Hi everyone! As the latest addition to the editorial staff here at SmartCanucks I thought I should take a few moments to introduce myself. Many of you already know me and my antics – I’ve been a pretty active member in the SmartCanucks forums on and off for the past year. For those of you that aren’t familiar, let me take a moment to introduce myself. My name’s jimmycanuck, and I’m a blogoholic. 😉
I’m a father to a soon-to-be two year old daughter and a husband to a soon-to-be mother of two. I’m a student with Athabasca University and an avid gamer. But most importantly, I’m an active blogger finding himself more and more active by the day. In addition to my exciting new role here at SmartCanucks, I’m a regular contributor with the gaming blog bits bytes pixels and sprites and the primary contributor to the pop culture blog flotsam/jetsam which should be relaunching in the Spring of 2007.
I’m a busy guy, and life just keeps getting busier. I’m looking forward to becoming an active contributor here at SmartCanucks, and hopefully you’ll all come to know and love my irreverent sense of humour the seemingly random selection of topics I’ll bring to the table.
Jawaad M. of Ordisante.com is writing a well researched 3-part series on Air Travel in Canada and has kindly offered to share his series with us.
Jawaad will join the SmartCanucks.ca editorial team. He will have his own account on SmartCanucks.ca and will publish articles directly. I’ll also add a brief biography of him in the About section very soon. For the time being you can find more about him by visiting his blog. Jawaad will write special articles every now and then giving us advice on how to save money on flights, hotels, car rentals, etc. His articles will be published on both Ordisante.com and SmartCanucks.ca
Thank you Jawaad and welcome to SmartCanucks.ca 🙂
Read Part 1 of Jawaad’s “Air Travel in Canada†below
Please vote daily for Smart Canucks in the “Best Blog†category. Vote here
I’ll also be voting for Postcards from the Mothership for “Best Family Blog†Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy for “Best Progressive Blog†The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns for best “Best Humour Blogâ€
One blog I think deserves to be in the top 5 Best Blogs category is JimmyCanuck’s blog. He never joined the competition though.
I added a cute little feature to the blog. If you look at the right sidebar you’ll see a calendar. Move your mouse over a specific day and you get a list of deals and events for that day. Below the calendar is also a list of upcoming events. Sometimes I post about sale events a few days in advance and it’s hard to remember when things are happening. This way, you can easily know what’s going on and when 🙂
That being said, not every post I make is on the calendar: freebies, ongoing deals (without a known expiry), and anything without a clear timeline will not be there.
Yes! We made it to Round 2 in the “Best Blog” category! Thank you so much for voting 🙂
The top 5 in each category make it to Round 2.
Here are Round 1 results in the 3 categories Smart Canucks was in
Best Blog:
1st: Raymi the Minx (317) 8%
2nd: Debaucherous and Dishevelled (163) 4%
3rd: oRadio (158) 4% 4th: Smart Canucks (105) 3% – We made it!
5th: Milkmoney Or Not, Here I Come (101) 3%
Best New Blog:
1st: Meg Fowler (168) 7%
2nd: oRadio (156) 6%
3rd: Harper-valley (145) 6%
4th: Gay Persons of Color (113) 4%
5th: The Next Agenda (93) 4% 6th: Smart Canucks (92) 4% – we were off by 1 vote!! oh well
Best Group Blog:
1st: oRadio (152) 9%
2nd: Peace, Order and Good Government, Eh (145) 9%
3rd: The Stroumboulopouli (140) 8%
4th: The Galloping Beaver (131) 8%
5th: Stageleft: Life on the Leftside (114) 7% 6th: Smart Canucks (93) 6% – 6th place and out of this category too
Thanks for voting! There’s no monetary prize for this competition but the motivation I got far out weighs any prize 🙂
You can see the full Round 1 results here. I also encourage you to visit some of the other Canadian blogs on the list. Some blogs (even with a few votes) are nothing less than a masterpiece.
I’ve had very few posts over the last couple of days… sorry about that. I had some school work to finish and deadlines were fast approaching. Things should be back to normal this Friday.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for freebies don’t forget to visit the forum’s Freebies section which has tons of nice freebies. If you want to just chit chat with other smart canucks you can do so here.
Hayden, Ryan, Ames, Baby J and Samantha, you’re the winners of SmartCanucks.ca Cutest Baby Contest 🙂
CONGRATULATIONS! I’ll contact you later on as regards to the prizes.
Last but not least, as this contest comes to an end, I would like to say that all the babies in the contest are cute and I trust that you know that. The judging in this contest was based solely on the photo of the baby, not the best way to judge someone, but it was only meant to be for fun…Thanks to all the contestants and to the people who voted.
We just finished preparing the cutest baby contest gifts. Initially we had one large gift for the winner only but then we decided to have 5 nice little gifts instead. This way more people will benefit from the contest. Right now we have about 20 contestants which means that about quarter of them get to win a prize 🙂 Submissions are still open til the end of this month.
So this is how the prizes get handed out: the winner gets to be the first to choose one of the five gifts. 2nd place winner then chooses from the remaining 4 gifts and so on.
Here are the gifts (in no particular order)
This cute little backpack
$20 Indigo/Chapters Gift Card
Seba Med 100ml Children’s Shampoo and 100ml Baby lotion
Thanks to my friend David, we moved SmartCanucks.ca to a better, faster and more reliable server yesterday. This will hopefully mean that Smart Canucks will always be available (less downtime) and should load much faster than it used to 🙂
Thanks David for your priceless help!
David runs a tiny hosting service. If you’re looking for a reliable and friendly host you’ll be totally satisfied with his outstanding service and professionalism. He offers very affordable hosting and can help you get your site or blog up and running in no time. If you’re interested in this more personal kind of hosting please leave a comment below or email me and I’ll forward your info on to him. I might also post his contact info here once I get his permission.
Over the past year I’ve subscribed to many Canadian blog feeds and I’ve found myself staying up past my bedtime reading blogs on the internet. I find some of these blogs fascinating and truly creative! (I’ll list my favourite blogs in a future post). About a month ago, while reading the comments on one these blogs, I came across this comment by Yvonne who said that their company was giving out a free Nokia 6682:
I work for a word of mouth marketing company called Matchstick and I’m looking to give away brand new multimedia smart phones to a number of qualified individuals [snip]. Please have a look at the criteria and feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.
I am looking for existing Rogers customers who meet the following criteria:
• Hosts a popular blog with 400+ hits a day
• A current Rogers cell phone subscriber (phone only supported with the Rogers network)
• Between the ages of 22-35
• Keeps his/ her blog updated on a regular basis with pictures and video
• Very socially active
We think you will thoroughly enjoy this product and its features, and if you do, we would encourage you to talk about it. If you or someone you know fits these criteria we would love to hear from you!
Thanks for your time, I hope to hear from you soon.
To be honest, at first I thought this was spam. All bloggers get loads of spam messages everyday and after a while one becomes very suspicious of any unusual comment. However, this comment as you might notice, didn’t exactly feel like spam. So I gave Yvonne the benefit of the doubt and decided to dig more into her claim. I visited matchstick.ca and it seemed like a legitimate company. But it wasn’t until I checked around in the Canadian Blogosphere and found that a couple of bloggers had actually received their free cell phones, that I knew matchstick.ca were serious and legitimate.
The next step was to see if I met MatchStick’s requirements
Hosts a popular blog with 400+ hits a day
I get way over 400 unique Canadian visitors everyday so this wasn’t an issue
A current Rogers cell phone subscriber (phone only supported with the Rogers network)
Luckily I had a Rogers contract which I signed up over 2 years ago and I’m still stuck with until now.
Between the ages of 22-35
I’m 24… phew I barely made the cutoff
Keeps his/her blog updated on a regular basis with pictures and video
I believe I update my blog quite regularly with pictures. Not many no videos really… but hey, if I could figure out a way of adding deals related videos I wouldn’t mind posting videos.
Very socially active
I wasn’t sure how socially active is “very socially active†but I do have a few activities and I’m a member in a few clubs/communities.
So I decided to contact Yvonne. She was very friendly and professional and we talked about their campaign and my blog. She asked a couple of questions (household income, how much I spend on electronics every year, etc.) and in less than 10 minutes she had my mailing addreess and said that I should receive my brand new Nokia 6682 Smartphone and a whole bunch of accessories before the end of the week. I received the package in less than 48 hours 🙂
Here are the contents of the package:
– Nokia 6682 Cell Phone with USB connector and charger, headset and 64MB MultiMedia Card (MMC)
– an additional 512MB MultiMedia Card for mp3s
– a Nokia Bluetooth Wireless Headset
– Extra set of white headphones that look like iPod headphones.
– a welcome letter
– a bunch of “Get the Buzz†cards to give out to family and friends.
It’s been about a month since I’ve received this package and I can confidently say that I’m enjoying my new cell phone. Before I got this cell phone I was using a Nokia N-Gage which I whole-heartedly loved. Changing to Nokia 6682 was very easy since the menus were very similar. Nokia 6682 has many cool features including a 1.3 Megapixel camera (pretty good for a cell phone), Bluetooth, mp3 player and other fascinating bells and whistles.
I’m personally very satisfied and thrilled by my new Nokia 6682 and I truly enjoyed dealing with Matchstick.ca.
If you want to find out what other Canadian bloggers thought of this cell phone or the promo in general here are the permalinks to other related posts. Just like everything else in life some reviews are positive and some are negative. But overall they’re very interesting.
