“Time to have us a good old extension cage match. In one corner you have the Hawaiian punch of the link sharing world - Mahalo Share. In the other, weighing in with way too many link sharing resources is Shareaholic.”

- Add-on Cage Match, Mahalo Share vs Shareaholic! | Firefox Facts

“Share, bookmark and e-mail web pages quickly without leaving your browser. Shareaholic makes it easy for you to submit the web page you’re on to your favorite sharing or bookmarking service, including: digg, del.icio.us, facebook, friendfeed, google bookmarks, google reader notes, kaboodle, magnolia, mixx, myspace, pownce, reddit, stumbleupon, tumblr, twitter, and ycombinator. You can also e-mail the web page directly to a friend.”

- Shareaholic - The browser add-on extension to share, bookmark and e-mail web pages quickly

Xoopit: I’m grooving on this plugin for gmail/firefox that lets me browse all my videos, photos and file attachments in a convenient way.

Last night I finally got around to making my Obama donation. They invited stories as part of the donation process, and here’s what I posted:

My mom turns 70 on November 16th and insists there’s nothing she wants for her birthday other than photos of her grandchildren. I know the one thing that would thrill her even more: being present at Barack Obama’s inauguration. She’s a lifelong Democrat — my parents met when my Dad ran for a congressional nomination 45 years ago — and while she’s lived in Canada for 40 years, she’s never stopped feeling like an American (or dressing like one, on July 4th in particular!)

Her American-ness is particularly heartfelt when it comes to her political attentions. Over the past year, she’s spent hours every day watching CNN. For the first half of that year, we had the typical generational divide: I was pulling for Obama, and she felt it was time for a woman — for Hillary in particular. But she has been completely won over by watching speech after speech; I think that for the first time, she’s realizing that the United States is no longer the country she left in 1968, for better and for worse. On the one hand the Bush years have been far more brutal than she’d ever have imagined; on the other hand, the US she lived in was profoundly divided — particularly the segregated world of her Tennessee grandparents.

I know that the prospect of President Obama has made her feel like an American again — not just in a red-white-and-blue, Fourth-of-July outfit sort of a way, but in a return to the idea of America as a political beacon for the world. I’d love her to see it shining brightly, first hand, at the inauguration.

Just realized that the incessant deluge of comment spam had masked a number of comments unrelated to Viagra, porn and serial number cracks. I’ve approved a bunch of actual genuine comments tonight, some going back to 2007 ….thanks for your patience, faithful reader/commenters!

We knew this day would come. Lice...yuck!

As we struggle to contain the lice outbreak on our kids' heads, we share the following resources and insights:

1. Think carefully before using pharmaceutical lice remedies like Nix. They are based on a natural derivative from chyrsanthemums, but that doesn't mean they are necessarily safe or effective. At the very least, you may find that your household gets MORE itchy before it gets LESS itchy. (That's how it worked over here.)
2. Don't just treat your household. Ensure your daycare or school CAREFULLY examines all kids' heads, and commits parents to treating kids with lice or nits.
3. Educate yourself. The most detailed resources we've found are at http://www.headlice.org
4. Spring for the fancy tools. The plastic lice combs that come with most lice treatment products don't begin to do the job. The tea tree oil-based Lice Stop product available at natural health stores contains a much better, metal comb; you can also buy a higher a quality comb from your pharmacist.
5. Expect to spend a lot of time and money solving the problem. We're currently spending 2-3 hours per night going over each head with a finetooth comb; and we've already spent $100 having bedding and clothing laundered after we ran out of hot water. (To kill lice, you have to use HOT water and HOT dryer heat.)
6. Consider getting professional help. We've just called in the pros at http://www.lice911.ca to make sure we get the job 100% done.
7. Build lice checks into your routine. We realize our little one has likely had this problem for a while. If we'd been doing weekly lice checks, we could have tackled this problem much earlier, and had an easier time of it. From now on, we're doing weekly checks on each kid.
8. Whatever you do, don't blog about your family's lice. It will only lead to trouble. I'm just sure of it.

The new and much improved look of my blog is based on the blog style template at Open Designs, created by fellow-Canadian Collin Grasley. Rob hacked it into Wordpress-iness for me, a process that’s still being debugged.

Open Designs is a very cool site that offers more than a thousand different blog and website looks, all available for repurposing. Once we finish adapting the theme to Wordpress, we plan on repaying the open source goodness by contributing the Wordpress version to the Wordpress theme garden — if that’s ok with Collin.

We’re retheming alexandrasamuel.com tonight. Could get funky, people!

How we perceive technology has a lot to do with how we use it. I've recently written a blog post that talks about how we can personally use the web to support social change. In Five ways to shape the soul of the Internet, I argue that

The social value of the Internet is determined by how each and every
one of us uses the Internet as a communications medium, social space
and support tool. How we experience the Internet in our daily lives --
whether we experience it as a dehumanizing void in which e-mail
replaces face-to-face interaction, or as a meaningful community in
which we discover new commonalities and connections -- is a choice we
make every day, with every message we send or browser page we load.
Those choices can add up to personal and social alienation, or personal
and social transformation.

 

This month’s vendetta: Christmas. Why Christmas? The fact that my Christmas vendetta has to begin on November 6th should say it all. This holiday could be the poster child for scope creep. It starts out as a nice little religious holiday, sing some songs and have a big meal with your friends, and now it’s an entire season.

And what is the season about? Shopping. OK, shopping and drinking.

Normally, I am all for shopping and drinking. In fact, I like to start by having a drink to lower my inhibitions about maxxing out the Visa card, get a few hours of hours of shopping in, stop for another drink to get my second wind, and then keep on shopping until I hit that limit.

The problem with Christmas is that it makes it virtually impossible to achieve this shopping-drinking synergy. The stores are so crowded that you need your edge if you’re going to elbow your way into the store, clobber your way to the must-have-under-the-tree toy, and drag yourself all the way to the cash register. And as we all know, alcohol takes the edge off.

But you know where alcohol doesn’t take the edge off? Your office Christmas party. Office party booze actually puts the edge back on. By my fourth crantini I’m really worried about what I said to the client who just asked me a question about that thing we did with the whaddyacallit. By the fifth crantini I’m ready to gnaw my way out of the bar, if only to ensure my colleagues won’t have another chance to YouTube me singing “One Night in Bangkok”.

If the shopping and drinking were the whole Christmas drama, I might be prepared to charge up my Visa, water down my vodka, grit my teeth and coast through to December 26. But there are a thousand other little nightmares along the way. The Christmas muzak piped through every orifice of every building in the western hemisphere. The tedious heartwarming Christmas movies, TV shows and ads that occupy every screen in your field of vision. The Christmas dinner where you seat someone new in the seat that used to belong to Uncle Quentin, who was noisy and rude and you never really liked, until he divorced your Aunt Nina and now that there’s someone else in his seat you actually kind of miss him. And now, thanks to the joys of parenthood, the lobbying campaign that begins in mid-October for the Glow-in-the-dark Lion King Princess Barbie.

Do a poll of your own and find out whether anyone you know really needs multicoloured strings of tree lights to find their way home after Daylight Savings Time ends. Or cherishes the opportunity to spend $20 on a totally generic present for an office gift exchange where everyone gets something they don’t need and gives something they wouldn’t otherwise buy.

Or ask them whether they feel that our society really needs at this moment — a moment when we’re drowning in our own excess consumption, stripping the planet of its few remaining resources, and killing each other over our ethnic and religous differences — is an extended version of a European-created religious holiday, metamorphosized into an American marketing and consumption orgy.

I make a good case, don’t I?

Sadly, I must now inform you that this month’s vendetta has been cancelled. In the face of overwhelming evidence, and upon receipt of a cease-and-desist letter from the International Conspiracy of Christmas Marketers, I have been forced to concede that this is one vendetta in which I am unlikely to prevail.

Christmas is here to stay.

This is not an unconditional capitulation, however. Christmas, I am prepared to accept your continued existence. In return, I must stipulate that the Christmas season will henceforth commence no earlier than midnight on December 22, and end no later than midnight on December 25. Any seasonal decorations, Santa sightings, gingerbread foodstuffs, red and green wrapping paper, limited edition toys, Ebenezer Scrooge references, gift shopping, Nutcracker performances, evergreen decapitation or other holiday-related activities undertaken outside of this window will be punished with mandatory consumption of an 18-month-old brandy-soaked plum cake. And no sneaking in with “season’s greetings”, “winterfest celebrations”, “Chanukah bushes” or the like.

Yes, it will be three days of sheer hell — think, 72 hours of shopping fuelled only by eggnog — but then it will be over, and we can return to our usual programming, already in progress.

For all you folks who insist — despite all ad-supported evidence to the contrary — that Christmas is actually about the spirit of giving, love, peace on earth, etc etc, I want to reassure you that neither the vendetta nor the time limit extend to any of these virtues or practices. Go ahead and have as much peace on earth as you want. Can I suggest that Iraq might be a better place to try that out than your local mall?

Ditto for love. Bring it on.Don’t feel like you have to wait until after Halloween, or American Thanksgiving, or whatever.  In fact, go for a 365-day-a-year love party, if you want to.

As for giving, again, I’m all for it. And since you need to have a target for all that spirit of giving stuff, let me volunteer my services as a recipient. But just to keep you safe on the whole Christmas spirit front, let me encourage the giving to focus on ethically produced, sustainably harvested, and ideally handmade products. I’m still looking for someone to knit me a black cardigan.

I've tried a lot of financial management programs, but nothing beats the simplicity of an excel spreadsheet.

I've tried a lot of financial management programs, but nothing beats the simplicity of an excel spreadsheet.