Avenue Commercial Schedules Annual General Meeting

If you’re an investor in any of the five ill-fated Concrete Equities properties in Calgary, now being run by Avenue Commercial, there’s an important meeting coming up on April 29th. It’s being held at the Highland Park Community Association Hall (3716 – 2nd Street NW). The schedule is as follows:

  • MEG LP Investment Corp: 9:00am  to   9:45am
  • Millrise Deer Valley LP Investment Corp: 10:30am to  11:15am
  • Castleridge LP Investment Corp: 12:00pm to  12:45pm
  • Lavalin LP Investment Corp: 2:00pm  to  2:45pm
  • CE Place Investment Corp: 3:30pm  to  4:15pm

You’re required to bring photo ID with you for registration – which starts 30 minutes prior to each meeting, and closes 10 minutes after the meeting starts – and only registered owners will be permitted into the building. I’ve emailed them to ask if husband/wife combos are permitted; the investment is in my wife’s name, but I’m the one who handles the investments in our family – so far no response from them, but I’d be surprised if they said not to this. No audio or video recording devices are permitted.

The email I received with this information alludes to some good news, so I’m tentatively hopeful that the investment we have in Castleridge will get back on track and earning us money like it was always supposed to.

Working with a Resume Professional is Sometimes the Best Choice

As someone who spends a good part of his day writing – blog posts, reviews, editorials, email, etc. – I pride myself on my ability to put words down in a cohesive, effective manner. So you’d think that when it came time to update my resume, it would be an easy task. Not so much. I don’t know if it was the fact that I’ve never been overly comfortable writing about myself, or if it’s that the idea of putting together a resume from scratch was extremely daunting. I hadn’t updated my resume in seven years, so when I looked at it and saw how outdated it was, I wasn’t sure where to start. I toyed with in for more than two months before accepting the fact that I needed help getting it done. Yes, there was a strong case of denial at work – and while I was initially reluctant to spend money on having someone help me write my resume, I finally accepted that it was the best approach.

I did a quick Google search for “resume writing” and saw an ad by Resume Lifesaver, a.k.a. Sarah Wright, and clicked on it. I found Sarah’s costs to be reasonable, her response time consistent, and she was an absolute pleasure to deal with – especially since I was an uncooperative client, often taking weeks to respond to her at the beginning. She also took the time to have a phone call with me to learn about what I wanted my resume to communicate. There’s something I find profoundly unpleasant about working on my resume, and she was patient with me while I slowly convinced myself to finally tackle this project.

If you’re looking for someone to help you write a new resume from scratch, update an old resume, or re-work your current resume for a new job, I can recommend Sarah Wright and Resume Lifesaver without reservation.

And here’s a tip: once you get your new resume, update it a couple of times a year with significant accomplishments and career milestones. Don’t worry about it getting a bit long – you can trim out the unnecessary stuff when it comes time to share it. You’d be surprised at how easily you forget some of this stuff if you don’t write it down!

9 Things The Rich Don’t Want You To Know About Taxes

“John Paulson, the most successful hedge-fund manager of all, bet against the mortgage market one year and then bet with Glenn Beck in the gold market the next. Paulson made himself $9 billion in fees in just two years. His current tax bill on that $9 billion? Zero. Congress lets hedge-fund managers earn all they can now and pay their taxes years from now. In 2007, Congress debated whether hedge-fund managers should pay the top tax rate that applies to wages, bonuses and other compensation for their labors, which is 35 percent. That tax rate starts at about $300,000 of taxable income—not even pocket change to Paulson, but almost 12 years of gross pay to the median-wage worker.”

This is a stunning, eye-opening article about taxes in the USA. Reading it made my head swoon – there’s so much corruption, deception, and outright lying going on when it comes to the issue of taxes, it makes you wonder how much longer this can continue. I’d classify myself as “anti-unnecessary tax” – I have no problem paying taxes every year because I know that my taxes go toward funding the things that make the lives of my family better: healthcare, defence, roads, police, fire-fighters, etc. I don’t embrace extra taxes, however; the GST we have in Canada (currently at 5%) irks me because it’s a tax everyone has to pay, regardless of income level, and when you combine it with the taxes we already pay on fuel, property, etc. it adds up. Paying taxes are part of what it means to live in a society where services are provided though, and seeing people – very wealthy people – manage to get away with paying nothing is infuriating.

Simultaneously Impressive and Chilling: North Korean Military March

Make sure you go full screen and 720p HD – excellent camera work (shot with Canon DSLRs)! This is a “re-mix” of this original footage.

The Triumph of Coal Marketing: Putting Things in Perspective

Is that a shocking graphic or what? If you can’t quite make out the word on the far left, it’s “Nuclear”. This chart compares the number of deaths generating nuclear, oil, and coal-based power on a per-watt basis. Seth Goodin shared this and I found it quite profound. I’ve been a proponent of nuclear power for a few years now, and this chart only further drives home the truth. Coal, and oil, are destructive, messy, finite energy sources and we need to move toward nuclear power to generate our electricity. Yes, the problems with the nuclear power plants in Japan are scary, but the hard reality is that even when incredible disasters occur like the 8.9 earthquake and the resulting tsunami, modern nuclear power plants are still fairly safe. There were some lessons that were learned in Japan – such as placing the back-up power generators underground, along with their fuel supply – that will help ensure nuclear power is safer for everyone in the future.

Oh YouTube: You Attract Such Gems

I’ve seen a lot of stupid comments on my YouTube videos, but this one really made my day (here’s the video it was from). I know I talk fast, and that might be challenging for some, but my actual use of the language? Apparently my spoken English is so poor, this fellow from Portland, Oragon, USA, just couldn’t make out what I was saying. 😉

Finally, Something Nice Happens on Chatroulette

I didn’t get the full context right from the start – basically, it looks like the singers ask the name of the woman they’re chatting with, then sing their catchy song using that name. You can tell their aren’t native English speakers because they pronounce it “Deeeana” in the song, but I doubt the woman on the other end cared – she was clearly thrilled with a bunch of strangers singing her a song.

Why I Wish Domains Cost $100 Again

Anyone that remembers registering a domain in the ’90s from Network Solutions – I think they were basically the only game in town back then – will recall paying $100 for a standard .com domain. Now you can get the same thing for $10 or less from a variety of sources. When you paid $100 for a domain, unless you were a wealthy person, you’d only sit on a few domains that weren’t being used. Paying $100 a year for something you’re not using was a waste. Now that domains are $10, people sit on domains for years and years, never using them, and not feeling compelled to either because the domains are so cheap. If you’re someone looking to launch a new Web site, it’s extremely difficult to get a domain name for your new project because of domain squatters.

I say this myself as someone who has a few different un-used domains (MMA Thoughts.com, Photography Thoughts.com), but I’d be willing to pay $100 a year for those domains if it would force some of these squatters off their domains – I looked up one domain earlier today that was registered back in 2000 and still has nothing on it. If you can’t get your Web site launched in 11 years, guess what, it’s time to give up…

Bell vs. Teksavvy: Bandwidth in Canada

I have to admit that I’ve made an about face on this issue: earlier in the year I was arguing that bandwidth caps weren’t a big deal, because most people never went over them, but since then I’ve done some research on the bandwidth caps in place and am appalled at the trend I’ve seen: bandwidth caps at one of the major ISPs in my part of Canada have either stayed the same, or gone up moderately, while prices have either stayed the same or gone up. This isn’t the typical trend we’re used to with technology, where prices go down over time and the functionality/performance goes up. I’m all for companies making money, but there’s something very wrong with the current state of competition in Internet access in Canada – we have among the slowest and most expensive Internet access in the world, and that needs to change.

If you’re in Canada, stand up and make your voice heard.