#09writeoff: Emma interviews a fashion blogger…

June 22nd, 2009 • View Comments 2009 Write-off, Emma's Posts - #09writeoff

For Day 13, Emma interviews fashion blogger Zephyr of CollegeFashion.net about blogging and its difficulties. CollegeFashion.net is a site aimed at offering fashion tips, trends, and deals for college-age girls. I can’t say I’ve ever seen this site before, but I’m not exactly its target audience. From the article:

7. Do you have any advice for someone starting out with trying to move their blog to a full-time employment opportunity?

Work hard and don’t expect success to come overnight. So many people start blogging because they think it’s a “get rich quick” thing, and nothing could be further from the truth! To be honest, I think blogging is one of the LEAST easy/quick ways to make money online. You have to work really hard, write well, motivate yourself, stay creative, and update as often as you can to see success, and even then success isn’t guaranteed. It’s definitely not for everyone – you have to be willing to work hard for next to nothing for a few years before you’ll see real income.

Interesting thoughts from a full-time blogger. One of the things that I’ve always thought you’d have to be able to pull off as a full-time blogger would be living on a reduced budget, because Zephyr definitely has a point regarding it being incredibly difficult to make money blogging. If any of you have been thinking about writing or blogging as a career, this post is a good read for some of the pitfalls or issues to expect.

Emma’s certainly winning the creativity portion of this content – in her 7 days of posts, she has a picture, a video, and an interview among her content, where I just have myself blathering on. Go check her posts out if you haven’t yet already!

CityChase 2009 – My Toronto #1 Experience. In a Word, Amazing

June 20th, 2009 • View Comments 2009 Write-off, Personal

Today I participated in the CityChase Toronto #1 event with Jason, a long-time friend. Some background: CityChase is based on the Amazing Race concept, where teams of two compete to complete 10 goals (out of a list of 40) in the fastest time possible. The goals are located all over the city, and you don’t know where they’ll be beforehand; you have to figure that out by a clue sheet which you receive at the start of the event. Contestants are allowed to run, walk, or take public transit, but no wheels or private transit are allowed.

I’ll be honest, before Jason messaged me last week asking if I wanted to participate in the event, I hadn’t ever heard of it. However, I had nothing planned for today, and said “sure, why not.” As the week unfolded and I got more details, I was both intimidated and excited for today. So how did it go?

Holy awesome.

It strongly exceeded anything I had ever thought of the event, and we bettered what our personal goal was, it being our first CityChase and all. I think it also helped us bond a little more; perhaps for better or worse. Figured I’d share what our personal experience was and how the day unfolded.

The day kicked off when I rolled into Metro Hall (the event start/finish line) shortly after 8:00 to meet Jason, operating on 1 Red Bull (sugar-free, natch) and about 4 hours of sleep, due to the decision I made last night to watch the first Transformers movie. Jay was already energetic and ready to go; I’m not sure that I was quite at the same level yet. After a quick Tim Horton’s breakfast and some strategizing, we gathered with the rest of the racers for the kickoff meeting. We were team 2312, Awesome Sauce, thanks to Jason’s creativity. At the kickoff, we ran into my buddy Andrew and his friend Geoff, who were a team, and their friends Diane and Michela (whose name I’m sure I’ve butchered), and got a little friendly competition going. After a speech from the event founder, we were told how to get our clue sheets – it was a scavenger hunt, to the chagrin of a few in the crowd. (The groans could be easily heard.) After pairing up with another team, as per the rules of the hunt, we managed to gather 6 of the 9 required items within about 15 minutes. We got: 1 penny from each of the 70s, 80s and 90s, the time of the next Air Canada flight to Quebec City (the location of national finals this year), a picture of two team members with their clothes completely backwards, a Molson bottle label, a page of news from a newspaper from Thursday, and the bible chapter and verse that the founder quoted during his opening speech. (Things we didn’t do? Recite the first verse and chorus of Nickelback’s “If Today Was Your Last Day,” take a picture with at least two people mooning, one of whom must be a non-participant, and apply a red Mitsubishi mark somewhere on a participant’s body.)

Clue sheet in hand, we headed off to the Rees Street Slip for our first challenge. Jason and I had raised $50 in donations beforehand for Right to Play, the event charity, so we already got our first ChasePoint credited to us without having to do anything. Awesome! The first task we had to do was to get into a pair of kayaks tied together, and maneuver our way through a short slalom course in the water. Other than getting soaked when I first got into my kayak – I thought it was going to tip – and Jason’s occasional overexuberant paddling, we managed to get through it with pretty much no problem. ChasePoint #2 in the bag!

Following this, we returned back to Metro Hall to do an event called Eight Legs or None, but they weren’t ready for us – even though we were there right when that station was supposed to open. After arguing to try to get the free ChasePoint, we settled for a 10 minute time deduction instead. From there it was to the Boxing Loft, for what was easily our most strenuous physical activity of the day: 5 two-minute workouts based around boxing. We paddled imaginary bicycles and did pushups; skipped rope and did burpees, bobbed and weaved under a suspended rope, shadow-boxed with dumbbells (where I’m sure Jason got tired of hearing me say “Keep those hands up,” due to the fact that if either dropped our hands, we both had to do 10 pushups. I was already about 45 or 50 pushups in at that point, I had no desire to do any more), and finally, spent our last 2 minutes taking our frustrations out on punching bags. Exhausted, we collected our stamp, and had ChasePoint #3 in the bag. I was worn out enough that I was struggling to drink from my water bottle, but we persevered on to our next task.

Arriving back at Eight Legs or None, we were pleasantly surprised to see no line-up – and less pleasantly surprised to learn that we were dealing with a tarantula and a snake – hence the name. A flip of the coin determined which we had to put on our bodies. Jason flipped first and got tails – which meant that he had to have the tarantula on his bare stomach for 30 seconds. I wanted nothing to do with that tarantula, so I was pleased when I flipped heads, and had to put an 8-foot snake on my shoulders for 30 seconds. I’ve had a 30-foot boa constrictor on my shoulders before, so this badboy was nothing. Completing our tasks concurrently, we successfully reached ChasePoint #4, after about an hour and a half involved in the contest thus far.

At this point, our lovely operators Becky and Dave, who were helping us scout out locations, e-mailed us with our remaining route, so we went right to it. ChasePoint #5 was located at Canyon Creek on Front Street. We discovered that one of us – me – would be blindfolded and have to smell 6 items and taste 6 items and correctly identify all 12 of them. For each one I got wrong, Jason had to eat a live cricket. After joking that I’d get them all wrong, much to Jason’s dismay, I set to work. I got 5 out of 6 on the taste test – nailing the balsamic vinaigrette but missing garlic, of all things, but only ended up with 3 of 6 on the smell test. I identified all of the alcoholic scents – red wine, white wine and tequila – but totally whiffed on the other three. Not a huge surprise, but it meant Jason would have to eat 4 crickets. I felt a little sheepish until I saw that the two groups that went in front of me had to eat 7 and 8 respectively. After a quick ingenious thought – to drop the crickets in a glass of water and chug the mixture – we successfully completed our challenge and got our 5th ChasePoint. Jason complained of feeling a little queasy for the remainder of the day; I suppose I can’t blame him. We were just under 2 hours in, and we had 5 ChasePoints, including a bonus. Not bad, but little did we know our best was yet to come.

ChasePoint #6 found us taking the subway up to Trinity Square, which is connected to the Eaton Centre. Hat-tip to the lovely Aussie lady on the subway who confirmed the location of it for us. There, we had to construct a wearable balloon piece of clothing using 3 different balloons. Jason’s old summer camp days came right back to him and I pumped the balloons up while he fashioned a hat in about 30 seconds. He then had to wear it for the rest of the day, which was amazing. 6 ChasePoints down, and we did this one in record time!

ChasePoint #7 was just up the Yonge line at Church and Wellesley, where we had to do a quick photo/video scavenger hunt within a 30 minute timeframe. We checked in at 12:15, got our Blackberry Curve to take pictures/video with, and were off to work. This was honestly one of my favourite moments of the day. I’m not sure whether it was the hot dog vendor we convinced to do the actions to “I’m a Little Teapot” while Jason sang it – she was more into it than he was! – the picture of a temporary tattoo underneath a garbage can, because there was a typo on our clue sheet of taking a picture of a tattoo “below the waste,” or the man that we had Jason share a powerbar with, Lady and the Tramp style, and he ate more than his fair share of the bar. We checked back in at 12:22, a mere 7 minutes after we left; 2 of which were taken up by the SickKids canvasser we did a random act of kindness for. We were one of the quickest groups to finish, and by the fact that we had a lot of amazement over the 7 ChasePoints we had, we knew we were doing well.

ChasePoint #8 found us at the Rogers store on Yorkville Ave, where we found ourselves signing out another Blackberry – a Bold this time – to take shots of pieces of QR code posted in the area. After a bit of struggling with the BeeTagg program – which wasn’t very intuitive – we got our 6 snapshots in and collected ChasePoint #8 – only two to go!

There’s not really a lot I can say that would do ChasePoint #9 justice. After finishing up in Yorkville, we hopped the Bloor subway line to Bathurst, and took the streetcar down to Queen to do our last mandatory ChasePoint, simply entitled Pole Position. That’s right, our team of guys needed to do pole dancing. My back still being a little tender from the poor weather and the boxing workouts, Jason stepped up to learn a quick routine from the pole dance instructor, while I coached. She demonstrated it to him once, and then did so a second time while I filmed her – in the interest of getting the routine so we could review it, of course – while he mimicked his way along. He then said he’d try to get through it right then, without any video review. We only had three chances to get this right, but we didn’t need them; Jason got the dance bang-on the first time. Seeing him do the squat and spread, the Fireman’s Spin, or smack his ass at the end of the routine… well, it was almost too much to handle. Regardless, we had ChasePoint #9 in the books, and only had one left to go – and it was only 1:15 or so, meaning that we had only been out there for 3:15! We were excited, since we had seen past winning scores near 3:30, and we knew that we’d likely exceed our expectations.

ChasePoint #10 was just around the corner – and directly across the street from my office – at the Toronto School of Art. Prior to arriving at this challenge, we had to collect 3 recyclable items, so we arrived with 3 bottles. Perfect choice, as it turned out that we had to create a replica of a famous tower in the world. We randomly drew a model – the name of which I honestly forget; it was P-something Twin Towers – and went to work with our bottles and the supplies that they provided us. After a mash of bottles, glue-dispensers, tape, popsicle sticks and my trusty knife later, we managed to create a reasonable replica of this tower. While I’m not sure our judge totally approved – she kept calling it the “black towers of death” due to the black masking tape we’d used – we were permitted to go through, and collected our 10th ChasePoint. Now, just a quick 2 block sprint to the finish!

… Or not quite a sprint. We were pretty worn out, and half-jogged, half-walked until we arrived back at Metro Hall. A final push – including Jason running through the fountain out front – and we crossed the finish line as the 76th team to finish the race. However, because of our delay earlier in the day at the Eight Legs or None challenge, we had our 10 minute time deduction, leaving us officially at 54th place, with an overall adjusted time of 3:35:45. We were ecstatic to place in the top 10% of all entrants, especially looking around at those who finished near us; a sea of fit, toned bodies, something which Jason and I are not. We travelled roughly 20km today, based on my GPS Tracker – a pretty good jaunt.

We hung around the finish line and recouped, waiting from Andrew and Geoff to come in (they finished a very respectable 137th, without collecting the donation ChasePoint), and then headed over to Montana for a much needed complimentary beverage and some chow. Diane and Michela joined us later; I’m not sure where they finished, but they completed the course in roughly 5 hours. It was a great way to wrap up the event, and what was a very fun day.

So what tips do I have?

• Train for the event! Jason and I both struggled with long-distance cardio, costing ourselves precious minutes. If we were in better shape, we would’ve been in the top 50 easily.
• Get great support. Our two operators, Becky and Dave, helped us whittle down our clue sheet of 40 into a solid route of 10. This definitely saved us time, and we had backup plans in place just in case anything went wrong.
• Get past your fears. Jason had to do a few nasty things today – mostly the luck of the draw – but he fought past them and helped get us ahead of a lot of other groups. Don’t let your fears stop you once you’re at a challenge; just get past it and you’ll be more successful. Competitiveness hides fear, after all.
• Have fun! Regardless of the mediocre weather, or the physical exertion, Jason and I both had an absolute blast today, and would do it again in a heartbeat. It’s a great bonding experience – although Jason suggested it as a first date opportunity for people; something my competitive nature would never let me do if I wanted to see the girl again.

The second Toronto CityChase qualifier is on August 15th – I encourage you to check it out and give it a shot! I know I’m thinking about it, although Jason’s already in it with his sister, so I may be looking for a partner…

Social Media: Aggregating Uninformed Opinions?

June 18th, 2009 • View Comments 2009 Write-off

Sometimes, I wonder if social media reminds me too much of how willing people are to make uninformed opinions public – or how many people are just truly uninformed.

Before you lynch me for that statement – which, trust me, is an informed one – hear me out. Every experience I’ve had during the course of my life has surrounded me with smart, sensible people, in addition to everyone else in the general populace. I learn a lot every day from those who I interact with – both online and off – and am better for it. Part of being connected, however, is being able to see what the popular trending is. While ordinarily the flood of awful memes and banal event/celebrity/reality TV news is easy enough to tune out, it’s when the conversation turns to more serious issues that I get irritated. The utter lack of knowledge behind many people’s impassioned support is easily questioned, but when it becomes the popular thing to do, questioning it leads to detrimental effects for the questioner. If you’re observant enough, you can also identify hypocrisy between different viewpoints. Perhaps it’s just me that does that, I don’t know.

Creating this strong movement of uninformed opinions and groupthink really leads to some interesting interactions. It also acts to turn me off of social media. I’m not really interested to listen to the same message over and over again; let alone the same incorrect message.

While I’m not specifically referring to the current situation in Iran, it is a good case study for this. There is a sea of green avatars being shown by people on Twitter. It’s being pitched as the colour of freedom and democracy, but green is the colour of Mousavi, the leader of the losing party in the election, and the lesser of two evils. The lesser of two evils is an important point here; if you examine Mousavi’s history, he’s certainly not without fault, and will not bring our concept of democracy to the Iranian people. Bring that up now, however, and see what sort of response you get.

The Sri Lankan protests in Toronto brought a lot of the same issues to the forefront here – and offered a lot of the same problems. People were taking sides or making statements on situations without making an effort to educate themselves of both sides. It was painful to watch, although it did at least bring up some true conflict.

The only victims in these situations are the people themselves, and not the leaders of either party. This means that stepping in and getting involved into these situations from a government level is NOT the thing to do – unless you want to start another Taliban.

What do you think? Are you facing a significant number of ill-informed people in your social media interactions? Am I one of those? Would love to know your thoughts.