Who is Farhan Lalji?

Happy Canada day!!! As it is Canada day today and a glorious day in London and my cousin is visiting from Toronto and I’m hopping on a plane later today to look for flats in Switzerland later today I thought it would be a good idea to talk about places on the blog.

Richard Florida, who a friend of mine works with, has written a book called “Who’s Your City”, it’s sitting on my bookshelf waiting for me to pick it up, and after I finish the Bottom Billion it’s next on my list. I agree with Florida that where you live says a lot about you. But I also think with the world becoming a smaller place, where your networks are says a lot about you as well.

For me Toronto (born there, the Bee’s from there, went to school there and generally like Canada) and London (worked there forever, went to biz school there, lot of friends there) will always be anchors, but I’m hoping that I can cast the net wider into more of Europe, Asia and Africa as well as North America and the UK.

The Bee has a rule/notion that we shouldn’t spend more then 5 years in a place and I’m not sure if five years could be too long, too short or just right depending on the place. But I do agree that moving around is great and living in different areas of the world is exciting and makes life really worth living. I believe that part of my thinking is due to being brought up in Canada and living in the UK, both pretty international themselves. Part of it is due to being very multi cultural and mixed up myself. And part of it is just dumb luck. But all of it is a lot of fun. So happy Canada day, but remember that there’s more to the world then the couple of square miles you live in today.

I’ve been using twitter for the past few weeks and have really enjoyed the service. I like updating and enjoy reading other peoples updates. I think the SMS integration is sweet and I’m pretty hooked.

Found this video on Vimeo, via blog.andrewparker.net which does a good job explaining what twitter is and why it works:

Twitter in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo

One of the things I’ve done with my tweets is used the twitter facebook app to pull in the updates to twitter. This has meant a lot more status updates on Facebook, occasionally confusing users. I’m not sure whether to uninstall the Facebook app or to keep it running and wait till most people figure out that they too should be on twitter.

So, here’s a poll (users on facebook you’ll probably have to come to the blog), let me know whether you think I should keep twitter on my facebook profile or not.

More new years shenanigans

Originally uploaded by farhanlalji

I finally managed to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress and along with the upgrade decided to give the blog a new look and feel. As a consequence my layout no longer breaks when I embed videos, phew. I think it was long overdue. Let me know what you think. Facebook readers, check it out!

Edit you’re Flickr photo’s on Flickr!Flickr’s just released an edit your photo feature directly on Flickr feature. They’re using Picnik, which I used earlier for cropping, reshaping, sizing, and basic filtering. It’s very cool and it’s sweet to see Flickr’s pulling in this feature.

I did a quick sepia jobbo on my Ikea billboard pic and the result is just right and took next to no time at all!

I think a lot of companies can really learn from Flickr’s approach to openness, if something’s cool work with it to ensure the community can use it in the easiest way possible.

Love it. Go Flickr!

Random guy hanging out with Jesus

Originally uploaded by farhanlalji

London is full of guys with bull horns and loud speakers telling you to embrace Jesus or be condemned to a life of hell… or whatever.

So I was amused and impressed to see this random gent hanging out in his fluorescent jacket carrying a small sign that read Jesus.

That’s enough to make people think. He made me think and blog post… job done.

I loved the Arsenio Hall show back in the day, as an homage to the show I’m going to start a regular weekly feature on this blog that was first launched on the show “things that make me go hmmm….”

1 – Why aren’t people making a bigger deal of the Wifi deal on the iPhone, the cloud has a ton of Wifi posts all around London, if that means I spend more time on the Wifi network and less on the edge that’s a winner – plus with the possibility to get skype or other IM on the thing, why make calls?  Just skype.  Unlocked iPhone here I come!

2 – If someone described a movie as a mix between “Lord of the Rings” and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” but in Chinese, would that make you want to go?

3 – If 30 is the new 20, does that make 20 the new 10?

India celebrations in trafalgar square

Originally uploaded by farhanlalji

On my way home yesterday I passed by trafalgar square and was surprised to see a DJ, this big Indian movie like poster and a ton of people just hanging out, chilling, enjoying the music.

It was part of the Mayor’s Trafalgar Square Festival.

Only in London. Gotta love it.