A few months back I started to get more involved in Vancouver's start-up/tech scene. I met with the key players (Mack, Boris, Parveen, Campbell, etc) and signed up for the relevant Meetups so I'd get all the invites. I even went to several of the events, which of course were great and I was excited to learn more and contribute. Then in January I decided that improving my fitness was important to me so I joined CrossFit and now do that 3 times a week and I'm loving it! My problem is that...

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Yesterday while out for lunch, a co-worker expressed surprised that someone with an iPhone did not have a Mac. This surprised me as there are 550 million iOS users and only around 100 million Mac users, so most iPhone owners in fact do not own a Mac. He then mentioned Apple's "walled garden" to those of us with Macs and it made me a tad defensive, seeing how interested I am in owning my data. I really feel that with some thought and planning you can have reasonable access to...

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For a while I have been slowly dumping all Google services. It has been quite challenging as their products are just soooo good. But I just don't have any faith in what they are doing with my information and it seems like every week there's another story about how Google is capturing data it shouldn't be. I first dumped Google Calendar and went to iCloud (yes, I do trust Apple with that information more than I trust Google). Then from Gmail to Fastmail.fm (imagine, paying for great...

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A few days ago I saw this tweet from Campbell Macdonald regarding the Firefox OS. As a sort-of joke I commented, "What's the over/under on how many they sell, 1000?" The arguments I got back on why it was good/would succeed were: 1. Brazilian launch where Firefox has a good brand 2. Web-native operating system 3. Open source 4. Cheap I think these are all rather silly reasons for success. First, is it really a great brand? When it comes to browsing on the desktop it is #3 on...

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