Anyone that watches Canadian media have recently been hearing a lot of Listeria and Listeriosis and the knee-jerk reaction against Maple Leaf Foods.

The long story short is as follows: some foods produced by Maple Leaf Foods were contaminated with Listeria, a bacteria that can make you sick. Some people died. More got sick. Maple Leaf recalled a shit-ton of their foods. People stopped buying Maple Leaf products.

I've been reading comments on news articles from people saying that they would stop buying anything Maple Leaf and "let other people be the guinea pigs." My alma matter, University of Waterloo, has stated "Since the initial recall announcement, our chefs have discontinued purchasing any Maple Leaf Foods product and will continue to buy our deli meats from other sources, like Piller and Olymel, going into the Fall term."

Seems like a normal reaction. But the "normal" reaction is just that: a reaction. It's not proactive nor does it protect oneself from future harm. It's emotional and counter-productive. If people think that other food manufacturers are infallible to Listeria(or any other bacteria) contamination, they are living in a dream-world.

Ironically, Maple Leaf Foods has the most incentive to tighten up their production and be as pristine as possible. They're spending millions on the recall and likely millions more cleaning up their plants.

If anything, the safest bet on a source of uncontaminated foods in the coming months and well into the future is from Maple Leaf Foods themselves.

The 2008 nationals just took place this past week in New Brunswick.

It's now been 2 years since I left the karate world. My last official competition was in the fall of 2006 when I competed in Japan for the SKIF World Championships. In terms of the WKF/NKA circuit, my last competition was the 2006 National Championships in Newfoundland.

Karate has been a part of my life ever since I could walk. Since I was 14, the Ontario Karate team has been like my extended family that I would see 4-5 times a year, culminating in a week-long bash that is the National Championships. I miss my karate family. I also miss the rest of my karate family that spans the whole country. I've made so many great friends from the rest of the country over the 8 years that I competed at nationals and the two times I competed at the pan-american championships in Venezuela and Chile.

2 years ago I made the difficult decision of ending my karate career. Or rather, putting it on hold. I hadn't trained at all during my 5 years in university and I was having the time of my life and karate just wasn't a priority. Simply travelling to Toronto 4 times a year for the provincial meets was a hassle for me. Between not wanting to embarrass myself with my slowly deteriorating karate skills and wanting to give the younger up-and-coming stars an open road, I stopped competing.

I think it was the right decision but now that I am done school I feel it was such a big part of my life that I should give it another chance. For the last few months I've been thinking about returning to the karate world. Since the 2nd week of May I've been doing intense physical training with Mariano and I'm already in the best physical condition I've ever been in my life after 7 weeks.

Tonight I had a moment. I saw pictures of all my old karate teammates on the podium. They are cleaning up. The young kids that used to look up to me have far surpassed anything I ever accomplished and have more than filled my shoes. I am so proud of them. Trevor Sheppard, whom I have so much respect for, finally took the national title for Men's Kata. He has deserved it for so many years now and he finally did it. I'd like to think Arjun and I are his biggest fans.

This moment reaffirmed my desire to return to the karate world and compete at the national championships in 2010. I want to medal for Men's Individual Kata. I want to perform the best Shotokan katas that have ever been performed at the Canadian National Karate Championships.

I have a a year and a few months before I need to begin competing at the provincial level to qualify for the provincial team and I have roughly 2 years before the 2010 nationals.

Two years to get bigger, stronger, faster, jump higher, and more flexible.

Two years to hone my art.

The journey begins.

Today I bought a 1 gig stick of A-Data ram for my 12" Powerbook G4. I gave up on the idea of upgrading my ram over a year ago when Canada Computers had them for about $180 and didn't even have them in stock.

All hope was lost until today when Ahmed told me that, miraculously, they seemed to have an abundance of them now and at rock bottom prices.

I've been getting increasingly frustrated as of yet with my laptop and have been yearning for a new one. Getting beachballs every few minutes every time I switch windows or tabs was getting really annoying. I've been lusting after the Macbook Pro but I've been waiting until they come out with the newer designs, hopefully by the end of summer or end of the year.

In any case, the extra 512 mb of ram(I had 768 before) has really juiced things up and I can happily say that I'm in no hurry for a new computer anymore.

Yes I'm a computer nerd.

If I could program my camera, I'd add a shooting mode that would take a picture without flash, and then take another picture with flash immediately afterwards.

Pictures always look better without flash because it doesn't wash out people's skin and also has a much warmer colour, but unless the lighting conditions are really good you end up with a blurry picture. You can compensate for it with a higher ISO (the digital camera's sensitivity to light) but the trade-off is a grainy image.

Sometimes it's worth having a bit of graininess because it still looks far better than a picture taken with flash. But sometimes it's so grainy that the picture with flash is more bearable. So what I end up doing is taking pictures with and without flash and then discarding the one I don't like.

It's just a pain in the ass - to myself and to my subjects - to have to take a picture, change the setting, then take another picture. Why can't I just do both at once?

Off "The Stills" next album, dropping soon.

Sounds Awesome...Enjoy!

The other day, I saw a dog wearing a hoodie. How awesome is that? Normally, I hate it when dogs wear clothing, but this was really cool.

And I'm back, folks. More posts to come.

-- Can I change my picture Hiro? I'm gonna send you a picture to change my picture. --

So, I was sitting around reading the news (which is awesome), and I came across a CBC article saying that Nine Inch Nails has just released a new Instrumental album called "Ghosts". I was like "what the fuck?" so i went to the site, and there it was.

It is FUCKING AWESOME, I don't care what anyone thinks about NIN, Trent Reznor is a genius.

Anyways, he is releasing it independently with some minor help, no crappy Interscope stealing our money.

The site is sort of down, they secretly released it, and then they were flooded with hits and downloads.

The album on the other hand is amazing, It kind of reminds me of something theatrical. There is a great mix of synth, and acoustic sounds all mixed up, but it sounds great. Reznor created four acts for this EP, and the first one is available for free.

You can get the first act of the four on Pirate Bay Here You can find all four acts elsewhere, but because I want NIN to get as much support as possible, I'd rather you get it from the official torrent site.

Also you can hit up www.nin.com to purchase it officially, there are several different packages available where you will get the download right away (when the site is back up), and a cd package at a later date. You can also get it free here as well (but again the site is down temporarily).

GET IT AND ENJOY!

Love,

Tony

UPDATE

Here are some reviews for those that are skeptical about what i'm trying to push onto you. Here and Here

The only person that enjoys hearing your ringtone is yourself.

Just sayin'.

Also, I had a funny idea for a ringtone: record yourself coughing.

Rarely would people look for the source of your ringtone!

For all the lovers out there

On Christmas Eve Future Shop started their online boxing week sale. They had a few good deals but otherwise their sales were about on-par with the regular price of Canada Computers. I still don't understand why anyone that lives in the same city as a Canada Computers would buy anything related to computers from Future Shop but that's another story...

Anyway, I was interested in buying the Canon Rebel XT from them which was on sale for 399. I've always wanted a digital SLR so I figured this would be a cheap way to get into them. The website went down for a few hours "to prepare" for the boxing week sale store. First of all, it's pretty sad that they actually had to take down their site for hours to do that. It should be a matter of a flick of a switch but somehow they have managed to translate the real-world physical constraints of a brick and mortar shop and let it manifest in an online virtual shop. I'm surprised you don't have to go back to the home page to "leave" the online store.

The site was then back up at 7 pm in "preview" mode to let people check out the sales before the mad rush began. The sales were set to begin at 8 pm. In anticipation of some rush I pre-created an account and made sure I was already logged in.

Just as 8 pm rolled around I added the camera and an SD card to my cart and proceeded to checkout. I was brought to a checkout "queue" screen where I had to wait in line to check out. Lovely attention to detail I must say, as it was quite like being in an actual store. Although I was rather disappointed that there weren't any impulse buy items for me to throw into my cart as I waited in line. A minor detail that I'm sure will be remedied in future versions of their online store.

Wait a minute, let's get serious. How ridiculous is this. It's an ONLINE STORE. WHY AM I WAITING IN LINE. The bonus feature of this setup was that although I was waiting in line to check out, I didn't actually have possession of the item(s)! The lovely screen warned me that once I proceeded to the next step of the checkout process, that some of my items may no longer be available. Oh sweet. So this is where they notify me of how utterly useless their "quantity remaining" detail on their product info page is. Cuz you know, some sort of ticket system whereby you get a product allocated for you while you wait in checkout is simply too difficult to implement.

The technical answer as to why they would implement such a asinine procedure is most probably that their checkout servers couldn't handle that sort of volume at once. Ironically (I'll get to this soon), they could easily have used something like Amazon's EC2 or some other type of temporary computing environment to handle large spikes in traffic, as would be expected during a boxing week sale.

Back to my checkout story now. So after about an hour or so of waiting it finally told me I was ready to proceed to the next page. I clicked on the button to proceed. I was staring at the product page for a 500 gb hd. That's right. A product page. How did I get there? I don't know. I clicked back and it brought me back to the proceed to checkout screen. Clicked next. Back to the 500 gb hd. Right, that clearly makes sense.

At this point the items were also no longer in my cart so I had to go back and add them again. As I went back to lineup to checkout again, it told me the website was down. It couldn't handle the load.

I waited 2-3 hours.

The site came back online and I repeated all the steps and waited another 45 minutes in the queue. There were 1000 cameras at 8 pm. There were less than 300 now. I finally got the go-ahead to proceed beyond the checkout queue again. Now it told me I wasn't logged in. Yes I was. But not anymore. Their website clearly has problems with session management. Over the next 15 minutes I had to log back in about 6 times and hit the back button about 4-5 times to escape from blank screens but I finally made it to the point where I could enter my shipping info.

The next screen just blew my mind. It asked me how I wanted it shipped. It gave me two options: Ground (14.98) and Air (13.25). Let's ignore for a moment the fact that they're actually charging me for shipping. Their distribution centre is somewhere in the GTA. And they want to fly it to me. In Belleville. Well, I guess there are some regional flights that flight into/out of Trenton. Maybe that's how it works. No wait, maybe it's just that total idiots designed this website. Why Air is cheaper than Ground is a mystery to me. Why they don't even tell me what the hell Ground vs. Air means is a mystery to me. Why they don't tell me which is faster is a mystery to me.

I think the Future Shop team should try ordering from Amazon for once. Not only is it free shipping for orders over $39, but it also tells me how long it takes (1-2 business days) and it also gives me the option of paying for express shipping and yes, it tells me how long I should expect to wait.

So after selecting Air (It was cheaper. I actually did try to figure out whether Ground or Air would be faster but I could not come to a solid conclusion) I finally got to enter my credit card info. Oh yeah, had to log back in again. As I reached the climax of my purchasing journey I was ushered over to Visa so I could sign up for Verified by Visa. Talk about killing the mood. Now without ranting on too long about Verified by Visa, let's just say it's the most useless and annoying "feature" ever. The entire system was conceived to protect the retailers and certainly not to improve the user experience. They spin it as more "secure" but all it does is create a hassle. Now I can understand if some smaller e-tailer wants to implement this to reduce charge appeals but a large company like Future Shop should be most concerned with driving sales through fast with a minimum of obstacles. Amazon knows this.

Already so committed at this point, I trudged through and clicked the final button. And then it took me to a white screen with a simple message saying "An error occurred sending the VBV data". Cool. Thank you for wasting the last 3 hours of my life.

I did have one more chance at it but as I stared at the credit card page I decided that I would not go through with this. I can live without the camera for now.

So what's the conclusion of this long story? Well for starters, once Amazon expands their selection of goods at amazon.ca, Future Shop doesn't stand a chance in the online world. Much more importantly, their business in the real world will die a slow death. Evolve or become obsolete.

The fundamental problem with Future Shop/Best Buy is that they are a traditional brick and mortar store that are used to making killer profits through insane margins. They have done well. But with mass adoption of the internet there has been a paradigm shift. It has only begun and we are only now reaching the tipping point. We are reaching a level of near-perfect competition now that geographical barriers have been all but eliminated. In order to survive this new age of internet consumption, they need to drastically improve their online experience.

I do not think that it will happen anytime soon. They are a brick and mortar retailer. They think and act like one. In contrast, Amazon is a technology company. Future Shop hires teenagers to peddle their wares. Amazon hires programmers. Future Shop most likely outsources their website development. Amazon is innovating the latest web technologies.

Best Buy's only hope of survival is to leverage the Best Buy and Future Shop brands and partner with Amazon just like Toys R Us has already. That's their only saving grace.