Barack Obama Wants You to Have Cupcakes!

My friend Bryan Leblanc turned me on to this little bit of absurd political geniusness: BarackObamaIsYourNewBicycle.com. How do you take the effortless charisma and implied linked goodwill of the possible next President of the US and translate it to the web? Simple, just think of those things that make you feel good, and have them all start with Obama.

Apparently, he made me a mixtape.

As a side note, a lot of these cute messages imply a sort of friendly connectedness and do so by referencing Facebook actions or other tech-related items, which I thought was interesting. Whenever I get asked (it's more like accused, really) by people about how the Internet may be reducing our ability to create "real connections" with each other, I always like to point out how many of us use our on-line social networks to provide little bursts of joy to a large group of people in a way that is just impossible off-line. In fact, the aforementioned Barack site was Bryan's status update today, so there you go.

I'm front-page news!

I had the great pleasure of making a speech to APEX (the Association of Public Service Executives) last week. And because of this, I made the front page of my hometown paper.

Sort of cool: the Ottawa Citizen covered this conference and my speech was pretty well received. A reporter wrote this story about it (which also reflects to contents of the speech pretty well).

I get a fair amount of media coverage, but this was extra-special. One, because I grew up in Ottawa, but more importantly because I really believe that government needs to do more to engage young people. I was really honoured to be able to present to four hundred or so high ranking Public Service executives and get my message out to them: I also love telling goverment folks that teenage Canadian workers essentially have taxation without rerpresentation, because it's true. You can work - and therefore pay taxes - when you're 14 (12 in Alberta!) but you can't vote.

Anyway, it was some very nice coverage and made my family proud. Next up is getting some work with the Feds to try and effect some change. But this was a great start.