iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

The Toronto Maple Leafs have won all three of their games so far this year. As of right now they are tied for first place over all with Washington.

I’ve started building my bandwagon so that it’s ready for the Stanley Cup parade.

Haven’t found any wheels yet, should I be worried that as soon as I find them they’ll fall off?

The rescue of the Chilean miners has been a great triumph of engineering and the human spirt. Congratulations to the nation of Chile and everyone involved.

What a great story, and what great television. I started watching the first three miners rescued last night and watched a more of the rescues on-line at work.

The images were compelling; the large pulley wheel turning counter-clockwise as the rescue pod went down, clockwise as it hauled someone up. A variety of faces and emotions up top in HD contrasted against the minors below in grainy digital video.

Every 20 minutes the pod showed up at each end of the hole bored to rescue the miners. At the bottom an excited minor either welcomed a rescuer or jumped aboard the rescue pod. Then 20 minutes later there was an emotional reunion with loved ones at the surface – each with its own back story.

The miners have made a pact to share the profits of their story and not to only tell the story starting after the first 17 days – only building the integer. Here’s hoping they make the most of their ordeal and their able to tell their story and benefit from it. Here’s hoping that other miners benefit from a closer look at their safety after this.

For now it felt good to have a disaster end in great news that the whole world could be a part of.

Apple always succeeds when they make it feel like their technology enables the best of human emotions and experience. It’s really hard to watch this video and at the end of the 60 seconds not feel like you need to buy the phone to feel this way again….. then you realize that you’d have to buy one for everyone you care about, and then you just watch the the video again.

Keep in mind:

• They don’t normally let you use your phone near medical equipment and she must have had a MyFi in her purse (at least in Canada a MiFi can be on the same account as your iPhone)
• Who’s going to help grandma and grandpa with their WAP2 password?
• Hotel WiFi has never worked that well.

Really good blog post by Shea Sylvia about her chilling experience with a FourSquare “stalker”.

foursquare.com/ is a web site and mobile app that lets users “check-in” at locations. The social side that many enjoy is being able to discover your friends at locations, make new ones, and bring exciting elements of the internet to your physical spaces. Also, there’s “badges” like “Mayor” or “bender” people can earn for checking-in at a location enough times. People like badges.

I’m not a foursquare user, but I feel like I know enough about the service to understand its appeal and its danger.

Sites like pleaserobme.com/ made a joke to highlight the danger is publicly telling people where you are, “because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home.” Their goal is to scare both users and services like enough to address this issue.

Shea Sylvia had a much more visceral scare. She’s OK, but the experience clearly had an impact on her: blog.sheasylvia.com/post/809428679

I also appreciate her acknowledgement that her mother will probably read her blog post. I know my mother’s the number one reader of my blog.

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Update: BinaryParadox ( twitter.com/BinaryParadox ) tipped me off about icanstalku.com — uses camera EXIF information posted to twitter posts to get the location of the person posting the picture.

Five issues that are worth protesting at the Toronto G20 meeting about that the rioters are preventing from being heard:

1. The environment, it’s exploitation and climate change and the global response it requires.
2. Sovereign debut levels….. of poor countries.
3. Maternal health AND family planning.
4. The rights of women and minorities in discriminatory cultures.
5. The many diseases that disproportionally affect poor countries.

Issues I couldn’t care less about include “Who’s streets are who’s” and who started the fire, you or the police cruiser.