The Economist on Toronto

So, post-run Saturday mornings have turned into a reading time for me, typically with The Economist on the list. Being in London shortly, with a weekend stay I thought I'd check out the city guide to see if there was anything particularly interesting to hit.

What'd I discover? It turns out the city guides are actually pretty interesting, and comical at times.

So, let's quickly compare London and Toronto, shall we?

London

The strongest relationships are forged after work—be that in a pub or at an informal evening meal. The line between work and private life is not as clearly delineated as in America, and the British tend to socialise with colleagues quite regularly. Drunken behaviour on a Friday evening will be laughed off the following Monday, and in some cases is quite the norm.

and

Midday drinking has declined, but it is still normal to have a glass of wine or a beer, with food or without.

Toronto

Once the working week is over, Torontonians value their free time. Important meetings are not typically scheduled for late on Friday afternoons, and you should not try to set up meetings at weekends.

and

Unless your host indicates otherwise, stick to sparkling mineral water during a business lunch; midday meals here tend to be dry.

and

There is a tendency to keep business and private life firmly apart. Don't, therefore, expect to be questioned about your family or recent holiday, or to be invited for post-work drinks.

YIKES! We are known for being boring people that can't have a drink with lunch, have any real interest in the people we're doing business with, or any desire to socialize with them?!

Now, as a general fan of breakfast meetings, I'm not keen on the Brits' distaste for it, or Oscar Wilde's claim that "only dull people are interesting at breakfast," but I'll take it over what we get pegged as, any day.

The worst slam about Toronto (and one that's hard to disagree with, I think) is "Risk-taking and unconventional thinking do not tend to be the norm. In general, expect your business contacts to be cautious, and to value organisation and detail."

It's hard to treat generalizations as anything more than just that, but while I love Toronto, I have a hard time disagreeing with any of this... and that's a sad thing.

Of course, there's also this gem "Many Canadians nurture both inferiority and superiority complexes about America. Tread carefully."

On facebook, from Uncyclopedia.

Facebook is a mutation of the LiveJournal virus that infects people who consider themselves "way too cool" to have a Myspace. Its precise origins are unknown, but it has been hypothesized that the Facebook mutation occurred after the LiveJournal virus was exposed to a form of delta-radiation known as Internet pretention. It is mainly intended for clinically depressed teenage wanabees, and co-morbidity with the MySpace virus is fairly consistent.

Check it out at Uncyclopedia.

Vista activation, still broken.

I'm not generally against the idea of software activation: If I paid for your software, and you need to be able to confirm that this is true... okay, fine. (Not a fan, but not violently opposed.)

Well... I was, right up until 5 minutes ago. I had to launch Vista (in Parallels on my Mac) to backup my BlackBerry. Windows started to complain that my version of Vista wasn't genuine, etc. and took me to a website where I could confirm the validity of my license (or whatever).

The site was totally useless, and gave a 6+ step process including running some other app, copying it's output to the clipboard, going to another site, finding the LOCAL tech support resource for Microsoft, pasting the results into a form there...etc. This looks like a massive hassle.

For the record, my copy of Vista? Given to me by Microsoft, box and all... I doubt the folks in Mountain View are handing out bootleg copies of Vista, and I sure haven't changed anything in Parallels in the last several weeks, so ... what gives Microsoft?

OneZone: 98% downtime.

Much will be said about RIM today, and their massive system failure last night, that seemed to knock out ever BlackBerry in the western hemisphere (nice). So, I'm not going to apologize for RIM... they've definitely got some 'splainin to do... but at least their service usually works.

I'm sitting in a coffee shop, connected to OneZone, and getting the same problem that I usually do : my computer just can't get an IP address.

So, of the 50+ times I've tried to ever get OneZone working (over a span of several months), I've succeeded once.

BlackBerry: Predictably works. Occasionally doesn't and we all get very upset.

OneZone: Predictably doesn't work. Rarely does, and some of us get excited. The others don't care... they stopped trying to get OneZone to work long ago.

The most amusing part of all this is listening to Toronto Hydro Telecom advertising this service, and the idea that we'll have to pay for it at some point.

A different kind of thank-you.

A great email I just got from Nike. Some times, I really, really love their marketing group... and I love that (at least in my little bubble world) they occasionally stand up for something.

The email's a simple block of black text on white, in an image.

It reads:

Thank you, ignorance.

Thank you for starting the conversation.

Thank you for making an entire nation listen to the Rutgers team's story. And for making us wonder what other great stories we've missed.

Thank you for reminding us to think before we speak.

Thank you for showing us how strong and poised 18- and 20-year-old women can be.

Thank you for reminding a sports nation that another basketball tournament goes on in March.

Thank you for showing us that sport includes more than the time spent on the court.

Thank you for unintentionally moving women's sport forward.

And thank you for making all of us realize that we still have a long way to go.

Next season starts 11.16.07

Thanks Nike.

Update on the JBL's

So it turns out my iPod had the "Bass Reducer" EQ setting turned on (which I didn't realize). So, when I turned it off : WOW, the bass on the JBL's is WAY heavy (these are the JBL Reference 220's, btw) and overpowering. At least it sounds okay with the reducer EQ on... but it's definitely making me think the future involves a pair of Shure or Eymotics.

New TED site launches.

I've never been to a TED conference (TEDCity in Toronto doesn't count...), but because the folks at TED have been generous in releasing videos of many of the talks, I do feel like I've been half there... :) Also, personally, I can't think of a single podcast out there that can match the depth, and inspiration of the TEDTalks... but that's just me.

This morning, TED's launching a new site, w/ lots of social networking goodness, 100 TED talks, and apparently 30 of them haven't ever been made available before (so I'm definitely taking a look!)

Also, they've got some "high resolution video"... which I assume means 480P or thereabouts.

Site membership is free and open to the world. Check it out. (It's a little slow, and while the UI looks gorgeous, it makes searching around quickly actually somewhat difficult. Hopefully they'll fix the UI soon!)

Oh, and one more thing... here's a clip of an amazing poet (Rives) performing at TED.

How I Met Your Mother

Second public wish... it'd be great if CBS managed to make this show available on iTunes...

or if I could figure out how to torrent it down :)

Facebook wish: Handle cookies!

I've been using facebook on my BlackBerry and on my Mac... the problem is that it doesn't seem to remember WHO I am whenever I switch platforms, so I always have to type in my email address / password. It's kind of a crummy experience, when all they need to do is implement cookies properly :(

Weekend reading...

Gotta' love Internet censorship... just another reason not to vacation in Cuba, I guess...

Creationists are a funny sort... and to (with a straight face) talk about humans and dinosaurs inhabiting the earth at the same time, and the idea of the continents rapidly splitting in the span of around a day through "runaway subduction" is... comical.

Canada has an HIV entry ban? Great. Guess we had to be ashamed to be Canadian every now and again...

Oh, and as interesting and socially compelling Ségolène Royal may be... I wonder how she's planning on paying for her plans...

New headphones : JBL Reference 220's

So, I was sprinting off to Waterloo, and moments after jumping into a cab, noticed that one of the earpieces on my Sony EX-71's had broken off. Ouch. More than 2 hours to and from Waterloo (on a train) without any music?!

So, I headed over to the Apple Store instead, and did a quick (like 5-second skim) of the boxes available. The JBL's caught my eye, and I took off with them. My first impression of the sound was that it was overly shrill on the high-end, and certainly had far too much bass (yeah, I know, it's a personal thing, but I don't like my headphones colouring my music).

Anyway, after about 2 weeks of burn-in, the headphones actually sound pretty great: the midrange and treble sound fantastic (any shrillness is the singer's fault now :)... voices come through as though they were right next to you, and the staging's pretty good. They're still a bit more bass heavy than I'd like, but it's forgivable. (Arguably preferable on a plane anyhow.)

I've been avoiding active noise canceling headphones (another battery to charge, and more bulk to bring on a plane... and you can't take 'em to the gym in a pinch), and so these are my second or third pair of in-ear cans...

We'll see how they work out, but I'll have to say, my next pair might just be one of those Etymotics... (Don't get me wrong, the JBL's sound great, and the Etymotic's I want are pretty pricey, but in another 12 months my clumsiness will probably affect these cans, and the Etymotics are supposed to have a more balanced sound... I guess it depends on whether you like the extra bass or not).

On facebook...

If you get facebook friend-spammed by me, I'm sorry... some chunk of my addressbook got uploaded, and I clicked the "send 'em all" button... thankfully it wasn't all of the address book. Sorry again!

oh, and... wtf ... the number of people using facebook is ... stunning .... like people who aren't students... who're just using it as a new social network?

I really gotta' start playing with more stuff, more often :)

Happy 6th birthday Matchstick!

Matchstick, an awesome Toronto startup just turned 6 years old. They're a word of mouth marketing company, built by two awesome founders and have done work with some of the biggest brands around (Coke, Land Rover, BlackBerry, you name it).

One of my friends actually just got a free BlackBerry through a campaign RIM did with Matchstick... if years of my pestering didn't drive him to get one, at least someone at Matchstick managed to slip him some ThumbCrack.

Oh, and speaking of the birthday... these guys throw a great party... if only my head didn't hurt afterward...

Either way, it's pretty great to have a company like this in our backyard!

150 people, multiple offices/timezones ... in a startup!?

So how does Joost do it?

Having more than one office for a startup is hard enough (arguably, having one is hard enough), but what about having several offices, across multiple timezones, in multiple countries? Not as a large multinational conglomerate... but as a fledgling startup getting off the ground.

Why would anyone ever want the headache? Outsourcing development is one thing, but choosing to manage so many people/locations/cultures, all at the start? I was chatting with someone yesterday and we realized that there're basically three HR paths when you're doing a startup:

• You put all the best people for the job in one office and start cranking
• You get everyone in the same office... but are they the best? No. They're competent, but not stars.
• You find stars, wherever they are (within reason) and you find the way to make it work... leaving them where they are.

The first doesn't often happen... unless you get incredibly lucky (personally I believe in hiring for raw intelligence over domain expertise, but sometimes - especially when building the senior team, experience matters). Generally it's the big companies that are stable, and have deep pockets that can manage to relocate a large number of people to create great teams. As a startup? Wouldn't count on it.

The second is easy... there are great, talented people everywhere. The people you have may not all be rockstars, but they'll probably be pretty competent, and will probably work well together (or at least not have all the communication overhead of having several offices).

The third path is hard. You're basically deciding that the extra value you get from these stars is more than enough to make up from what you lose in additional communication overhead, management overhead, and the cost of extra offices, etc. It's a hard bet to make as a startup (where you really want to be able to bump into people in the office, go for lunch or dinner spontaneously, and decide to get leery after a few late nights working to push something out).

Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft's former CTO once said that a great programer is around 10,000 times (no, not a typo) more productive than an average one. There's probably an order of magnitude exaggeration there, but if he's right (and he was Microsoft's CTO, remember), it begins to make a pretty strong case for finding the absolute best people, wherever they are, and learning to deal with whatever additional overhead that causes (which certainly sounds like how Joost works).

Changing gears, I re-read Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and The Bazaar recently. It's something I read a long time ago, trying to first get my head around open source development... but this time through I learned a lot more... especially since I've been thinking about how you build/manage/support a distributed team. The idea that open source projects are pretty good at breaking big problems down into smaller, discrete chunks, and having teams go off and build those chunks.

... on open-source projects, the halo developers work on what are in effect separable parallel subtasks and interact with each other very little; code changes and bug reports stream through the core group, and only within that small core group do we pay the full Brooksian overhead.

It probably also forces better software design.

So open source projects show us that distributed development, when you've got dedicated, talented people (these are people that are largely volunteering their time and talents) involved can really work. I wonder if it's an accident that Joost is built atop some Mozilla code. I also wonder how distributed the engineering teams at companies like MySQL, RedHat and others are... guess I'll have to look into it.

In the meantime, if you've got any pointers on just how you make this distributed team thing really sing, please send me a note. :)

Whenever in doubt, remember the answer is 42.

Gotta' love a VC that references Douglas Adams...

Via Nivi.

Things not to do: fake exploratory/diligence calls.

So, being at a venture fund is interesting... you get to meet all sorts of interesting people, hear what they're working on, share what you're either working on or thinking about, etc.

So I got an email recently from someone asking if I'd place a call to a company that we might perceive as competitive, in the guise of a VC wanting to make a potential investment.

I think I've been on the receiving end of one of these calls once before, and I know a friend whose company got cold-called by an unscrupulous VC who wanted to get a trial version of their software (!?!?!?) to play around with, when it turned out that this VC had a competitor in their portfolio. What makes it worse is that this VC was particularly slimy, by pretending to be a consulting firm that would use this particular software for a client. As it turns out, they were also particularly dumb... it turns out that if you send a fax from your office fax machine, it's likely to have "SomeRandomFund Capital" at the top of the page.

Anyway, back to present-day : I'm not sure how competitive or not this company actually is. I've met their CEO once, a long time ago, and have met one of their board members more recently. From what I've seen and heard, they're focusing on a different problem (and an important one, so I wish 'em luck). Either way, I am going to look into it more deeply: but I'm going to call around and get information that I'd be able to get anyway, not try and trick someone into telling me something they really shouldn't.

Okay, so what is an EIR?

Okay, so after Ambient, I've started a new job... I'm an EIR (entrepreneur in residence) at Celtic House (the VC that backed us at Ambient).

I've been asked a few times just what an EIR is, what we're supposed to be doing, why it's a great gig, etc. I also remember frantically searching for blogs by other EIR's before I joined, so I could know what I should expect. So with that as my motivation...

VC's are all about finding deals, and teams. EIR's are generally entrepreneurs that a VC knows and trusts, and wants to bring on for a few reasons:

They've got

• experience or insight in a space a VC's interested in
• a view to deals that VC might not typically see
• they've got a network that's different (and useful to) that VC

At the end of a stint as an EIR, "success" is typically the EIR either going and starting a new company, or jumping into one of the companies that pitches them. So, as an example, if a company that was in a particular space that an EIR had real domain expertise in, and took a liking to, that EIR might end up (as part of the funding process) taking a role in that company. In my case, I'm focusing most of my time on building something new, and assembling the best team I possibly can to make the vision real. It's a funny job where the goal is to be out of it in a few months (6-12 months seems pretty typical, and if my informal sample is any indication, most EIR's are dying to get back into operational roles pretty quickly anyway).

Regardless of how the EIR stint ends, the hope is that all along the way, the EIR's providing value by helping look at deals, and provide insight on whatever space they've got an interest in. My contract, for example, mentions some of my responsibilities as "will review the business plans as provided by the partners", "will provide his insights and his thoughts on opportunities in the spaces of", and "will perform due diligence on opportunities as requested by the partners".

So being an EIR is basically one of these amazing gig's where your job is to meet fantastically smart people (other entrepreneurs, VCs, technologists, and others) while you basically figure out to do next.

Okay... so what do you owe the VC for this? From another quick and informal sample of other EIR's, there's actually a pretty basic moral commitment: the VC gets first look at the deal, whether it's a new company the EIR's building, or one that they're looking into. Of course, this is more than fair, given that you'd never take an EIR gig at a VC where you didn't want them to invest in your next company! ("Thanks Captain Obvious," I can hear someone mutter.)

Okay, so the last bit, before this post gets really unruly: what's a typical day-in-the-life? I think this happens in stages:

1. Learning/exploring
2. Ideation
3. Creation

And the more I think about these bits, the more I think each needs it's own post :-) So more on that soon.

OneZone... working!?

For the longest time, I've never been able to get OneZone (Toronto's downtown WiFi network) to work for me... with any device, regardless of whether it was a WiFi phone or my laptop. It seems that this is a pretty common experience, with nobody I know being able to actually use it.

Well, this morning I'm sitting in the Starbucks at Queen and John, and posting this using OneZone... it's kind of slow, but at least it's working. :-) Now I'm getting excited about this beginning to actually start working quickly/etc.

That said, I still think I'd rather just put an HSPA card in my laptop, once we get not-so-usurious data (and data roaming) prices.

Alex made me say this

Exchange *rocks* !!!

Bob Metcalfe at Motorola

Padmasree Warrior (CTO at Motorola... and I'm a big fan :), recently sat down and had a public chat with Bob Metcalfe, and he gave a talk entitled "Ethernet, Entrepreneurship and Energy."

Listen to the podcast here.

Thoughts about RIM ... what's good enough?

Lots of money's been spent trying to catch up to RIM. Billions of dollars, I'd guess, if you added up the over quarter-billion of VC spent on Seven, Visto, and Good, and the other attempts by Microsoft, Nokia and others. So why does RIM keep winning against such incredible odds?

My guess? RIM's got an end-to-end solution for BlackBerry that looks a lot different from everyone else. Motorola, Nokia, Microsoft... everyone else made the bet that mobile would evolve like the PC did: one company provides the hardware, one the operating system, one the email application, and whether it's an ethernet/WiFi/EDGE/EVDO/etc. network connection, it's all good ole' TCP/IP back to your mail server.

So, for me this generally looks like:

• WiFi
• Entourage
• Mac OS X
• MacBook Pro

But it's also been:

• WiFi
• Outlook
• Windows Vista
• Parallels
• Mac OS X
• MacBook Pro

... and you know what? It works pretty well. The folks making the OS, hardware, and email app didn't really need to know one another terribly well.. and they didn't need to know the mail server creator. The PC industry's evolved to the point where each of those components by itself is (generally) good enough, so they can be decoupled from one another and things generally work.

So if I look at a Treo, it's basically running Palm OS or Windows Mobile, with Outlook/Visto/Good/Chatter running on top... and it doesn't really matter whether the network's CDMA or GSM. The same is true of the Nokia stack: just substitute Symbian for Palm or Windows Mobile.

The difference? Palm's a horrible OS (crashes all the time, can't run more than one program at a time well, etc.) Windows Mobile is better, but not MUCH better (eats battery, it's clunky/hard to use/etc.), and Symbian's a usability nightmare: it was developed for smartphones, but seems more at home on a normal phone than an email device.

The Nokia E61 is (to me) a great example of the failure of Symbian, and the OS/Hardware/App split... Here's a phone with 3G/EDGE/WiFi, an awesome screen and lots of memory. On paper, it's awesome. Ever try to use one, though?

Let's start with WiFi... Symbian is an OS that feels a lot like it was built by wireless engineers. You'd think that the phone could intelligently switch between the GSM and WiFi networks as appropriate? Nope. You've got to create "access points" and "access point groups" with combinations of GSM and WiFi networks in them, and hope that the application you want is able to understand what a "group" is... So, that snazzy and snappy WiFi radio? It's basically useless.

What happens when you get an email on the Nokia? Well... it's about 5 button presses to get to the email that made the device buzz... and that's if you can figure out which inbox your message landed up in. Was it an SMS or an eMail? And why do files sent by Bluetooth end up in the same inbox as text messages? I don't mean to pick on Symbian or this particular phone... it's just an example of a bunch of different people building a bunch of different pieces of the overall solution, and having the end result be an ugly mess.

RIM took a far different path: they own the operating system, the email app that's on the phone itself, the servers that compress and push the messages to you... they even use their own messaging protocols, because at the time they built out the BlackBerry device and network, TCP/IP just wasn't good enough.

In The Innovator's Dilemma, Clay Christensen makes the point that in the early stages of a market, the components for a complex product are - probably - by themselves not good enough, and the only way to create a total product that's good enough, is to do it all yourself. As the market evolves, though, those individual pieces end up being good enough... and it's easier to just pull together "best of breed" pieces to build your solution.

So, where are we in the mobile cycle? Hardware's getting pretty good... the networks are pretty snappy (so TCP/IP is just fine, thank you)... Operating systems? Well, Symbian's still in need of a major redesign, and Windows Mobile is still pretty clunky. It's curious that the mobile operators and handset vendors seem to have realized this earlier than their PC counterparts did: things like the Linux/Java initiatives, and the Java standardization projects suggest that the OEM's and the operators realize that they've all actually got more to gain by creating a standard operating platform that works and allowing developers to create and innovate, instead of spending time building more fragmented, broken platforms.

So until the OS problem gets really, deeply fixed, I don't see RIM having to really worry about the competitors taking over anytime soon. That said, everything else is really getting to the good enough stage... and once the operating systems get there, we'll finally be where we are in the PC world: innovating and competing in the application space, not really the OS/infrastructure stuff. So what's RIM's play in this world? I'm not sure... but I think some of the things that made them wildly successful over the last few years have changed. Maybe it's converged devices, consumer devices, and the like. (Mind you, we're probably 2-3 years away from this happening, so I'm sure they'll be fine :-)

NB: As I write this, my Berry's receiving weeks old messages from Gmail... I don't know whether it's Google's fault or RIM's... but for two companies that work pretty closely together... they ought to do better than this!

Canadian National Vimy Memorial

Vimy, originally uploaded by zoreil.

One of many good days to remember.

Are you an Alpha?

Two years ago, the folks at AceTech held their first conference in Ontario. I wasn't able to make it, but did happen to receive a copy of a book by Kate Ludeman and Eddie Erlandson... the book talked a lot about coaching type-A personalities... what Bob Sutton basically calls assholes. ;-)

The two authors also have a consulting practice, and their website has a 12-minute test to help you figure out if you're an alpha. It's interesting in that it gives you both the strengths and weaknesses any one of your alpha traits may happen to have, and some suggestions on how to deal with them (i.e. become more effective, less of an asshole, whatever).

The website (with the 12 minute test) is here.

DeepFish is cool, but has it solved the right problem?

Microsoft's launched DeepFish recently, with much fanfare. It's definitely a cool product, and allows people to consume existing web pages much more effectively than the can with a traditional mobile browser. It's not that DeepFish is entirely new, though, as Nokia's done a great job with their Series 60 browser (based on WebKit) and has given it a similar pan/zoom sort of interface.

What troubles me, though is articles like this one which miss the point: DeepFish is cool, and they've built a great app to solve an interesting problem, but I fear that it's the wrong problem. The Register's article dismisses the notion that people will build apps for mobile phones, by taking a quick swipe at WAP and saying, basically : "See... it doesn't work when you build just for mobile."

Slow down now... what about iMode, that built itself around cHTML (a bare-bones version of HTML)? They picked a standard language that lots of developers knew and understood, removed a lot of the fancy stuff that wasn't terribly mobile friendly, and it's been a complete success. So, I think the message here is that people will develop for mobile phones, but they'll only do it if it's easy, and if the environment they develop for is rich, deep, and familiar. Simply cramming the standard New York Times or CNN page onto my phone's screen isn't terrible useful, and more importantly, it's - at best - a stopgap measure until we've found the real solution to the mobile application development problem.

Cool new tool... VoodooPad

Okay, so this may not be a revelation for anyone other than me, but there's a great little app for the Mac called VoodooPad, and I've been recently using it as my notepad (which is a bit of a shift for someone that's basically always used a text editor).

Unlike David at 37Signals, it does matter to me if an app I use works offline, and wiki's as we normally know them don't really work offline well. There've been a few self-contained Wiki's that run in the browser, but none that really seemed to work quickly enough to make the tradeoff (features vs speed in a text editor) worthwhile.

So VoodooPad is basically a little wiki-as-an-app that runs locally on your machine... it's fast, searchable, lets you drag and drop docs/etc. in as links. It's my first text-file replacement.

How far is the edge of the universe?

Excellent question. :)

Great reading: Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks

So I've had a bit of time to catch up on some reading recently... and got to add Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks to my "finished" pile (it's been sitting on the reading list for some time, but after the EFF awards ceremony at ETech, where he received an award, I couldn't put it off too much longer).

I've been spending a lot of time recently thinking about the open source community, the economics of open source, etc. I've been trying to figure out : how do you build an open source project where the big (and important) chunks are open and free... while still retaining pieces with proprietary, closed code... perhaps even with patents being involved. (I guess my extended reading list is going to include some of ESR's work...)

What's most interesting to me about Benkler's book is the discussion about the economics of production... one of the basic ideas being that monopoly rights to IP, or indeed stricter IP legislation doesn't necessarily produce the intuitive results. You'd think that creators would be more incented to create in an environment where there's stronger IP protection, right?

Well, what if that stronger IP protection made it harder for those creators to license the IP of other creators? Would that actively discourage innovation?

Benkler's book also got me thinking about service vs. license revenue for projects that are open sourced. His book shows IBM generating $2B in 2003 in "Linux related services". What's interesting to me (of course) is figuring out just what they made on licensing software built on an open core... and how they managed to do this.

Anyway, enough of my rambling... it's a great read, so stop by Benkler's site, have a skim (it's CC licensed), and buy a copy at Amazon.

Air Canada does good...

So, a few weeks ago they managed to totally screw up a flight to Ottawa (I went from a nice seat on a nice plane, leaving at 7 AM, to a crappy seat on a crappy plane leaving around noon). To add insult to injury, the guy at the gate offered a meal voucher as compensation for the mess up (I swear, I was calm right up until then).

Anyway, I sent AC a note, and within a week they sent back a note saying they'd send me a $100 credit for my trouble. Not bad... not great... but certainly not bad, all things considered. And then when I was glancing over my Aeroplan statement, I noticed that they'd given me 7,500 miles as well... Something they didn't even mention. I thought it was a great gesture on their part.

Good treatment from an airline? Yeah... I'm suprised too :)

Joost finally supports Apple Remote...

Which, I've gotta' say, really does make it a whole lot more useful... Though, I gotta' say the video performance is still a bit dodgy, and the lack of HD content is still unfortunate: Any program that decides to launch full-screen to play back video really ought to have video that doesn't have lots of scaling/compression artifacts.

Lots of cool stuff happening in the IPTV / cablecard kinda' space (Brian is has a few interesting companies in the space) so I'm looking forward to seeing HD content delivered to my screen sometime soon...

If you were at ETech

The good folks over at Zimki have decided to let you tell 'em where you flew from, and they'll contribute some cash to buy carbon credits for your flight...

It's a great gesture... hope a few more attendees sign up as well