Ch.aoti.ca by Stefania Sigurdson Forbes » Web

Scoring Your Neighbourhood

Stefanie — Mon, 26 May 2008 17:03:39 +0000

A friend recently sent me this interesting site: http://www.walkscore.com/.
It allows you to calculate how good your neighbourhood is in terms of
walkability. My neighbourhood (High Park) faired okay and the
neighbourhood I lived in when I went to high school (Kanata Lakes)
rated at under 10% – which seems about right since it was pretty much
as suburban as you can get. As oil prices go up, I imagine Walk scores
will become more and more meaningful in terms of real estate value.
What does that mean for the ‘burbs?

TED – Lunchtime Fun for Intellectuals

Stefanie — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 21:23:17 +0000

My naturopath said that I had "too much heat" this winter. When I asked her to explain, she said it was something like too much stress, excitement etc. When I told her about my lifestyle, she said that I am trying to do too much and I should just relax. I told her that mostly I can’t, since my business is at the stage that it is at, but there have been some small changes.

One thing she insisted on, was that I don’t work while I eat. This is impossible for when I have a business meeting, but when I am just doing writing and research work, such as today… okay.

With perfect timing, a friend of mine sent me an interesting new site full of lectures called TED. Today I watched Industrial Design icon Philippe Starck talk about the meaning of life when you are a designer (of toothbrushes and toilet brushes) and Daniel Goleman, the father of Emotional Intelligence talk about why we aren’t more compassionate. Not a bad lunchtime activity! Maybe you should try it, and turn down that heat a little bit.

Great Low-Cost Image Site – Dreamstime

Stefanie — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 21:40:22 +0000

I recently got this site from a designer-friend. It is a way to get royalty-free images for about $1/piece. The site is community-based – each photographer/illustrator gets a cut of the revenue from their photos. From what I have seen, the quality of the photos are excellent. It’s about time!!! Here is the link:

Dreamstime

Online Chart Generating Tool

Stefanie — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 03:38:40 +0000

I am here on a Saturday night building my plan for my business, and I just found an excellent tool for generating flow charts. It is called Gliffy. With a free account you can create flow charts, network diagrams and parent-child type diagrams. It is a pretty good tool and I was able to get charts pretty easily and they look beautiful. Enjoy!

Creepy Hypnosis Software

Stefanie — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 03:07:56 +0000

While doing market research for a client I happened across the site for Neuro-Programmer 2 by The Transparent Corporation. The software, they claim, "stimulates Brainwaves while using Hypnosis, NLP and other Psychological techniques to help you transform your mind and enhance your mental abilities."

You can see a screenshot here of a "brainwave training session"(I wonder why the ADHD session is headphone free?):

I guess we have come a long way from a gold stopwatch going back and forth in front of the subject.

One Year Blogging

Stefanie — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 03:11:18 +0000

Well – today marks my first year of blogging. It has been a pretty good year and I have unexpectedly met some great new people through the blog, along with rediscovering some old friends. The main point of the blog was to take myself out of the anonymity of the web. I had been posting for years under different aliases, always keeping my internet life separate from out there in RL (real life). The year of it coming together has made for some interesting situations – especially in my family and work life.

So – to commemorate this event, I thought it would be fun to check out my competition on certain topics online using Nielson’s BlogPulse tool… and here is what I came up with:

So – basically this tool measures what blog topics are popular online. I put "sex" as a baseline, assuming that was something that lots of people were talking about (I am very curious to see what was happening on that large dip between Nov 17-Nov 23, my guess is that something happened where people were not as interesting as sex, or maybe people were so busy having sex that they couldn’t write about it ).

Anyway, two topics that I frequent on this blog are both Marketing and Feminism. I see that Marketing follows a Monday-Friday type of pattern, similar to a typical B2B site and Feminism has a paltry 0.01% share of internet traffic, or less than 1% of the share of "sex". Very interesting and it may explain some things (likely the mindshare the feminism holds compared to the mindshare of sex? But, using the internet as a model for the brain may be dubious).

Looking forward to another year of blogging, sharing more ideas and meeting more interesting people.

For Those Who Like Positive Affirmations – bmindful

Stefanie — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 20:29:02 +0000

I did a Google search last night on Positive Affirmations because I didn’t really know what they were… and I found a social marketing site all about them. Geez – social marketing is everywhere! The site has some pretty good features: including the ability to create an RSS with your affirmations. Here is the link:

bmindful

Social Networking – What are We Connecting On?

Stefanie — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 22:50:37 +0000

I sometimes wonder what would happen if the human race was wiped out but the Internet was left in tact. If another lifeform accessed our Internet… I wonder what they would think on a number of levels. In fact, so many levels that it is too big to talk about in one post. The internet, the human race’s only legacy… a chilling thought!

But, one thing in particular… if they looked at our social networking sites, how would they think we lived? My brother loathes MySpace, because he sees people uploading their favorite logos and songs and thinks that that is not a real reflection of who they are. I mean, isn’t a person defined by their character and their actions… not by the brands and songs they love?

I discovered Facebook not long ago, and have since reunited with all kinds of people that I haven’t connected with since forever. It is in general a fun little site, but when I look at the required fields to fill in, I wonder if these are the right things to reintroduce myself to my old friends with: favorite movies, favorite TV shows, favorite books etc. What about who I am and what I think?

I mean, most of my friends don’t share the same favorites as me (for example, I have been dating Mac-lovers lately ) but they do share some of the same values and ideas. So, as the lifeforms look at the fact that people like Grindhouse or Gilmour Girls, I think they are getting a very limited picture of the depth in people.

Secret and Hidden Places at Google Earth

Stefanie — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 20:07:52 +0000

I found this cool video with gorgeous music about secret places on Google Earth. In Elemetary school my friends and I used to draw giant people with chalk trying to communicate with passengers in the airplanes flying overhead (I grew up near the airport). Now there would be cameras to record them and thousands could watch through their computer screens. What a world that we are living in!

Stop the Big Brother State

Stefanie — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 02:34:00 +0000

I just found one of the most interesting movie commentaries I have ever seen on the web. David Scharf comments on the tradeoff between freedom and security, on his site: Big Brother State. The main thought:

We believe that people willing to trade freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.

Great thinking and execution. A reminder about what we are actually giving up when we give up our privacy.

(On an unrelated matter, I am adding a technocrati tag here: Technorati Profile)