So to kick it off, here's my friend's older brother, Dominic Graham, who has recently started posting his acoustic tunes to YouTube. All of the songs so far on his YouTube channel have been written and performed by him. If you like relaxed acoustic tunes with meaningful lyrics, you should enjoy his tracks.

I decided to take his song "Only Love" and make a simple slide show vid using images from my friend RobotRogue's Flickr stream and make a bit of a story out of it, kinda. The 2 main reasons I decided to make the video was to give the listener something to look at while enjoying his music as well as I wanted to try out a FREE online video editor called JayCut.

The JayCut interface is easy to use and straight forward and allows the final video to be saved to your PC, sent to a mobile device or sent directly to YouTube. Using JayCut for the first time, I opted for downloading the completed video first so I cannot tell how well it works for the YouTube export or for mobile devices. It took the site about 10 minutes to render the final product and email me the download link. If you need to do quick basic edits or put a song to your recent vacation pictures and videos, you should give this a try as it is online based and requires no installation. If you need more features and controls, you may want to look for an editor you can install on your PC.

You can view the final result below or watch it on YouTube.

Share it with all your friends and family as well as let me know what you think. If you know of an artist that should be highlighted, leave me a comment or send me a message.

Yesterday, we woke up and once again witnessed the power of Mother Nature with the tragic M8.9 earthquake in Japan followed by numerous M5+ aftershocks. Keep in mind, each time the Magnitude scale goes up by 1, that is 10 times stronger. This was over 800 times more powerful than the Haiti quake (but deeper and off coast). This in turn caused a very powerful tsunami that raced across the Pacific ocean at over 800km/h. Japan took the full brunt of the wave quoted at over 10 meters high and decimating complete villages in the blink of the eye and barely losing any speed.

Luckily, I did not see any reports of damage for B.C coast but Oregon and California did have some damage and one person swept out to see trying to take pictures. Sorry but I need to put my two bits in on this. If you're dumb enough to go down and try and get pics of a TSUNAMI, at least ensure you are in a safe location. This way, you'll save others having to risk their lives to go rescue your ignorance and stupidity. You'd have thought after seeing footage of the previous large tsunami and how devastating and quickly it moves, people would learn not to go intentionally to the waters edge for a photo op. Remember, you cannot move faster than the wave and it only takes around half a foot of water to float a car. Okay? Let's move on.

Today, Japan's natural disaster continued but this time with much more potential global ramifications. During the initial quake, one of the nuclear plant's cooling systems that sustained damage in the quake has been leaking coolant. Parts of the No. 1 reactor's nuclear fuel rods were briefly exposed to the air after cooling water levels dropped. This is what keeps the reaction in check instead of send temperatures up into the thousands of degrees Celsius range and causing a possible meltdown like Chernobyl. Today one part blew up. This is the before/after of what blew up and some video.

Now at this point, I am starting to get worried but then my coffee kicks in. My brain reminds me, it is the news, do some checking because death and destruction sells and they tend to leave out the lighter side of the info (sometimes). We don't need any more panic and thanks to the Australian Radioactive Service's image of projected fall out you see above, it does not get my hopes up. ಠ_ಠ

Checking the jet stream, shows it is currently over the southern part of British Columbia. This is not how I wanted to start my Saturday. Time to do some more checking.

Luckily, this type of reactor is a light water reactor. Loss of coolant means a temperature rise, but it also stops the reaction. Naoto Sekimura, a professor at the University of Tokyo was quoted:

"Even in the worst-case scenario, that would mean some radioactive leakage and equipment damage, but not an explosion. If venting is done carefully, there will be little leakage. Certainly not beyond the 3 km radius."

So hopefully the scientists are correct and we will just have to wait and see what happens. I assume if there was an explosion on the actual reactor, that can still cause radiation fall out but if they keep the temperatures in check, this should be contained to a couple kilometers around the site. If you are trying to find someone in Japan or get more information, you can go to Google's Crisis Response page. You can also search for people on Google's Person Finder service. If you need more news and footage, here is a good page with links to live streaming and real time updates.

What does this mean? Well, if you use Facebook over WiFi or in public hot spots, you can now use a https:// secure connection instead of http:// unsecured connection to get an encrypted connection to most Facebook pages just like when you log into your bank.

I am not going into the details as they are graphic but to give you an idea, the employee ran out of ammunition at one point and had to use a knife to kill an aggressive dog. Marcie Moriarty, general manager for cruelty investigations with the BC SPCA told CTVBC it's technically legal to shoot an animal, as long as it dies instantly. But continued to state "That most certainly did not happen in this instance". Moriarty added that lethal injections supervised by a veterinarian would have been the more humane way to cull the dogs. Sadly, that did not happen either.

Now a lot of people have jumped the gun and to make an informed decision, you need all the information. The guy that had to carry out this gruesome task went to the SPCA twice for adoption assistance for the dogs and was denied assistance both times. Once before the slaughter in question and a second request in September of 2010 as they still had more dogs. The SPCA admitted they didn’t realize the dogs would be brutally slaughtered and would have stepped in had they known. But instead, they told the man the dogs would not make good pets and were not adoptable. The following is from the Vancouver Sun article explaining the second request plea for help to Senior animal protection officer Eileen Drever:

The second time the man approached the SPCA was through an email dated Sept. 10, 2010 — nearly five months after the cull — asking if the SPCA would take some of the remaining dogs in the pack, which before the cull numbered about 350.

The Sun has obtained a copy of that documentation, which states: “I understood from Joey that there were to be some dogs going to you for adoption? Is that indeed happening? Or should I just show up with a truck full so they can get off the chain and get some attention, exercise, stop fighting, etc....I am happy to bring some down to stop cruelty they are going through here.

“This is me as a bystander (I am off due to injury to both arms). I am the only one who has made any effort to move dogs. We still have almost 60 dogs too many, and a new litter of pups to be given away. Can you please give me a call so I know something can be done. It’s breaking my heart.”

Drever replied five days later, apologizing for taking so long to respond as she had not been in the office.

In her email, dated Sept. 15, 2010, she wrote: “I just informed Joey that after consulting with an animal behaviourist/veterinarian we have reached the decision these dogs are not adoptable. I will however conduct an inspection of the facility.”

Drever did not end up doing the inspection in the fall. However, she did go on Tuesday along with two other SPCA animal cruelty investigators to look into the deaths of the 100 sled dogs in April. She said it was not necessary to take the remaining 150 dogs into protection.

Now it is understandable that the SPCA did not take the dogs. Why should they be responsible for helping a business when that business should have had contingency plans in place for the dogs should a downturn occur. Plus 100 dogs is a lot for any SPCA shelter to take, let alone a smaller community. If they needed to be moved, who should absorb those costs? The SPCA? The company that can no longer provide for the dogs? Even if the SPCA took the dogs, probably most would have been euthanized (but at least it would have been humane). It should be noted this guy also has 65 previous orders written against him in the past with respect to care. One would think the SPCA might have gotten involved before than?

The people of Canada have spoken out over usage-based billing to the point that Prime Mister Stephen Harper has finally gotten involved and tweeted yesterday to say:

"We're very concerned about CRTC's decision on usage-based billing and its impact on consumers. I've asked for a review of the decision." @pmHarper.

This shows the Prime Minister is aware and wants to let every Canadian know or maybe he just wants to reduce the volume of messages being sent his way. Especially once you factor in the Conservatives have yet post anything related to UBB or show they oppose the decision by the CRTC on usage-based billing, based on most recent media releases on their site. The NDP is opposed to UBB and got their Digital Issues Critic Charlie Angus to call on the Conservative government to better protect Canadian internet consumers. The Liberals are also against UBB which shows most political groups are finally listening but only kinda in my opinion for the party in power. Now all of this political issue jumping, I take with a grain of salt (maybe some lime and tequila). Why? This ruling has been out for 60 days and the Liberals and NDP were slow to respond. They are only taking action now with 30 days left and probably more based on the recent volume of complaints than the willingness to step up and protect Canadian's best interests. Maybe they are just participating now as a political measure in seeking to get votes and switch some Conservatives. Just a thought?

At the time of this writing, OpenMedia.ca was showing over 334,000 people have signed the online petition which is good but I like stats and want a bit of prospective on how well it is doing so far. As of 2009, we had a population over 33,894,000 people in Canada. Of that, 25,086,000 are Internet users as of September, 2009 (source) which works out to over 74% of the Canadian population is online. But if you look at OpenMedia.ca's petition, around 1% of all Canadians have signed this and if we only factor in Internet users, as they are the ones affected by CRTC's decision, that works out to just over 1.3%.

To give you an idea that more people need to get involved for the anti-UBB campaign, the anti-HST campaign in BC required 10% of all constituents in each riding to sign the petition to be heard by the provincial legislature. They succeeded. Now I know this is something completely different as UBB only affects internet users, both businesses and consumers, and we have shown 1 in 4 Canadians do not use internet but we should try and hit that same 10% goal with at least 2.5 million signatures of Internet users. If Canadians aim for a 10% of all Canadian internet users petition, then OpenMedia is just over 10% of the goal with less than a month to go. In the last couple of days due to media attention, that number is growing around 50,000 signatures a day and would come out to around 1.3 million give or take by the end of the month. So if you're reading this and against it and haven't added your signature, click here, I'll wait for you to finish. Either way, 10% or not, OpenMedia.ca stepped up to take the lead on this issue on behalf of Canadians and so far appear to be doing a good job of it as over 334,000 people have agreed to use them as a portal to convey the dissatisfaction over UBB.

Now that shouldn't be hard when we have that many people online and very few, if any, do not have some form of UBB already in place, including myself. I get 62GB for $39.50/month from my ISP and pay $1/GB overage which isn't bad compared to others at up to $5/GB overage. Sadly, my ISP does not provide anywhere for me to find out my usage. So other than a possible nasty bill at the end of the month or calling in an waiting on hold, I have no way of knowing my total usage. I have sent them a request via their website asking for my bandwidth usage and where I can check online (and use my own bandwidth to find out, oooohhh...the irony) but am still waiting for that reply and the site states up to 3 days for a response. But if people are willing to take action, that is another case. We will just have to sit back and see once more and more people realize they will be affected and the internet bill is about to go up or usage a lot less to keep at your normal monthly amount.

Now before we go into what you can do to reduce bandwidth, I want to share 2 images related to UBB. One is to put Canada's situation in context and the second to give you a good laugh with a side of reality check. The first image shows someone from the Middle East comparing their current internet to Canada's. This shows we are not bad off compared to other countries, so count yourself lucky even if UBB gets implemented. The second image gave me a good laugh as it shows it is theoretically cheaper to buy an expensive solid state hard drive, fill it with 300GB of data, ship it across Canada and then throw it out once you're done and it is still cheaper than downloading the same volume of data at $2/GB.

So what can you do to reduce bandwidth usage?
Well, that all comes down to what you do and what steps you are willing to take and what you are willing to possibly sacrifice. This is by no means a finite list, google "reducing bandwidth" for a bunch of more sites on ways to save plus I am only pointing out a couple measures that would have a decent impact on bandwidth usage. So let's kick it off with the economic impact on business due to UBB tip #1 for you to save your precious bandwidth.

For those not quite up to speed on UBB, here's a quick 411 to get you up to speed. Recently, the CRTC approve large Internet Service Providers (ISP) to be able to impose a low download bandwidth cap and then charge you a per gigabyte(GB) charge for going over that amount. They want the cap as low as 25 GB/month downloaded and then charge between $1-$5/GB if you go over depending on your plan.

Now for a lot of Internet users, they are not aware of bandwidth usage and in some cases how the Internet works "behind the scenes". As long as the web page loads quickly or the YouTube video streams, they are happy. What they may not realize, everything you see on your screen was downloaded to your computer before it could be viewed, including this blog article. Most sites are optimized and files kept small and cached to save your PC from re-downloading it if you visit the site again. All of this to ensure quick loading but it all adds up over time. For some people, they set their browser to clear its cache when it closes, if so, they're downloading each and every time they fire up the browser.

If you use services like Netflix, an average HD movie is around 3.5GB in size. Now over a given month, say you watched 10 movies, you would have used approximately 35GB of bandwidth which would be 10GB over the recommended alloted bandwidth of 25GB they want to give for the cheapest service. Now assume they are charging $2 per GB overage charge, that just costs you an extra $20 that month. Keep in mind, this doesn't include anything else you are doing online like checking email, chatting, Skype calling, streaming radio or even Facebooking. Are you an online gamer? That could use up some decent bandwidth based on how much you play. By the way, those updates for your software and operating system, that's using bandwidth too. Hmmmm....suddenly, 25GB doesn't sound so much. That's under 1GB/day. Got a smart phone? May not be in your best interest anymore to switch to your WiFi instead of 3G when at home as your 3G data rate could be cheaper now.

So you can easily see, some users under UBB can easily go over their alloted bandwidth depending on what package they have and could easily receive a surprisingly high bill. Most people on Shaw or Telus have/had around 60GB/month prior to UBB which is better than the proposed 25GB Ontario ISP's have under UBB. If you went over in the past, you would get a warning and possibly disconnected if a repeat offender. Now you will just get a larger bill. One thing to point out, currently, No ISP has offered a discount or refund for users who use under the allotted bandwidth. So technically, they are being punished for the select few who do abuse the system.

Where the battle lies is the justification of the high overage charges when it has been stated it costs hundreds of times less. There are claims it only costs ISP's a couple cents/GB but they are charging customers between $1-$5+ overage fees. Rocky Gaudrault, president of ISP Teksavvy, was quoted last May when this first started saying "The rates are absolutely atrocious. How the hell are we doing above one dollar for extra usage? It’s in the thousands of multiples beyond what the costs are."

Tony Werner, the chief technical officer for Comcast Cable further confirmed to his investors "The cost of the equipment necessary to expand network capacity is decreasing all the time as technology improves. Werner even told investors at that same meeting that it only costs an average of $6.85 per home to DOUBLE the bandwidth capacity of an entire neighborhood, and that the equipment necessary to provide 50Mbps costs less than what it paid for the 6Mbps equipment."

So we have some ISP executives saying the charges are too high but the CRTC cannot regulate the amount, they only approved the ability for ISPs to charge UBB. The CRTC even states under paragraph 9 that they do not control the rates. "The Commission notes that carriers’ retail UBB rates are market-based and are not subject to prior Commission approval – that is, they are forborne from regulation.". How can they approve the right for ISPs to charge without regulating it to avoid it getting out of hand?

I collected myself assuming just a decent knock; it's okay; I can walk it off and be back playing in 10 minutes. Standing up proved it could be more than that. I made my way to the sidelines and a fellow player grabbed me some ice. After about 10 minutes, I decided to try this walking thing again and looked like a newborn giraffe. After some more choice 4 letter words, I regrettably hobbled out only half way through playing. By the time I got home, I had 3 decent golf ball size areas of swelling and one looked like a pyramid was stuck under my knee (sorry, I did not get pics). After some more ice, I made a pathetic attempt at trying to sleep. You never realize what muscles get used for what until you injure them. Then you find out the most mundane task is done by muscles you would assume had no reason to be involved. Once again, I have learned these muscles I have injured have multiple roles too.

What felt like I had only just fallen asleep, good old mother nature decided to send me a quick message that she feels like some snow instead of rain. With my back's weather message notification system kicking in, I got the reluctant advance warning snow was on the way and I was awake again. Thinking the injury was all just a dream, I got out of bed and was quickly reminded it was not a dream. "Ahh...crap" went through my mind as I fell back onto the bed with that 4 letter word pain coming back. Now what is usually the first thing you need to do within a couple minutes or less when you get up? Yeah, me too. My problem was my speed had been reduced to a turtles and I had drank a lot of water the night before. Not a good combo. After bearing the pain and doing some impromptu speed hobbling, I thankfully made it. Not the kind of start I wanted with this injury but I guess I didn't have a choice and could have been worse. I could at least still stand. Somewhat.

Apparently, my 3,400+ letter of complaint on the terrible customer service I received from Xbox Support, which I sent in over the weekend to Xbox Support, did get seen by the right people. Before I had a chance to print and mail the letter in to the Head Office on Monday, I got a call from Xbox Corporate, not the support department. Unfortunately, I was not home at the time of the call but I got a kind message and an email stating they had tried to call. The rep provided a direct line and extension and asked me to call back at my convenience. Perfect, direct line and extension = no holds or menu system. There is a light at the end of the tunnel and it was not a train.

For a quick background for those wondering what has lead up to this, my initial article was on December 26^th outlining my initial terribad call in experience. It was followed up on December 31^st by me fixing the issue myself but still no call back. On January 6^th, I finally got a call back but was blindsided by the lies and false promises that were told to me. And finally, on January 15th, still with no contact, I wrote a letter of complaint with my utter disappointment with this service I received, as my last attempt to right this wrong. That will now bring us up to today.

When I submitted my letter, I hoped maybe some action would be taken but I was not expecting the response I got. I tried to layout as much detail so they could see where the issues occurred and leave it up to them to correct it in the best manner they see fit. So I called back the corporate rep (leaving names out and will explain why later). We had a good conversation and he apologized for my experience, informed me my letter definitely got their attention and by multiple people in various levels of management. He informed me they would be using it for training purposes and enacting changes so my experience is not repeated. They even gave me a small form of accommodation, which I was not expecting and that was not the intent of my letter. My intent was to fix the wrong so others don't go through the same and so far, it appeared I have reached success. The accommodation was just a bonus for my effort.

Before we ended the call, I offered my assistance if they had anymore questions on this issue to ensure the best possible outcome for all. Based on that offer, the rep informed me an executive may want to call me later that day as he may have more questions on this issue and I accepted. This was not a guarantee as they already had the information and we ended the call on a good note.

Later in the afternoon, I did receive a call from an executive. Once again, I will leave his name out of it. We also had a positive conversation and went over the issues and possible causes. He restated the amount of stirring the pot my letter did which pleased me as it was all worth it now. They were glad they got feedback and especially in the detail I provided. I emailed him my screenshots on when I got the errors and based on them, I was even able to assist him with possibly tracking down the cause of my issue and possible remedy. Bonus.

So in the end, even though it took a couple weeks, my steps to correct this wrong hopefully will make all future calls to Xbox Support a better one for anyone else. Hopefully it will also reduce the Invalid Code errors others may be receiving, saving them from calling in, as they could fix what is causing that issue.

For those who have been wronged or received poor service and feel it necessary to speak up; I offer the following tips and steps to right your wrong. There will never be a guarantee of success BUT you will never know until you try and at least you did your diligence, so regardless, feel good about that. For those wondering why I have not provided the names, direct lines and emails of the Xbox corporate rep and executive, you do not need it in my opinion and I was successful without it. If I provided the contact info and names, you would just jump the process thus defeating the escalation process. A lot of issues you may have do not require the involvement of the people I got to deal with. I did it in the proper order of escalation in my opinion and recommend you do the same for positive results.