Play up the economic advantages of equal marriage

I'm amazed we don't hear more about the economic arguments in favour of equal marriage rights. It's a huge source of competitive advantage that Canada offers gay couples the same legal rights as straight couples — just think about how much easier it makes it for Canadian companies to recruit and retain talented gay employees.


Shambhala centre classes?

Some friends have recommended classes at the Shambhala Centre, which apparently offers both religious and secular versions of an intro to Buddhism program. Has anyone else taken them? What's the review?


MacBook with tag cloud

 

This week's tagging project: a MacBook cover that displays my del.icio.us tag cloud, thanks to the folks at Pimp My Laptop.

Here's how I did it:

  1. I used the del.icio.us tagroll feature to customize the look of my tag cloud and make sure it included all my tags ("size" controls how many tags display; max/min font controls the size of the individual tags).
  2. I hooked my laptop up to a huge external monitor so I could make the tagroll display big enough to create a screen capture that was high enough resolution to print out clearly.
  3. We took screen captures in chunks (Rob figured out the necessary size to display by working backwards from the Pimp My Laptop specs) so that they'd be even higher res.
  4. We stitched it back together in PhotoShop until we had an image of the size specified by Pimp My Laptop.

Ta da! I'm now wearing my tag cloud on my (laptop) sleeve. 

ChangeEverything is TechCrunched

We're delighted that Change Everything has been noted on TechCrunch as "a nice alternative to the user generated advertising model".

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes:

I think this is a great example of a company making use of Web 2.0 tools to promote themselves in a way that places the ballance of the impact on providing value to users and incurs promotional benefits for themselves as a consequence of that. Though this model may seem less immediately lucrative, it’s also much less likely to face the kind of anti-corporate backlash bubbling up in MySpace and YouTube.

Marshall had a couple of tips for us, too:

Unlike at 43Things, there’s not the option at ChangeEverything to mark a goal as something you have done already or the question of whether a goal is worth persuing or not – perhaps leftists are too Quixotic for such features.

These are both options we hope to introduce on the site soon – so no, lefties aren't too Quixotic (in this respect, anyhow!)