Yuill.ca

Tom Brokaw Explains Canada to Americans

Mathieu — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:11:05 +0000

I posted the Michael J. Fox/Terry Fox video from NBC and I maintained that it wasn’t insulting but merely a mistake. Well if you’re convinced that Americans don’t care about us and are totally ignorant to our great land then watch this. Caution, lump in the throat inducing.

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Matt Enright and Mike Fowler perform Jump Around

Mathieu — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 07:02:56 +0000

At Enright's wedding, he and Fowler hip-hop kareoke'd a little House of Pain.

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NBC – the story of Michael J. Fox who ran across Canada to raise money for cancer research

Mathieu — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 15:09:29 +0000

This is from NBC’s Web site. Yesterday afternoon they were hypothesizing who might light the Olympic torch and the first guess was Betty Fox, the mother of Michael Fox who ran across Canada to raise money for cancer research. They even show a picture of Alex P. Keaton to boot.

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Car crashes into house? OH YEAH!

Mathieu — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 00:48:08 +0000

I found this via Twitter which then lead to a Reddit post and finally, I want to give the OP credit. Elizabeth Dixon maintains a blog What Ever and posted an entry about some public art that sprung up a few hours after a car crashed into a house in Savannah, Georgia.
Best. Post. Ever.

As she writes:

“Someone looked over there and saw not the place of a terrible car accident, but the opportunity to live out a dream.”

“And really, haven’t we all had that dream? To be in a situation where making a sign of the Kool-Aid man breaking through a wall would make sense?

Thank you Elizabeth Dixon for sharing this most awesomest of blog posts.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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CCSAI Christmas Party 2006

Mathieu — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:03:00 +0000

The Centennial College Student Association Inc. held its annual Christmas party for students and their families at the Student Centre @ Progress Campus

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What it means to be a professional athlete

Mathieu — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:15:20 +0000

I came across these two photos on the @raptors photo stream. DeMar DeRozan and Sonny Weems were at Best Buy shopping for video games and took a minute to pose for a photo with a clearly very excited young lady. Here are two guys I’m not worried about having loaded or unloaded weapons in their locker. Good on you guys.

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Wired.com blocked in China

Mathieu — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 01:53:35 +0000

Wired.com, the sister site to the awesome magazine, Wired, has reportedly been blocked in China. While the magazine has been unable to confirm this independently a report from Examiner.com suggests users from Bejing to Shanghi have been unable to connect to the site since Friday.

You can see the news from Wired here but I’ve also reposted the entire story after the link. If you are in China and can confirm this directly with Wired, please do so by e-mailing them.

Chinese authorities have begun blocking Chinese internet users from reading Wired.com, according to a report from the Examiner.

Internet users from Beijing to Shanghai found the site inaccessible starting Friday, reports Glenn Loveland, the Examiner’s Beijing correspondent. The block adds Wired.com to a long list of sites that are or have been considered too dangerous for Chinese net users.

Current blacklist members and alumni include YouTube, Facebook, the BBC, Wikipedia, Google and most recently, IMDB, an encyclopedic movie information site. China’s censorship of the net is in constant flux, aided by sets of powerful firewalls marketed to the Communist government by Western technology companies.

We’re not sure if we are supposed to give an acceptance speech or file an official complaint in triplicate at the Ministry of Proper Online Thought.

Wired.com was not notified of the block and has not been able to confirm it independently. If you are based in China, we’d appreciate you letting us know in the comments or by e-mail if you can’t load the site without having to use a proxy or censorship evasion tools like Tor. Another easy way to report this block or others is to use the Berkman Center’s Herdict tool.

Wired.com editors are hard at work trying to figure out what we did to earn a spot on the blacklist. Was it our wall-to-wall CES coverage? Or was it Wired.com’s critical coverage of Chinese internet censorship?

Wired.com is the online affiliate of Wired magazine. Both are owned by Condé Nast, a privately held publishing company based in New York that also publishes Vanity Fair, GQ and The New Yorker, among other titles.

Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/china-wired-censorship#ixzz0cAcJQeV9

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Ken Lewenza doesn’t answer questions on Focus Ontario

Mathieu — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 03:46:11 +0000

Between economic collapse and a downturning economy, Ken Lewenza says Canadian auto workers shouldn’t have to give up a penny to help sustain the Big Three automakers. On this episode of Focus Ontario, Lewenza is asked – that compared to Toyota and Honda whose wages are debatabley lower than that of the Big Three – shouldn’t CAW members accept a cut in pay and/or benefits. He has an answer, but not one to the question.

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DRiVE – my recap

Mathieu — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 04:44:44 +0000

A year or so ago I read Dan Pink’s book A Whole New Mind and was really impressed. Pink presented a challenge to look at the world an entirely new way backed up with clear analysis and intrepid arguments. I thoroughly enjoyed A Whole New Mind so when his latest title, DRiVE, became available I picked it up.
I was actually in the middle of another book, The Opposable Mind, but after reading the first chapter of DRiVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, I was hooked. I bought it electronically and read it via the iPhone app Kobo.

DRiVE is a natural progression from A Whole New Mind. In A Whole New Mind, Pink argued we has a race had progressed through three “ages” and the fourth age, the conceptual age is where we can excel. In DRiVE he makes the case for different strategies for motivating ourselves, our coworkers, our family and our communities (for the purpose of this recap I’ll focus on how it applies to a business environment but there’s just as much in there for personal growth and families).

He lays the foundation for the book by suggesting humans, like software have gone through two versions: motivation one, where our basic operating system was fuelled by the need to survive. Motivation two introduced us to the idea of seeking out rewards and avoiding punishment and finally – our latest upgrade – motivation three “presumes that humans also have a third drive – to learn, to create and to better the world.”

So how does this translate into the real world? Pink uses several examples illustrating the downfalls of motivation two. While motivation two was definitely the version humans used to spur the explore across the oceans, found new countries and spur the industrial revolution it is not able to work with today’s motivation three humans.

For example, a day care in Israel had a policy that all children had to be picked up by 5 p.m.. The amount of late parents was minimal but they decided to introduce a new policy, if you were late picking up your child you would be charged a nominal fee which would be added to your monthly bill. Administrators expected the amount of late parents would reduce but in fact it dramatically increased.

When there was no carrot and stick to persuade the parents to come early they were motivated by their good will.

But when the day care introduced the late charge, parents felt it was now okay to come late because they were paying for it.

Pink also sited studies where subjects would be divided into two groups, one where they would be paid to perform a function and another where they were not paid. Surprisingly the group that was paid would not outperform the unpaid group.

If you translate this into the workplace it establishes an interesting problem: how do you motivate employees to do their work? Pink says the first thing you have to do is take the issue of money and benefits off the table and you do this simply by ensuring your employees are paid fairly both inside and outside of the company. So people who have similar experience and responsibilities should be paid the same. Those same people should also be paid comparably to positions at employees at similar companies. The key here is you can’t use money and benefits to motivate employees, you can only use it to keep them from being demotivated.

There are three elements you can offer employees to keep them motivated:

Autonomy
Mastery
Purpose

Autonomy: Pink points to Best Buy’s Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) as the best example of offering employees Autonomy. Under this system employees set their own hours and meetings are completely optional.
Employees are paid based on results, not attendance

Mastery: I’ll put this into my own thoughts. Mastery is the action of offering your employees to become better every day. Whether that attending workshops and training that directly helps them on the job or by making educational benefits available for things like golf lessons or to get your real estate license.

Purpose: Provide employees with the knowledge that what they are doing is greater than just meeting quarterly profits.

DRiVE is divided up into three sections with the final section being a field guide for how you can test the waters with the ideas he presents in the book. What makes this section particularly useful is if you’ve gotten this far you’re probably convinced that what he’s saying has some merit and you’re motivated to put the axe to the grindstone.

For me, Pink was preaching to the choir with DRiVE. I’ve had lots of conversations with my close friends about what motivates us and less and less the answer is money. Even status and prestige are taking back seats to personal growth and giving back. DRiVE is the roadmap for any organization that wants to excel in 2010 and beyond and its clear and digestible style makes it an easy playbook to follow.

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I should have just done this

Mathieu — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:04:48 +0000

From failblog.org

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