Last time I saw Peggy Nash I told her to kick ass, and with enthusiasm and wit she kicked her boot high in the air, demonstrating her strength and grace.

In Parkdale - High Park, I predict NDP candidate Peggy Nash will be victorious. It will be a tight race against her Liberal opponent, Gerrard Kennedy, but as the incumbent she has an advantage, and friends of mine still in the riding say that as a local representative she has done a great job.

So the Canadian election is coming to a close and I've been having a lot of conversations with friends and colleagues analyzing what has transpired and how social media has played a role.

We've all been witness to the Obama campaign and their innovative use of social media and the internet. Explicitly what was different about their internet campaign was the way they asked people to give more than money or support but their labour. This labour might be getting them to come into to campaign offices, but it was more likely to solicit their help in doing work online. Whether that be raising funds or reaching out to friends in key swing states.

All the Canadian political parties are using social media platforms like Facebook, and YouTube, and similarly all political parties have elements of social media on their own site. However without exception, their use is primitive, and generally of a symbolic nature, rather than an explicit social nature.

The 7th Annual Seneca Free Software and Open Source Symposium is coming up, and it is a great event worth checking out if you want to learn more about what really drives the Internet. Unfortunately I won't be attending this year, however I have given presentations in past years, including this improvised rant from last year:

I use a lot of Google's services, in part cause they tend to work really well, but also to try them out and share my thoughts with friends and colleagues. About a month ago Google announced their Chrome browser, which nicely coincided with my purchase of a new windoze desktop computer. So instead of installing any additional software on it, I just started using Chrome.

A month later I'm still using Chrome, but it is far from perfect. YouTube doesn't always work with it, and Google Docs is kind of buggy. The irony of course is that these are both Google owned applications, so they're supposed to work seamlessly with Chrome, and yet they don't. With that said, Gmail is super fast, and I tend to browse the web with dozens of open tabs at a time. In this regard Chrome is great.

However I have had to install Firefox to load certain pages and do certain things on the web due to Chrome's overall flakiness. I'm going to continue using Chrome, and hopefully it will evolve and improve like all Google products.

I do of course have to mention the whole controversy with Google's user agreement, although it too seems to be evolving, yet personally I'm a little acclimatized to less personal privacy and tend to engage the surveillance society in strategic and chosen situations.

Nobody likes to make predictions, as they inevitably risk the possibility of being wrong, however I'm going to stick my neck out and report on some first hand on the ground knowledge I've picked up. I think Olivia Chow, the NDP incumbent, is going to lose on October 14th to Liberal candidate Christine Innes in Trinity Spadina in downtown Toronto.

I've spent more time living in Trinity Spadina than any other riding, and I have many friends and family who still live and vote there. In fact Emily still wishes we lived in the riding so she could vote for Olivia Chow.

Whenever there's an election on you can guarantee I'm going to be active. When I was younger I would volunteer all of my free time for some party or candidate that I wanted to get closer to. This election I'm mostly doing non-partisan stuff, and talking to people informally and in social situations.

What I'm hearing in Trinity Spadina is that traditional NDP voters are switching to either Liberal or Green. One person I spoke with today who voted for Innes in an advance poll this weekend had voted NDP almost her entire life.

Anyone who has owned a used BMW knows that while they are wonderful machines, they can also be expensive to maintain, and having a good relationship with skilled mechanics is essential. I have been really fortunate to know some great people, honest and exceptionally talented, who have helped me learn incredible amounts of info about BMWs.

I've already introduced my readers to my friend and BMW artisan Geoff Reid, and now I'd like to take the time to introduce you to my friends Jamie DeWolfe and Frank Apa who own and operate Eurotech Import Auto Service.

The guys at Eurotech have been helping my dad with his car, but also his racing car (a converted e30 328i), and as a result my dad spends almost all his free time there. Whenever I drop by and visit the atmosphere is always warm and welcoming.

Over the course of the summer I hardly published a thing on this site, in part cause I was really busy with work, but also because most of the blog posts I wanted to write had the word "sucks" in the title. I didn't want my blog to convey the idea that the summer sucked, cause in fact it was the opposite, one of the best summers I've had in a while. So now that I'm making an effort to write more regularly, I'm gonna post some of my "sucks" posts stored from the past couple of months.

As part of the work I was doing this Summer I traveled to Vancouver to meet with a few clients and run a few workshops. The following post was written on AC 101 Toronto to Vancouver.

During a number of the talks and workshops I've run around social media, the subject of politicians and their use of the internet often comes up. The discussion tends to focus on how candidates and elected officials use technology to foster a stronger relationship with their constituents and supporters.

Unfortunately a lot of people approach this topic with a lot of baggage and assumptions, associating tools like Twitter or Facebook with procrastination and wasting time. In my consulting work and in my media appearances I often promote the use of social media by politicians, however I make an effort to emphasize the need for authenticity and understanding how to use the tools properly, rather than symbolic appropriation as a token attempt to reach young voters.

Yet I still get feedback from people who say they don't want their elected officials wasting their time on Facebook, although one assumes they do expect these same pols to answer letters that they receive. The reality however is that modest use is what we can all manage, and it is exactly the weak ties that politicians tend to have with their constituents that can be strengthened by use of interactive platforms.

Today in Toronto another cyclist was killed by an automobile, something that is unfortunately not uncommon, as illustrated by this map of bicycle fatalities in the GTA (click on each mark for more info):

Each death further discourages people from riding in the city, as it creates the perception that it is not safe on Toronto's roads. I was an avid cyclist in this city for decades, and only stopped due to health reasons. I obtained my driver's license only three years ago, and since then have spent quite a bit of time thinking about how cars and bikes share the road.

When I was a cyclist I was aggressively anti-automobile. I generally regarded cars as mortal enemies who sought to snuff me out and splatter my brain on the road. Now that I'm a driver, I'm a little less anti-automobile, but not by much. I still regard bicycles as having more rights to the road than I do, and when driving I try to do my best to help out cyclists.

Today the consortium (monopoly) that controls the televised leaders debates for the Canadian federal election decided that they would exclude the leader of the Green Party, Elizabeth May. In doing so they have discredited their own debates, and will alienate a great many of Canadians who will rightly see a political class as being terrified of environmental issues.

I am not a member of the Green Party, and I will not be voting for them this election. However I am an environmentalist, and I do think it is a crucial issue in this election. I am also smart enough to recognize that the Green Party is *not* a one issue party, and that they have just as many policy positions, and just as many candidates as any other party in the country. It is clear to me that the reason they are being excluded is not because they do not qualify, but rather because the fear, from an optics perspective, is that by including them, the environment will become a more dominant issue. With Green leader Elizabeth May in the debates at least two leaders (May and Dion) if not four (May, Dion, Layton, and Duceppe) will raise the environment as an example of the Tories being totally asleep at the wheel.