1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read the player’s blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

And now, my answers…

What were you doing five years ago?

Me at the Naked News party, 2003.

I was:

• Dealing with the fall-out from The Girl Who Cried Webmaster, an identity thief whom I dated very, very briefly. After her, I established my “no dating girls with LiveJournals” rule.
• Interviewing for a job at Tucows.
• The usual (for that era) girl trouble and other random weirdness.
• Hanging out with LizVang at the Canadian Idol auditions.
• Giving directions to strip bars.
• Comtemplating pimp-slapping the people at the Bell store.
• Being mistaken for legal aid.

What are five things on your to-do list for today (not in any particular order)?

1. Continue writing specifications for a couple of projects at b5media.
2. Drop off my bike for a tune-up at West Side Cycle.
3. Pack for my trip.
4. Deposit my tax refund cheque.
5. Kill Clarence the drug dealer for crooked cop Francis McReary in Grand Theft Auto IV.

What are five snacks you enjoy?

1. Oreo Blizzard from the world’s most oddly-located Dairy Queen at the Dragon City mall here in Accordion City, down the street from the office, deep in the heart of Lactose Intolerance Central.
2. Chocolate chip cookies from Le Gourmand.
3. Fruit from Fresh and Wild.
4. Coffee yogourt.
5. Two small 70-cent chicken pies from Ding Dong Pastries.

What five things would you do if you were a billionaire?
(not in order of action folks!)

1. Two chicks at the same time.
2. Set up some investments to make the money continue to work for me. Give some deserving charities nice fat cheques.
3. Take a big steamy dump on this PC laptop and buy myself a Mac. Reimburse b5media for the laptop I just pooped on, too.
4. Buy houses in Toronto, Boston and Manila and float between all three. Pay off any outstanding debt on my sister’s, mom’s and in-laws’ houses. Buy my brother-in-law Andy Ramoniac and his wife Sue a house.
5. Roland FR-7 V-accordion synthesizer, baby!

What are five of your bad habits?

1. Tendency to bite my thumbnails when deep in thought, annoyed or stressed.
2. I check my email and IM too often.
3. Tendency to overthink and over-edit what I write.
4. Diet Coke.
5. Tendency to make wildly inappropriate, lurid or so-weird-it-silences-the-room remarks.

What are five places where you have lived?

1. Manila, Philippines: My place of birth.
2. Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.: My first home in North America. I was there before Wendy was!
3. San Francisco, California, U.S.A.: I lived here during the dot-com bubble.
4. Accordion City: The city in which I’ve lived the longest. I came here in 1975.
5. Kingston, Ontario, Canada: Where I lived during the Crazy Go Nuts University years.

What are five jobs you’ve had?

Me playing accordion on the bar at the nightclub “The Living Room”.

1. Computer programmer. It’s something I’ve wanted to be since the seventh grade.
2. Technical evangelist. A role that I landed partially because of the accordion and had from 2000 through 2007, first at OpenCola, then at Tucows.
3. Project manager. My current job at b5media.
4. Snow-cone street vendor. There are some interesting stories from that time that I haven’t blogged yet.
5. Go-go dancer, pictured above. I bailed after a couple of weeks because my weekends were no longer my own, but I had a good time, and ladies did actually stuff bill down my pants. That’s why I didn’t have a bachelor party — most of my thirties was a bachelor party!

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Norman sees nothing wrong with the t-shirt’s imagery:

Norman acknowledged the imagery’s Jim Crow roots but said he sees nothing wrong with depicting a prominent African-American as a monkey: “We’re not living in the (19)40’s,” he said. “Look at him . . . the hairline, the ears — he looks just like Curious George.”

Found via The Triumph of Bullshit, via The War on Folly.

I’ve been enjoying my friend Cory’s latest book, Little Brother, reading it in bursts between work and all sorts of other things I’m doing. I certainly wish there were socio-politico-techno thrillers like this when I was a young teenager! I’m sure my friend Stacy, who gave it a good review on her blog, Booktopia, thinks the same way. If you’re looking for a good read, go check this book out!

I’ll certainly finish it before an upcoming flight, which is a good thing because I think bringing it on a plane would be inadvisable, to say the least.

Why? Because of the description of the book on the jacket:

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

In this age of security theatre, my tendency is regard the folks at U.S. Customs in pretty much the same light as my ex-girlfriend C. from 1996: in possession of a toxic combination of anger, bitchiness, caprice, and an unhealthy fascination with getting up my ass. I can imagine this book jacket getting me hauled into the cavity search room.

Recommended Reading

• U.S. Airport Screeners Are Watching What You Read (Sept. 2007): “International travelers concerned about being labeled a terrorist or drug runner by secret Homeland Security algorithms may want to be careful what books they read on the plane. Newly revealed records show the government is storing such information for years.”
• Homeland Security Not Interested in Your Books, DHS Says (Sept. 2007):…as long as they’re not suspicious books, that is. Says DHS spokesperson Russ Knocke: “I flatly reject the premise that we care at all about the latest Tom Clancy novel a traveler is reading. But the fact does remain that CBP officials are going to be mindful of whether there is anything that suggests there could be possible violations of a law associated with a traveler or items in possession of a traveler as they make an admissibility decision about that traveler.”
• Hayduke Lives! (Oct. 2001) Not only did airport security freak out over this guy’s book, they also lied to his father, saying that he’d cracked a joke about bombs to airport security.

Here’s a transcript of the last bit of the clip:

Colbert: When you see or hear things that are bad are going on in your church, you get up and you walk out! That’s what Catholics like me, and Papa Bear [his nickname for Bill O'Reilly] and Sean Hannity understand. You leave that church!

Unless it’s, you know, widespread decades-long rumours of sexual abuse. In that case, you gotta give it time. The church has its own processes; we don’t understand it!

The point is, all any Catholic pundits and Catholic politicans who may be criticizing Obama are saying is: “Do as we say, not as we didn’t”.

Here’s a great video that’s making the internet rounds: right-wing attack dog Bill O’Reilly, losing his cool and turning into an eight-year-old upon encountering the phrase “play us out”, a term that anyone who’s been in a TV studio at least a couple of times has encountered. Be warned, he bursts into a potty-mouthed temper tantrum and lets fly with the f-word:

This is from his days on the television news tabloid program Inside Edition, which he hosted from 1989 to 1995. I remember thinking that Inside Edition was about as trashy as television got, but that was well before The O’Reilly Factor.

Photo by George Maschke.

George did a little math and converted the Dutch prices so that they’d be expressed in U.S. dollars per gallon; I simply did the Euro-to-Canadian dollar conversions to get the prices in terms of Canadian dollars per litre. The results of our calculations appear in the table below:

No wonder there’s such a strong bicycle culture in the Netherlands! (Yes, their urban geography helps too.)

Keep these Dutch prices in mind should the predictions of gas hitting CDN$1.50 per litre this summer come true.

The question remains: did they have to mimic it so closely? You might as well put up a sign that says: “Toronto: We’re too dumb to come up with our own identity, so we’ll settle for being the dollar store version of New York City.”

Local tech evangelist David Crow points to The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need. Unlike What Color is Your Parachute? or Who Moved My Cheese?, Johnny Bunko is in manga form — that’s right, it’s a Japanese-style comic book.

An unusual book needs an unusual promo, and Johnny Bunko is no exception — it’s got a trailer!

In a review at Amazon, Donald Mitchell provides a quick summary of the book:

Most career writers when they want to simplify a message use a fable, with a few illustrations that show the key perspectives. The fable is clearly secondary to the details.

In The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, the story is more interesting than the advice. Having read a lot of Mr. Pink’s writing, I thought I knew what he would probably advise. But I didn’t realize that he would make the story so interesting, and that the manga format would add so much power to the story telling. Nice work!

What’s the advice? Let me rephrase to make it clearer to you:

1. Don’t be rigid about planning out each step well in advance . . . it’s not possible to do.
2. Build on what you’re good at (Peter Drucker originated that one) and avoid relying on what you aren’t good at.
3. Focus on what you can do for others (start with the boss) rather than what’s in it for you (you can read more about this in How to Be a Star at Work).
4. Keep at it. Practice makes perfect.
5. Take on big challenges and learn from them.
6. Make a difference.

I think I’ll pick up this book — it’s pretty cheap, and I’d like to see how Daniel Pink uses the manga format to advantage.

More Advice from Daniel Pink

Here are some video clips featuring Daniel Pink some pretty interesting giving career advice…

Abundance, Asia and Automation

Pink says that the really useful skills are those that are hard to outsource, hard to automate and that serves a need that goes beyond functional. And those skills are the right-brain ones — the ones often derided as “soft skills”.

Help! My Resume Has Too Many Jobs!

Don’t worry if your resume looks like it has too many jobs on it — the world of work today doesn’t give out prizes for lifetime service. These days, it’s about whether you can solve their problems.

Exercise Creativity at Your Job

The old adage applies: “It’s often better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” And from my own experience, I can tell you that he’s right.

Choosing a Major

Follow your interests — don’t choose a major based on what kind of job you think you’ll get after you graduate. The job market is likely to change! Follow your passion instead. You should also work on your “high concept” and “high touch” skills.

Take a look at these suspiciously similar subway safety posters. The one on the left is from the Toronto Transit Commission, the one on the right is by New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority:

Click the photo to see a larger version.
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele and Vidiot.

My question is: who plagiarized whom? Given the New York envy that a lot of city planners, developers and assorted people running Accordion City seem to have, coupled with the unoriginality of the ad campaigns to promote the city, I’d bet that the TTC did it. I’d love to be proven wrong, but this has all the hallmarks of our local brand of half-assery written all over it.

Update 1:

“senior”, a commenter, points out that:

If you read the gray text on the bottom left of the Toronto poster, you’ll see that it says something along the lines of “posters produced in co-operation with the MTA.”

While it’s honest, it’s still lame. We both agree that it’s pretty sad that the TTC couldn’t come up with their own safety poster ideas.

Update 2:

A response from Brad Ross, Director of Corporate Communciations for the TTC, with the downright Chuck-Norris-ballsiest first sentence I’ve seen in a comment on this blog in a good long time:

You are wrong.

The Toronto Transit Commission requested, and received, permission from the MTA to use this creative concept. Transit properties across North America often share “creative” when communicating safety messages to their customers.

If you look closely, you’ll see a line that reads, “Concept and design R Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York.”

Constructive criticism of the TTC is welcome, but alleging plagiarism without first checking the facts is simply unfair.

Regards,

Brad Ross
Director - Corporate Communications
Toronto Transit Commission

Hello, Mr. Ross!

Firstly, please allow me to apologize for calling “Plagiarism!”. I couldn’t read the text at the bottom of the photo and assumed it was graphic design plagiarism, which happens quite often.

I updated my blog to correct that as soon as I find out. That’s the beauty of this medium: its ability to adapt as new information comes in or as dictated by circumstances. It’s an ability I hope the TTC will someday acquire.

I think that there are ways to get the share creative without being so stultifyingly, blandly, boringly, homogenous. The MTA’s poster reflects its unified design identity right down to its typeface. The only thing that’s uniquely “Toronto” about the TTC’s poster is the photo — the rest of the poster, right down to the layout comes off as being a lackluster copy of the original. What’s partly to blame is the lack of a unified graphic identity for the TTC, an organization whose communication skills are so poor that its best website and merchandise are fan-made, not official.

I’m certain that you could’ve gone with the general creative concept for the safety poster and done something a little original.

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Look closely at the package: it says “Made in Hong Kong”. Yowch.