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.

The NHL has gone Crazy

I wasn't going to write this blog because so many people have been blogging, twittering and commenting everywhere about the pure insanity of the NHL over the last two days but my outrage and disdain needs a place to go. So here it goes.

As a Habs fan I am slightly biased about the Chara/MaxPac hit, but as a hockey fan I can move that bias to the side and look at the whole picture of this season and of all teams. The NHL has gotten to the point where bad hits, from marginal players is at an epidemic proportion. What does the league do about this? Nothing. They throw out the odd suspension here and there to teams that aren't that important or not that high in the standings or to the odd player that makes league minimum salaries and mean less to their team then the equipment guy, but as soon as a star player does anything remotely serious it is swept under the rug.

I wasn't looking for Chara to be gone for the rest of the season and the playoffs, it would have been nice since MaxPac is gone for the season and possibly next depending on how his rehab goes, but I thought the NHL would at least suspend the guy for a couple games due to the fact that his arm and hand drove Max's face into the turnbuckle.

Then today they suspend Kubina for 3 games for giving a guy an elbow to the head, I agree they should have. In fact anytime any player targets another players head (Chara did) he should get at least three games. The NHL, however cannot consistently ever get that right. Look at Crosby (who I really dislike ass a player) he gets targeted twice in two games and hit in the head and has not played a game in two months. Both of those hits should have been suspended. They targeted Crosby and may not have hit him with an elbow but still hit the head with a should pad that is hard plastic body armour that is more or less like hitting a guy with a brick.

To top that off, the NHL gets a letter from a sponsor saying that they will withdraw their sponsorship of the NHL if it can't clean up the league. Instead of taking it under advisement, worrying about losing money, or just acknowledging that something has to be done, Bettman comes out and says thanks for all the money Air Canada but if you don't like this sport you can take your money and leave. So not only does the NHL not care about it's players safety, enforcing rules or looking at dangerous equipment but it doesn't even care about it's sponsors concerns.

You think to yourself, no worries, the NHL and owners only care about their own pockets. The players have the NHLPA that are there to protect the players and make sure that the NHL keeps safety and players concerns in the forefront of the NHL but instead of taking this seriously they are looking at the turnbuckle and saying that is the issue not the players out hurting each other.

So where does this leave the fans? Well we can petition the NHL to clean up it's act but if they won't listen to their sponsors they aren't going to listen to the fans. We could go to the NHL's big sponsors and have more of them put the hurt on the NHL, eventually they have to listen to that right? Or finally we can write lets to our team owners and get them to take action by removing Bettman, Campbell and all their cronies from the NHL and hope that new blood will correct the mistakes of old. What really needs to happen is for the owners, the NHL and the NHLPA to stop dragging their feet and get serious about change. Change the equipment so players don't get hurt by that, change the attitude of the players by suspending a guy for a year if he targets the head no matter who he is and finally get players to take responsibility for their actions on the ice.

Will it ever change, I don't really know but this year has been one of the worst years I have seen for injuries, bad hits, bad calls by refs and even worse calls by the NHL. Make your voice heard where it will make the most effect, contact your team owners and unfollow the NHL on Twitter and Facebook and finally don't buy anything that the money goes to the NHL. Eventually they may wake up and hear the complaints.

Canada Post Sucks

This blog has been brewing for a while now and I need to post it now.

I live in a newer neighbourhood in Calgary and as such we no longer get door to door delivery from Canada Post. They have "super boxes" placed all over the neighbourhood and you have a specific box and keys to get your mail. I have no problem with this as I realize the city is bigger and to save time it is easier to have a truck full of mail and place it in the right box instead of going door to door. It would just be nice if they actually put things in the right box. Yesterday I picked up the mail and there was a key (the key is to one of two bigger boxes that they can put a parcel in to) I opened the parcel box and it was a parcel for an address on the other side of the street from me. This wouldn't bother me so much except for the fact that they never get anything right. Over Christmas they were actually doing door to door delivery of parcels. My house number is 55. There was a package on my doorstep (they don't ring the doorbell or wait for someone to be home they just drop it on the door), the issue was that is was for 7966 on a completely different street. I can understand wrong street as everything starts the same name but to look at my house being 2 digits and this being a 4 digit house number wasn't a big red flag? Not to mention my house numbers weren't even in the 4 digit number.
Put that on top of my mother in law sending a package to us with gift cards that never ever arrived. It had a tracking number and was supposedly delivered to us at 10:30 one morning. Problem was I was home and the postal contractors never actually get to our neighbourhood until at least 2pm. Nothing ever came of that one.

I also still have not received my package from the US that was sent to me before Christmas. At this point I don't think I ever will get it.

So with Canada Post being useless, it comes down to the fact that I don't know what tell people that want to send me things.

What to do with a teenager?

Well this is a tough blog for me to write. I have two children one is a 14 year old girl (about to turn 15) and the other is a 10 yr old boy that has Aspergers Syndrome. My daughter is a step child but I have been raising her since she was 2.
With the mixed family there have always been issues but we managed to go get through most of them fairly well. Last year my daughter was failing school and was hanging around with some bad kids. In an effort to wake her up (after finding out the school would not fail her) we talked it over with her and sent her to her grandparents home for the remainder of the school year. Her marks didn't improve greatly but she seemed to be passing everything and had lots of friends and even got a job at McDonald's. We thought things were turning around and she was maturing.
My wife went down for a vacation just after school let out to discuss with her parents about my daughter staying for another year of schooling. They did not see enough effort put forth in school and it was causing them some hardships having a teenager living there so they said no and it was decided she would move back home. At this time we also found out that she had been drinking several times with her friends (we had asked her not to drink til she was 16). After my wife left my daughter had a week to quit her job, pack and get ready to move back in with us. In that time we found out she had a one night stand with a boy without using any protection.

Move forward to this year, things have actually been going fairly well, she was getting along much better with her brother, we were letting her go out with friends, giving her limited computer and cell phone time with the chance to increase her privileges based on school work. Just before Christmas we got her first report card. She was failing three classes, mainly because she wasn't putting any effort in them. We were very disappointed but after talking to her and the teachers we think things are going to turn around on this.

Then comes last night, she had asked to go hang out with a friend yesterday and we had no problem with it as we know this girl and didn't think a big deal of it. She came home on time (after having asked for a sleepover and denied because we needed her to babysit). When she got home she was acting somewhat strange, ran upstairs before even talking to us and changed, was talking about how she had to shower because her friend had put ketchup in here and in general not getting to close to us. She was also wearing a lot of perfume, which she never does as she knows it causes us migraines.

So after a little sleuthing work, looking at her eyes getting close and smelling her hair I was pretty sure I knew why she was acting strange. So I let her shower and then confronted her. No I didn't know for sure but I had my suspicions so I simply said "Do you want to tell me what you really did?" She had that shit look of a busted teenager on her face and said no. This when I knew for sure what happened. So I sat down and talked about why, who, where and if she knew what the consequences of doing pot was or could be. She wasn't very open and was avoiding eye contact and didn't really want to say much so I asked her is she wanted her mom brought into this conversation. She said whatever. So we moved to the living room and had a family talk.

We talked about trust, dangers of drugs, why she did it and who she did it with. After that we sent her to her room so that we could figure out what to do. I thin called the parent of the other girl to let them know what we had found out. She dismissed it for the most part saying my daughter doesn't do that but was still going to have a talk to her about it. She said things like that don't happen in our house and I hope this won't stop you from letting our kids hangout.
The problem with this is I know it was her daughters friend that supplied the drugs, it wasn't her daughters first time and it was under her watch that they did it.

So now the conundrum, what to do with my 14 year old daughter that thinks it is okay to drink, do drugs and have sex because as she puts it "All my friends are doing it and they all say how awesome it is".

I knew growing up was hard but this is ridiculous.