Dave Duncan

Okay, so yesterday’s official launch of Radar was pretty exciting, but the day only got more surreal.  Despite being told that the average Toronto homebuyer bids on 5 houses before they land one, we won out on our second!  That’s right, just after dinner yesterday, we bought a house.

We’ve been looking casually for nearly a year, but we got serious a few weeks ago and bid on a house near Woodbine and Danforth.  It seemed perfect and we barely lost out on it.  Needless to say, we were crushed (as are most first-time buyers when they don’t land the first place they want).  Well, then we saw “our house” and it was WAY better and we were scared how even more crushed we would be if we didn’t get it.  Alas, we did.

We’ll be moving in about 30 days to the far-flung region of East York where we’ll be walking distance from the O’Connor Bowl and the Peek Freans factory.  We have a war-time house with two bedrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen and one bath.  There’s a partially finished basement that I hope to fully finish soon enough, lots of parking in the driveway and a ridiculously huge yard for Mojo to play.  I mean, it’s suburbia huge.  It’s even in a quiet little neighbourhood where you forget you’re in the city.

It’s everything we wanted and more, which is especially nuts considering we never thought we could get a yard, parking and room to grow in a Toronto house without spending millions of dollars.

Stay tuned for photos and I’m sure you’ll all be invited over for drinks (or to help mount drywall to the ceiling in our basement) soon enough.

What a morning! Aside from making huge strides in our neverending search for the perfect house, today has also been a professional milestone a few months in the making.  As of about 8am, big time design and communication officially launched Radar.  That means that all my blood, sweat and tears from the last few months is now officially out there for everyone to see.

If you click on the Radar link above, you can finally see what all the buzz is about.  At the bottom of the main page, you can click to see a short (8 minute) video of our demo, narrated by yours truly.  It was fun to do, although I do say ‘handy dandy’ twice, which is two times too many.

To mark the launch, we wrote up and released an official press release (which you can read on our site here) and we’ve already received some media attention from Techvibes, a leading-edge Canadian technology community portal. The article is entitled “Direct Marketing for Social Media” and we’re really happy with how it turned out after our interview a few weeks ago where we gave our demo.

I encourage everyone to check it out, and if you (or someone you know) might be interested in more information, or an on-site demo, let me know. We’d love for everyone to spread the word, and we would really appreciate your help.

So, with all that going on, and a beautiful and sunny day where the temperature is expected to hit about 14 degrees, it’s safe to say that I’m more than a little giddy.  I’m practically beside myself.  Today is a very good day.

Last night, Twitter rolled over a pretty significant milestone when it announced the sending of the 10 billionth Tweet.  I’m sure it’ll come out today who exactly posted it what it was, but I’m guessing they won’t release stats on how many of those Tweets were about what people were currently eating, wearing or that they were going to bed.

Since I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve seen the best and worst of what it has to offer in terms of sharing, and that’s about as wide a spectrum as you can imagine.  Aside from following some retailers to keep track of deals, I also love following funny people to get a few laughs mixed into my Twitter stream.  I don’t really use it for news or updates, but I also like following people who are engaged with social media for useful links to stories of interest or general information sharing from people who have been to trade shows or events.

I’ve often been asked by people who know I’m on Twitter “Is it useful?  Should I sign up?” and that’s a tricky question to answer.  It’s a really ‘noisy’ system.  You get a lot of information thrown at you, and you have to be ready to scan through it and sort out what you actually care to read, so it’s not for everyone, but if you’re looking for laughs, it’s a good place to start.

For just a little timely comparison how big 10 billion Tweets is, just keep in mind that it’s 5.4 times our annual defecit this year, which will be reduced to a mere 1.4 billion by 2014*.  Good times.  And yes, I did just turn this into a political rant.

*This number is dependent on massive growth in our economy in that time period and further economic and job losses were not accounted for.  This number was provided by the federal government and I take no responsibility for us hitting anything even close to this number because it’ll never happen. I suggest we all hunker down because the next few years will be a VERY bumpy ride.

Yesterday’s throne speech was a lot of things but exciting and inspirational it was not.  After a few months hard at not work, one would expect lots of new ideas and a bold new strategy for the new government, at least that’s what we were promised.  What do we get instead?  Same old, same old.

Oh, but wait.  You’re going to have to learn a gender neutral national anthem.  This has caused a bit of an uproar, but it’s not a big deal at all.  You see, the original English version was gender neutral and we changed it back during the First World War. You can read all about it here.  It’s not the scandalous thing everyone thinks it is, but I’m sure our legislators have better things to do with their time, like resurrecting important legislation killed by the prorogue.

As boring as yesterday was, I can hardly wait for this afternoon’s budget.  It should be good times, and by good times, I mean massive defecit and no new taxes (just things I have to pay extra for).  Sigh.

Can you believe that Roll Up the Rim to Win (hereby referred to as RUTR) has been on for a few days and I haven’t bought a single coffee?  I’ll have to do something about that.  My usual coffee spots for the last few weeks have been places with free Wi-Fi where I can give product demos to my new best friends.  Still, it’s worth the trip to Timmy’s.

That also means that I’ll have to clean up my RUTR tracking sheet for those of you out there who want to play along and see what your winning stats are.  In the meantime, just jot them down on a piece of paper and I’ll have something later this week.  I’m guessing that Jon is the only one eagerly anticipating it, but I can’t be entirely sure.

In other news, we put an offer on a house on the weekend and were just thousands of dollars shy of having our first home.  It was kind of a kick in the pants to be so close and not get it, but it was also comforting that our bidding tactics got us into a close second place, so we will go forward with the same strategy.  So many people bid on dozens of houses before they get their dream home, and this was our first, so we’re just playing the game.

Too bad RUTR doesn’t have houses you can win, just Toyotas with awesome acceleration.

Sorry about the lack of posting yesterday.  I had to get Karim out of the country (he was cheering for the US in hockey and people were starting to find out) and then had some big meetings for big time.  All in all, it was a pretty awesome day and I hope I’ll have more to say about it shortly.

What a weekend!  Canada capped off their gold rush at the Olympics in legendary form with a nailbiting win by the men’s hockey team over the US (I don’t even know why I mentioned this as every one of you were probably on the verge of a heart attack while watching it like I was) and the Olympics finally drew to a close.  For all their problems, both on-site and in broadcasting, it was an exciting time and normal TV will never fill the void left by all the fun.

I watched a bit of the closing ceremonies, but missed all the funny stuff.  From what I’ve read online, all the tongue-in-cheek Canadianess went over really well and made for a great show.  Maybe I’ll see if I can find it online and watch it later.

Did we end up owning the podium?  I guess that’s debatable, but it’s safe to say that we’ve set the bar pretty high for gold medals for any nation, let alone a host nation. I guess we’ll just have to wait four years to see what Russia can do in 2014.  Good luck!

Yeah, I’m not going to blog today. That is all.

According to reliable sources, Southern Ontario is set to get whacked with another ‘big’ winter storm which could see 15 centimeters of snow hit Toronto by tomorrow morning.  While that’s hardly a big storm, that much snow while make things pretty sloppy out there on roads and highways; the very roads and highways I’ll be driving on today.

For reasons that barely make sense and require no explanation in here, Karim and I are heading to Brantford today and I fully plan on tracking down a member of the Gretzky family and high-fiving them.  My plan is not the reason we’re going, but if you’re driving to Brantford on a blustery, wintery day, you might as well have some fun, right?  Right.

I guess I could just as equally try to track down a member of the Graham Bell family and give one of them a high-five too, but I’m not sure if any of Alexander’s family is still down there.  Are there any other famous Brantfordians that I’m forgetting?