It's been almost exactly a year since my last move. I had almost forgotten how much of a serious pain in the ass it is to move all of my crap... that was until yesterday. Yesterday I moved from my duplex into an apartment, because both of my roommates moved back to Saskatoon. Lame.
Sorry, not much more to add, other than to say I really, really, really hate moving. Gah.
Earlier this week, Chris and I applied to the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Neither of us have heard back in regards to our application status yet, but we should in the next couple of weeks.
I've been thinking hard about going overseas for school for quite some time, so hopefully everything will work out in our favor, and we'll be able to go. We've got a lot of work to do if we are actually going to go, in a very short period of time—semester starts in July of this year.
I'll keep you updated.
I haven't been posting much to this blog lately and one of the reasons is the time I've been devoting to Too Real. The last two days have seen that time actually pay off.
Yesterday I published an article on the Top 7 Canadian beer that somebody stumbled the article, and then started receiving a bunch of traffic. And to add to that, it hit the front page of the Odd News section of Newsvine. Yesterday TR received 360 visits and 650+ pageviews—the majority of which went to my beer article—which makes it easily my best day of blogging ever. Only, so far today TR has received 550 visits and 1000 pageviews, again the majority of which is centered around my beer article.
Sorry for the blatant navel gazing. But it's sweet.
Saskboy is pissed about some girls getting suspended for saying vagina. This is me giving in to his call to arms, along with Tanya, Debra, Peter, The Yecart, Nicole, Rosie, Gordo, Larry, Cris, Ellie, Miss Cellania, Dan, and others.
I like vagina. I don't see anything wrong with saying vagina. I think vagina is a great word. I sure wouldn't suspend someone for saying vagina in school. Heck, if they said vagina five times, like: "vagina, vagina, vagina, vagina, vagina," I still wouldn't suspend them. I think people should be able to say vagina as many times as they want!
The UN is projecting the world population will grow from 6.7 billion people now to 9.2 billion by 2050. We'll grow by nearly a third in 43 years. While I'm all for urbanization and big cities, it won't affect those of us at home too greatly. 46 (mostly developed) countries are expected to lose population in that time too, and most growth will come in currently undeveloped countries. The best news contained in this article: the UN has lowered it's projected AIDS-related death counts. Good news for everybody.
In other news, Stefan is pissed at Air Canada and has drawn up an open letter to their CEO. Read it!
I came across a pretty interesting article entitled Life After College: Managing Your Reputation Online today. It goes over ten scenarios that you might face in the future for the dumb things you write/do online:
So you think everything is all fun and games, huh? Sure, it's harmless, right? You're young, and having a good time, and you can worry about your future on a later date.
Keep thinking this way and you won't have a future to think about. You see, with all the wonderful technologies that are available today, it's more important than ever to be a little more careful about what it is your doing, or rather who knows about it.
This is pretty much common knowledge. Common knowledge that can use a bit of a refresher course every now and then though.
I've been on a movie watching kick lately, so I thought I'd briefly go over the last few films I saw:
There's another ten or so I should be listing but I got bored.
During an interview at South by South West, former-CBS news anchor Dan Rather was asked his opinion about bloggers:
Anybody who blogs, who does real reporting, which is to say, make telephone calls, go interview people, go talk to people, in a spirit of independence…and (tries) to do journalism with integrity, I would consider a journalist.
I'm glad that someone as influential as Mr. Rather is/was is giving bloggers some kind if validation. Good on him. (via The Blog Herald)
If you're like me and read a couple hundred blogs, and even happen to comment on a few from time to time, you know how much of a pain in the ass it is to keep track of where you've commented. Doubly so if you've had a few drinks at the time of commenting.
I like to stay a part of the conversation once I become involved so I'd been looking for a solution to this dilemma for quite some time. I'd tried using a folder in Firefox bookmarks, but that just got too heavy too quickly; I'd tried bookmarking entries I'd commented on to del.icio.us with an aptly named 'commented' tag; the list goes on and on.
Then I came across CoComment, an excellent Firefox Add-On that integrates itself with almost every blog I read (aside from some custom CMS setups). I've only used it for a couple of days but I already consider it indispensable. So if you like to leave comments on blogs, go check this out. Now, yo!
A lot of people are trying to find ways to monetize their homes on the web. Others have been rocking AdSense ads for years. If you fit either of the above categories and want to make money online, you should check out John Chow's blog. John offers advice on a lot of different ways to monetize your blog, and he'll even link to your blog if you review his.
John made over $7500 in February from his personal blog alone, so his advice has got to be worth something. Head over and check him out.
When I saw Saskboy's IQ score on Flickr, I decided to head over to CBC's Test the Nation website and see how well I would do. I did remarkably better than I thought I would:
Head over to the Test the Nation website and see how well you can do!
I have a few things I wanted to let you in on this morning and none of them really needed their own post so I figured I'd just post them all in one:
I've been following Blogged Out recently and it has quickly become one of my favorite fixtures of Google Reader. Darren is a very generous blogger and is really looking to help you increase your readership. If that's your goal, be sure to head over and check it out.
If you're running Firefox and want to support the websites you visit on a regular basis without doing anything, I'd suggest installing the Search Status add-on. It doesn't do much for the user, but it does report your visits back to Alexa which will help increase your favorite bloggers (and your) blogs Alexa Ranking which will in turn drive more traffic. I've wanted to report my browsing to Alexa for a while but I hate toolbars—especially Alexa's.
And on a final note, Sam appears to be blogging again after a four month hiatus. Sweet.
An interesting new startup called Street Advisor launched yesterday and looks like a rather well put together product—so far. It aims to have a rating of all of the world's streets, but will need a huge user adoption level to get even close to realizing that goal.
Basically, you log in, rate the streets you've lived on. Others do the same, it averages the ratings and comes up with Top Streets list. It could be a decent help with researching your next home if it becomes popular enough.
I've rated a couple of the streets I've lived on and plan on reviewing more in the near future. You should too.
NOTE: I emailed a suggestion to their support and received a response in about twenty minutes, from Adam the Co-CEO. It shows how small their group really is and makes their application even more impressive. I was surprised to get a personal response and not some form letter type of crap. Good on them. Go sign up..
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