Daily thoughts

Two men are walking in the forest and they see a rock and a stick in front of them. They quickly look at each other and run over to the two items. The one man picks up the rock and is so happy and impressed with it, at the same time the other man picks up the stick is equally happy and impressed. They then proceed to tell the other why their item is so much better than the other one.

What is the point of that useless story? It simply shows you that two people can see different items and have different opinions of said items.

How does this relate to you? Well it's simple lets change those two phones. You find an iPhone and a BlackBerry, some people will always pick the BlackBerry and other's will always pick the iPhone. It doesn't mean one is better than the other it simply means you have a preference and will choose that device.

Here is another story. As a business person you have a Smart Phone and you come in on Monday and realize you have lost your phone. Like most people you don't actually put a password on your phone because you find it annoying to have to enter that password in every time you want to use it. You call the phone company and cancel the phone right away, which will prevent people from using it to run up large amounts of calls on your bill but what about all the confidential information on it. Whether it is emails, contacts, notes with personal information or perhaps pictures that should not be seen, you have a serious problem if someone decides to look through your phone. If your phone is a BlackBerry on a BES, no problem. You tell your IT guy and he sends a wipe command from the BES server and all your data is gone from the phone. If you have an iPhone or Android you may be in trouble.

Does this make the BlackBerry better? Not really but it does make it more secure for businesses and governments and that is why they use them.

With that in mind pick the device that you like the best and use it but don't attack the guy that uses the other device. They have reasons for picking their device just like you have your reason. Play nice with each other because you never know when you may be forced to switch and may need some help.

Red State comes to Calgary

On Wednesday August 17th Kevin Smith brought his new "horror" movie to Calgary on his cross Canada tour. I brought a VIP ticket so that I could sit in the first 8 rows of the theater as well as getting a copy of the DVD when it is released.

I showed up at the theater an hour and forty five minutes before the doors opened so that I could get in line and hopefully get a good spot. I was right near the front of the line of the Will Call group. My friend Matt showed up shortly after that and stood in the line for people with tickets and was also near the front. We figured with two different lines we would have a good shot to get good seats.

When they finally let us in it took a bit longer for the Will Call people to get tickets and in so Matt managed to get in and get us 2nd row from the stage.

Before the movie began Kevin came out and did a little intro for the movie and talked to the crowd for a bit.

The movie itself is classed as a horror movie, but after seeing it I would say it is more a thriller than a horror. It had some gory pieces to it, it had lots of action, and a great story line. The acting, writing and directing was all great. I was never bored, lost or confused. I was just simply kept at the edge of my seat waiting to see what would happen next as you could not predict how it was going to go at any point in the movie. Normally when you here that, it means the movie is rough and makes no sense but this movie flowed perfectly and followed a great story, it just kept you guessing.

I own every movie Kevin Smith has made (except Jersey Girl) and love his comedies, but I have to say this ranked up there as one of his best movies. It is not a "Kevin Smith movie" as you would think of them but he does a great job with this new genre and shows that he is a great director and writer.

The crowd cheered and reacted loudly (quite possibly because Kevin was in the back of the theater) and it added even more to the movie viewing experience.

Once the movie was over Kevin came up and did a Q&A. He didn't get to many questions because when he answered he did so in story form and it was amazing. Kevin is a great speaker and kept the audience intrigued with stories about this movie, his family, his life and his new movie that he is currently working on.

It was a bit pricey if you look at it as going to see a movie, but so worth it considering you got a movie as well as a Q&A with Kevin. The whole night was amazing. I would recommend seeing Red State as soon as you can, it is a great work of art and shows that Kevin can do much more than just penis and fart jokes.

Do fan's have the right to boo?

I am a fan of the Montreal Canadiens and the Calgary Stampeders and have been thinking about all the games I have been to and how when the home team is playing poorly how the fan's begin to boo either the team or the player that is playing badly. With that in mind it raised the question do you think home town fans have the right to boo their team or a player when they are playing bad? I know if I do a bad job I get talked to or yelled at by my boss and I am sure the players do as well, but can the fans be considered bosses as it is our money from ticket and merchandise sales that pay their salaries.

Habs fans have a history of booing players that are playing badly and although they get paid millions to play the game, they are just people and I can't imagine it make you feel very good when 30,000+ people start to boo you. So when a player gets mad at being booed what can they do? Not much really, because if they do react it ends up all over the press and fans react even more to what they have done. So players are in a tough spot, yes it is their job to play the best they can but as a fan you don't know everything that is going on and maybe they are having a bad day, an injury or something personal that is affecting their game. So should they get a free pass?

One of the big reasons I bring this up is Rob Maver of the Stampeders was booed off the field a couple of times during the Stampeders home opener. He missed a couple field goals that should have been made and seemed to be having issues kicking in general. After a while some fans realized the reason he was kicking so poorly was injured, but most didn't realize it until the coach came out and said he re injured himself in warm up and that is why he was struggling. I personally felt very bad for the guy. It showed amazing courage to try and kick even though he was in major amounts of pain and could have done even more damage to himself. So were the fans right to boo him off the field?

It's a tough call and I don't know the answer, I know I have booed players and teams when I am watching a game and get frustrated with their play, I have called for players to be benched, traded or moved around to see if that will help the team, but as a fan I know I don't know everything that is happening with the team or the players so perhaps I should take a step back and look at the bigger picture that they are playing for my entertainment and I should stand behind them no matter what and always cheer my heart out in hopes that it will help them play better and bring home the win.

The Premature death call of RIM

I am an avid Blackberry user, I have gone through many upgrades and currently have the Bold and a PlayBook and I love these devices. That being said I also am not such a fan boy that I don't see the odd issue with them or won't admit that there are flaws.

With that being said I am quite saddened to see all the RIM bashing that is going on in both the technical and financial markets right now. Some are saying that RIM is now dead and can't recover from where they are. That the loss of market share is massive and they are done as a company. To those people I would like to say that I think you are looking to profit from a hiccup and that your call of their demise is very premature.

RIM was the first smart phone maker and as such had a 100% market share. When the iPhone came out guess where they took the market share from? When the Android came out it had to take a market share from someone as well. Just like Apple was the first to push out the iPad they had 100% of the market, now there are several tablet devices that have taken from that market share but no one is saying that Apple will die because of it. It's not that RIM is dying as much as they have competition now and have to adjust marketing practices to make sure they compete with the new technology. That being said they are also the only devices that are authorized for use by military and governments due to their security. That is a huge market that they hold, and that alone can sustain many companies.

With all technology when new items come out they will take a share of the market from the big boys and it is how they react that matters, RIM has been slow to react to market change and it is costing them but the technology they are building is solid and is very good at what it does. They are not the best "toy" on the market but I do believe they are still the best business device on the market. I know the consumer market is where you want to be but consumers are fickle and will constantly change to the newest best marketing pitch that is presented to them and not what is necessarily the best device. I know lots of people that have iPhones and most of which are Apple fanboys and will buy anything (and line up) that has that Apple logo on it. It doesn't matter the cost or the functionality they will always buy it because in their eyes Apple is better than everyone else. RIM will never win those people over no matter what they try. So why not stick to the market that they have a shot at keeping and converting? The business user will take whatever device their IT person tells them is the right choice. So in my opinion RIM needs to show the technical market that their devices are better.

This brings me back to the days I started working in the computer industry. I found an amazing operating system that was GUI, stable and had the ability to multi task. It was called O/S2 and was made by IBM. It was far better than anything Microsoft had at the time but in the end went the way of the dodo because no one ever heard of it. IBM had the best stealth marketing team known to man at that time. RIM is in the same boat right now, you see Apple advertisements every where. Ask anyone on the street and they will know what an iPad or iPhone or iPod is. Ask them if they know who RIM or BlackBerry is and you will get some strange looks. If RIM can fix the marketing situation they will be back better and stronger than before.

As a disclaimer, I do not work for RIM, I am not a sales guy, and I have no affiliation with them. I just like their devices and wanted to put my thoughts out to the world.

Radio contests

So this week the media in Calgary is up in arms over a new contest that Amp radio in Calgary is having. They are giving away a 10,000 breast augmentation prize to one lucky winner. The media has portrayed it as a contest that is sexist, disgusting and disturbing. In actual fact it is a prize that several people will want to win and they will enter it and will listen to Amp in order to see if they get the "big" prize.

I personally don't care what radio stations give away as a prize in any contest, if it is something I want to win, I will listen to try and win it. If it is something that has no interest for me then I probably won't listen but for sure I will not enter the contest.

I will never look down on someone that enters a contest that I don't like because they obviously want to win that item or they wouldn't enter it and if you are one of the people that complain about contests on a radio station I think you probably need to find more things to do with your life because in all honesty it is not going to affect your life so you shouldn't care one way or another.

Just my two cents on this whole thing.

What if we all had Riders?

The other day I was reading a couple riders from singers as to what they needed in their dressing rooms in order to perform at concerts and it got me thinking. What if everyone had a rider that was had delivered before you would do any work? What would different professions riders look like? Is there one thing that you had to have in order to do your job and if you didn't have it would you refuse to go do it?

Sample Rider for your IT Professional

Must have bowl of candy to snack on while working
Must have a case of coke, Pepsi or Jolt Cola chilled
Must have one large pizza if job will take more than 4 hours
Computer keyboard and mouse must be clean
No magnets or post it notes stuck anywhere on the computer or monitor
Need detailed description of what you did (I didn't do anything is not the correct answer)
Need all admin passwords for the computer and network
Once IT Professional shows up user must leave the office and not talk to said professional until he/she initiates conversation to say the job is done or is asking for more information.

What you put in your rider?

BlackBerry Playbook

So after having my PlayBook from BlackBerry for the last 48 hours I decided to do up a review for it.

I will start off saying that I won my PlayBook from RIM at the PlayBookTO Party and flew out to collect my prize. The party was a lot of fun with everyone taking pictures in the photo booth, getting to play with several PlayBooks scattered around the bar and drinks and food everywhere.

Upon leaving the party I was given a bag with my 32GB PlayBook inside. I went back to my friend Sam's place to crash for the night as I had to fly back home to Calgary the next day. Before going to bed I unpacked the PlayBook and plugged it in so that I could have it fully charged for my flight the next day.

I turned on the PlayBook and went through the initial setup. During the setup you need to connect to the Internet so I hooked to her WIFI and away it went downloading the OS and setting it all up. Other then the initial Demo that I didn't really want to do or pay attention to but was forced to the setup was quick and painless. Once setup I then used the BlackBerry Bridge to hook it to my Bold 9700 (I had already downloaded the Bridge application on BlackBerry before I left home knowing I would use it once I got the PlayBook). This was a little more difficult than originally thought as it wouldn't scan the Bar Code properly. I simply selected manual connection instead and it hooked up reasonably quickly.

I played around with it a little that night but was pretty tired and just went to bed knowing I would do a lot of playing with it during my 4 hour flight home the next day. When I woke up I went right to the PlayBook and signed in to my wife's KoBo account and downloaded her purchases on to the PlayBook to do some reading. While I was doing that in another window I downloaded a couple apps from App World. All went extremely fast and was quite impressed with the ability to do multiple things on the device at once.

I got to the airport early so plugged in the PlayBook and hooked up to the free WiFi (wasn't sure about battery life and didn't want to kill it before I got on the plane). I played around on Twitter and Facebook (links already on the PlayBook for both), I found it fast, responsive and easy to use. Then I played Need For Speed Undercover which comes standard on the PlayBook. The graphics, sound and playability of the game was amazing.

Once on the plane and up in the air I once again went to my PlayBook instead of turning on the TV in front of me. I browsed through the items on the PlayBook, tested some different things, read a bit of the books on the Kobo App and played Tetris and NFS. Everything was responsive and the only complaint I could think of was that I should have checked out App World a little more before I left to see what else I could have.

Once I got home I didn't really play with it much as I was tired so I just sort of relaxed but I did notice that it automatically pulled my home WiFi info off of my BlackBerry and automatically connected to it (very cool feature). On Friday I woke up and saw there was an O/S update available so I set it to download and jumped in the shower. When I came out, it was downloaded so I chose to install it and went to get dressed. By the time I was done the O/S was updated and after a reboot was ready to go. I played around quite a bit with it on Friday including going to App World and downloading several apps and games. I know people have been complaining about there not being enough apps for the PlayBook but in reality it has almost as many apps as what the iPad had when it launched a year ago. Now that it is out more apps will be developed and released for it so comparing how many apps the iPad has now to how many the PlayBook has right now is asinine. The iPad has been out for a year and a half so of course it will have more apps. Not to mention Apple is actually a software designer on top of that where as BlackBerry is not.

As for the apps that currently are on it and available I have been impressed with it. There is Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF reader all native on it thanks to Sheets To Go. There is Bing Maps, which all though not ideal as you have to connect to the web to use it, works reasonably well with the GPS on the PlayBook. The camera's both work well, the music player sounds amazing and video play is unmatched by anything I have seen out there.

The couple things that I wish they had on release and don't is a Skype type program so that you can take advantage of the dual camera's, and BBM would have been smart to either include or at least have in the Bridge App. I am sure these will come out soon but it is a deficiency for sure. The only other complaint that I could really think of is that I use a Bluetooth headset on my phone so I have to disable the Bridge to the PlayBook while that is on which means no sync for my email, calendar and contacts during that time. If they could set it up so I could hook my PlayBook directly to my BES server then I wouldn't need the Bridge and would probably be a bit nicer feature wise.

All in all I am extremely impressed with the PlayBook, I can see my self using it quite often when I don't have my laptop with me or if I just need to do something quickly and don't want to boot up my laptop. The .9lb's and overall size makes it nice and portable and with all the functionality makes it a great device. It will not be a full laptop replacement (no device really is) but will make for a great addition to my technology capabilities.

If you have a BlackBerry that is always attached to you I would recommend the PlayBook for sure, if you don't have a BlackBerry but are looking for a tablet that you can take with you and use when you don't always have your laptop with you then this is still a great device, you just need to make sure you have WiFi capabilities if you want to do anything online with it.