What does your garden grow?

Michael Valiant | July 4, 2008


Garden specs :

The 2008 garden is a little below 25 X 30 feet, or ~850 square feet.

Biggest pests so far:

Garden 2008

Grown:

We’ve planted the following:

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Topics: iFoodie |

iPhones and Rogers

Michael Valiant | July 3, 2008


There’s quite a bit of talk passing around the interwebs of Canada lately regarding the coming release of the iPhone on the good ole’ Rogers network… and little of if it is positive.

What has been, essentially, a great play by Rogers (the iPhone makes a perfect flagship product) is starting to turn ugly; and Rogers has no one to blame but themselves.

Before I continue, I’ll say that I’m not anti-Rogers, in fact, most of my technological life is powered by Rogers currently. Yes they’re expensive, yes their customer service is spotty, yes they lock you into crappy contracts, but I’m happy enough with the service and the competition really isn’t any better.

Rogers has never had a shining history of customer friendliness, but then they didn’t have to. They only had to be a little better than Bell, and that wasn’t hard (as a past Bell customer I’m talking from experience here).

So Rogers kind of sucks, but so does their competition… where does that leave us?

On familiar terrain.

Canadians should be used to being dictated to, and over-paying for things… oh, and for taking it all sitting down. There’s a lot of talk online right now, but I hold no delusions that it will actually change anything. Even worse, Rogers knows the same thing and is so confident in their power to do whatever they feel like that they’ve been brazen enough to throw it back to the Canadian public:

Rogers… has sharpened its pencil. It is watching this very closely. If this starts to truly negatively affect significant opinion — and you have to be careful about 5,000 on a blog versus what’s really meaningful — we will be on top of this thing to ensure that we manage that tension between responsible pricing and not [upsetting] customers.

- Luke Sklar, of Sklar Wilton & Associates - from the Globe and Mail.

In other words, Rogers has decided to gouge the Canadian public in order to try and drive their share prices back over $50 (they’re sitting around $40 right now), and have no intention of changing their behaviour unless it looks like they may come out losing in some way.

Or, in OTHER other words, Rogers really doesn’t care about their paying customers as long as their stock prices aren’t suffering as a result.

Excuse me a moment while I try to shake off my disgust.

I want an iPhone. Really. But I won’t buy one.

Firstly, I’m not big on text messages or mobile data consumption. Not for lack of interest or savvy, but because I’m in front of a computer far more than the average person (12 hours in a day wouldn’t be unusual), so I just don’t need a mobile phone to duplicate what my desktop/laptop can do.

Secondly, and by far more importantly, I believe that in today’s ever more transparent commercial world, companies should be open and honest with their consumers, that they should listen to what their customers have to say and that they should tailor their products to the NEEDS of their market. And I don’t believe that Rogers is doing any of that with the launch of the iPhone.

Despite the fact that I am only one person, I have to make a stand somewhere and I cannot justify forking out any more of my money to support a company like Rogers, in an endeavor like this.

Rogers, if you are listening (no, don’t laugh), and want to win me over, how about offering a package for people like me.

I want to use the iPhone like I use my current phone.

To sum up the above, my usage would be, over your network, no different than it is now. But, to do exactly what I currently do, you want to more than double my monthly rates!

Why? I really don’t understand!

The Good (if you can call it good)

The Bad

Rate this:
3.2

Topics: Conversations, Technology |

Some new stuff

Michael Valiant | July 1, 2008


MichaelValiant.com is undergoing some changes… all for the better.

First, this site was never intended to be a strict ‘Internet Marketing’, ecommerce, or social media type blog.  MichaelValiant is me, literally (obviously) and I get bored writing about the same thing all the time (sorry, blame the gemini in me).

So, in order to try and regain my center (refind my Zen as it were) MichaelValiant.com is about to shift more towards my original plan.  Feel free to let me know whether you love, or hate the changes that will be occuring over the next couple of weeks.

The good news is that I will be posting more often.  Actually, I will be posting just as often, but now, the posts I do on other blogs will be syndicated back to this one, which will continue to be my main ‘home’ online.

The bad news (at least for some, I anticipate), is those posts will vary in topic along with my interests. I will continue (and actually increase) my writing on ecommerce, SEO, social media, internet marketing, blogging, etc. etc. etc. but you will soon see more posts that are ‘off-topic’, especially food related (I like talking about food).

I also plan on delving more into productivity and life-hack type topics, parenting, and other things that I like to do, see and talk about (like music and movies!)

In the end it’s all good news and broadening the scope of this site will allow me to spend more time talking about the things I love (like Reputation Management… yeah, I know, I’m a geek) and less time worrying about whether or not a topic is applicable/right for this blog.  From now on, it’s ALL right.

What I WILL try to do is this:  While I will continue to show full posts for everything I write specifically for this blog (as I’ve always done), I will use the ‘More’ tag and only show snippets for everthing that is syndicated in from my other blogs (and therefore, a little more off-topic).

I installed the FeedWordPress 0.993 plugin to help me with this, and I love it so far!

You may notice that I’ve already setup my Food site to syndicate content to this blog.  I have to work out a few display quirks (spacing and blank lines seem to be missing in the syndicated content), I really like the plugin so far.

Thanks for your patience in advanced while I try to get organized over the next week or two.

Michael

Rate this:
3.6 (2 people)

Topics: Uncategorized |

Upgrading my Blog

Michael Valiant | June 30, 2008


I am about to upgrade CanadianFoodies.com to Wordpress 2.5.

So please ignore any short term randomness as I disable plugins, upgrade and (hopefully not) troubleshoot. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program shortly!

Thanks for your patience.

* Update (15 minutes later) - Upgrade complete. If you notice any further randomness, it is completely my fault!

Rate this:
2.7

Topics: iFoodie |

Excuse Me for a Moment

Michael Valiant | June 30, 2008


I am about to upgrade to Wordpress 2.5.

So please ignore any short term randomness as I disable plugins, upgrade and (hopefully not) troubleshoot. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program shortly!

Thanks for your patience.

* Update (20 minutes later) - Upgrade is complete. If you notice any randomness from here on in, it’s completely my fault!

Rate this:
3.2

Topics: Wordpress |

Breaded Veal with Mushroom Gravy

Michael Valiant | May 28, 2008

I forgot to take a picture! -ack- I must be out of practice… I took a few days off work to celebrate an extra long holiday weekend (and my birthday - yay me!-) and that generally means a little more time to plan a nice meal. And in typical fashion, I went with a few new dishes… Thursday night meant Breaded veal in a rich mushroom gravy (a hunters-style gravy) and lemon beans (with lemon zest and more mushrooms) . Read the rest of this entry »

Topics: iFoodie |

Wintered Vegetables

Michael Valiant | May 5, 2008

We spent a day in the fields today. For future refernce (because I know you MUST be visiting and reading my site fanatically!) Saturday or Sunday means garden day. Unfortunately, and if you followed along last summer you probably know, we live in the city. Not that living in the city is unfortunate, there are plenty of good things about living in the city and at this point in our lives it just makes sense to be close to everything. But, I was raised in the country and would like to find my way back sometime before I retire :) Read the rest of this entry »

Topics: iFoodie |

The Perfect Steak

Michael Valiant | May 3, 2008

How do you know when your steak is finished on the bbq? Practice. But in the meantime, stop asking HOW LONG… because it’s not the right question. Read the rest of this entry »

Topics: iFoodie |

Canadian Foodies in 2008

Michael Valiant | April 24, 2008

Hello everyone! Thanks for visiting. To any of my old regulars, thanks for checking back. We’ve been a little quiet around here over the past 6 months or so… what can I say :) I’ve been hibernating through the long Canadian Winter! Read the rest of this entry »

Topics: iFoodie |

The new and improved ScribeFire

Michael Valiant | April 22, 2008


I love Firefox.

I have plenty of other browsers installed, some are good, some less so… but I’ve never found anything to coax me away from Firefox.

Believe or not though, this post isn’t about why I love firefox, but rather it’s addon capabilities.

There are a lot of smart folks who have produced a lot of smart addons that make my day to day life easier and more productive. (I’m sure most of those smart folks don’t read this blog, but if you do, THANK YOU!)

Specifically, the reason for my little ode to Firefox came about because I just installed the new version of ScribeFire.

I used to use ScribeFire back when it was called Performance or Performancing and for one reason or another stopped (I honestly can’t remember why). But I came across news on the newest release today and reinstalled it… and what a treat!

ScribeFire is a Firefox addon that provides you with full posting capabilities from any webpage.

Once you’ve set it up to talk with your blog (took about 15 seconds) you can create posts/notes/drafts/pages from anywhere! No more copy and pasting from one tab or window to another!

And the ScribeFire WYSIWYG is significantly better than any built in blog editor I’ve used before.

Other features from ScribeFire:

…categorize and tag your blog posts, upload images, set the timestamp of your posts, save works-in-progress as notes, post an entry as a draft, share your posts on social websites, and upload files via FTP.

You can also open multiple posts in ScribeFire at the same time, copy text from a website and preserve the sites formatting, copy text as a quote with attribution, supports common keyboard shortcuts, call up old posts in the ScribeFire interface, flip between code and design views, pull in images or video from flickr or youtube instantly and even promote your post via several social bookmarking sites right from the interface.

I love the fact that ScribeFire is tabbed and isn’t locked to the page you are on, so you can do some research, opening each source in a different tab, and then open ScribeFire and flip back and forth between all your sources, pulling what you need without interrupting your blogging interface!

A couple of funny things I did notice already (hey, nothing’s perfect right!?)…

All said this is a great addition to Firefox for any blogger and I heartily recommend giving it a try (I’ve only been using for 1/2 an hour and look what I have to say!)

This is the best lifehack/workhack tool I’ve tried out in a long time!

Rate this:
0.0

Topics: Blogging, Lifehack, Tools |



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