One Big Chocolate Bar
Peer pressure brought about what is my first food post. Recently whilst walking through our local Costco, my friends and I saw this HUGE Toblerone (wiki) bar on sale. Apparently it was the post easter, post any-other-holiday-you-give-candy, we must get rid of this sale. Everyone was busy thinking what the hell you would do with such a huge candy bar. I was busy counting my cash.
Now spur of the moment purchases like these are the type of insanity we usually reserve for John Chow, especially in the purchase of extremely large stuffed polar bears. But I was under pressure to be the go to guy in this crazy endeavour. Now I’m left with the above chocolate bar sitting on my living room table. I’ve pictured it with the Guitar Hero Wii controller. You…know for size comparisons.
If your curious exactly how much chocolate such a bar is…well…here you go. That’s almost 10 lbs of chocolate, for those of you still using your archaic pounds to measure. Now I’m left asking myself what the hell I’m going to do with this mammoth slab of chocolate. I couldn’t possibly eat it; at least not in it’s pure form. Perhaps I’ll have to give it to someone I know who likes baking. They’ll make it into cookies or something.
Dell Closes Edmonton Call Centre
Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) today has announced that they are closing their Edmonton call centre, effectively putting 1,200 Edmontonians out of a job. This was further confirmed today by the Edmonton Economic Development Corp, which stated that it had been told the call centre located in the Edmonton Research Park will be closing permanently sometime between May and the end of July.
This is the second closure announcement in a week for the 2nd largest PC builder. It was only Tuesday that Dell announced that they were cancelling a 1,200 employee expansion to their Ottawa location and reducing the current workforce of 1,500 by an unspecified number.
The two Canadian call centres were originally opened in an effort to curtail problems with overseas customer service, product issues, and declining profit margins due to intense competition. During a tour of the Edmonton location in late 2006, Michael Dell was even asked by The Edmonton Journal if Canadian labour could compete against overseas workers.
“The reason we are here in Edmonton and in Ottawa is because we need skills…What’s important to us is that our customers get the best experience from anywhere in the world. We found that support teams here have a better track record of helping the customer,” Dell said. This is in contrast to the statement released today with the closure announcement.
“Differentiating Dell through superior service and support remains one of the company’s primary strategic priorities and we appreciate the role our talented Edmonton team has played in this effort,” said Dave Vanden Bosch, Dell’s Edmonton site leader.
Employees affected by the closure are being offered other jobs at the company, or severance packages and career placement services. The jobs being lost in the closure will be moved to other locations.
For more information, check out the Edmonton Sun article.
The 2nd Annual Sony Poker Party - CES 2008
Sony Online Entertainment is one business unit within the Sony Corporation that knows a good idea when it has one, at least when it comes to throwing Press/VIP parties at CES. Last year they threw the first poker party, and some of the other Sony business units were there to boost the launch of the PS3 and some of their newest HDTV sets. The prizes were big, and the party was rather drawn out. Sony gave out too many chips, which made last year’s poker tournament go until 3:00AM. This was rather enjoyable for everyone…except the folks from Sony, who undoubtedly had to be up early the next day to tend to their CES booths.
With lessons learned from last year (make the tournament close-ended, hold it at a better venue) Sony sent out invitations for their 2nd annual poker party. The theme was to be pirates, to boost their new MMO Pirates of the Burning Sea. It was held at The Joint nightclub at the Hard Rock Hotel. I was of course invited, as was pretty well everyone else from the TTZ crew. We also managed to convince the man himself, Fatal1ty, to attend the festivities. Would his god like abilities in the FPS arena translate into some luck at the poker table? Well with the blinds adjusted, an ante implemented, and a timer being used, it wouldn’t take us long to find out. Sony definitely wanted us to have fun this year, but not until 3:00AM. (Read on …)
I Fragged Fatal1ty…Kind of
Well as promised in my previous post I have video of my going up against the man himself, Fatal1ty, in a one on one Quake 4 Death Match. The map of choice was the Quake 4 remake of “The Longest Yard” from Quake 3, which is also know by the map number Q3DM17. The time limit for the match was 3 minutes, which against someone of Fatal1ty’s calibre can seem like an eternity. Anyhow, here’s the before picture.
So everyone was smiles and happy thoughts prior to the big match. Full video is after the jump. (Read on …)
Trump Looking Into the Lemonaide Market
A 9-year-old girl from Toronto caught The Donald’s (as in Donald Trump) eye when she raised $20,000 for the Canadian Heart & Stroke Foundation. How did she do it? The same way any young entrepreneur makes a few extra bucks, by selling lemon-aide. She did have a little help from her parents and neighbours, but only in so far as when she needed help. Must be nice to be able to order around your parents at 6. Anyhow here’s the news story, courtesy of Global National.
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