October 2006

Rick Mercer usually has great blog posts (along with his television show) and if you seen his television rants you probably know what to expect. This week’s post is about Michael Fortier and he offers us a choice: should he run or should he stay? You decide! So far running is beating staying.

No, I’m not podcasting myself. That would be quite ridiculous and I don’t think anyone wants to listen to me talk about something unless they’re around me in real life (or do they?).

For me podcasting is all about listening to others’ podcasts. I have quite a few that I listen to on my Nano (1G). Among them are:

• Toronto This Week – Since I take the bus most days now I don’t get a chance to listen to much radio so this keeps me up-to-date on the local CBC shows (Metro Morning, Here & Now and Ontario Today).


• The Best of Ideas – This is one of the best podcasts that I listen to; hour-long documentaries on intellectual subjects such as organic food, religion and philosophy and the culture of sleep.


• The Best of The Current – Anna Maria Tremonti has some really great interviews on topical themes plus The Voice makes an appearance on each podcast.


• The Best of As It Happens – You can’t go wrong with this show. They deliver some hard-hitting interviews and some rather goofy ones too so it’s bound to keep you entertained and informed.


• The Best of DNTO – Definitely Not The Opera is a very fun show (hosted by Sook-Yin Lee) that gives me my pop culture fix for the week.


• The Movie Blog: Audio Edition – I started reading The Movie Blog a few months ago and it gives me my movie news but it’s nice to hear some discussion on movies too and these guys know how to deliver: almost an hour-long talk about movie news of the week plus a mailbag edition most weeks as well. It’s all of the movie news you’d ever want to hear! It’s also one of the most popular podcasts around.
• CBC Radio Editor’s Choice – each day they take their favourite segment and bundle it up in podcast form. Some of the segments are repeated in the other podcasts that I listen to but it gives you a good sampling of what’s available (and great) on CBC radio.


• The Bloggers Hotstove – Canadian politics discussion in podcast form. I recently started downloading these but I haven’t listened to any yet but knowing that James Bow is involved means that it’s bound to be high quality.


• Money Blogger Podcast – a personal finance podcast where Scott interviews different personal finance bloggers about their blog, their philosophy about saving and what they think about the world of personal finance these days. I’ve found some very great personal finance blogs through this podcast. It’s worth it for the links alone.

So that’s what I’ve been listening to and it’s kept me in a fairly good mood traveling back and forth to work. The other day I forgot my iPod at work so I had to go home and back without anything but the people on the bus to entertain me. If you have any podcasts of your own that you listen to or think that I might be interested in, please let me know!

I decided to make use of some of the other features that FeedBurner provides me. I use them to publish my RSS feed but I realize that not everyone likes to read sites through RSS. So I’ve added an email subscription box on the right hand side of the site so that if you want to know when I write new content but don’t want to be bothered to actually visit the site you can add your email address and it’ll send you an email. I’m fairly certain that FeedBurner will not sell your email address but I’ve added my own email address as a subscription so I’ll know myself how trustworthy their service is (plus it’s good to eat your own dogfood). So give the email subscription a try if it suits your needs, otherwise you can continue to visit or read the content through your RSS reader.

I think those of you who grew up watching Saved By The Bell (not The New Class or The College Years) should be bidding on this auction on eBay. That is some collection! It takes a certain level of devotion to amass that.

Marcy and I went to see Death of a President yesterday. It won one of the awards at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. It has generated quite a bit of controversy as a couple of the movie theatre chains in the United States have refused to screen the film.

After seeing the film though, it’s hard to understand why they would have those major objections. It’s not really as controversial as you might expect. If anything it’s fairly neutral to the policies of Bush and it’s actually more harsh on the media and protesters than anyone else. It felt to me like I was watching a documentary about the Kennedy assassination. I’m not going to give any of the plot away but there were quite a few parallels in this film to what Lee Harvey Oswald went through before getting gunned down. The atmosphere was also quite similar.

I’d recommend the film because it’s a pretty interesting piece of film work but don’t go in expecting it be an anti-Bush/war/oil/terrorism propaganda movie because it’s not. It presents a more simple plot and asks you to think about what kind of questions would you ask and what would you do if you were in a position of power and had to deal with the assassination of a president.

Hello, remember me? I’m the author of this site. I used to write pretty frequently in this space but as you can tell from my archives, I haven’t written anything meaningful since August (or ever if you’re really feeling cruel). In fact I haven’t even looked at this site since September. It’s not that I didn’t know that I wasn’t writing; that part is pretty obvious but I really couldn’t come up with much to say.

It’s also not that there haven’t been goings-on in my life either. In fact these last two months have been some of the busiest I’ve known for quite some time. Perhaps that’s part of the problem – the busier I get, the less time I have for writing anyway and since my job requires me to spend a great deal of time in front of a computer, I’m not inclined to spend a great deal of time in the evenings writing about whatever strikes my fancy.

I have become obsessed (obsessed!) with metrics recently. Car statistics is one of the metrics that I have consistently been tracking since June. Also personal finance is something that I have become really interested in. I’ve read numerous books and I have quite a few personal finance blogs (or pfblogs for those of you in-the-know) on my reading list (by the way I love the new Google Reader). I judiciously track our spending using Quicken 2006 (no need for the upgrade to 2007 yet). It’s very encouraging to watch our balances fall (credit that is; savings would be a different emotion). I know that we’re well on our way to financial freedom and once we get there it will really be a big sense of accomplishment.

I’m hoping to find some more time to write here because I really do enjoy it. The only problem is that life gets in the way and to be honest, living my actual life is more enjoyable anyway especially these days. Things are a little uncertain but you need some uncertainty to appreciate what is certain.

So that’s what is new with me these days. Wait a minute, I didn’t really give any specifics of what in fact is new with me. That will come soon enough, don’t you worry. I wouldn’t leave you in the dark for too long.