TakeTV, Something I want for a change

Okay, it is a rare day that a new tech toy comes out and I go “I want one, now”. It is a rare thing because most of these things do not satisfy my criteria of:
-It must do something I want to do, or it does something I want to do, easier than what I currently have do something.
-It must not cost an arm and a leg.

So, something that I want to do is watch videos I have downloaded from the internet on my TV. I don’t mind watching some streamed stuff on my PC, but my TV viewing area is designed for watching TV, unlike my computer area. Now I have an easier solution:
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Review part Deux: The Dog & Duck Public House & Restaurant

Pub Makes Amends and Proves the Personal Touch can Still be Found in Calgary

Address: 5340 2nd St. SW Calgary

DnD outside

I love management that actually cares about what people think of their establishment. They know that word of mouth can be the kiss of death or the hot inside tip that spreads like wild fire. In these days of blogging, a new twist has been thrown in: managers can comment back on blog entries rather than just hoping for the best with old-style word of mouth.
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Top Gear does again – Why can’t we get funny stuff like this here?

Still recovering from laughing. Too bad I can’t buy one.

Tiny Car Review

Need more Top Gear!

Still can’t embed videos worth shit!

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30 Years of Atari, 30 ads

If you are of a certain age and have any love of computer games, “Atari” is not a company or a maker of video games, but a former way of life. I never owned an Atari system, but so many people I knew did that I might as well have. Many fond memories. Here is a great collection of ads that will take you back to a time when as kids we could only dream of a day that home systems would even approach anything in the arcade, but at least we had Atari.

(Some of these ads are hilarious — #19 yuppies taken by the hand of god – rotfl!)
The Best Worst Atari Commercials

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One of the better rants on the state of the music “business”

Highly recommended reading:

When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.

I am not a huge music fan. I used to buy the occasional CD, occasional becoming even less so due to my frustration with a)Finding any music I liked b)Price of said music found. A good part of my old music collection is stuff that I recorded on radio or copied off of friends because I wasn’t going to pay for collections that were steaming piles of crap wrapped around one good song. It didn’t help that the only way I was going to find out about the crap was to buy the album, because I don’t listen to the radio – they are not going to play most of what I buy anyways. The last two CD’s I bought were from artists who directly burned their own stuff and collected all the profit as a result. Previous CD’s were from MP3.com – which was an early victim of the music industry’s heavy handed tactics to maintain control. Continue reading

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The headline for the Calgary Election should be “Dollars don’t buy you Votes”

Another predicable boring election is over in Calgary – other than Helene Larocque being voted out of my former Ward, the rest of the results I mostly don’t care about. But there were some good signs – voter turnout up to 33%, still dismal but not the pathetic last election turnout of 20%.

The story of this election is that 19 year old Jeremy Zhao spending a total of $1853 gets 8007 votes (unofficial City of Calgary numbers) – good enough for 5th out of 9 candidates while Alnoor Kassam spends around $1.2mil and gets 35443 votes. Bronco still won by a large margin, at 128111 votes, 61% of the vote.

The big deal is, when you do the math, Alnoor spent a whopping $33.85 per vote received, Jeremy spend 23 cents per vote. Bronco comes in at $7.81 per vote – I am assuming here that he spent about a $mil for his campaign, and Alnoor was at $1.2mil for his campaign. Jeremy, as per his website is at $1853 – the only website I could quickly find his donator list and spending easily. It would seem Jeremy is the only one that gets that open accountability promises start with how you run your campaign.

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Review: Paddy O’Leary’s Irish Pub and Grille

Suburban Pub Tries to be all things to all people

Address: 8294 Centre Street NE Calgary (403) 275-6601

Paddy OLearys_1114A pub located outside of the normal inner city circle, Paddy O’Leary’s is a growing trend in the last few years for some pubs to locate out in suburbia, where it is handy to visit from home rather than from work, which most of the first – generation pubs in Calgary seem to have focused on. Having visited this pub on several occasions, this review is somewhat of a general view from those visits.
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Alnoor Kassam just lost any chance of getting my vote

Occasionally, a politician does something so monumentally stupid that with a single act, they kill any hope of their being elected. Sometimes they just do something to honk me off and permanently loose any chance of getting my vote. I don’t know quite where this falls yet.

I first heard of Alnoor from his attention grabbing posters at LRT stations talking about building west LRT now, not years from now. Smart move, promising LRT improvements and talking about it in the exact location where people would be sympathetic.

So I check out his web site Seems pretty reasonable, not too much detail at the time, but this was early in the campaign. Perhaps some reasonable alternative to vote for come election day.

Then I start hearing about his previous business dealings in Kenya – not exactly a shining “Business Leader”. Furthermore, his line on his site “A city is no different than a business: it has an annual operating budget of $2 billion, 12 thousand employees and 1 million customers.” doesn’t exactly strike me as very compassionate – so as a “business” should Calgary kick out anyone that is not paying there way in this city?

The final straw is he’s just honked me off by leaving a phone spam message on my answering machine, showing a total lack of respect for my private phone line, which I don’t care to have turn into an auditory spam repository like, say, email these days. If that’s how Alnoor runs things when he’s trying show how great he is, I don’t want to even contemplate how he’d be if he was running the city. As far as how big a mistake this is, well, then depends on how many phones he’s left his message on – anyone out there get one of these on their cell phone?

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Review: The Dog & Duck Public House & Restaurant

Interesting House converted into a Pub – Ruined by bad Service

Address: 5340 2nd St. SW Calgary

Edit: You may want to check out my newer review, which comes on a re-visit with much better service

Dog and Duck

A bit tricky to find, this is a house converted into pub located on a back street just east of MacLeod Trail. There is a charming, quiet outdoor area with actual picnic tables. A nice pub decor greets you on the inside. However, this is yet another Calgary establishment that tries to be both a sports bar and a pub. The huge big screen TV in the middle of the main sitting area is just annoying if you don’t care to watch whatever sports event is on at the time. At least they keep the volume down. I would also note that the washroom area could use a bit of cleaning and renovation.

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What are they smoking over at Future Shop?

I’m browsing my way through the B5 stuff at Future Shop when I run across this little gem:

” In 1994 Star Trek had to take a backseat to this science fiction series, created by Michael…”

Uhhh, I don’t know what you guys are smoking over there, but pass some over to me, ‘cuz that’s some fine tripp’n you are doing over there.

Oh, and prices have dropped on the original series now: $68 per season, finally cheaper than when purchased originally. But when is the 5 season set coming out?

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