that canadian girl

Latest adventures…

  • Geek update of the week

    Sorry if posting’s been a bit on the lean side recently, I’ve been, shall we say, rather busy. So here’s the past two weeks in summary…

    • We got kittens, we got kittens, we got kittens! I’ve been spending nearly every evening entertaining them myself while teasing them with a silly stick with a green feather at the end.
    • I went to Paris for a very interesting Mobile Monday event, where Bob presented Taptu to the French and Zazie serenaded everyone.
    • I bought an iPhone. Yup. I was at the Cambridge O2 store on launch day. There was a big queue of like… 20 of us. Not a huge hit with the plebs, but I’m absolutely in love with it.
    • I went to the Future of Mobile conference, saw the usual suspects and met some new people while seeing Powerpoint slides being blown up bigger than ever before.
    • We’ve put our house on the market and have put an offer in on a bigger house just down the road. Comes with it, some serious tidying of the house in order to make it vaguely presentable to potential buyers!
    • Did I mention I got some kittens?

    Right well… Good night my lovelies!

  • Political correctness gone absolutely bloody bonkers!

    So Christmas the holiday season is coming, and as if we needed any more political correctness madness going on, Santas have been warned not to use their age-old “ho ho ho” laugh to greet children as it may be degrading to women.

    Santas in Australia’s largest city have been told not to use Father Christmas’s traditional “ho ho ho” greeting because it may be offensive to women, it was reported Thursday.

    Sydney’s Santa Clauses have instead been instructed to say “ha ha ha” instead, the Daily Telegraph reported.

    One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use “ho ho ho” because it could frighten children and was too close to “ho”, a US slang term for prostitute.

    “Gimme a break,” said Julie Gale, who runs the campaign against sexualising children called Kids Free 2B Kids.

    “We are talking about little kids who do not understand that “ho, ho, ho” has any other connotation and nor should they,” she told the Telegraph.

    “Leave Santa alone.”

    A local spokesman for the US-based Westaff recruitment firm said it was “misleading” to say the company had banned Santa’s traditional greeting and it was being left up to the discretion of the individual Santa himself.

    To echo Julie’s thoughts, gimme a fucking break! I thought the Aussies were chilled, don’t-worry-be-happy people? Are they becoming brainwashed by our Western world political correctness insanity? It’s mindblowingly ridiculous that someone even SUGGESTED that!

    Thanks to Celia for finding this article from Sydney APF

  • Must PR people and bloggers be like oil and water?

    Last week, Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and Wired Magazine blogger, lashed out at lazy PR people. The crux of the story is that Chris gets torrents of press releases, some more or less relevant, from public relations agencies that can’t really be bothered to do their research before sending releases around. Therefore Chris chose to publish the email addresses of a few hundred PR people who’ve sent him said releases.

    Bloggr cat sez ur PR is b0ringThis story really rings true for me on three levels;

    • First, I’m a blogger, albeit a small-time one. But I still get plenty of press material, ranging from jaw-droppingly excited news to awfully written, pointless drivel. More of the latter than the former, needless to say.
    • Second, I come from an email marketing background where my key concern was whether the content I was sending week in, week out, to over half a million readers was worth THEIR while. I was, to say the least, precious about Data Protection and if anyone suggested buying lists from agencies or scraping our customer database for addresses, I suggested in return ripping their balls out and cooking them in a nice tomato and basil sauce. Once I felt that the company I worked for didn’t allow me to produce content I genuinely thought could make our customers feel warm and fuzzy inside, I had to leave.
    • Finally, in my new role at Taptu, I wear many hats – one of which involves handling some of the communication and PR. I adore that part of my job but it means I’m on the OTHER side of the fence, sending press releases, praying that bloggers won’t rebuff me or, worse, publish a post claiming I’ve spammed them with irrelevant content. That’s amongst my worst nightmares, no joke.

    It’s a funny place to be, to say the least. I sympathise with both camps to a certain point; the PR people who are given targets to meet, numbers of mentions and pageviews to get, and the bloggers who want real news.

    At the same time, as a blogger, poor journalism in the form of bloggers who regurgitate press releases thinly veiled as news articles make my blood boil, as I know these are the people who have lulled PR agencies into a state of comfortable laziness.

    There’s no denying it, working in PR and always being on top of the latest news and the important bloggers isn’t easy and requires passion. You need to be interested in your industry and personally invested. The canyon between the passionate product evangelist and the PR Joe Bloggs who’s trying to hit targets on paper is deeper and more obvious than ever, and I’ll let you guess which one manages to appeal to me, Carlo or Chris Anderson.

    So PR people, make an effort to think before you send. Send quality news, don’t blow your own trumpet too much and let us figure out whether your product is “revolutionary” or “ground-breaking”. And bloggers, let PR people know when they’re hitting the sweet spot and when they’re not.

    Hopefully, we can all learn to play nice together and live in a nice utopian world where bloggers and PR people walk together hand in hand, surrounded by rainbows and unicorns. Right? Right? Can’t we? Well… I tried.

    [Cat picture by edmittance on Flickr]

  • Plastic carrier bags vs paper bags

    Dear Britain,

    Plastic bagsEvery year, over 17.5 billion plastic carrier bags are given out by supermarkets to enable you to take your shopping home. We all collect bags of bags, reusing maybe 5% of them at most, and disposing of the rest either by dropping them in those big supermarket bins, or at home in the usual rubbish.

    The above is crap. Completely, utterly crap.

    What I want everyone to ask next time they go to the supermarket is whether there are brown paper bags to use as an alternative. I find it shocking that none of the big shops, Sainsbury’s, Tesco or Asda, offer paper bags. They offer reusable bags, but being realistic, the vast majority of people are disorganised and forget their reusable bags at home, or they go immediately after work without popping home.

    Supermarkets, please get brown paper bags into the stores. People, demand them and use them.

    I’m far from an environmentalist and I know I probably leave a Bigfoot-sized carbon footprint on the planet, but this is one area where I think we’d all benefit.

    Thank you.

    Peace, love and H2O,
    Vero

  • Kitten rodeo: Jack and Rose are definitely feeling at home

  • Top 10 useful apps for Mac newbies

    A week ago, Leopard, the latest version of OS X, the Apple Mac operating system, was released. I already thought that the rate at which my friends and acquaintances were deserting Windows for Mac was high back when Vista came out, warts and all. I knew nothing. It’s less of a trickle nowadays, and more of a thundering tsunami wave heading Mac’s way!

    Since I haven’t had the opportunity to really sit down with these friends lately, I thought the least I could do as a faithful disciple of Apple was to share my list of top 10 useful applications, which I consider to be must-haves when using a Mac. They vary between productivity apps, cool alternatives to overpriced professional products like Adobe’s and just outright fun stuff.

    1. Quicksilver: No Mac is complete without Quicksilver, in my opinion. The main feature I use is the quick launcher – create your own keyboard shortcut from which you can call up any application or file without going into the app folder. Leopard’s Spotlight can now do that, but if you’re patient with Quicksilver, you’ll realise it does a whole lot more than just quicklaunch…
    2. Skitch: Hands down THE best quick-fix image resizer, editor and uploader. Completely intuitive to use, you’ll get from zero to LOLCat in 4 seconds!
    3. Pixelmator: For slightly fancier image editing than what Skitch allows, Pixelmator might be the perfect solution for those of us who get a rash from using Photoshop. It’s $59 for a license but it’ll probably do everything you and I need.
    4. Adium: Stick MSN Messenger, GTalk, ICQ, Yahoo! Chat and whatever else tickles your fancy from a single client. Less clutter is good.
    5. Flickr uploader: Pretty straightforward app – put pictures in, tag images, upload to Flickr. Simple, quick, fuss-free. Oh and free too.
    6. Parallels: This is a necessity more than anything, but Parallels allows those new to Mac to still access their Windows apps, and gives web designers/developers a way to check their sites in Internet Exploder.
    7. TaskPaper, OmniOutliner Pro, OmniFocus: I know I’m cheating here, but I didn’t want to drag on too much about GTD and productivity apps, because they’re not to everyone’s taste. However, if you’re looking for a friendly OS X GTD app, try one of the above, ranging from utterly simple – TaskPaper – to complex and complete with OmniOutliner and OmniFocus. TaskPaper certainly does the job for me, with contexts, projects and archiving of done items. Simple and practical. Have a play and let me know what you think!
    8. Unison: If you need a Usenet reader, Unison does the job wonderfully well. Produced by the great team at Panic, it’s priced at $24.95, but comes with a 15 day trial.
    9. Coda: I don’t personally use this one, but seems to come as a consensus from most web developers I know who are Mac users. Another Panic app, it’s priced at $79 and probably also comes with a trial period.
    10. iStat Menus: If you’re keen to know how much memory is being used, how much network activity you’re racking up, etc, you’ll like this app. You can put the most essential pieces of info directly in your toolbar, editing settings from within the Systems Preferences. iStat Menus is donationware.
    11. Bonus! Activity Monitor: Now this one might seem strange, seeing as it’s a utility that is already part of OS X, as opposed to a 3rd party download. However, too few people are aware that the tool is there. When your machine whirs itself into a frenzy and you can’t work out why, open Activity Monitor – or leave it running in the background as I often do – and find out which application is guilty. If you use Firefox, it’ll often be the guilty party, I warn you.

    Right well, this should get Tom and Darla started, shouldn’t it? 🙂

    [Update 07/11/07: Andrew pointed out that Chris Pirillo totally outdid me with his post of Top 100 mac apps.]

  • Straight out of the ice age

    Defrosting the freezer is something that we all think “oh yeah, must really do that next weekend” but since it’s about as exciting as watching paint dry, it always gets delayed.

    Well, last night, looks like I didn’t shut the freezer door properly. Bugger. It means that, this morning, there was a nice puddle of water and a hell of a lot of defrosted food around. Thankfully, the kittens hadn’t spotted the mess and stayed nicely away while I cleaned the whole thing up.

    Three nearly-finished loaves of bread with a whole ice age worth of frost on them, a few melted ice lollies, a bag of pesto cubes (ooh great find!) and some frostbitten bagels. So really, not many food casualties.

    I apologise to the environment for the wasted electricity overnight, I’ll make up for it by planting a tree or composting the cat poo or something…

    At least I’ve just recuperated about 25 Ikea food bag clips. So THAT’s where they’d all gone. And here I was, blaming Andrew for throwing them away carelessly.

    And the moral of this story – since there needs to be a moral to such a boring post – take half an hour today, empty, defrost and clean up your freezer, especially if it’s not a frost-free one. You’re making it work doubly hard with all that crappy ice, therefore using more power than necessary.

    Right, well, time to go get reacquainted with the bottle of grapefruit vodka I also found in the freezer, wedged between the year-old oven yorkshire puddings and the half melted ice lollies.

  • Jack and Rose: The kittens are home safe and sound

    I promised everyone photos as soon as the kittens get home. I expected to have to stick the camera in the cat box, where they’d be hiding all nervous about their new home.

    Rubbish! They were chilled during the whole journey home, after about 5 minutes of meowing, then once home, they explored the entire house within a few seconds. They ate, had a wee and promptly fell asleep on their little activity centre. Now they’re pouncing up and down the stairs, playing together, taking the occasional break to purr against my leg like a little engine – so it’s time to share a few of the photos we’ve taken so far.

    Couldn’t ask for sweeter kittens, they’re absolutely adorable. I’m sure I’ll find time to upload a video tomorrow, but for now, time to play!

    Jack and Rose sleeping in their activity centre on the first night
    Jack and Vero bonding on the first night

  • Too excited. Might blow up.

    Today is going so well, I’m kind of tip toeing around for fear that it’s too good to be true and the Big Bad Monster of Stress and Worries will wake up and eat me.

    But for now, let’s celebrate all the good stuff:

    1. We’re picking up the kittens, Jack and Rose, tonight. Can’t wait!
    2. I’m definitely getting an iPhone. On launch day. You just try and stop me now!
    3. I’ve booked my ticket to Future of Mobile conference in London. See you there!
    4. Google IMAP has been enabled on my account. Sweet!
    5. Leopard is still perfectly smooth and functional and lurvly on my MacBook. Rowr!
    6. Even my lunchtime sandwich from the crummy vans outside was reasonably good.

    Let’s all bask in the positiveness for once, because you ain’t getting this on my blog again anytime soon.*

    [* Note that this post is not even fuelled by cheekily swiped Halloween candy. I haven’t had sugar yet. Really!]

  • Uhh hallo, I mam a m0use!

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    Uhh hallo, I mam a m0use!, originally uploaded by thatcanadiangirl.

    I give m0use three days before it gets decapitated by Jack Harkness!