So evidently I’ve been nominated for a Best of 604 Award in the Best Personal Site or Blog category. Also, ChangeEverything.ca has been nominated in the Best Group Blog or Multi-Author Site category.
If you have a second, and it really only takes a second, please consider voting for azaroff.com here and for ChangeEverything.ca here.
Also, hat tip to Tony, a friend from elementary and high school whom I’m now connected to on Facebook for letting me know. Thanks Tony!
September and October were a whirlwind of speaking engagements. I enjoyed them all tremendously, but I’m glad those two months are behind me. I recently received my scores for some of my speaking engagements.
For the International Association of Business Communicators’ Communicating Social Responsibility Conference conference my session received an average rating of 4.5 out of 5. The rating for the overall conference was 4.2 so I’m pleased to have surpassed the average. It was a great conference, and nice to speak to a group of people focusing on CSR in their business.
Net.Finance East took place this past October in New York. It was a great conference, full of great presentations and great participants asking insightful questions. At this conference my average rating on a scale of 1-5 was 4.76 for content and 4.81 for presentation. Those may be my highest marks ever (including high school).
It’s extremely rewarding to be able to speak at these conferences, share my knowledge, learn a whole lot from the other presenters and attendees and get to bring that knowledge back to Vancity. To be this well received is truly icing on the cake.
2009 will have a lot less speaking engagements for me. Time to focus on my real work at Vancity. I love my job and want to spend more time doing that and not travelling around. I’ll be at a few, including The Finance 2.0 Summit taking place in New York January 26-27, 2009 and I’ll be back for another run at the main Net.Finance West taking place April 20-23, 2009 in Las Vegas.
See you there.
I’ve been waiting for the MacBook refresh for a few months now, so I was paying close attention when they were released on Tuesday. I bought one on Friday, and am very happy to be writing this post on my new machine.
About a year ago I bought the new iMac when that line was refreshed. A few months later I bought a eyeTV hybrid so I could use our 24″ iMac as our TV and PVR. But I never hooked it up because we didn’t have an extra computer to use.
Until now.
So I moved my iMac upstairs and pulled down our circa ’94 television and set up my iMac in its place. Took about five minutes and it was up and running. So easy. Now we truly have an integrated entertainment centre, with our TV, music, Internet, photos and homemade movies all on one system. I can use our spare firewire drive for both our Time Machine, as well as our PVR to record our favourite shows (we have still been using a VCR, so we’re slightly behind the times).
Now we have our iMac in our home office and bought a cheap extra monitor to get a little more screen space (my only gripe is that the new Mini DisplayPort adaptor for external monitors wasn’t released to Apple Stores at the same time, so I have to wait before I can hook up the monitor). Bought a wireless Apple keyboard and mouse for the iMac just to round things off.
It’s a big upgrade, but it all seems to be running extremely well. I’m not much of an early adopter and have never had a Mac laptop before, nor more than one computer at a time. Hard to justify the expense, but we’re pleased with the outcome.
I can already tell that my son Ivan will grow up with an entirely different sense of TV and movies than my wife or I did. YouTube, television, DVDs, our home movies… what’s the difference anymore – it all comes through the same box. He doesn’t understand why television can’t play on his timeframe, but on its own schedule. True enough.