If you haven’t given Accordion City’s newest, best, FM radio station, Indie88 (CIND-FM, 88.1 on the FM dial, or via its live internet stream), a listen, I’ve got another good reason for you to do so. Eric Alper, all-round knowledgeable guy on the topic music, music correspondent on CTV’s Canada AM, music blogger, and Facebook friend of mine, will control the music on their Throne of Glory show this afternoon at 4 p.m. Eastern. Tune in and hear what his picks are!
Ten years ago today, at 4:11 p.m. EDT, the power went out through much of the northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada. I was five weeks into my new job as a tech evangelist at Tucows, located in Accordion City’s Liberty Village neighbourhood. I lived at Queen and Spadina at the time, so work was a leisurely twenty-minute bike commute for me. This would come in particularly handy that day.
When the power went out, there was a collective groan let out by Tucows’ hundred and twenty or so employees. Liberty Village’s aging electrical infrastructure was prone to power outages in those days — back then, the condo projects hadn’t yet bloomed in the area — and it was assumed that this was another “brown-out” and that power would be back in ten minutes.
I figured that it would be a good time to get away from the computer, stretch, and perhaps get a nice cold drink from the convenience store. When I stepped out onto King Street West, it became quite clear to me that the power wasn’t just out in our building. The traffic lights were out of commission and the streetcars were stopped dead in their tracks, literally.
A few of my coworkers went to their cars in the parking lot and tuned into news radio. They were already announcing that the power just wasn’t out city-wide, but in several cities. One guy, a Star Wars fan took a line from The Phantom Menace and quipped “A power disruption could mean only one thing: invasion.” Hey, 9/11 was just shy of two years prior.
We were all told to go home. It was an easy trip for me: I lived pretty close by, and on my bike, I whizzed past the stalled traffic. Along the way, I took some photos with my ever-present digital camera. Remember, this was 2003, when cameras were still a new feature on mobile phones, and they were terrible. I kept a funky-looking Nikon Coolpix SQ strapped to my belt most of the time.
Along the way home, biking east on Queen Street West, I passed by a hairstylist, who finished working on their customers outside, where there was enough light:
With the traffic lights out and subways and streetcars disabled, traffic ground to a halt. A couple of hours later, there would be a number of cars ditched on the streets, some because their drivers decided to stay put or walk home, some because they ran out of gas while idling for a really long time on near-empty tanks:
The streets were pretty crowded with people making their way home on foot. A number of convenience stores were giving away their ice cream:
In my neighbourhood, many people took the opportunity to hang out on their porches with flashlights and battery-powered radios tuned to the news, girding themselves for the darkness that would soon follow:
This blog was also around back during the blackout, and I wrote about it in an article titled It’s the Post-Electrical Age!, Part 1. I never got around to Part 2, and perhaps I should.
Leslieville Farmers’ Market’s Bacon Fest is back, and it’s happening this Sunday, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Jonathan Ashbridge Park (a block west of Queen and Coxwell)! I had not only the good fortune to be able to catch last year’s Bacon Fest; I also got to be a judge. Here I am with the chef who made the third-place entry, Conrad Reiner from local bacon purveyor This Little Pig:
Bacon Fest is just a part of Leslieville Farmers’ Market, which is in its third year of providing the residents of Leslieville with great, fresh-from-the-farm food in the big green space of Jonathan Ashbridge Park. This year’s season runs every Sunday from May 26th through October 27th in the park with food aplenty and lots of entertainment, too.
Last year’s Bacon Fest, which I wrote up in this entry, featured entries from a number of local restaurants. They were all so bacon-licious that it was hard to pick a winner. We managed to pick one, and it was Le Papillon on the Park’s: a little-bit-of-every-taste buckwheat crepe stuffed with bacon, cheese, apple chunks and apple syrup, topped with mixed berries and powdered sugar:
Another favourite entry of mine was the combined work of area restaurants Mr. Spinners and Waffle Bar — a waffle, filled with bacon, topped with a fried egg and melted cheese. Because that wasn’t enough, it’s finished off with crumbled bacon:
Here’s This Little Pig’s entry — a simple crostini, but it showed off just how good their bacon is:
And for those of you who don’t eat meat, there’s something for you, too! Ying Ying foods was there, showcasing their soy bacon, and it was pretty good:
Bacon Fest 2013 will take place this Sunday, August 18th, along with everything else at Leslieville Farmers’ Market at Jonathan Ashbridge Park (a block west of Queen and Coxwell), from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.. The judges will sample the entries at noon, and the winners will be announced at 1. Not only with the entrants be feeding the judges, they’ll also be selling their dishes so you can get a nice breakfast, brunch, or lunch full of bacon-y goodness.
I finally got around to shooting a Vine video, titled Your Moment of Airport Zen, only to discover that it’s been designed so that you hold your smartphone the “wrong” way:
And by “wrong” way, I mean vertically, which leads to Vertical Video Syndrome:
Hey, Vine team! With such a popular app, you’ve got an opportunity to reinforce good habits: tweak your app so users have to holding their phones properly when shooting video, as shown in the photo below:
Photo by Jaime Castillo. Click to see the original.
The annual street fair known as Taste of the Danforth got some extra media attention, thanks to Toronto’s Peter-Griffin-esque mayor and taxpayer-funded constant source of amusement Rob Ford, who got wasted on the Danforth on Friday night. When it comes to the abuse of drink and even more hardcore substances, there are two different pictures of His Worship (the proper honorific for the Mayor of Toronto, even if it’s this assclown):
A couple of videos of His Worship’s drunk-walk, both taken by “Mala”, a student at George Brown College, have made the YouTube rounds. Here’s the first one, with a very wobbly Ford surrounded by a lot of young people:
Ford seems to be under the impression that they’re throngs of youthful admirers, a delusion probably fuelled by his self-image as the Greatest High School Football Coach Ever. They actually seem to be gathering around him to get some amusing photos and videos at the expense of the city’s most famous clown. You can even hear an off-camera voice at the 0:35 mark sum up what appears to be the general sentiment of the people lining up to get their Instagrams: “He’s an idiot”.
In the second video, he insists, drunk-uncle-style, “I’m not driving! I’m not driving”, despite having been seen having driven in to the street party in his trademark SUV:
Even more worrisome: at the 0:17 mark in this video, he seems to be saying “Give me some blow. You want some blow? I got some blow.”
A friend suggests that perhaps he’s saying “cologne”. Hopefully for wearing and not for drinking.
Being a bit of a bacchanalian myself, I have no objection to the mayor (or anyone else who isn’t driving or operating heavy machinery) tying one on. However, the mayor, as is his insistent habit, likely drove himself to and from Taste of the Danforth. There’s also this matter, which The Atlantic brings up in their article, Maybe Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Enjoyed This Festival Too Much:
This would be acceptable behavior for a politician — hey, we all get a little wet behind the ears sometimes — but Ford’s leash is shorter than most. This is the mayor who has a history of getting loaded and embarrassing in public. Ford was thrown out of a military gala last year allegedly for being intoxicated. He also got into a confrontation of sorts after chewing out a woman at a Maple Leafs hockey game a few years ago. Oh, yeah, and don’t forget the whole (alleged!) fan-fiction inspiring crack video scandal, too.
Ford’s visit to the party to Taste of the Danforth has appeared in a number of media outlets:
And soon afterwards came the official “pay no attention to the visibly drunk man behind the curtain” explanations:
It’s just another incident to add to the growing Rob Ford file.
I love the look on the model’s face. It looks as though he’s thinking
“Look serious. This is for the kitchen reno…this is for the kitchen reno…”
Click the photo to visit this Sears catalog page.
I’m impressed that Sears carries this kind of stuff. Now I’d like to see the downmarket version that Walmart would carry.
Thanks to Nic Pouliot for the find!
Because this is an article about business, and because I grew up in the 1980s, in the era of They Live, I had to include this pic.
Because this is an article in which I criticize business culture, and to head off any cries of “Socialist!” hurled at me, here’s the obligatory “Yes, I am a businessman, in a real job, and I actually do work for a living” statement:
Yes, I am a businessman, in a real job, and I actually do work for a living.
You can go look at my resume — it’s my LinkedIn profile. It’s no ordinary profile, either; it’s noteworthy enough to have been in the top 1% most viewed last year:
And not only do I work — I can work in all sorts of places. There’s my rather nicely set-up home office:
I also set up shop at client offices, such as this one in Calgary:
As regular readers of this blog know, I even get work done in places like Tampa International Airport, as this photo from a recent post of mine shows:
And now, the main topic of this article.
Recently, a Business Insider piece by Henry Blodget suggested that McDonald’s could still be profitable by increasing their wages, not increasing their prices, and accepting lower profits (according to Blodget, operating profit would be reduced to a “mere” $5.5 billion). Blodget’s back-of-the-envelope math was based on some erroneous assumptions (for starters, McDonald’s spending on employees accounts for about 24% of its revenue, not 17%), and face it, nobody’s going to buy into the idea of reducing profit for the sake of paying employees more — at least the rank-and-file ones, anyways.
The article brought about a Twitter discussion that elicited a tweet from fellow IT consultant Daryl Tremblay that pretty sums up what the so-called “job creators” really think about job creation. Blodget made the radical (in some circles) suggestion that employees shouldn’t be treated like costs, and that’s when Tremblay chimed in:
Employees, Tremblay said in the tweet — and has been saying over and over again in subsequent tweets — “are costs. They don’t have a stake, they hold nothing. They trade their labor for money.”
If you’ve ever taken an accounting course (I did, and at one of Canada’s best business schools t00; I figured that a technologist should know how to speak and relate to “the suits”), you probably know that on a balance sheet, this is correct. Your office building, equipment, furniture, and trademarks? They’re assets, that by virtue of being sellable, contribute money to the business. The people who come to your office building, use the equipment, sit in those chairs and do the work that make the company go? They’re liabilities.
Once again, if you took accounting, you know that I haven’t mentioned the final piece of the A = L + OE equation. A is “assets”, L is “liabilities”, and OE is owner’s equity. The equation says that once you take away the costs from the total value of the business, what you have left belongs to the owners. Included among the owners are shareholders.
The problem is that shareholders these days seem to think of the companies they invest in merely as “black boxes” that they put money into and magically have it multiplied. They’s not particularly interested in what the company does, or whether it even survives; only that it makes them rich without effort. This has led to the thinking that the best thing you can do for the company is maximize shareholder value — something described in Forbes as “the dumbest idea in the world”.This in turn, leads to:
Eek! a cost! Cut it! CUT IT!
Creative Commons photo by “G.e.o.r.g.e.”. Click to see the original.
It turns out that the best possible investment you can make is to become the CEO of a publicly-traded company. It’s more than twice as good as simply having an S&P 500 portfolio and 127 times better than being a “cost”:
Graph from the Washington Post. Click to see the original.
Me in October 2010 at Microsoft Canada’s offices in Mississauga beside a giant Windows Phone 7 phone.
Back when I was a developer evangelist for Microsoft, I was one of the Windows Phone Champs, a hand-picked two or three dozen people from Microsoft’s worldwide ranks charged with getting developers interested in making apps for Microsoft’s then-new mobile phone. It wouldn’t be an easy job, as three years had passed since the introduction of the iPhone (and Steve Ballmer’s now-infamous dismissal of it):
Just before the launch, those of us in the Canadian arm of the company received an email from the then-CEO of Microsoft Canada, who said he was counting on our efforts. While it was implied that he wanted Windows Phone 7 Series (as it was called at the time) to make a big splash, and to get developers interested in building apps for it, and help the phone become a big success, that’s not what he wrote.
Instead, he specifically wrote that he wanted Microsoft share prices to go up as a result of Windows Phone’s introduction.
So while corporate profits and profit margins are way, way up:
Graph from Business Insider: Why Economic Growth is So Slow in 2013.
…wages, expressed as a fraction of the GDP, are way, way down…
Graph from Business Insider: Why Economic Growth is So Slow in 2013.
…labour’s slice of the corporate income pie is at its nadir, what with most of it going to owners and execs…
Graph from Business Insider: Why Economic Growth is So Slow in 2013.
…and employment is the lowest it’s been since around the end of the Carter administration. (Or, from a purely balance-sheet point of view, all those pesky “costs” and “input” have been cut. Nicely done!)
Graph from Business Insider: Why Economic Growth is So Slow in 2013.
For more, see Henry Blodget’s articles, This One Tweet Reveals What’s Wrong With American Business Culture And The Economy. and Why Economic Growth is So Slow in 2013.
Given this reality, it may turn out that some of the best advice to follow comes from this unlikely place:
When I was a kid, both Cracked and MAD were paper magazines, and Cracked was often MAD’s lower-rent, not-as-good poor cousin. In their present-day online incarnations, Cracked is so much better than MAD.
One reason present-day Cracked is a worthwhile read is because every now and again, they publish an article with material that really should be covered in school. Perhaps not with Cracked’s sarcastic, adult-humour angle, but it should be covered anyways. One such article is David Wong’s 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person, and particularly truth number six:
The world only cares about what it can get from you.
If you don’t end up being a CEO or end up being able to live off being a shareholder, your best option in the short term is to take this harsh truth to heart and make sure that if you’re a cost, you’re one that people are willing to pay for.
In the long term, a good strategy would be to bring Peter Drucker’s mantra back to the business world: “There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer.”
I’ll close with Alec Baldwin’s Oscar-winning scene from Glengarry Glenn Ross (a movie a cited in an earlier post of mine, New York City’s Most Entitled Food Truck Ex-Employee), as a reminder of what it’s like out there:
(This speech was merely a dress rehearsal for the much-publicized dressing-down he gave his kid in a phone message.)