Well Questrade is a company that I am a real paying customer of, and due to their disastrous decision I have to cancel my account with them. Questrade for those that don't know is an online discount stock brokerage.

They recently announced a new upgraded (and much needed) online trading platform called IQ. I signed up to be transitioned to this new platform and received the email yesterday saying that I would have access to it on Monday. While reading more of the details, I realized that this actually would be the end of my relationship with Questrade.

The key section of the email stated:

First, make sure you have Microsoft Silverlight (the technology that powers IQ). If you don't have it yet, download it here and follow the installation instructions. Then, simply refresh your browser and you're ready to trade.

This is a real problem for me, as the chair that I sit on a 9-5 Monday-Friday basis does NOT have access to the Silverlight plugin. At my desk with me, I have a Linux based PC and an Apple iPhone. There is a Silverlight plugin for Linux called Moonlight, but I have never had it successfully load a Silverlight app. No mobile device (Android/iOS/Windows Mobile) can run Silverlight apps.

So I read further in the email...

If you can't download Silverlight, use IQ Edge.

This sounds promising... Stripped down HTML version of the trading platform? Nope its a Windows executable, still not a cross platform solution.

So this application that they have created runs only on Windows and OS X web browsers. Did Questrade miss the last 5 years, and the web dominance of the Android and iOS platforms as web devices?

Maybe they forgot to talk to Microsoft, and the impending doom of Silverlight as a platform:

Plug-ins were important early on in the web’s history. But the web has come a long way since then with HTML5. Providing compatibility with legacy plug-in technologies would detract from, rather than improve, the consumer experience of browsing in the Metro style UI.

-Dean Hachamovitch - the Microsoft executive who leads the Internet Explorer team

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/14/metro-style-browsing-and-plug-in-free-html5.aspx

A quick browse of the web yields that Silverlight may in fact be sunset, with Silverlight 5 being the final version:

Microsoft is poised to release to manufacturing Silverlight 5. There’s word from some of my contacts that this might be the last major release of Silverlight, but Microsoft isn’t confirming or denying.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/will-there-be-a-silverlight-6-and-does-it-matter/11180?tag=mantle_skin;content

Questrade also told me in this email that my existing trading platform would be unavailable today at 4pm. I phoned and cancelled the transition, which apparently will only buy me a month of time. They plan to close all of their other trading platforms and only support the Windows only (OK it also runs very poorly on OS X) IQ trading platform as of May 14th 2012.

So I have a few options. I can get IT at my company to create me a Windows VM so that I can run Silverlight I would feel mildly bad wasting company resources due to my association with such a short-sighted company as Questrade, or search for a new online brokerage house that understands the web, and the fact that not all web browsers run on Windows PCs.

Below I will go into a little detail about what I found, and how it works, and how these things interact.

Tracking Weight (Withings.com - $159.99 for scale)

One of the best tips I have had to improve weight loss, is to weigh yourself regularly and record the progress. Enter the ultimate geek scale, The Withings Scale.

The scale is not cheap at $159.99 but it certainly is a great product. It is wifi connected, and it automatically records your weight and provides tools to graph it and produce reports. Setup was incredibly easy, simply connect it via USB to a computer with an internet connection and it took care of the rest. It can track up to 8 people, and has been entirely problem free for the 2 months I have had it. There are mobile apps for Android, iPhone/iPad as well as a web version. These apps all some to have some quirks that I wish they would work out, but they seem to be 4/5. Beyond standard weight, the scale also tracks Body Fat% and BMI. For athletes who have a tough time getting accurate body fat readings, there are various different models that can be used for tracking body composition.

Withings Scale

Tracking Fitness (Endomondo.com - Free)

I have spent this summer doing a lot of biking. Again it is nice to chart and track this information; to do this I have been using an iPhone (and just about any mobile you have) app called Endomondo. This is a free GPS app, that tracks your routes (and calories), in real time while you work out. The usage is simple, you start the app, enter type of workout you are doing, wait for a strong GPS signal and press start. After that you can throw your phone in your pocket or backpack and you are good to go. For the most part it has been very accurate in terms of tracking my location.

In order for it to track your calories it needs to know your weight. Thankfully Endomondo recently announced integration with Withings so your weight is automatically updated in your profile.

Endomondo also offers a variety of social features that allow you track friends, send live pep talks (you can send a message to someone who is working out and it will be read out to them through text-to-speech), and there are various messages.

A sample workout:

Putting It All Together (DailyBurn.com - Free)

To put it all together, I needed something that would track my calorie input, calories burned, and my dietary goals. For this I have been using DailyBurn. It is a general health and wellness site, that does a decent, but not fabulous job at making it easy to track calories. It has mobile apps, and a good webpage that allow you to enter the foods that you eat to track your calories consumed. It has a very extensive database of woods with nutritional information, which makes it pretty easy to track all the calories you consume. For any foods that are lacking, you do have the ability to add your own foods.

As well as tracking your calories, you also enter in your weight, and desired weight and activity level and it will give you caloric consumption goals and a time frame to reach your goal weight. This allows you to know how you are doing in regards to eating the right amount of calories. Thankfully DailyBurn is linked to Withings so your weight is automatically updated.

DailyBurn - Calories Consumed

Beyond daily activity you can also enter exercises that you have done and calories burned. If you don't know how many calories you have burned it will estimate. Unfortunately there is currently no integration between DailyBurn and Endomondo, which is my biggest current functionality gap.

Like Endomondo there are various social features including challenges. One of the nice features of the challenges are that a good number are Everyone Wins challenges. Such as the goal is to lose 10lbs, and everyone who loses 10lbs wins, not just the first person.

Putting these 3 apps together has made it very easy to stay motivated in my fitness endeavors, not to mention tracking my progress towards my fitness goals. For anyone eager to chart and track their workouts and fitness I highly recommend this trifecta of tools.

Sniping involves setting up a software program that will automatically bid on an item at the last second (usually 5-10 seconds remaining), making it very difficult for someone else to get in at the last second and outbid you. It was the wonderful side effect of keeping you from upping your bid to a level you don't want because someone outbid you...

There are tons on the market but this one is free and has worked well for me: Gixen

They have some pay services, but the free has worked just fine for me. I also like that it doesn't require you leaving your computer on with a program running (like some of the other services I have tried).

It is super convenient that when I would add a bookmark to my browser at work, it was instantly on my computer at home. One of the other features that I absolutely loved was that all of my bookmarks also appeared in a read-only folder in my Google Docs. This was super convenient if I was on a computer that was not synced to my google account.

Well when Google updated the docs app with Collections as opposed to Folders we somehow lost access to all of the bookmarks. For something that is synced in the cloud, I absolutely need browser based access to it. So where to get it now? If someone has a good way to get browser based access to my bookmarks please let me know.

If it's an accidental hit that could be have been avoided, just because you're stupid and you just skated the wrong way, but you hit the guy, fine, 20-game suspension, If it's truly accidental and the guy just ran into you, you know what? Give the guy a break. But, if it's a deliberate hit you should not be in any game of hockey.

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/sports/Melnyk+wants+head+hunters+life/4446520/story.html#ixzz1Gs90NvNu

Well the now hypocritical Melnyk has one of the offenders, who under his terms should be banned for life, on his own team! Witness two seperate incidents of Chris Neil head hunting:

Well Melnyk should practice what he preaches. If he honestly believes that this sort of action should result in a lifetime ban, then he should at a minimum trade/waive Neil and say that he won't tolerate it on his team.

A Hill in Spain from chris akrigg on Vimeo.

Google search is smart enough to provide such settings.

These settings are browser instance specific, not account specific. This means I can have different settings at work and at home. What I need is to have this kind of filtering on Google Reader; either to have it intelligently filter items, or to have the ability to mark certain blogs as inappropriate.

Currently I have a NSFW folder in reader, and I put blogs that always or occasionally have questionable content in that folder. I then avoid those items while on public computers or at work. It would be much less painful if that folder just wasn't present on that browser. And they would only show up on my home machine. It would prevent accidental clicks, or curiosity from opening those items.

Google Reader - Sent To...

Google Reader added a little send to link that gives you the option to send the article to various different services, including twitter. This method sucks! I am not a fan of the fact that it opens a new window. It took about a day to eliminate this option.

Use An Auto Delivery Mechanism On Your Shared Items Feed

I used this for a little while. It worked pretty well, things that I shared made their way to twitter. It was clean simple and very convenient. What I found was that I didn't want to tweet everything that I shared in Google Reader. I would end up with tweets that looked like:

photo... <some linke>

Ugly tweets, with things that weren't always of interest to my twitter followers. As well I have 3 separate twitter accounts to keep things of interest separate from the individual followers, this really didn't allow for posting to separate twitter accounts.

Final Solution

This final solution is a modification of the of the previous option.

Step 1: Create a tag for each twitter account. Tweet is the tag I use for my main twitter account.

Step 2: Share the feed for that tag. This is done in Reader Settings > Folders and Tags. Just click on the little RSS icon next to the feed to make it public.

Step 3: Get the feed from the tag public site. Just click View public page in the settings and get the feed url from there.

Step 4: Use one of the many feed propagators to auto tweet items from your tag feed. I have gone through quite a few: TwitterFeed.com, FeedBurner.com (there is a socialize feature buried in the settings) before settling on dlvr.it. dlvr.it is by far the most reliable of the three that I have tried.

If you repeat these steps for each of your twitter accounts you can easily tweet items to a specific twitter account.

Tagging items is very quick. When an item is open just hit 't' to open the tag box, then type in the tag corresponding to the twitter account you want to tweet it to.

The thing that would make me buy an iPad immediately, no questions asked is a video player.

Here is the scenario:

I coach ski racing and one of the most valuable tools (if not THE) most valuable tool is video. I shoot tons of video, and frequently I want to be able to show athletes video pretty much on the spot. Hooking the camcorder up to a TV/monitor is not always an option, but carrying around an iPad could be. Right now, we watch too much video on the 2.7" camcorder screen.

What I would love is an app which would read off the SD card from the camcorder and be able to play/pause (maybe slowmo) the video.

The challenge is that the high-def AVCHD footage from the camcorder is a challenge for even laptops to handle. I assume that the camcorder can handle it due to on-board processing, I doubt that the iPad has the horse power to watch un-edited AVCHD.

Another option would be if I could find a way to use the iPad or other tablet as a monitor for HDMI input, but that isn't an option on the current version.

There seemed to be light at the end of the tunnel in the iPad VLC player. But alas it will not play AVCHD.

Maybe I should look at switching camcorders to one that records to MPEG-4 or something of the like, even though it seems they are rare.

Leasing It

When I leased the car there was a deal where you could reduce the interest you paid on the lease by putting down multiple damage deposits. What happened was for every damage deposit you put down they would reduce the interest by 0.15%. Doesn't sound like much, but for putting down $3500 in damage deposit, I lowered the interest on the car by 1.5%, which saved me $38/month. If you do the calculation on that amount, that means that I was getting about 13% interest on my $3500.

Anyway, since I actually wanted the damage deposit back, I negotiated something called the Mazda WearCare which allows you to return the car with up to $3500 of damage without being charged for it.

Returning The Car

I was worried that even with the WearCare that I was going to run into issues with some dents to the car. I spoke with a neighbour who happens to work for Mazda, and he had a quick look and concluded that I would have no problems. I got the damage report from the lease inspection and it concluded that there was $1496 of damage to the car. Sounded like I was in good shape. A few days later I get a check from Mazda for $2,859.15 some $640.15 less than I expected. I quickly phoned Mazda and was told that it was due to an improper repair. So what was the repair... well remember this: INCIDENT!? After a few calls to Mazda and having them say that if I had just not had it repaired by the towing company IT WOULD BE COVERED, I finally got them to make some kind of concession.

While they wouldn't refund the entire $640, they were willing to put in half. For a difference of $320, I am more than happy to avoid having to go to small claims court. I will on the other hand be phoning the towing company to attempt to get some more cash out of them. If I can find some time and energy, and actually feel like thinking about this again, I will post to let everyone know how this ends.