IPhone Consumerism

A small lineup of 20-30 people wait for their chance to buy an IPhone, at the Apple store in Market Mall, Calgary.


It's hard to know where to start.  The whole fan-person, lining up for gadgets topic is so broad and full of side issues we could be here for days.

As a technologist I love gadgets and electronics in general, however this perpetual culture of buy and re-buy as a means of keeping our economy going is something to think about.

Most Technology tends to roughly follow Moores law, where price, speed, and functionality tend to radically improve every 18 months or so.  In some cases manufacturers are getting into one year cycles.

This is both good and bad for the consumer. If you have the means and the interest you can line up every year or so and get a great deal of satisfaction out of the next version.  If you don't have the means, you quickly get left behind.  Your 4 year old flip phone is a key status marker out in the wild.

I remember asking a Rogers Sales Person about why they lock people into 3 year plans when the Phones are only desigined for a much shorter life span. (Both feature wise and in terms of break resistance.)   She stared at me for a good five seconds like I had just asked for sex, then recited the talking point about how great it is to upgrade in the second year.  You should see that "loyalty price" spreadsheet, it's huge.

If you get tired of waiting in that line-up there's a Cookie's By George right around the corner.  Two rich gooey chocolate chip cookies for $3.  There is no Moore's Law for cookies, they'll always be as good as they get.  But picture this, a three year contract requiring you to eat a certain number of cookies in order to get an overall reduced price.

Reprinted from The Last Cut is the Cheapest Please recommend this post

Interview With Rob Anders

Please recommend this post

Buy a Condo Screw a Waitress

This is a Condo ad in Calgary. Somebody posted it in my Twitter stream today. If you can't read the text:

A $20,000 downpayment is easier than scoring on a 4 minute 5 on 3. And way easier than scoring with your waitress.

Yeah. Great marketing. This must have come from the creative class that I keep hearing so much about. Also I think it's down payment. I'm not sure I ever would have found this funny or interesting, certainly not now. Other people will though.  Ann Coulter is coming to Calgary soon. Please recommend this post

CAPPYYC Rally Afterburn

Disclaimer: My Blog, this post, and my thoughts here reflect my own views and are not associated with the Organizing Committee of CAPPYYC.






We had a post rally debriefing meeting last night. We put together the following statement for our Facebook supporters:

Our rally outside Mr. Harper’s office this past Saturday was a solid success. Over 350 people attended (based on the 357 signatures on our petition as well as the estimates of the police and news crews!) and we had solid coverage from 3 English television networks, one Chinese network and a wide variety of local papers. The tone of the gathering was polite and positive, attendance exceeded our expectations despite the weather, and we are very happy with how everything turned out. Thank you to everyone who took some time out of their day to come out and make their opinion known!

Here is a link to a video of the event,
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=295426917159&oid=233912789510
plus a link to the delivery of the signatures today,
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=302982977159&oid=233912789510

The steering committee had a debrief meeting on Wednesday to discuss lessons learned and the possibility of future events, and we agreed that much remains to be done. We don’t want this issue to fade or to get lost in partisan posturing! As a result we will begin working on events dedicated toward increasing civic engagement and educating people about our system, as well as a second rally to be held close to the actual sitting of Parliament in March. The fact that concern over the erosion of our representative institutions got over 350 Calgarians out in the January cold seems to us to indicate that there is work to be done before the next election!




I thought the debriefing meeting was a little intense as everyone shared their thoughts about the things that worked well and the things we could have done a better job on.  There were a lot of things we could have done better.  Generally, I think every one felt the rally was a great success.  We got a turn out of about 350 people.  That may not seem like a lot, but consider that it was -10c with blowing snow, and we were in the most conservative federal riding in all of Canada.

I thought the Calgary media was really good to us in terms of coverage and reporting the event fairly. I really didn't know what to expect from the media. The 3 or 4 Calgary Police Officers assigned to the event were really nice to us even though we spilled out onto the road due to a lack of room on the sidewalk.

We feel we picked the right location in front of Stephen Harper's constituency office.  I had some off and on worries that the location might not work.

Another thing that totally impressed me was the attitude of the crowd and the atmosphere.  Everyone was really happy and friendly.  Everyone I talked to agreed that it was a fun atmosphere.

While it would not be fair for me to divulge specific comments of other committee members, I can tell you the list of "learn from" issues that I brought to the discussion:

• Not enough time to recruit volunteers. Five people did all the work, and among us the work wasn't really distributed properly.
• Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter and Blogs has mixed results for generating interest. This may have been due to the compressed delivery time, or we just may not have been messaging properly.
• I thought people with key tasks should have some redundancy or backup in case they couldn't deliver their responsibility for some reason.
• If we had more time we could have identified people's skills and interests more and mapped tasks a bit better.
• There was no real project time line to see where we were in the planning.  Again, due to compressed time frame.
• Our  petition  should have gone out much earlier. 
• We should have had some type of hand-out at the event. (There were about 4-5 other groups that showed up and handed out their stuff.)
• I would have liked to live blog the event, or video stream it.  We didn't have the time or resources

All of our self-criticisms seems to come out of not having enough time and people.  Nonetheless I am personally very happy with the way the event turned out.  And I also am in awe of my fellow committee members for their smarts, determination, and passion.

We now look forward to planning another event that we hope will be even more successful. Stay tuned. Please recommend this post

CAPP YYC Rally Tomorrow

Thanks for all who worked to get the Calgary Rally off the ground, and thanks ahead of time for all of you who are going to show up tomorrow.

Here is a link to our petition document.  It got out a bit late, but whatever signatures you can get is great. We will have lots of places to sign tomorrow at the rally.

Two final reminders:
1. Parking is very limited around Mr Harper's office.  Please try to avoid driving if you can.  There is lots of parking in South Glenmore park, but its a 10-15 minute walk.
2. We still need volunteers.

Map Please recommend this post

CAPPYYC Needs Some Volunteers

We're getting more excited about the CAPP rally on Saturday.

If you're in Calgary and are attending we really could use some volunteers.  We realized that our venue is somewhat sprawling with multiple entry and exit points so we want some people to direct participants to the right location. Its a fairly simple job and we'll buy you all the sugar free bran muffins and green tea you can eat.  Or, cheese burgers and coca cola.  We're not here to judge you.

Drop me a line if you can help out.  And thanks. Please recommend this post

CAPPYYC Rally Blogger Plug

Calgary's CAPP rally is this Saturday, January 23,2010, on the parking lot directly outside Stephen Harper's Constituency Office.

The address is:

1600 - 90 th Avenue SW
(also known as Glenmore Landing, a popular shopping centre.)

We recommend you not bring your car to the event due to limited parking.  There is a lot of parking in nearby, but not in the shopping centre.  There are maps and transit info on the event page.  We also wanted to avoid causing a problem for the retail businesses around Mr. Harper's office.

If you like walking, the location is about 15-20 minutes from the Heritage CTrain Station.

The rally will start at 1pm and will go for at least an hour, and longer if the participants want.

Because of the right leaning nature of Calgary's Social media, and the completely appropriate  attention shift to the Haiti relief efforts, it has been difficult to get our rally talked about in the blogosphere or on Twitter. If you are a Calgary blogger please help us and blog about this non-partisan event.  There are tonnes of excellent opinion blog posts about the Prorogue so I won't cover that territory here.

We will be presenting a petition to Mr.Harper's constituency office and hope you will help gather signatures. The petition asks that Parliament return in January. A PDF version of the petition and signing sheets will be available sometime today.

A link an image of  one of our posters is here.

Our press release is here

Follow the organizers on Twitter.

Thanks to the Calgarians who have supported this event, and the organizers who have worked very hard.

Tell your friends. Please recommend this post

Calgary's Rally Until Now Noticeably Lacking

I was surprised to learn Calgary, Alberta was one of the few cities in Canada not organizing an anti-prorogue rally.  Ok, I wasn't really surprised I was just being polite.

Although I loath facebook it is somewhat useful for organizing groups and events. Please join the group I created attempting to organize a rally in Calgary. If it falls on dead ears, at least we tried.  Sorry, typo, I meant deaf ears. I was thinking of brains.

What we need now are ideas, facebook tips, admins and joiners.

If you can think of any other social media sites we could supplement this group with please let me know.

In the meantime a little Bruce Cockburn:

Please recommend this post

Hurtful By Intent

Here is a pdf copy of Rob Anders anti-Muslim pamphlet that I received in my mail box not long ago. Free speech is free speech, but this particular free speech, borderline hate speech, is wholly funded by the Government of Canada.

The key piece that caught my eye:

It is now illegal to hold opinions that offend radical Muslim activists.

A lie, pure and simple.

That, and frequent references to liberal activists, who by the semantics of infantile McCarthyism are equally to blame for whatever ails you.

It was released on or around Ramadan, and designed to fall on the fertile ground of Calgary West, a constituency built by hand by Preston Manning and Stephen Harper.

As a political strategy keeping people dumb, full of hatred, and confused about basic facts seems to have worked quite well.

h/t to Jennifer Pollock, whom I stole the post title from.



Join the conversation on Twitter.

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