Got my recent iconoculture
in the mail. They had a piece about thinknets: cyber communities of thinktanks.
In particular it referenced Massive Change
which is striving to be one of these. Their forum
has some interesting topics. I don’t think it’s at the super “thinktank” level
yet, like the conscious city or anything like that, but it has good potential.
I’m keeping a watch on it. Maybe make a post or 2.

After reading the Massive Change
site, I woke up to some interesting thoughts about society. I shared one on the
site about Social Architecture
and my other one is this.

• Native myth and folklore teach values like communication and community
• Greek mythology teaches things like free will and astrology
• Viking stories teach values like exploration and battles

Now look at their societies.

If you look at these cultures, all of their core values are ingrained in their
myths and stories. The largest religious revolution has one of the greatest
collection of stories, The Bible.

Take a loot at the United States. What are their myths and legends? Independence
Day, The Civil War, The Wild West, all of these collection of stories are based
around the fight to choose, the fight for freedom, the fight for money, the fight
for oneself. It’s no wonder that it reflect in their social culture.

Now how about Canada. What about us? Look at our Greatest Canadians.
I see inventors, Socialists, Athletes. I think of things like the Montreal Expo. I
think of stories like the underground railroad. Where did that lead to? Canada.
Now look at our social culture in comparison.

Now it’s the chicken and the egg thought. Do we choose these myths and legends
because of our society, or is our society driven by these stories. I say that if
we can introduce the right hero’s, the right legends and the right myths into our
society we can effectively make change to its values.

What are your myths?

O.k. So I’ve gone through the process of adding the links to my “Networking” section, on the left side. I’ve signed up to 3 different sites and I’ve been playing with how they work and what can be done.

• Ecademy – Seems to be chalker block full of features and additions. You’ve got blogs and message boards, meetings and clubs but only if you can afford it. I’m still looking through it, but so far, nothing for the broke ( which is me ).
• LinkedIn – It’s a friendster for business. You can search profiles, groups, experiences, business industries, anything that the users put up. And another bonus, it’s free. I’m connected to 1 person so far, woohoo!
• MeetUp – This site’s purpose is a little different. Like LinkedIn, it’s free. They’ve got a small twist, its goal is to create physical networks. Sure they’ve got a message board but their strive is to make the face to face connections, which is scary but I think can be very beneficial. I’ve got my first meetup on Feb 10.

Ultimately like real networking, it’s something that takes time an patience, so one week isn’t going to get me huge results. I’ll check in from time to time to let you know how the network grows.

It seems there was a mistake in a shipment of Doris Day DVD’s. The BBC reported, Sex movie mix-up shocks couple.

Now here’s the kicker.

The couple, regular attendees at their local Baptist church, settled down with a cup of tea to watch the 1957 musical… “My wife and I were very shocked but we watched it until the end because we couldn’t believe what we were seeing.”

When people are in shock they’ll watch just about anything! This was a mistake, but just turn the T.V. on and you’ll see this kind of stuff happening intentionally.

Not only do companies have problems with translating things into foreign languages. But now slang is the problem too. Ha Ha, McDonalds! Takes their recent catch phrase “I’m lovin’ it!” to a whole new and disturbing level. Did I say Ha Ha?

Well, I’m still looking for finding ways to extract event data. If you’ve got any suggestions or sites to read, send them my way. At the same time, I’m now working on building out the advertising portion of the database and UI. This of course is needed if I want to make money, and well…I do need money to make the business go.

…speeding cheetah? Here he comes to save the day!

Update: There was a link. I removed it because it was a 404 and not even Wayback Machine has it

This past week my Company of Friends Group was discussing aspects and thoughts towards Networking. Stewart Marshall has learned some great lessons and shared them with us, and the conversations that ensued were interesting and eye opening for me.

The best aspect I took from our conversations was the misplaced negative stereo-type people have created over the years about networking. I’m not exactly sure how and when this happened but I know I had this idea until this conversation. the term “Networking” for me conjured images of fake smiles and fake hand shakes. Giving your card out to thousands of people and knowing only 1% might actually keep it. I found myself surprised that concepts and principles in networking are the exact same I use to make friends. It all comes down to meeting new people, however we’ve found that we can do that, use it.

So as a learning and growing project, and being an internet person, I’ve decided to start linking in through various networking sites and to give them a try. I’ll be adding the Networking sub-category to my Business Category, and as I learn about these sites and explore, I’ll definitely be keeping everyone in the loop.

Side Note:: This also keeps in line with this new concept of chaos theory. New People = Unexpected = Chaos.

I’ve seen a couple of instalments of The Hour and so far it’s a refreshing take to news. Previously, I stopped watching news or caring about news because quite frankly it sucks. All of it, the news; the people. Well, welcome George Stroumboulopoulos and welcome back caring about news! I love this new take. Congrats not just to George, but to the CBC for allowing this on the air. He started his interview “Hey Man, what’s happening”. Who does that?

I had intended on writing maybe a witty, and maybe and interesting post today. I wasn’t exactly sure as to what or how or why. No topic had come to mind. I woke up, relaxed and made my morning Postum. As I sat on my couch and started to drink I realized by butt was wet. Matter of fact, there was an odd smell. Oh crap! My cat had pissed on my couch yet again! I have been trying to figure out why he was doing it. I thought I was on the verge of figuring it out. It’s not his food, it’s not his water, it’s not his litter, it’s not the living room. It’s not anything! Oh, and I’ve tried everything to clean the stuff up with. I’ve tried all sorts of brands. Cleansers with chemical, enzymatic cleaners, natural cleaners. I still haven’t found anything. I found a reference somewhere to a new product which has a remote possibility to maybe get rid of the hidden smells we humans can’t pick up on. So with that minor chance of a whim, I’ve just had to order online. I’m starting to go mad. My friend vanessa say’s to get rid of the couch…i just spent $600 on the couch a couple of years ago. I’m not throwing it out. I tried to look how much it would cost for new cushions. Guess … no just guess. $80 each. That $160, I don’t have that money. Especially when I’ve quit my job to start this enterprise of my own.

Funny thing, is that just yesterday I was having a talk with my Dad about this my new lessons about the chaos theory. I’ve come to the conclusion that everything, regardless of whether I know it or not has a root cause. My Dad on the other hand believes that some things don’t have any reason. They just happen. So we debated on this for a little bit. In my new idea, to really fix a problem you need to know the root cause. If not, then you are just masking the problem. But what about moments like this where nothing is evident. You can’t figure out the root problem. Do you give up on trying to figure what the root is? We don’t always have the time to find the root cause. But I guess figuring out our own answers is part of the process. How we handle and learn from the unexpected is how we can define our success or failure.