Colin's Blog

The relatively tiny country of Malawi - often called “The Warm Heart of Africa” – has always been a part of my family’s story.

In 1965, just a year after Malawi gained its independence from Great Britain, my grandfather accepted a  school administration position at Blantyre Secondary School in Malawi’s largest city. His appointment was part of a program of Canada’s Department of External Affairs – the first such program to assist the fledgling country.   At the same time, my grandmother accepted a teaching position at St. Andrew’s Secondary School – now known as St. Andrew’s International High School.

So, at thirteen years old, my mother and her younger sister and brother found themselves in the heart of the dark continent.

The stories have been told many times over the years – with sometimes varying details: the time an elephant snacked on the thatch roof, the time a gecko fell in the pudding, the time my aunt – peering through her camera’s viewfinder – shouted “just another second!” as a disgruntled rhino charged their Land Rover. Thankfully, the driver ignored her. [these are my memories of these stories - I make no claims of accuracy]

In exactly six months, my wife Arminta and I will set off on our own Malawian adventure!

The Presbyterian Church in Canada (where I happen to work) does a considerable amount of work in Malawi. In addition to funding several projects through PWS&D, we have anywhere from five to ten staff in the country working with our partner, the Blantyre Synod of the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP).

We will be travelling with several other Presbyterians from across Canada on a two-week “study tour” of Malawi in and around Blantyre.

We are beyond excited about this trip. While both of have traveled overseas before, neither of us have been to Africa – and we haven’t really traveled at all since our honeymoon a decade ago – and that was just to Maine, so it doesn’t really count.

I’ll likely blog more about this as the time gets nearer, but now that it is all confirmed, I wanted to make the “official” announcement.

I had hoped to have a follow-up post about Facebook’s Subscribe feature, but unfortunately that’s just not going to happen today – look for it early next week.

Instead, I happened upon this great little Dos and Don’ts post from Blue Avocado. There are six pairs of Dos and Don’ts but the author summarizes them nicely right up front:

Ultimately, understanding yourself and your audience is more central to a successful social media presence than mastering the minutiae of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Nevertheless, there are a few guidelines that can help you maintain good social media “hygiene” and avoid shiny new distractions:

via Six Dos and Six Don’ts with Social Media | Blue Avocado.

Smaller schools was a big part of my school board trustee campaign last year. There are MANY reasons to support smaller schools but one of the major ones is that smaller schools are closer to home and, therefore, encourage students to walk rather than drive or take a bus.

That was so last year. This year, Ontario voters find themselves in the throes of another election campaign – this time to elect their Members of Provincial Parliament. As I’ve promised before, I’m not going to get into my personal partisan here.

What I do want to share with you, however, is a campaign within the campaign being run by the Heart & Stroke Foundation. The campaign, called ‘Healthy Candidates’ encourages all provincial election candidates to endorse a set of policy recommendations. Among the policy recommendations is the following:

Healthy Communities: greater support and funding for community planning that encourages mixed land use, greater density to enhance active transportation that is safe, secure and financially viable. A specific concern that was expressed was the construction of mega-schools even at the elementary level that require busing.

via Healthy Candidates.

Now, I will admit that this does not say “build smaller schools” but the idea is clearly there that larger schools with larger boundaries are necessarily pre-disposed to relying on busing to get kids to school. You may recall that we are dealing with this ourselves here in south-east Galt.

I applaud the Heart & Stroke Foundation for making the connection between walking vs. busing and its impact on childhood obesity. I also hope that the candidates from all parties who have endorsed the campaign will also support efforts to create smaller schools across Ontario.

It’s a big week for Facebook. With their annual developer conference coming up, they’ve rolled out a few new features including “Smart Friend Lists” which I hadn’t even had a chance to write about here before today’s HUGE news: you can now subscribe to a personal profile’s public updates without having to friend them.

Here’s how it works. As you browse around the site, you’ll notice that some users have a button at the top of their profile that says ‘Subscribe’. Click it, and you’ll start seeing that user’s status updates in your News Feed, just as if you were their Facebook friend. But there’s a big difference: unlike normal Facebook friends, the people you subscribe to don’t have to approve your subscription request, and there’s no limit on how many people can subscribe to any given user.
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Of course, Facebook has offered a similar feature called Pages for years now, which was meant for nearly the same thing (you’ll find that many journalists and politicians have already created Facebook Pages… because that’s what Facebook told them to do). The difference here, Facebook says, is that users no longer have to maintain two separate entities; they can just use the site’s sharing settings to decide which content they want to share very broadly, and what will only be shared with friends.

via Facebook Launches Twitter-Like ‘Subscriptions’, Lets You Share With Unlimited Users | TechCrunch.

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I tried twice this summer to teach my almost 6-year-old to ride her new bike without training wheels. Both outings were epic failures leaving both of tired and frustrated.

Imagine my envy when I came across this little story from one my favourite parenting bloggers…

..at the tender age of three years and 10 months, he just learned how to ride his bike without training wheels.

I’m super proud of him, but actually, I can’t really take any credit for teaching him.

The only person who taught Nico is Nico. Seriously. Other than that last twenty minutes or so this morning, when my oldest son Marco and I repeatedly yelled, “Pedal!!!” and “Keep moving!!!”, no one taught Nico any bike riding skills.

via How I Didn’t Teach My Three-Year-Old Son to Ride His Bike Without Training Wheels | Playborhood.

I got a pretty awesome email from Groupon the other day. Several months ago, I had purchased a Groupon deal for a snazzy restaurant in Waterloo with the intention of taking my lovely wife out for dinner sometime near our tenth anniversary. Well, July 28th came and went and we never got around to going out for dinner.

The Groupon deal expires October so I was mostly resigned to losing the $30 unless we could somehow squeeze a night out into an already busy September.
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I don’t have much use for a resume these days, but when I came across this post on MakeUseOf.com about using your existing LinkedIn profile to quickly create a professional-looking resume, I was intrigued. I was also skeptical that a machine could take the data in the LinkedIn profile and turn out a document as nuanced as a resume.

I decided to give one of the two services a spin (the one that doesn’t require its own account) just to see if it really was as easy as MakeUseOf claimed:

Resume Builder is by far the quickest way to turn your LinkedIn profile into a professionally looking, minimalist resume. It was created as part of LinkedIn Labs and the whole process takes no more than a few minutes:

via 2 Tools To Turn Your LinkedIn Profile Into A Neat-Looking Resume.

The verdict is yes, it really was that easy. I was able to construct this resume in less than five minutes:  http://resume.linkedinlabs.com/85brx1cvb

The really killer feature is that your saved resume is updated in real-time as you update your LinkedIn profile. If you are the type of person who is constantly tweaking their resume and LinkedIn profile, this awesome little service may help you kill two birds with one stone.

I have been pretty quiet about the passing of Jack Layton. I hesitated to acknowledge his death publicly because I disagreed with him, and his NDP colleagues, on so many things it seemed disingenuous to suddenly gush about him simply because he had died. Then I saw this photo.

Remembering Jack Layton at Nathan Phillips Square | Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

Taken by Jackman Chiu yesterday, the image captures a fleeting moment in Canadian political history that I doubt will ever be repeated. Indeed, the chalk remembrances created in Nathan Phillips Square were washed clean just hours later by a powerful storm.

Jack Layton was the most remarkable politician this country has seen in decades. Remarkable not for his ideas or policies or electoral successes but for his ability to say “Follow me” and elicit a response like this. I can think of only one other politician who so deftly seduced Canadians with equal amounts of charm and tenacity. It will be interesting to see now if their sons can follow their fathers into the hearts of Canadians.

This blog post nails the major misconception about Facebook pages for brands and organizations:

Unless someone has actively interacted with your page, they won’t receive your updates. Many brands launch a Facebook contest to boost their fan count, assuming that their future updates are now reaching the thousands or millions of people who clicked “like”. But that’s not how Facebook works.

Unless a fan actively participates in a brand’s Facebook Page and their activity on the Page has been continuous, the brand’s status updates will cease appearing in the fan’s Facebook stream.

via Can Facebook Work For Brands? | Market Sentinel.

… as Canada’s digital transition comes into effect next week, the appeal of sticking with over-the-air channels could increase. Those stations will be moved off the analog spectrum – with its sometimes fuzzy signals and occasional snowy screens – and converted to crisp, high-definition digital signals.

via TV’s digital switch boosts appeal of cord-cutting – The Globe and Mail.

We cut the cord six years ago and just put-up with the snow and fuzzy signals. Earlier this week, TVO‘s local transmitter made the switch to digital and it is, in a word, amazing! We’ve watched hours of TVO that we wouldn’t have watched otherwise. We really only get two other channels, CTV and Global, and both of those are already pretty clear, so I don’t expect to be as blown away when they flip to DTV next week. With the stronger digital signals, though, it will be interesting to see what else we pickup.