Every year I post a review/resolutions blog post, usually within the first week of the new year. I look at what I had said I would do the year before, and I set out some goals for the coming year. Take care of my health Take care of our financial health Succession plan for NorthIQ … Read more
My little sister’s husband passed away on Thursday January 31st. I got a call at 7 in the morning from my mom, but my phone was in the basement and I missed it. Char missed a second call, and as I got to my phone my mom’s voice was on the other end saying “Chris … Read more
Each year I post a year in review/resolutions blog post. This site is my journal, and I use it to keep track on what past me has done.
I wrote a guide about this about five years ago – Ruby Newbies – My Ruby on Rails Recipe – but in the meantime, life has changed. We’re now on OSX High Sierra (about to introduce Mojave, so this will be obsolete in a couple of months), and because of that, everything is different.
Here’s what we are going to cover in this really simple guide.
There was a time, where I was kind of a big deal.
I’ve loved wrestling my whole life, it’s been a close one/two between wrestling in comics. My buddy Ryan once walked into my bedroom in college where I had wrestling playing on TV, and I was drawing comics. He said “Dude, you are living your 12 year old self’s dream life!”.
In 1997, I set up a wrestling website on TSN.ca to provide coverage for TSN’s professional wrestling programming. I covered WWF and WCW, occasionally ECW and some independent promotions. As our audience continued to build, I started getting footage from WWF’s developmental group, and I got to follow the earliest appearances by guys like John Cena, Dave Bautista, Shelton Benjamin, and a young man named “Brock Lesnar”.
At one point, my columns were read by over a million people a month.
I was a guest on The LAW, Live Audio Wrestling many times, and I met a young lady named Trish Stratus on that show.
Every year I write a blog post that’s about a review of the previous year, and goals for the current year.
This post is one of the few posts I write every year that is for an audience of one. They’re for future me, and I post them publicly so I have some accountability, and so that I can reflect on them a few times during the year.
The last two years have been a whirlwind. It has both taken longer to accomplish everything I wanted to do, and yet everything is happening so fast.
In 2017, NorthIQ Business Solutions became NorthIQ Inc., and my business made it through two full years in operation.
Through the last 12 years I have had four different business banking accounts with RBC. The first two accounts were prompted by partners who had good experiences with RBC. In both cases setting up the account caused us problems, but in both cases we were treated incredibly well. One of those businesses, All New Comics, which I am no longer a part of, has gone on to be very successful, and makes a good amount of money of which RBC benefits from various fees.
When I started my own solo enterprise in 2015, I came to RBC because of the ad campaigns they had created around small business. I was approved for a $5,000 credit card, and other than a few very minor snags when the account was created (including the naming of the account…something that RBC seems to get wrong regularly), things were mostly good.
This year (2017), I incorporated my business, and went to RBC to create an account. The first version of this account was built completely wrong, with the account in the numbered corporation’s name, rather than its trade identity. The new corporation was granted a credit card, and when paperwork started rolling in I found out that in addition to the name of the company being wrong, I was also listed as “Mrs Brian Garside”…I assure you I am not a Mrs.
Wonder Woman is a good movie that suffers from some of the typical issues with DC Comics movies, namely a weak third act and a villain who is simultaneously overpowered and not very well realized.
Overall it’s a good film, and is the best DC Cinematic Universe film to date (this includes Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, and Suicide Squad).
Back in the late 90’s, I was “TSN.ca’s Darkside” who wrote “Tales from the Darkside” for the second most popular section on TSN.ca…which at the time was tsn.ca/wrestling. I built that bad boy from the ground up, and wrote a ton of awesome articles.
There was a time where I could write something and get a million views in a month. Those were heady, heady days.
Two of my favourite wrestlers, Edge and Christian, have a podcast now – E&C’s Pod of Awesomeness, every week they ask for reader letters, and since I’ve got some fun Edge and Christian stories, I thought I’d send one in.
This is that email.
As our kids have gotten older, we’ve tried to take an annual trip with the kids to make some memories that will last a lifetime. We’ve done a Disney Cruise, a week at a cottage in Kingston, a trip to Las Vegas, and this year we decided we’d do a week at Disney World in Orlando.
We planned things out for a while, and I looked into the best times to visit Disney when the lines would be shortest, and the weather would not be punishing. We settled on the week of April 22nd – 30, and booked a Villa in Florida. Our condo, the 2100sq foot “Ocean Villa Inn” was listed as minutes away from Disney World with a pool, BBQ, and tons of space.
We decided we would save some money on airfare, and planned to drive down to Florida. We talked with a number of people about the trip, and I got some great recommendations on the cities to stay on the way down.