baffling,” said Smith, 38, of Ypsilanti, Mich. “I knew who she was, but I don’t recall that we were ever friends. I don’t recall that we ever had a conversation.” Social networking sites such as Facebook have experienced phenomenal growth in the past year, according to market researcher comScore. Facebook is now the No. 1 social networking site, with more than 120 million active users, and its fastest growing demographic is those 25 and older.”

This is a great article because it touches on the radical way the term “friend” has been re-defined by social networking. Although I’m sure there are exceptions, where long-lost friends have re-connected after losing tough, I think the vast majority social networking promotes a distored view of what the term “friend” really means – and it forces to the surface social “facts of life” that are otherwise buried though seperation of time and physical space. In the real world (“meatspace”), if someone calls you one or two times, and you don’t call them back, that’s a social signal that they probably shouldn’t keep trying to communicate with you. Most people get that. Yet somehow on social networking sites, there are people that will make repeated friend requests, or re-invite you as a friend after you remove them.

Somehow the social norms we pick up over our lives get thrown out the window when it comes to social networking sites…I wonder why we think the rules don’t apply? Or maybe that’s not the issue – maybe it’s more an issue of distored views of importance. Maybe with social networking sites making it so easy to be “friends” with people, we assume that everyone we want to be friends with wants to be friends with us? I find this topic endlessly fascinating, and I haven’t even mentioned ex-girlfriends yet… 😉

So here I am, driving home from church this morning, thinking about how incredibly poor the driving conditions are – it took me about twice as long to get to church as normal this morning because I had to slow down so much in order to be safe. For the past month or so, I’ve also been thinking about trying winter tires this year. I’ve never owned winter tires before, but as I thought about what it’s like to drive our two cars on snow and ice – essentially controlled skidding – I thought it might be time to give winter tires a shot. On my way back from church as I was nearing my home, I was marvelling at how the heavy slush made control so difficult – and about one second later I completely lost control of my car (I was driving the Mazda Protege 5). I was heading down a very slight incline, only 30 seconds away from my house, and doing about 25 kmph, and I started sliding to my right. I immediately realized I couldn’t regain control, so I went into damage control mode, aiming my car for a gap between a parked car (on the left), and a fence (on the right). I managed to pull it off, sliding up onto the sidewalk and into a green space area that is also the start of a walking path. Unfortunately there was a large metal pole at the start of the walking path, and I smashed into it.

In the above photo, if you look at the set of tire tracks on the left, the inside tire track is from my left wheel when I was sliding in – I missed the parked car by about four feet. You can see the pole in the middle of the green space area – it was under my car and near the back…so I slid quite far.

This is what I hit – I tried to put it back in, but it didn’t quite want to fit. I’m grateful that the City of Calgary made it a break-away pole…if it was held in place by concrete, I would have caused much more damage to my car (and myself).

And here’s the damage done – it doesn’t look like much, but “not much” in auto terms usually means $1000 to $2000, easily. Since it’s essentially one piece, the whole front bumper will likely need to be replaced.

I’m kicking myself for losing control of the car – the last thing I need right now (OK, ever) is $2000 in car repairs – but I keep telling myself that it could have been much worse if I’d slid into the parked car…then I’d be dealing with not only repairing my own car, but another car as well. I’d have to chose between paying out-of-pocket, or going through insurance and having them hike my rates. Speaking of insurance, I’m reminded once again of how much disdain I have for insurance companies; we’re insured by ING Direct, and like all insurance companies, they consider losing control on icy roads to be an “at fault” accident. Yes, it was my fault because I was driving, but it baffles me that I pay a large monthly fee for insurance against accidents, and when I have an accident, I can’t get it covered. Insurance companies suck – and evidently, so so does my driving skill on snow and nice…

Less than 12 hours after Barack Obama wins the presidency of the United States of America, spammers are already hard at work trying to trick people into clicking. I hate spam, but talk about a work ethic!

I saw this interesting post over on Digital Nomads and I thought it was worth highlighting for anyone that works outside a normal office – although there may be lessons here for people that work in regular offices as well. I try to stick to a 9 AM to 5 PM work schedule, although there are some evenings when I’ll devote myself to writing or catching up on email. In order to minimize my online presence though, I’ll usually sign myself out of my IM client, and shut down Outlook (unless I’m playing email catch-up). And even though I’ve had the ability to use push email for years, I instead configure my Windows Mobile smartphone to check email every two hours during the day, and every four hours over the weekend. I also will happily ignore the email chime when it goes off. I never want to become one of those sad people who are trained like dogs to reach for their phone whenever they hear the email chime. Have you ever tried to have a conversation with one of those people? You’re talking, or they’re talking, and everything comes to a screeching halt as they have to check and see what email came in. Things have gotten completely out of control, and office workers need to take back control over their lives by working only within working hours. Ok, rant over. 🙂

There are some things word can’t express, and this is one of them. Go on, look, I dare you. Like what you see? Evidently you can hire this guy and he’ll bring his, uh, creative skills to bear. Isn’t that like paying someone to hit you with a car? Why would you do that? Thanks to Ed Hansberry for putting this plague into my head. 😉 Want even more fun? Check out these sites.

Michael Geist says it perfectly:

“The Canadian government passed legislation in 2005 mandating the creation of a do-not-call registry.  The registry takes effect on September 30, 2008, yet many Canadians may be disappointed to learn about the exemption of a wide range of organizations (registered charities, business with prior relationships, political parties, survey companies, and newspapers).  Under the law, exempted organizations are permitted to make unsolicited telephone calls despite the inclusion of the number in the do-not-call registry. However, organizations must remove numbers from their lists if specifically requested to do so.”

If I were to summarize the types of organizations that I get telemarketing calls from, it would be charities, survey companies, and certainly businesses with which I’ve had a “prior relationship”. The last one is especially egregious in that the threshold of what a “prior relationship” is doesn’t seem to be defined anywhere that I could find. If it means “We got his number from a database that we purchased from a company that he used to do business with”, then what’s the point in having this Do Not Call list?

Thankfully, Michael Geist has created iOptOut. I don’t know how well it will work, but I’ve registered and given it a try.

…you’d better be professional and deliver professional results. Over the past few days we’ve been putting the final pieces in place in a home renovation project, and I’m getting increasingly frustrated the more I discover about the errors one of our contractors made. There’s nothing worse than trusting someone to do a job for you and finding out that they cut corners, didn’t install what they said they’d installed, and generally rushed the project. Doesn’t anyone care about their professional reputation any more? You’d think in this Internet era they would…

Over the past six months, I’ve been using eBay less and using Kijiji more. I’ve found that eBay is increasingly a home for professional sellers, with jacked up shipping prices, fixed “Buy It Now” selling prices instead of bidding, and it’s hard to search for anything without finding endless listings of knock-off accessories and bundles instead of the product you’re really searching for. Then there’s the whole feedback thing, where I’ve been hit with negative feedback from sellers when I’ve complained to them about their shoddy selling practices. The feedback issue has been largely fixed, but somehow when I browse eBay now I feel like something has gone horribly wrong with it.

Kijiji on the other hand, which interestingly enough is an eBay company, is a completely difference experience. It was created to compete with Craigslist. I’ve never actually used Craiglist for anything, largely because I didn’t realize until last year that it was available for use outside the USA. I personally find it extremely ugly, like a DOS BBS from 15 years ago. At any rate, Kijiji looks great, is a fast site, and works really well. I’ve sold a few things on it, but I’m still pretty new at it.

And so we come to the question: what’s the ettiquette for selling things via classified ads when it comes to fielding multiple inquiries? Last month I was selling a Samsung CDMA mobile phone – it was a few years old, and I just wated to get rid of it, so it was at a fire-sale price of $10. I had six inquiries, one person even wanted me to ship it across Canada to them. One woman said she’d show up to look at it, but never did, and I ended up selling it to another person. The point is, I considered it un-sold until I had the money in my hands. I think of Kijiji like a one-item garage sale – the first person to pay for it, gets it.

A couple of weeks ago, I was selling a motherboard + CPU, and it went much like the sale of the phone: several inquiries, and on Thursday afternoon one guy wanted to come see it on a Friday morning, with the intention of purchasing it. As I was exchaning email messages with him, another guy called and said he’d come and buy it on Thursday night. I didn’t tell the Friday morning guy it was sold, because it wasn’t yet, and for all I knew the Thursday night guy wasn’t going to show up. He did show up, and after I sold him the motherboard + CPU, I immediately emailed the Friday morning guy and told him the products were sold. Friday morning guy got quite irate with me, claming that I wasn’t being fair to him; that he had already re-arranged his schedule to come and pick up the motherboard + CPU, and I shouldn’t have sold it to someone else.

So what’s the proper etiquette when selling items via classified ads – do you stop selling it and pull the ad when someone says they’re going to come buy it? Or is it first come, first serve – the first person to show up with the money gets it? Did I wrong Friday morning guy by not selling it to him?