When I posted about the iPhone 4 a few weeks ago, a few people thought I might be smoking crack to think that people buying unlocked phones would have any impact on the cell phone industry in Canada. While that still remains to be seen, Rogers just announced that they're willing to sweeten a 3 year contract by $100, which in my mind is a direct result of the lack of people signing up (or extending their current contract) to a 3 year contract compared to previous iPhone launches. Obviously that's just my gut feeling, but it's in line with my previous thinking regarding people wanting to jump from ...

If you do the math, that's January 2nd, 2010 2011. If all goes according to plan, that's the day I'll head out (with only a single backpack in tow) on a little adventure. While I still have a lot to plan for and get ready before then, I've set a date to hopefully give me the motivation to finally follow through on it. I don't really know why, but I'm always a bit hesitant to travel. Maybe it's all the time I've spent living out of suitcases in hotel rooms, or all the trips I went on that were work related (that usually involved 60 hour weeks, and then nights by myself in a hotel). Other than a ...

I've been trying to find out ways to get myself out of the apartment in the evenings and get a bit more exercise. I've actually being going to the gym quite a bit over the last three months. That's fine and all, but hitting the elliptical trainer and lifting weights gets a little boring after a while, especially if you don't have a gym buddy. So, based on some recommendations from some friends, I thought that I'd try out a few yoga classes. Vinyasa Yoga I decided to start with a Vinyasa Yoga drop in class at my gym last Tuesday. The class was pretty small - it had about four girls and two guys ...

The last time I was down in the Caribbean, I took a real shine to eating guacamole. Truthfully, I had always sort of stayed away from it because I thought I wouldn't like the avocados in it. But really good guacamole is addictive, and I was eating it like it was going out of style in the Caribbean. In fact, I was putting it on hamburgers, hot dogs, chips -- you name it. I've made about ten batches of guacamole in the last year, each time refining it a bit. It's actually getting to be pretty good, as evidenced by the number of people who want me to keep making it. So, I thought I'd do up a little ...

I've started making small plans for a possible working vacation for a few months. I originally was going to go sometime this fall, but I was starting to feel more and more like it was a bit too rushed. I also wasn't entirely sure how to deal with Christmas: spending $1,500 on a plane ticket to get somewhere doesn't make a lot of sense if you're just going to get on a plane and head back home again a month or so later for Christmas. With that in mind, I'm now targeting January as the month when I'd leave. Over the next few months I'm going to be slowly selling off the things I don't really need ...

I spent the majority of the day yesterday waiting in a huge line-up at Vancouver's Pacific Centre Apple store. Doors opened at 7am, but thanks to a late night wine-filled game of Cranium, yours truly wasn't quite up to snuff at 7am. I strolled down at around 9:15am or so, only to be greeted with a line that not only snaked all the way down the halls inside the mall, but had spilled out onto the streets, wrapping down Granville for about 3/4 of a block. I ran into my friend Dave at the store. Despite a level 4 hangover, Dave managed to get there around 7am and secure a pretty nice spot in line. ...

I've been writing about obesity and something called hyper-insulinemia for about as long as I can remember. For those of you who don't know, many people nowadays have something called metabolic syndrome, which is a cluster of symptoms including obesity, high blood pressure, elevated insulin levels, and high cholesterol. The main component of all of these is something called hyper-insulinemia (which is also called insulin resistance). What I just wrote is pretty much accepted as fact nowadays. What is still up for debate is a) whether insulin resistance is the cause or the effect of obesity and ...

I've been thinking lately about starting to go to Yoga. I really know nothing about it, other than people go and bend in various directions for an hour or so at a time. I had a few friends in Vancouver who went religiously, guys too, and they always seemed pretty pumped about going. I've been trying to come up with more things to do when I'm not working, and things that involve exercise or being healthy are at the top of the list these days. The gym is great and all, but treadmills and dumbbells get a bit boring after a while. I'm also hoping I can meet a few more people in the class and get to ...

Yes sports fans, it's almost that time. On Friday the highly anticipated successor to the iPhone 3GS is released. My experience so far with Rogers wireless this last week, as well as on launch days in the past, seems to indicate that Friday is going to be a complete gong show for everyone involved. Unlike the previous launches, we now have an interesting option in Canada: we can purchase an unlocked phone from the Apple store. Unless I'm mistaken, I don't believe we've ever had that luxury in Canada, at least not with Rogers. I remember getting my first Motorola phone back in 2000 - the guy at ...

Despite having a relatively positive outlook about the economy previously, the Fed today just downgraded all its forecasts and even mentioned the taboo "D" word, deflation. I thought it would be fun to post a few of the more educated comments from CNN here. Keynesian versus Austrian economic theory. Keynes 0, Austrians 1. Now pull up a lawn chair, pop a cold one, and kick back to the soothing hissing sound of every asset class deflating... ~ Jim Koutras I got my beer chilling in the fridge. You do realize that the only reason we're in this mess is because the Fed flooded the economy ...

Well, it's been nearly two weeks since the HST kicked in, and I thought I'd summarize some of the benefits: camping fees went up from $24 to $30 at Cultus Lake Gas went up about 5 cents per litre in Chilliwack Carbon tax on fuel went up 1.12 cents/litre the local Pharmacy started charging for all bags on July 1st a can of soda went from $1.05 to $1.15 at my favourite coffee shop BC Hydro's Rate Rider was silently raised from one to four percent Clearly this tax is on its way to causing prices to drop on consumer goods in BC. ...

Today I was up at the lake with my iPad, reading a book in the sun and listening to the sound of the little lake surf. Truthfully, it felt a lot like being in the Caribbean, sipping a beer by a pool in Punta Cana, and it made me miss traveling. While I was enjoying myself reading, my iPad decided to cut my experience short by shutting itself off due to overheating. So, I decided to head back to town and do a bit of thinking. At this point in time, I'm about 50/50 with the possibility of doing some traveling this fall. I can think of a lot of reasons why I should go, but really not many reasons ...

Tim Ferris would most likely classify me as one of The New Rich, those of us who have somehow managed free ourselves from the shackles of the cubicle, and from the typical 9-5 workday. Strangely enough, I don't much remember what it's like to work in an office anymore. It's been nearly one and a half years since I left a 9-5 office job (which had really been a 9-9 job for most of my adult life), and I've spend most of that time working from home and from coffee shops. I even managed to spend a few days last summer working shirtless from the comfort of a picnic table up at the lake. I had lunch ...

If Chicken Little were here, he might be staring up at the sky, wondering just how much longer it would be until he could tell everyone he told them so. Without a doubt, the last few weeks in the stock market have been pretty brutal. While the markets have made small gains over the last year, the last few weeks have seen the destruction of most of that value. In fact, the TSX had its worst quarter since the 2008 meltdown. I know most of my investments are down about 6 or 7% in the last month, which is something I've gotten used to over the last few years. Thankfully I'm a buy and hold type guy, ...

About six months ago, Dale and I started laying the foundation for the successor to our popular WordPress plugin, WPtouch. We released WPtouch about two years ago, and it's approaching around one million downloads in the WordPress repository. Aspects of it were also integrated into WordPress.com -- it is the default theme on WordPress.com for iPod/iPhone mobile visitors, and represents around 60 million page views a month for mobile visitors. WPtouch 2.0 is a fairly big upgrade to WPtouch, adding approximately 100 new features. First, we redid the entire infrastructure to make the creation of ...

My background obviously isn't in finance - I'm actually some weird hybrid between an electrical engineer and a physicist. While I understand a lot of the basics in finance, there are still quite a few gaps in my knowledge, and I'm slowly working towards filling those in. Last night I was pretty beat, so I crawled into bed and purchased a book about capitalism and the economy. I actually managed to read most of that in a few hours, and decided I'd grab another book as well. Wouldn't you know it, I finished that one as well sometime around midnight, and passed out on the couch. Both books gave pretty ...

So I realize this could potentially be a pretty deep rabbit hole, but I thought I'd ask the question here. I'm in the process of trying to put together a simple web server configuration that is more robust than a single server configuration. Truthfully, I've never set something like this up, but for what I'm after I'm not looking for something amazingly complex or expensive. The server needs to basically handle HTTP requests, and interface with a database. In my mind, this would require two servers in separate co-location centres (which would help if one centre went down and not the other). One ...

I first started investing in the stock markets around 2000. Since then, I've had front row seats to at least two big market corrections. During the first, I was working out at JDS Uniphase in Ottawa, Ontario. If that name sounds familiar, you probably heard about us on the news -- in 2001, JDS Uniphase wrote-off the largest amount of goodwill in history, a staggering $45 billion dollars. When I showed up for work that day, news trucks were lined up all down the block, and employees were being constantly questioned as they tried to get into the building. We watched all the interviews take place ...

In 2004, Duke University completed a study of the Atkin's diet and released the results to the world. The results of the study showed that not only did people lose more weight on the Atkin's diet when compared to the conventional low-fat diet, their blood cholesterol profile also improved, ultimately reducing their risk of heart disease. Prior to the Duke study, most people in the medical community passively dismissed the Atkin's diet as both unhealthy and even dangerous. Robert Atkins, despite having a thriving medical practice which treated over 50,000 patients, was labeled a quack, and was ...

Most people don't realize it, but the current form of printed money we all know and love is actually worthless. While the dollar value on the paper may say $5 or $10, it only holds that relative intrinsic value because each government says it does. There are unfortunately no assets or underlying resources protecting that value, something that has the potential to rapidly destabilize any given currency in the event of an economic or wide-scale crisis. This type of currency is known as a fiat currency, and it has become the standard in the last 40 years or so. Prior to the conversion to fiat currencies ...