The godfather

Posted on February 12th, 2007 by Antoine.
Categories: Videos, Technology, Site Meta, Anecdotes.

A bit of a mixed bag today.

Firstly, I am proud to announce that I am the new godfather for a young lad in England who was recently born to some wonderful parents, one of whom is my best friend from high school. Perhaps when he is old enough I can communicate with him via webcam and impart my wisdom to another little being who will probably know more about computers than I ever will.

A couple of cool vids to check out today - the first is an interesting web 2.0 montage put together by a group of faculty and students calling themselves “digital ethnographers”. It’s not too long, check it out if you have a couple of minutes to spare.


If you have more time, check out this documentary on Google, which touches on the dangers of a search engine monopoly in which one company controls the flow of information.

Personally, I don’t think Google is the next big brother, although it is kind of alarming that you can see your own car parked in your driveway on Google Earth. Still, it’s not like the images are running in real-time or anything.

My posts have been sporadic because I have been working on another online project, which I will unveil soon, hopefully within the next few days…

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I never thought it would happen to me

Posted on January 3rd, 2007 by Antoine.
Categories: Technology, Anecdotes.

I was looking around for the perfect domain name last night and I found it. I’m not going to say what it was because it was just too good. So, I rubbed my hands in glee, took out my credit card and bought it at godaddy. Then I get an email telling me that somebody else owns the name. According to the WHOis database, somebody purchased the name about a minute before I did, but I still got charged for it.

I refuse to believe this was a coincidence. While I was testing the name in Google and on several other sites testing for trademark violations, somebody got a whiff of it and literally stole the name away from right under my nose. Now when you type in the name, an amateur domain auction site comes up. Owned by the same guy who ripped my name off.

My advice: If you have a winner, don’t put it out there too much. Just buy it. I will always mourn the loss of what was probably the greatest domain name ever. Well, if I ever get a refund from godaddy, I’ll have to go back to the drawing board I guess.

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How to foil telemarketers…

Posted on December 1st, 2006 by Antoine.
Categories: Technology.

…by using the power of social networking. Most of us living in today’s low-trust world have call display on our phones. Yet, what do you do if the number is unrecognized? If you’re like me, you just let unidentified numbers go through to your voicemail. But what if they don’t leave a message? Doesn’t the curiosity eat you up inside? What if it was your long lost uncle from Barbados? What if you finally won one of those quick getaway competitions you keep filling out entries for at your local grocery store?

The answer can be found at an unobtrusive little website called Who Called Us. I’ve been using it for a while with excellent results. All you do is type in the suspicious number. Chances are, they’ve bugged other people who have recorded it here. I’ve done this to avoid calls from unscrupulous insurance companies and credit card companies who will call relentlessly for weeks until they give up. Unsurprisingly, most of the numbers in the database are from U.S. based companies (they are ruthless down there, especially if your number’s listed), but it works for Canadian numbers too.

But what do you do if your call display doesn’t even provide you with a number? If all you have is an unavailable to go on, you may want to pick up. Imagine your disappointment when you here the dreaded “Good evening Mr/Mrs [insert mangled pronunciation of name here]”. In that case, have this direct marketing counterscript form ready and give the telemarketer a taste of their own medicine. I haven’t resorted to using this yet, but I imagine it would be great fun!

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Anyone for some Web 2.0?

Posted on November 17th, 2006 by Antoine.
Categories: Technology.

A couple of things.

Firstly, I’ve been having some MySQL database issues with my Awardspace web hosting server. So, if you get the Wordpress error page when you go to w o r d s p a c e, check back later.

Secondly, wasn’t that storm yesterday insane? It took out the power grid south of the Fraser and now the Vancouver Water Board has issued a warning not to drink the muddy discoloured water that bears a resemblance to weak tea. Duh.

Thirdly, the web 2.0 buzz, like it or not, is here to stay. Here is a super-sized representative directory of over a thousand websites, sorted by category. I found some really useful links here, such as places to publicize your feeds and grass roots employment sites and all sorts of cool stuff. Even if you don’t know what the heck web 2.0 is, you’ll find a whole lot of goodies here.

One more thing. On a somewhat related topic…

As overhyped and ridiculously pedestrian as it is, I’ve finally given into the pressure. I’ve set up a myspace page.

I know, I know…

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