pitbullmedia.ca

I have a cousin in Perth, Australia where things are a little different.

He sends me some ripper materials that I used to just forward to friends or post on my website….but since I’ve started the blog and have been too busy getting ready for Friday’s Say Arrivaderrchi to Meaghan Party, well, I’ll just have to post it here.

More on the party tomorrow.

For now some Aussie Male Chauvinist  Humour
BBQ   RULES

We are about to enter the BBQ season (their season are reversed from ours here in the Northern Hemisphere). Therefore it is important to
refresh your memory on the etiquette of this sublime outdoor cooking ctivity. When a man volunteers to do the BBQ, the following chain of
events are put into motion:

Routine…

(1) The woman buys the food.

(2) The woman makes the salad, prepares the vegetables, and makes
dessert.

(3) The woman prepares the meat for cooking, places it on a tray along
with the necessary cooking utensils and sauces,

and takes it to the man who is lounging beside the grill - beer in
hand.

(4) The woman remains outside the compulsory three meter exclusion zone
where the exuberance of testosterone and other manly bonding activities
can take place without the interference of the woman.

Here comes the important part:

(5) THE MAN PLACES THE MEAT ON THE GRILL.

More routine…

(6) The woman goes inside to organize the plates and cutlery.

(7) The woman comes out to tell the man that the meat is looking great.
He thanks her and asks if she will bring another beer  while he flips the meat .

Important again:

(8) THE MAN TAKES THE MEAT OFF THE GRILL AND HANDS IT TO THE WOMAN.

More routine…

(9) The woman prepares the plates, salad, bread, utensils, napkins,
sauces, and brings them to the table.

(10) After eating, the woman clears the table and does the dishes.

And most important of all:

(11) Everyone PRAISES the MAN and THANKS HIM for his cooking efforts.

(12) The man asks the woman how she enjoyed “her night off.” And, upon
seeing her annoyed reaction, concludes that  there’s just no pleasing some women…

By the end of this month I will have spent about eight days working at a client’s office to fill in as news editor while their editor takes a well deserved vacation.

It’s a nice enough environment, the usual cube farm, corporate world with some very nice people who seem geniunely to like what they do and get along well with each other.

The Daily Commercial News is a construction industry newspaper which has been around for 80 years and is fuelled by an Ontario law which requires companies to post notices of completition and related milestones in a construction industry publication.

Since there is only one DCN, they get all the ads and though the press run is small - I think it’s only 5,000 - it costs $5 an issue or something like $1,200 a year.  It’s survived the Internet shakedown which as plagued other newspapers and magazines because it’s in a niche market and, also, because it’s clients are legally required to publish in the paper.

I’d call that a win-win and can’t help but chuckle that there’s life in those dead trees yet.

Anyway, the point of the post today is to note that I’m also feeling a little like a fish out of water. It’s a strange feeling to commute and sit at a desk. As a freelancer working from home, it’s a big day if I get dressed before noon. The TV is always there, the fridge is just downstairs and I really do love working in the peace and quiet of the house.

Some people have told me they quit freelancing and went back to work at an office because they missed social aspect of a job - and that’s reinforcement of Maslov’s Pyramid of Needs I guess.

But if I get lonely, Rusty the Dog is always available for a hug and belly rub; If I get bored she’s always up for a walk or the 1,000 channels on the satellite dish are just a click away. I’m sure there’s always soccer game on somewhere there. 

And its a strange thing to get out of bed, get showered and dressed and worry about the traffic as you commute to a job. Not having done it for four years I must say its discombobulating.

I also get this strange feeling of anxiety when I’m at an office: I feel cut off from something and I’m not sure what it is, perhaps the sound of the traffic, birds and the sunshine streaming through the windows.

Sometimes, I suppose, you just have to go somewhere else to realize what you miss.

TOR…ONT..

Okay, if you know the answer to those first calls to arms is “oooooh, ooh ooh, TFC” then you’re a footie fan like me here in Toronto.

 
For those who don’t know Toronto FC is playing its inaugural season in the MLS. We’ve having a typically crap expansion team year. We’ve currently got six starters out with long term injuries or suspensions and we’re rooted in the cellar.

 But we don’t care because win or lose, it’s all about the TFC. It’s about fans with attitude, who sing, dance, yell and scream just because.

Marvell Wynn, our injured right back says: “Toronto fans are insane and I love them.”

We are acknowledged to have the best fans in the MLS after only half a season and I’m proud to be a season ticket holder (Section 114, Row 4) and when the chance to go on a road trip to New York to see the TFC take on the Red Bulls came up I jumped at it.

For $150 you got a bus ride, a room at a hostel on the upper west side of Manhattan and tickets to the game Sunday Aug. 12. Son Jon and I joined the throngs milling at Yorkdale Friday about 11 p.m. then loaded ourselves onto four buses and headed south.

There were 224 of us on four busess. Others were driving down to meet up with us. What a party! You could taste it in the air…or was that just the beer farts?

It wasn’t all drunken guys; Many brought their wives and or girlfriends. I was too polite to ask which was which. One guy had his young son, another came with his 70 something dad.

Now, 12 hours on a bus is no one’s idea of fun but with movies, a pillow and some pitstops we pulled up at out Amsterdam and 103 West hostel about 1:30 p.m. tired, smelly but ready to go. Jon and I hit Manhattan, grabbing some lunch on Amsterdam and 78^th West, then walking though Central Park before heading on the subway for a trip out to the World Trade Centre site to get a look at ground zero. I’ve been to New York many times – I’ll be back there in September on business – but this was Jon’s first trip.

By 5 p.m. we were back in our shared accommodation, had a nap, showered and headed out to Nevada Smiths at Third Avenue and 12^th  - it’s an Irish pub specializing in football. A few drinks there and we were off to Time Square…which was just a teeming mess of people.

Exhausted we crashed about 1 a.m. but were up the next morning to hit Greenwich Village, Soho, Canal Street, Chinatown, Little Italy and finally Broadway.

The game of course, was to be the highlight. And so at 2:30 p.m. we loaded ourselves into the buses for Giant Stadium about an hour away in East Rutherford, N.J. Once in the parking lot we massed as a sea of red and white shirts, singing, tailgating and having a few beers, taking time out to taunt the incoming Red Bulls fans.

We marched into the stadium en mass, drums pounding, voices singing, drawing stares and looks from security and Red Bulls fans. When the game started we rushed down from our section and took over the empty lower seats a teeming mass of screaming maniacs.

From the outset we weren;’t going to be quiet. We were about 300 strong and we sang Oh Canada like our lives depended on it before breaking into a series of our more infamous chants.

Aside from the afore mentioned TOR-ONT-OOO TFC, there’s the standard TFC, the White Stripes song, the Danny Dicchio song sung on the 24^th minute to salute his and TFC’s first ever goal, the French chant stolen from the Lens fans in France – Qu’est que vous chantez? Nous chantons Les Rouges Allez!!!

Not to be dismayed by our 3-0 loss – we have five starters out including both our strikers so had no chance at all – we even taunted the Red Bulls who play strangely enough in Blue and White – with a couple of rounds of “We don’t pay for health care” just to rub it in.

When the Bulls’s 17-year-old local phenom Jozy Altidore scored his second and dared to sprint over to our section with his finger to his lips as if suggesting: “Now, it’s 3-0, you’re Shiite, just shush up,” he was showered with beer and plastic bottles.

Very rude. In the EPL player can be fined for inciting the crowd. Three of our guys were thrown out but we applauded their exit.

And that’s the point. We are fans with attitude. We’re not hooligans. We get in your face but we don’t throw punches. We’re not looking for a fight…it’s about making noise and getting behind your boys.

I think we did that in New York. There will be more road trips and our fan base will grow….this is the real deal here in North America. Football has found a home and the kind of European support we see week in week out on television has found a home here in Toronto.

Football – soccer – maybe a second tier sport but with this kind of fan base it has nowhere to go but up…..and up we are going.

There’s a scene in the current Bourne Ultimatum movie which caught my eye and made me smirk because it was such pure Hollywood and U.S. arrogance combined.

It’s the part where Bourne has hooked up with the Guardian reporter at Waterloo station and the CIA are tracking their every move on the CCTV system which is ubiquitous in London.

The fantasy, of course, is everyone knows the CIA are so powerful and the Americans so respected and loved, that of course, the Britsh Authorities would either turn over control of their cameras to a foreign power or, alternatively, not even notice they’d lost control of those cameras a a major train station.

Then I read this morning’s Globe story about how CSIS knew the CIA would turn over Mahar Arar to a country where he would be tortured and still did nothing.

This man,  a Canadian who was  charged with no crime and smeared because he knew a couple of people who maybe might have been connected to some mysterious faction was then beaten, tortured and subjected to hell for 10 months while our government did nothing. It is terrifying.

All because the US suspected him of something. Who are we? American lackeys? Have we no backbone?

You know, we’ve given up so many individual rights and freedoms in this phoney war on terrorism that I wonder what we’re really more scared of: the extremists on our side of the Atlantic or the other?

George Orwell was right. Question authority before they question you. 1984 was fiction. 2007 is reality.

On the bright side, however, I am proud to see the tradition of journalism is being upheld by the Globe in its relentless search for the truth.  They never gave up on getting the uncensored documents to expose all this despite the laughable claims of national security which resulted in the first draft being heavily censored.

The tragedy, if I can slip back into my rant, is that cost cutting and the obsession with celebrity gossipmongering, is eroding that fine tradition and fewer and fewer organizations have the resources to do what the Globe does as a matter of course.

Big Boooya! to the Globe and Mail, folks. Booooya! with a double salute. 

I’ve never met John Tory, the leader of Ontario’s PC party but he seems like the right guy.

I liked his Mayoralty campaign and I think he would have been a better choice than David Miller who has consistently tried to screw the suburbs with his garbage proposals, land transfer tax and worst of all car registration tax. If you live outside of the old city of Toronto you’re more likely to have more than one car since transit is so crappy. So the tax raised per household is more of a burden on those of us in single family homes on single lots than say those downtown condo dwellers who never venture north of Eglinton.

But back to John Tory. I am a fiscal conservative and a social liberal yet his proposal to extend school funding to all faiths has both sides of my political polarity in overdrive.

First, it’s a bonehead move. We can’t afford it. Secondly, if you want to create cultural silos it’s a wonderful idea. I just don’t happen think further dividing our society is a good idea.

 Heck, we can’t even get along on Vision TV where it turns out all kinds of extremists have been spouting their hatred on the public airways. One of them was on for two years before being defrocked, so to speak.

How then, are we going to know what our kids - yes, the kids of other families, races, cultures and languages are all our kids because it take a village to raise a child - are being taught behind the closed doors of their schools?  Sure, it has to follow the Ontario Education Ministry curiculm but there’s an awful lot of room for some freelance preaching here.

Fragmenting the public school system, as the otherwise sensible Bill Davis did when he left office in 1984 and approved full funding for the Catholic Separate School Board, was a fiscal bombshell we have yet to recover from. Our schools are falling apart; teachers are angry and frazzled. And so on and on.

Funding two systems is bad enough. Worse when we add French language school boards because the whole reason for funding the Separate School Board was that it’s constitutionally required under the old BNA Act. Duh, then why fund French schools? Look, it just happened that the French were mostly Catholics but the intent was for them to have access to education in their own language. We just went overboard with political correctness.

Religion is best left to the Church. And good luck to ‘em. Keep religion and faith out of our schools where we need one good system dedicated to education all kids regardless of race, colour creed or religion.

 Where do you draw the line? Sure there are substantial Jewish and Muslim families who would send their kids to publicly-funded faith-based schools. What about the Aboriginals? The Rastafarian? The Vegans? The Church of the Universe? Moonies? Scientologists? Amish? Lutherans? For each kid going to a publicly-funded school there are overheads and other standing costs for support staff at all levels of government to adminster and pay for. 

That’s why John Tory’s proposal has me losing my faith with the Ontario PC party because I’m starting to worry that PC stands for Politically Correct. I liked the John Tory who took a stand because it was the right thing to do not because it might expand his voter base. This smacks of political opportunism and it stinks.

The only issue now is that I’ll have to vote for those lying Liberals or the NDP.

So, I picked up the Dell Inspiron I ordered for Meaghan last night and started setting it up when I got home.

You know, for $499 it’s a nice little machine. She’ll like the cosmetics, the screen is large enough and bright enough and it seems to handle quite well.

But for $569 it’s over priced. More so because my freind Fabian told me last night he’s looking for a laptop too and was leaning to the Dell Inspiron which he says now comes with XPSP2 or Vista for $499.

Dell, of course, insisted I would have to pay a $100 more for XPSP2 then relented and then two days after I bought my machine, dropped the price to $499. The difference with our tax is about $80 and Dell won’t refund me  - according to their email posted in the previous Blog entry - is because while Americans get price protection that policy does not apply in Canada.

Wait a minute:  Americans get price protection but that policy does not apply in Canada.

So, what you’re saying Michael Dell, is that Americans are more valued as customers and get preferential treatment than us po’ Canadians?

Nice. I hope the Government of Canada takes this into consideration when they review the next bids from Dell Canada to replace some of their gazillion machines.

We’re not done chewing on this bone. Not by a country mile. Stay tuned.

Following up to my complaint about Del Hell….here’s the response from Dell.  Dear Ian Harvey,

Should you have any other questions please do not hesitate to contact us at www.dell.ca. Please choose Support & Customer Care.How are we doing? If you would like to provide feedback or feel you have an unresolved issue please feel free to contact our Case Manager, at Ca_OI_CustomerCare@Dell.com. We appreciate your comments.Please be advised you may receive an email survey from Dell directly related to the service I have provided you today. I thank you in advance for taking the time to submit the survey, as your feedback is very important to us.

I bought a Dell Inspiron in July for my daughter Meaghan who is off to Italy for four months as part of her graduate studies program at George Brown’s Chef school.

She needs a simple laptop that isn’t going to keep up all up at night worry about the financial loss should it get stolen or lost. So I found the Dell for $569 Canadian and called to make the purchase. All she does is email, surf and share pictures and  - for the first time - make Skype calls.

Making the deal itself was bad enough. I spent close to 40 minutes on the phone because the Operating System I wanted was XPSP2 - not Vista. I have Vist on my HP and it’s really annoying. Almost every program I have needs patches to work properly. And it’s a bit of a resource pig on entry level machines like the Dell Inspiron.

They wanted to charge me $100 more for XPSP2. I said no give it to me for the same price. It took 40 minutes of being put on hold before some manager in Hyberabad could authorize it. I even hung up and they called me back at one point.

I should have known this was only the beginning.

Two days later I get a Dell flyer in my Globe and Mail offering the Vista version for $499. With tax that’s a $80.50 difference so I called and complained.

No dice, they said. Dell doesn’t offer price protection. I found a couple of websites like ihatedell.com  where there’s some discussion around Dell having a policy of giving credit when the difference is more than $50 and the time frame is less than a week.

So I’m escalating my claim for a refund. And I’m going to be stubborn. I didn’t call my business frenchpoodlemedia. It’s called pitbullmedia for a reason.

Then I discover that despite my insistence they not give my personal information to a third party along with my credit card that they did just that. Bell Sympatico delivered a modem to my home along with a three months free offer.

Right. I already have a cable ISP (Duh, I live in Toronto, guess who that is) and I’m not changing my email addresses so why would I need it? And of course it’s a negative billing thing…once the three months are up…..they start dinging your card. That puppy is already on its way back to Bell. But isn’t that a violation of my PEPIDA rights or something?

And the last kicker? Apparently Purolator tried to deliver the package July 31….but didn’t leave a notice of attempted delivery so we knew nothing about it until someone calls us the next day. Strange, because I was working from home all day.

Then they tell us they’ll deliver on Saturday (which should have set off alarm bells). We wait pretty much all day (okay we were painting the living room) and nothing shows up.

I call today - monday being a holiday - and guess what. They don’t deliver on Saturdays. And no they can’t change the delivery address to the client’s offices where I’m working all this week. I have to go to the north end of the city to pick it up in person.  Luckily I’m working around the corner this week so it’s not as major a pain it would have been had I been working at home.

If Meaghan wasn’t leaving in a couple of weeks and I didn’t need that time to get her machine configured with Office, Skype and a few other goodies I would just tell Dell to take their machine back and credit me because just about everyone has their machines on Back to School sale now. The fact is I’m so damn busy this month I don’t have time to run around. Had I known this in July I would have just gone shopping in August for a machine at a store somewhere after doing some online researcy.

Having gone through this I wouldn’t recommend the process to anyone considering a new computer. Even an Acer looks good right about now for $499.

The final irony is that I interview Dell’s chief blogger Lionel Menchaca who writes the Direct2Dell.com blog just a few weeks ago. He said the reason they started the blog is because they wanted to reach out to unhappy customers and change Dell’s perception in the marketplace.

Psst. Lionel. The blog is nice but I think the issues start a little earlier in the process.

Okay, everyone else has cashed in with their thoughts.

My take on David Beckham’s arrival in the MLS?

 Nice to see you here, Becks. I’ve enjoyed watching your talent since you hoofed one in from the halfway line against Wimbeldon back in the early 90s while playing for Manchester United. I’ve also seen you raise England’s game - and lower it - from time to time.

No one player is infallable. Not even Pele. And Becks, we love ya, but you’re no Pele. Or George Best. You’re David Beckham and you are who you are. It’s unfortunately this pop star aura pervades your entourage but then, you’re not hurting financially from the fallout from all those promotion deals, are you?

I’ll be there with the Resident Princess Sunday Aug. 5 when the L.A. Galacticos- sorry, meant to say Galaxy - show up to play an injury ravaged Toronto F.C. Our boys will likely lose given there are six starters out including our top two strikers.

But, that’s footie, isn’t it Becks?  

Hmm, first steps are always tentative.

This is the first, blog posting at Bark with Byte but it won;t be that interesting. More about getting to know my way around the software and how I can integrate it with the other pages on my website.