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I was really frickin tired.

After taking a long red eye to Cuba (where the charter insisted on keeping the cabin lights on the entire flight) Jenner and I arrived at Varadero to a quiet and empty beach. We were soooo tired.

Cuba was kinda meh. You can read my review of Melia Las Americas at Trip Advisor. We booked through Jubilee Travel who highly recommended the resort. We paid a hefty premium to travel over New Years and it wasn’t even close to being worth it.

Pretty much the last time I will be using a travel agent, considering I can get it all done on my own, online, for cheaper.

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Regis and Kelly are having a Beautiful Baby contest. We just saw the promo and there are HUGE prizes. Over $100 grand and a cover shot on a magazine …

Not one to be shy from pimping out my son, I got all excited and then quickly deflated thinking it was probably for US babies only.

Well guess what? It’s not! The rules say Canadian babies are good to go, but the picture has to be taken in the last month. Here are couple of pics Jen took at the beginning of the month .. I had a hard time deciding. Which would you have entered?

#2 is the one I submitted. Deadline for entries is January 11, so we’ll find out in a couple of weeks if Le Grand Monsieur is cute enough!

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Mark Cuban is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks.

He made a lot of money in the first dot com boom of the late 90s when he sold his company, broadcast.com, to Yahoo! for nearly $6B. Not bad.

Since then he’s become an HD pioneer, one of the most outgoing sports owners in the business, and a contestant on Dancing with the Stars. He’s also a blogger - and a pretty good one.

His latest post is about effort. As we head into a new year, and we search ourselves for ways to improve our lives, change our ways and make things better - this is a piece of advice I will staple to my bulletin board:

In sports, the only thing a player or coach can truly control is effort. The same applies to business. The only thing any entrepreneur, salesperson or anyone in any position can control is their effort.

I had to kick myself in the ass and recommit to getting up early, staying up late and consuming everything I possibly could to get an edge. I had to commit to making the effort to be as productive as I possibly could. It meant making sure that every hour of the day that I could contact a customer was selling time and when customers were sleeping, I was doing things that prepared me to make more sales and to make my company better.

And finally, I had to make sure I wasn’t lying to myself about how hard I was working. It would have been easy to judge effort by how many hours a day passed by while I was at work. That’s the worst way to measure effort. Effort is measured by setting goals and getting results. What did i need to do to close this account. What did I need to do to win this segment of business. What did i need to do to understand this technology or that business better than anyone. What did I need to do to find an edge. Where does that edge come from and how was I going to get there.

The one thing in our business lives is effort. Either you make the commitment to get results or your don’t. [link]

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I lasted on MySpace for about a year and a half. I think Facebook’s lifespan will be much less than that.

I used to have 8 or more Scrabulous games going simultaneously, now I have 1. I used to be digging and looking for people and reading statii 20 times or more a day, now I go when I remember, which sometimes isnt even every day. It used to be the first page I opened, now I’m back to Google Reader.

Redesigning my blogs over the past two weeks has taken up my online time and I’m posting here instead of to Facebook many times a day.

Maybe it’s just the holidays, there isnt much ‘book action going on as people interact the old school way, but it’s lost a bit of the lustre for me.

I just read a blog predicting some trends for 2008 and Facebook came up.

Adults who didn’t grow up with social networking services experience burnout of being bitten by zombies after a few months, and many stop checking in four times per day. Those who went to school during the Facebook era continue to complain about all the old fogies (like me) polluting their sacred resting ground. They also continue to put radically inappropriate pictures of themselves online, blissfully unaware of the interviewing process. [link]

Ding! I’m over it and I still shake my head when I read the stuff that twentysomethings post on their profiles.

Clinton got a free pass on the weed because he was of the generation that did that sort of thing, in the same way Strom Thurmond got a pass on his racism and such.

Pretty soon naked girl-on-girl tongue wrestling pictures of a female president will be “No Big Deal” because, like I mean, who didnt do that when they were 17?

*Ahem* Miley Cyrus. *Ahem*

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You know about Recycling. Take your cans and put them in the blue box. Call 604-RECYCLE to get some tips and find a place near you that will chip your Christmas Tree.

You know about eCycling. Take your computers and electronics to places that can responsibly dispose of them, or turn them into useful things for other people.

But what about Freecycling? Have you heard of that one?

Imagine if everything on Craigslist was free - that’s freecycling.

Basically if you’ve got something you don’t want, you offer it up and see if someone else needs it. If they do, they come and pick it up, no money changes hands and all is happy in the world.

I mean, be honest, most of the stuff we try to dump on eBay or Craigslist is just taking up space in our place. The benefit to us is being rid of the item, it’s almost a greater value than getting $10 or $20 or $50 for a nasty old couch or bookcase.

There are thousands of people already Freecycling in BC and there’s probably a group near you.

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I recently chatted with Dan Kesselring from Panasonic to get some tips on how to buy a digital camera for my column in 24hrs.

Megapixel is where a lot of people get confused. It simply refers to the dots in the image.

If you have a 7 megapixel camera vs one with 10, you’re really only going to see the difference if you’re using the camera to make very large prints, say beyond 19×13. Dan says really 5 megapixels is enough for most of us who are just printing 4×6 or archiving family memories

When it comes to specific features, “image stabilization should always be top of mind,” says Kesselring. “Its almost become a generic term, but there are different types and optical is providing the best form of stabilization.” [link]

A test done by a German company is now coming out with similar information. More megapixels does not equal more better.

The study actually finds that picture quality over the last 3 years has actually decreased as megapixels have increased.

But why? Well, compact cameras are supposed to be small and reasonably priced. Therefore small image sensors, e.g. format 7.5 x 9.4 mm or 5.4 x 6.8 mm, are built into the cameras. To increase the pixel count, the sensor has to be divided into smaller and smaller pixels.

The result is a decrease in sensitivity of the camera and an increase in noise because the amount of light collected by a single pixel is smaller. [link]

So as the CCD sensors have to stay small for the point and shoot, they have a harder time getting the larger amounts of data processed properly. The study found the optimum relationship between CCD and MP comes in at 6 Megapixels.

That’s got to be the reason so many more people are stepping up to Digital SLR. Me? I’m not quite ready, so I picked up the Panasonic FZ-18 instead. It’s $500 list price, but I managed to grab it on sale for $250 at Amazon.com. What a steal!

Check out some of the pictures I’ve been able to grab with it:

Since the FZ18 is kind of a “hybrid” between a DSLR and a point and shoot, it’s offering me the chance to just grab it and take a picture, or work with the settings for something more artistic.

For that sunset shot, I just pointed and clicked. Nice.

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On the left, me and Alanis Morissette at the Automotive Pool Hall before she did a show at the Starfish Room (RIP) in the summer of 1995.

On the right, Alanis Morissette in the new issue of Allure magazine.

Girl cleans up nice. She has a new disc coming in the spring and so she’s heading out on the road to promote it and will be doing mucho media in advance of the release.

95Crave is your ticket to Alanis and Matchbox 20 on March 9 at GM Place, next chance to win tix is January 20.

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Miss 604’s latest flickr pic reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for a while now.

With the trend towards canvas and reusable bags for groceries and assorted shoppingness, is it really better for the planet?

I mean, we already have all these plastic bag plants set up and producing the stuff we’re using at WalMart, The Bay, Canadian Tire etc. Now that we’ve decided it’s trendy, fashionable and sensible to switch over to canvas, how many manufacturing plants are going to have to be built to sate our need for reusable baggage? And are the gasses and crap spewed by these canvas bag makers any better for dear Mother Nature than the plastic people?

If you’re making the switch, good for you. But don’t think you need just one canvas bag - you need lots. There’s trendy bags coming out all the time. That generic green Save-On bag won’t cut it next season, oh no! So you’ll need a new one.

And God forbid you might forget your bags. If that happens, instead of being a bad plastic bag person, you get another canvas one, of course. Pretty soon you have 45 canvas bags filling up your broom closet.

So - do we really need canvas bags, or is the status quo good to go?

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Back in September, I interviewed John Chow for 24hrs newspaper. John is one of the people I pay attention to on the internet to see how things get done.

John took his blog and monetized it - you know, just for fun.

In a year he took monthly revenue from $300ish to over $25,000.

Not bad.

Want to know how John Chow makes money online? Read my exclusive interview with him.

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