We spent a portion of the day keeping my little brother company at work - from noon until five. For those who know what our usual Christmas Day is like could only imagine the length of time it took us to complete.

Side Note: I’m writing this post on my new Aluminum Macbook. Sexy it is - but more to come on that later.

Happy Holidays!

I’m not a fan of Mountain Dew, but this made me want to go out and give it another shot.

Check back.

The idea and a pitch will be put up on my “Current Projects” page this evening. However, iBranded needs an identity. It needs a logo and an image.

This post is looking for just that. If you’re reading this and are interested in designing a logo, know someone who does identity creation, or any other connection to a designer please let me know. Depending on the amount of work, payment can be worked out either as a up front or a percentage.

Using Facebook as a networking tool, whether it be for prospecting or finding potential job options is very beneficial. It connects you with many people you may not have time or the resources to connect with otherwise. However, at the same time you don’t necessarily want your employer or co-worker to know what you did last weekend; and what happens if a friend “tags” you in a not-so-flattering picture?

So how do you let people find you on facebook and provide valuable information to your friends all while maintaining a good level of privacy? I recently had this conversation with a friend that actually sparked this discussion. I have come up with some recommendations to get the most use out of facebook while protecting your privacy. Take them as you will, and do provide feedback if you want to discuss.

1. Firstly, limit your profile. You don’t want everyone with an email address to find out all about you. Unfortunately a lot of people stop here thinking their privacy is safe.

2. Remove your public friend listing. It’s one thing to limit your profile, but if I am trying to gather more information on you and your friends are available for me to search through, I can find a friend that doesn’t have their profile limited and search for photos and information on you that way. On this note, make the only thing available on your public listing your name, network, and picture. Have the only option to contact you to send you a message or add you as a friend.

3. Choose profile pictures wisely. A professional picture, a nice family photo, etc. Something you’d want the world to see you in. If you have past inappropriate profile pictures in your “profile picture” album, remove them from that album.

4. Manage your photos. Choose who sees your tagged pictures. I recommend changing your photo settings to allow no one to see your tagged pictures. You can allow groups of people, such as family and close friends to see your tagged images if you wish, but for the most part you don’t want everyone seeing the 1487 pictures you might have of you and your friends.

5. Minimize clutter, and add relevant information. Remove the “what porn star am I” application and clean up your profile. This part can be customized depending on the amount of information you feel comfortable providing. But if you’re using it for networking you may want to increase the amount of information. I have added the “write something about yourself”, my contact information including phone, email, and address. A few quotes, interests, groups, etc. are okay just try to remember to minimize clutter.

6. Use groupings. You can limit your profile based on groups of friend you create. For example, if you don’t wish your co-workers to see certain information, you can limit that in the privacy settings by creating a group for your co-workers.

7. Use status updates. I know they can get annoying, so don’t update them every couple hours. But if you’re attending a networking event or giving a speech somewhere update your status to let people know. Who knows, maybe someone you didn’t really know is attending the same event and makes contact.

8. Add friends. Add as many people as you can. Make new connections. Introduce yourself to friends of friends. Use the “People you may know” tool to see who can be added to your friends. The more people you have contact with, the larger your network can grow.

That pretty much wraps up my recommendations. Take it as you will, but I think it’s a good start to successfully networking with Facebook while maintaining a good level of privacy. If you have any other recommendations or problems with my reasoning feel free to let me know. Cheers to Chris Kolmatycki for the discussion on this topic and sparking the interest for it to be written.

Tuesday’s are the busiest day of the week for me. I have class pretty much all day and because of this had a chance to talk to a lot of students as to if and where they were voting. I was a little disappointed to find over half the people I asked were not voting and didn’t find it important. I noticed two main reasons.

A) It’s too much of a hassle.

Yes, we’re students. We live busy lives and are great at coming up with reasons to procrastinate and push things off. But it took me all of 2 minutes to vote. I showed up, I handed in my drivers license, I even needed to show a copy of my lease, and then I voted. 2 minutes. It was no hassle, especially considering this is the government that will be in power when I am perhaps deciding on where to live and work, and starting a family. It’s worth that extra 2 minutes.

B) None of the candidates convinced me they care about students.

Many people complained that there was no solid plan to help students. Lets face it, the parties are all trying their damnedest to get into office by gathering as many votes as they can. In the 2000 election, 75% of eligible voters between 18 and 24 didn’t vote. 3 out of 4 people within the age of students didn’t vote. Do you really wonder why they didn’t develop a strategy to gain our vote? If we build they will come. We can’t rely on them to come for us to build. If we vote, they will notice, and our demographic will have more weight in the elections.

That’s my rant on the elections. Bottom line: Vote.

The day started early with a 5 minute presentation by each of the 10 employers present at the event: Sunlife Financial, Frito Lay, Pepsi Bottling Group, Xerox, Bell Aliant, Fastenal, Enterprise, Canadian Tire, Labatt, and Investors Group. After the employers were wrapped up the students had the opportunity to take the floor. We each had 1 minute to give an “elevator pitch” or a mini speech aimed to essentially stand out amongst the other 25 or so students.

I was fortunate enough to be selected to interview with every company, which meant a fun but busy day. It was a great opportunity to meet some wonderful people from a variety of organizations and industries. It’s interesting what a day can do to change your perspective on your career path. I must say that Sunlife had a wonderful 5 minute presentation, and combined with a great interview with Suzanne from Sunlife has completely changed my opinions on financial planning as a career option.

I would recommend this event to any student. It’s a great way to meet some key people and to build on your job searching efforts. Big thanks to Management Career Services for organizing the event.

The idea of it is that the ignition of the car will not work until the driver passes a built in breathalyzer test (see the image below). The program comes into effect on September 30th, and for most of the people with an alcohol-related driving offense, it will be the only way to regain their driving rights. Personally I think it’s a great idea. The cost of entering the program is upwards of $2,000 but to regain a license, I’m sure many will be willing to pay.

It’s claimed to be the first of its kind in Canada, and is a great step in keeping our roads safer. As long as the government doesn’t try to force the program on the general public I think it will be a success. I’m sure someone will ask the question, “well if it’s working for these guys, we should force it on everyone and eliminate drunk driving.” That’s not an issue for this post though.

Will be kind of cool to see how things play out and how successful they are with it though, something to keep an eye on for sure.

For more info check out the alcohol ignition interlock site.

While we’re watching McCain commercials, lets travel back to 1997 with one of their first commercials for this ever so lovely cake.

Since I’m back in school mode, expect more blogging.

My old Samsung phone broke in half over the weekend - although it still works, it’s quite hard to hold up to my ear - and since I was no longer in contract with Telus I thought it was time to get a new phone. I qualified for the free BB Pearl promotion and the great Student Fav 10 + data plan was only an extra $5 over what I was already paying for my last plan, so the transition was a no brainer.

This is day two with the phone and I haven’t really had a lot of time to play around with it, but I must say so far I’m definitely enjoying it. I commented on a previous post about the iPhone, how I would not like to be able to check email on the fly, thinking I would be too tied up. Well, I was so wrong. Being able to check my email on the fly is so convenient and I don’t feel out of touch when I’m on campus, needing to get home to make sure I didn’t miss any important emails.

Hopefully it will last as long as the Samsung did, that thing treated me very well.