I started off today blogging about something that made me sad, but I want to end today by posting something that put a smile on my face and lifted my spirit: some incredible a capella music. An incredible song (Phil Collins is a fantastic song writer) performed by some incredible vocalists. A capella music is pure because there’s nothing but the artist and their voice. Turn up your speakers! Heres the “official” music video.
Make Your Vote Count: Help Crystal and Her Family
[Crystal on her wedding day in July 2007]
I’ve written about my friend Crystal before, and she’s not doing very well – the cancer is laying waste to her body. It’s only a matter of time, and my heart feels heavy when I think of what she’s going through. She’s such a vibrant, fearless, loving person – and the world will be a lesser place when she’s gone.
There’s an opportunity to bring some light into her last days, however: Crystal, her husband Tony, and their seven-month old daughter Mattea have been nominated for a “Dream Baby Shower” in a contest a local radio station is running. There are $50K in prizes, including a $5000 Registered Education Saving Plan that will grow to $9000 by the time Mattea is 18 years old, $5200 worth of grocery gift cards spread out over a year, and bi-weekly house cleaning for a year. When Tony is on his own with Mattea, having food and house cleaning taken care of would be a burden off his shoulders.
Their profile with a brief backgrounder can be read for further details, and voting is done on this page. I’m sure the other contestants are wonderful people, but winning this contest is something that this family needs right now. I don’t think I’ve ever made a request like this before online, but please forward this blog entry to others and vote as many times as you can (yes, you can vote an unlimited number of times) until the November 25th deadline. Thanks for your support – let’s make this happen!
[A technical note for you geeks out there: the voting system doesn’t block multiple votes via cookies or IP, so it seems designed to be a “repeat popularity contest”. I was able to vote 50+ times in a matter of minutes by positioning my mouse cursor over the vote button, clicking it, using my previous page mouse button, then clicking again. Please, no automated scripts though, let’s keep this fair – well, as fair as a voting system like this can be. I’ve also submitted this to Digg, so please vote for it there as well to get the issue more attention.]
Mitsubishi Cross-Border Roadblocks
The lease on Ashley’s Mini Cooper is up in April 2008, so we’re looking at getting a new car in the spring. I’ve always enjoyed the look of Mitsubishi cars, and now that they’re being offered in Canada (that happened a few years back) I’m seriously considering either a 2008 Eclipse or a 2008 Lancer. Given the strength of the Canadian dollar, I figured I’d check into how much the cars are selling for in the US: I wasn’t overly surprised to see a 2008 3.4 litre engine Eclipse, fully loaded, selling for $30K USD. The same car in Canada? $36K CAD. No equitable pricing there. It’s always been less expensive to buy a car in the US though, which is why some Canadians will drive down and buy their cars in the US. There are costs involved in bring a car across the border, and some paperwork hassles, but $6000 is worth a fair amount of effort.
What was surprising to me was the conversation I had with the local Mitsubishi dealership: the saleman informed me that in October of this year, Mitsubishi segmented their warranty. Previously they offered a North-American wide warranty, meaning if you bought the car in the USA, you’d still have the 10-year warranty in Canada. No longer. If I were to buy a 2008 Eclipse in the USA and bring it up here to Calgary, I’d have zero warranty. Worse, they won’t even sell me a warranty – if anything went wrong with my Mitsubishi car I’d have to take it back down to the US to get it fixed under warranty.
I understand that Mitsubishi is under pressure from Canadian auto dealers to stop this cross-border buying practice, especially with the dollar disparity, but the solution would seem to be obvious: make the prices fair in both markets so buyers don’t feel like they’re being punished (price-wise) by purchasing from a local reseller. There will always be price discrepancies in different markets, but when I can drive down to Montana in five hours and buy the car for $6000 less…that seems a bit extreme to me. I don’t like it when companies use their power to abuse the consumer, so this is definitely a strike against Mitsubishi – the Eclipse and Lancer had better test drive damn good for me to continue to want one!
Stuck in My Head: Emmy Rossum
I love music. I really love music. Silence can be nice, silence can be helpful, but when I don’t feel like silence I want to be awash in music. I stumbled, quite randomly (saw it in an Oprah commercial), across a musician by the name of Emmy Rossum, and the clip I saw had something to do with YouTube. I checked her out and this is the song I found:
Enchanting, yes? Perhaps not musically everyone’s cup o’ tea, but I really liked it. The fact that the song feels like it’s all one big introduction, but the song never “starts”, leaves the listener with an unfinished feeling. Lest anyone think that she’s a studio-diva with a rack of auto-tuners to fix her vocal sloppiness, here’s a video clip of her performing live – and her voice is solid.
Chaos Reigns In My Office
The chaos and messiness of my office is directly linked to the number of review items I have on the go at any one time. Witness the disorder…usually I have next to nothing cluttering up my desktop except for the table section on the right of the U-shaped desk. Physical hardware items I’m currently reviewing: two new Zunes, an AT&T Tilt, a 6GB microSD, an iGo Juice everywhere85, a few software packages, and a few other items. I’ve got to stop asking for new things to review – I almost had my review queue empty, then the flood gates opened up…
More pictures after the break. I hope there’s nothing embarrassing left out. 😉 Continue reading Chaos Reigns In My Office
American Imports, Chinese Deaths
“The patients arrive every day in Chinese hospitals with disabling and fatal diseases, acquired while making products for America. On the sixth floor of the Guangzhou Occupational Disease and Prevention Hospital, Wei Chaihua, 44, sits on his iron-rail bed, tethered to an oxygen tank. He is dying of the lung disease silicosis, a result of making Char-Broil gas stoves sold in Utah and throughout the U.S. Down the hall, He Yuyun, 36, who for years brushed America’s furniture with paint containing benzene and other solvents, receives treatment for myelodysplastic anemia, a precursor to leukemia.”
This is a scary, sobering article. It was brought to my attention over at Digital Media Thoughts, and we had a little discussion about it there. The question is, what do we do about it? Can we avoid products made by the companies who treat their workers this way? Even if you boycott a certain product, unless you write a letter to the company explaining why you’re not buying their product, they’ll probably just think they’re not marketing it enough.
This is what happen when a country has a population of 1.3 billion people, a government with a voracious desire to modernize at any cost, and no Judeo-Christian history that speaks to the value of human life. Life is disposable to a culture like that – although it’s not like some of the conditions in North America are much better. A read of Fast Food Nation (an eye-opening book) tells us that. Greed is the real problem here, like it always is. What else is new?
Partisan Politics in the Blogging World? It’s Not My Fault!
It’s funny what Google AdSense will put up on a site sometimes…
“Rationalize Like A Pirate” Day
Thankfully, no content-pirate that I know has given me this excuse, but it can’t be that far off given our current cultural climate…
Vista’s Irritating Me Lately
How can Vista be reporting my network drives as being broken in the folder pane, yet functional and connected in the Computer reporting. When I closed it and opened it again (Windows Key + E), it was reporting them as being connected. The most irritating of all though? When I tried to open the network drive, I’m getting an error about the drive not being accessible (“An unexpected network error occurred.”) This is all related to some funkiness with my Windows Home Server that has cropped up and is puzzling me. There are some things that I adore about Windows Home Server, and some things that are driving me nuts.
Back to Vista: I’m thinking about doing a week-long log where I keep track of everything that puzzles/frustrates me about Vista…but I’m worried that the results might be too depressing.
There’s Just Something About Winter Sunsets…
