When showing someone your start-up/product/service, it’s easy to let them guide your thinking unconsciously. It feels like there’s an inverse proportion of weight given to feedback to sample size, especially if it’s the first time taking the cover off.
Here’s a really great example of why one should always take every bit of advice as advice and not gospel:
Have you ever been on Fischer-Hallman? It’s an ugly street, full of cars and traffic signals. Not pretty or pedestrian-friendly.
It’s also one of the busiest roads in Kitchener.
While this city is not the richest or the largest in Ontario, it’s to the point now where street cars can alleviate one of the biggest problems here: getting around.
The two lines presented below would let anyone go from the Downtown Go/Via station at Weber/Victoria to the Wal-Mart on Ottawa. Beautiful. As an added benefit, the Wal-Mart location is very close to the Conestoga Parkway, making it a great location to be picked up or dropped off by friends who use cars.
I’ve interacted with Adrian Banninga before on Twitter. I wrote about his game in a Fund This Game article on my gaming site. He re-tweeted my post and #ff’d me. So why do I need to know someone in between him and me before we can connect?
As a huge fan of LinkedIn I’ve recommended it to a ton of people. How can I continue recommending it when I am unable to perform this site’s most basic function: add a person to my network?
I’m not abandoning this blog, not by a long-shot. Still, my current work eats up my life these days.
If you wanna follow what we’re doing at Will Pwn 4 Food (and you know you do, because you like videogames just like I do), then come our first game, DodgeBots, and subscribe to our blog.
The Internet was way cooler when it was anonymous.
When it was anonymous, your name wasn’t attached to everything you did online. Everyone went by a handle. This means you could start a Geocities site and carve out your own niche space online, people could befriend and follow you who normally wouldn’t, and even the strangest of us found a home. All sorts of whacky, impossible things were possible because we weren’t bound by societal norms that plague our daily existence.
Now that that’s gone, the world is a lot smaller and so are the possibilities on the Internet.
Is there any way we can make an Internet 2 that forces its users to be completely anonymous?
Demoscene, demoscene, demoscene.
Signboard on a fence in Sausalito, CA: dog shit forbidden (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Outside of accidentally opening Internet Explorer the biggest annoyance on the web is mailto links. These are usually masqueraded as a ‘Contact Us’ link which you’d expect to forward to a web form. What ends up happening is either your operating system attempts to open a mail program (who still uses those, seriously?) or it forwards you to gmail (less annoying but still annoying as hell).
Here’s how to disable mailto links in Firefox and Chrome.
2002-2004 Chrysler 300M photographed in Fort Washington, Maryland, USA. Category:Chrysler 300M (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
While I wait patiently for Canada to adopt a comprehensive high-speed rail line and commuter service, the next best thing is a car for working on the go. Though I’m the primary driver these days, there have been times when I’ve been the passenger. I write this now from a very comfortable position next to Exhibition Park in Guelph. I’m doing work on the laptop in the passenger seat (using a 3G USB adapter from Wind mobile).
Rail is my favourite mode of transport because:
Still, for times when I need a third place and cafes are closed, I use my car. It’s a 2001 Chrysler 300m. Here are a few things that could have been done better.
Image via CrunchBase
Facebook has recently changed the way it handles my news feed. Because of this, it’s likely that I’ll be reading it less and keeping it around just to post things and check up on to make sure I haven’t missed a message.
Here’s why: I don’t equate friendship with following.
When I’m your friend, I want to keep in touch, maybe hang out, and share something with you directly. I don’t want to see your thought stream.
Don’t take it personally because it isn’t personal. When I read stuff online, it’s usually news. I want to learn something new about the fields in which I am excited, not in which you are excited. If it’s not news, it’s an editorial on said fields. If it’s not an editorial, it’s a tweet from someone who might be generating the previous two examples.
I had spent the last 6-12 months whittling down my Facebook news feed to weed out most people’s/most page’s posts from showing up. The little down arrow icon with the “Hide all from xyz” was my best friend.
Then, a week or so ago, all those settings got wiped in favour of a new “acquaintences” system where you specifically select which group you want to read from.
Here’s why it doesn’t work: I have no clue what people are going to say before they say it, so I have no idea who I would like to follow. But, once they’ve said it, I sure as hell know who I would like to unsubscribe from.
This doesn’t mean I don’t want to be their friend, it just means I don’t want to mix their stuff in with mine is all.
Staying at the Hotel Victoria in downtown Toronto for the last week with my girlfriend Amy has opened us to a ton of new, fantastic vegetarian and vegan restaurants. Google has helped us find them all, but I wanted to take a second to put together a small list in case you’re downtown Toronto for a while and are looking for great places to eat.
I’ll separate them by category.
Pizzaiolo
http://www.pizzaiolo.ca/
There are probably 15 to 20 of these around Toronto, but the one we went to was just a few doors down from our hotel on Yonge St. It was amazing. In fact, it was so amazing, we ordered pizzas there two days in a row. They have a ton of vegetarian and vegan choices and each are made fresh right in front of you. It’s amazing.
Urban Herbivore
http://www.torontoeatoncentre.com/EN/Directory/Stores/Pages/UrbanHerbivore_F018.aspx
Like most food places in Toronto, there are a few locations. The one we went to was in the Eaton Centre, and it was fantastic. I ate the BBQ Tofu sandwich and loved it even though I’m not normally a huge fan of tofu. It was quick and cheap. Like all great vegetarian food, if you didn’t know it was vegetarian you wouldn’t be able to tell.
Fresh
http://www.freshrestaurants.ca/our_history.asp
Fresh was, without a doubt, our favourite. It’s got great style, it’s busy, it’s fast, and the food tastes fantastic. Amy loved it so much she bought one of the recipe books they offer on sale.
King’s Cafe (Kensington Market)
http://www.kingscafe.com/
This is the sister restaurant to our favourite vegetarian restaurant in Guelph, Zen Garden. Great food and amazing Lychee Black tea.