I Went To High School with Feist? Whoa…

If you watch TV, even the commercial-skipping type, you can’t help but have heard the song “1234” by Feist, featured on the Apple Nano commercial. You know, the insanely catchy one where’s she’s dancing around in the sparkly blue outfit:

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Based purely off the video, I thought maybe Feist was the band name for Zayra off Rock Star: INXS, then I remembered that Zayra couldn’t really sing and Feist clearly could. 😉 I bought the song because I thought it was catchy, but didn’t really look into who the group was. Then last week I read an article talking about how Feist was really Leslie Feist, and how she was in a high-school band called Placebo. A bell went off in my head, because when I was in high school (Bishop Carrol in Calgary) there was a band called Placebo that a friend of mine was in (I didn’t know Leslie very well though, more like a friend of a friend). A quick Google image search brought me to this picture:

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Hey, I recognize her! I did a bit more searching and found this video of Placebo performing live, which confirmed it: I did go to high school with her! The bass player in that video is named Elescia (not sure about the spelling of her name – it’s been a while!), and I went to junior high school with her. The guitar player is named Keiran, and his dad was the art teacher at our high school. I recognize the drummer as well, but I can’t remember her name. What a small world – crazy! I wish Leslie well – go Calgary girl go!

Dell Gaming Training

A little over two years ago I was putting together a system quote at Dell, and I had a little chuckle when I go to the part about Training and Certification. Here’s why:

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Halo training? Sweet! 😀

Styx’s “Mr. Roboto” and The Office = Genius

I love watching what a talented video editor can produce with quality content, and this is a great example of that…

Baby Liv Arwen Berreth Welcomed into the World Way Early

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That’s a picture of tiny Liv Arwen Berreth, the daughter Kim and Mitch, some good friends of Ashley and I. Liv (pronounced “Leave”) was born at 6:40 pm on Saturday the 9th, many weeks too early, and only weighs 810 grams. That’s one LITTLE baby! Both baby and mother are doing well. Welcome to the big world Liv!

Charities Alienating Supporters: I’m Mad at MADD

Yesterday my office phone rang, and when I picked it up, I instantly felt a small surge of anger. Why? Because it was MADD (Mother’s Against Drunk Driving). So, yeah, I was mad at MADD. How could I possibly be upset at a charity that does such worthwhile work? I’ve supported them in the past with donations, and I support their goals. But somehow they got my work number, and it drives me nuts to be interrupted by a telemarketer when I’m in my office working.

The first time they called, I very politely asked that they remove my work number from their database, and gave them my home number so they could use that instead. The woman I spoke to was very nice and said it would be updated within the next 24 hours. A week later, I got the same phone call – once again, being very polite, I explained the situation and asked them to remove my work number from their database. Two weeks later, they again called me on my work number. Feeling a bit of frustration by this point, I explained that I’d already asked for my number to be removed twice prior, and the woman apologized and said she’d take it right to her supervisor. Guess what happened a week after that? Another phone call to my business line. Again, I explained it all. Again, they insisted they’d remove my work number from their database. A week later it happened again. I requested the same thing again.

A few weeks passed, and I thought the problem was solved, but yesterday they called me again. This time I calmly explained to the woman that I had no choice but to block their number from getting through to me again because they were not honouring my five-time request to be contacted at a different phone number. I don’t know how MADD raises their money – if they use in-house employees or a contracted service (I bet the latter have somewhat, ah, “looser” ethics), but this experience has certainly left a bad impression of their organization with me…

New Iron Man Trailer Out + The Quicktime Player Sucks

There’s a new Iron Man trailer out, and it looks amazing – you can check it out in HD if you have Quicktime installed, although I had to chuckle at how badly it works because of Apple’s restrictions on the Windows platform. See, if you have a Mac, Apple lets you view Quicktime full screen – and who wouldn’t want to? But on Windows, Apple gave us a hobbled version of Quicktime that won’t go full screen – unless you pay $29.99 USD for the “Pro” version, which I haven’t done (why should I have to pay $30 to view a video?). So when I clicked to watch the deliciously high-res 1080p version of the new Iron Man trailer, which is 1920 x 1080, it loaded on my monitor (which is 1920 x 1200) with the play button off the screen. I couldn’t start the video until I repositioned the whole window to access the user interface, which was awkward. The fact that Apple considers full-screen video a feature worth paying for is quite ridiculous…

UPDATE: Well I’ll be…Apple added the option for full screen video in a recent dot-release of Quicktime (just press CONTROL+F) and I didn’t notice. It’s unlike most video apps in that double-clicking the video doesn’t make it go full screen, it just pauses it, and I didn’t think to check the menu. Thanks to Janak and Vincent for pointing it out…

Amsterdam 2007 Photos Published

At the end of November I was fortunate to be invited to Microsoft’s Mobius conference, so Ashley and I decided to go a few days early and see the sites in Amsterdam. Here are the pictures from our journey. We’ve added comments on many of these pictures because we discovered that if you use Picasa’s comment feature, it embeds it into the EXIF comment field and Smugmug extracts that and shows it under the photo. Cool!

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Silverlight: Breaking New Ground

Microsoft’s Silverlight technology is really interesting, and it’s pushing new ground in a lot of ways – including being the first plug-in for Firefox that I’ve ever seen crash:

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I guess I should feel thankful that Microsoft even released a Firefox plug-in. 😉

Big Changes at eBay

This Wired article has the details about the changes at eBay – and beyond the changes in fee structure, which seem to be both good and bad depending on how you look at it, the biggest change is that sellers will no longer be able to leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers. This is great news, because vengeful sellers are the bane of eBay because they know even if the buyer leaves negative feedback, the seller will usually have enough volume to bury the negative feedback in a matter of days or weeks. Buyers, on the other hand, tend not to be as high-volume, so negative feedback sticks around in a much more obvious way.

I’ve been on eBay for nine years next month, and in my 281 buying and selling transactions, I’ve had six negative feedback points. Three of those were from sellers whom I had a fairly negative transaction with (like Majeeda Haaq), and when I left neutral feedback to express my dissatisfaction they left negative. The other two negative feedback points were from an eBay seller in New York who bought some software off me and left negative feedback as a way of ensuring I’d give him a refund – which I would have done anyway. I’ve only had one genuine negative feedback point from a buyer, who happened to be in Italy and was angry he had to pay duty/customs import fees – and all because he insisted I put the full retail value of the item on the shipment when I suggested putting a lower value.

So, as a seller on eBay I’m not too happy to hear about the higher fees, but as a buyer, I’m thrilled to hear that unethical sellers won’t be able to leave punitive feedback for buyers. I’m a bit surprised they’re stopping neutral feedback as well, although as someone pointed out to me last year, if a buyer pays within a reasonable time frame, that’s pretty much the end of the buyer’s responsibility.

Oh yeah, and their CEO Meg Whitman is getting the boot, largely because of eBay’s disastrous purchase of Skype (who the hell was advising her that sellers and buyers actually wanted to talk to each other?).

Selling a Leased Car: Thar’s Gold in Them Thar Hills!

Some of the regular readers of this blog have been very helpful in giving me suggestions and feedback on my post about us shopping for a new car when we drove a Nissan Altima Coup
and really liked it. One of the comments was from a fellow who goes by the name of Cold Flame and he suggested I look into buying out the lease on Ashley’s Mini Cooper and selling it privately. That had never occurred to me, because prior to financing then buying the Mazda Protégé 5, my previous two cars were leased Chevy Cavaliers – which of course have very poor re-sale value, so I always gave them back to the dealership. I was surprised to learn that our buy-out on Ashley’s Mini Cooper is only $14K, and a quick search of the online Auto Trader tells me that 2004 Mini Coopers with more mileage than hers are selling for $20K to $22K! So this might be a way to make a quick $5-6K, which makes that $37K Nissan Altima Coup a more affordable $31K. I love learning new things, so thanks Cold Flame