• Gawker – For Sale: A Video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Smoking Crack Cocaine
• Toronto Star – Rob Ford in ‘crack cocaine’ video scandal

Is it true? Who knows. Rob Ford isn’t talking and so far the video has been seen only by those few people. The drug dealers who supposedly have it want $200,000 to release a copy publicly. Gawker is trying to crowd fund the money through a campaign that has already raised over $100,000.

No Confidence

What strikes me is that a good percentage, perhaps even a majority of Torontonians believe that the video exists and that Rob Ford smoked crack.

It’s clear that the Mayor has lost the confidence of the residents of the city of Toronto. He’s literally hiding and running away from the media and from the people who he is supposed to be serving.

For a man who campaigned on the promise of “Respect for Taxpayers”, he’s shown little to no respect for them since the news of the potential existence of the video broke last Thursday evening.

Unless Ford can quickly restore confidence in his ability to act as mayor of Canada’s largest city, then there is no way he can continue to do so.

He has two choices – stand up in front of the citizens of Toronto, the taxpayers he promised to respect, and talk about the allegations against him.

Or, if he can’t do that, he must resign immediately.

We’ve moved on, right? I flipped on the TV and watched two Toronto teams play in Boston last night. Other than seeing the Boston Strong logo here and there, I never thought about what happened last month. Boston has moved on.

A young lady died out on the course at the GoodLife Fitness Toronto Marathon last weekend. Emma was just 18. One of my running friends saw her on the course as paramedics worked to revive her. Another friend went back and ran past the spot the other day and wrote up a nice article about her.

You go out for a run shortly after hearing about something like Boston, or a runner dying on course and you think about it. You consider yourself or your family at the finish line in Boston. Or you think about your own mortality and consider booking that annual physical you haven’t bothered with for five years.

And then you tuck it away, deep in the back of your mind and probably never consider it again.

As a runner, I’ve moved on.

That’s callous, right? How about the victims of the bombing that lost limbs or lost loved ones? Move on? What about the family of Emma? Move on?

But that’s exactly what those people will do. Granted it will be immeasurably more difficult for them to move on, but they will. Because it’s really the only thing they can do.

Moving on is part of life. Something happens, you deal with it, you put it behind you and you move on. Hit by a car? Shit happens, life sucks, move on. No sense dwelling on things in the past, on the things we can’t control.

One foot in front of the other. Keeping it moving.

I ran it first in 2011 on my 40th birthday and had a blast. I went out to Vancouver alone and spent a long weekend in one of my favourite places, running the marathon in the middle and just doing my own thing for a few days.

It was such a great experience that Ginny and I decided to go out last year together and run it again. She ran the half, and I did the full in 2012.

I met a bunch of runner friends out there in 2011 and I’ve kept in touch with a half dozen of them over Twitter and Facebook ever since. Seeing them again in 2012 was great and Kirsty and I ran the first 38 km of the marathon together before I crashed and burned and she ran away to a sub-4:00 PB.

I’m bummed that I won’t be running around the Seawall this year but more bummed that I won’t be seeing Jon, Kathryn, Skye, Kirsty, Jess and Damian.

I was feeling jealous of my running friends of late as I watched them prep for races. So I decided to sign up for the GoodLife Fitness Toronto Half Marathon on Sunday and at least get out there.

I’m in no shape to race a half, but I’ll be out there doing the running thing. I’m looking forward to 21.1km at a decent pace, enjoying the company a few thousand of my fellow racers.

I’ve been an iPhone user for a couple of years (currently using an iPhone 5), and a Mac user since 2005. I was interested to see what the difference was between using those three devices.

I use my MacBook Pro heavily. Hours a day. I’m on my third Mac since ’05 and I’m due for an upgrade later this year.

I use the MacBook Pro to do things – to write, to code websites, to edit photos. But I also consume content on it. I read tweets, browse news sites and read feeds.

I’m never without my iPhone. It is literally with me 24 hours a day. I love it.

The iPhone is all about consumption for me. I read email. I check Twitter. I flip through Flipboard. I listen to Rdio and hours of podcasts. When I create content it is a short email or a 140 character tweet. Anything more is a chore because of the tiny keyboard and mini screen.

Then there is the iPad mini. It’s half way in between the two. It’s great for content consumption and pretty decent for content creation. The screen is a bit small and the keyboard isn’t ideal, but I wrote this entire post on it. That’s something I’d never attempt on the iPhone.

I’m most excited about some of the unique apps on the iPad mini. And I’m really keen on its portability. Being able to grab a thin, tiny device that is a pretty solid replacement for a heavy laptop (in many regards ) is pretty great.

For $329, it’s a no-brainer.

Lots has happened since then, but I’ve kept up my running pretty well despite not having a race on my schedule and that little elbow surgery thing last month that put me out of action for a couple of weeks.

A few months back I ran 27km on February 24th. I came out of that run with a pretty sore ankle thanks to a near fall and some very icy streets. Since then I’ve run only eight times as I nursed the foot back to health with some rest, and went through the surgery.

Last Sunday I ran 12km and felt pretty good. I’ve been trying to get back on a regular schedule since then and it’s been going well with a half dozen runs under my belt. I’m feeling stronger and loving the running again as my fitness returns quickly.

Today I went out with the marathon group from the Running Room at the TD Centre. They had a 24km route mapped out and I figured running the first 15km (at least) should be doable. I got to 12km and was feeling good so I kept running. At 14.5km I had to commit to a trail section with no TTC escape until 18km. I felt good so I bombed down the Beltline Trail. It was great to be back, and I felt super.

I decided then to push through to the finish and run the whole route. We ran across the Bloor Viaduct, down Broadview, and then along Queen back downtown. The legs started giving out a bit, but 24.75km was done in 2:33:15.

Awesome amazing.

When I got home I signed up for the GoodLife Fitness Toronto Half Marathon in two weeks. I can’t wait to run another race. It won’t be my fastest ever, but that’s okay. Run for fun is my motto this winter and spring and this race will be the culmination of that effort.

It’s about tapping into a mysterious force that lets you do things you didn’t think you could. It brings out the very best in people like no other event does.

The finish line at the Boston Marathon was shattered on Monday by two bombs. Limbs of several people were lost. The lives of three were taken. We were all affected by it in one way or another.

An Unbreakable Spirit

But take heart in this truth: The spirit of the marathon is unbreakable. I spent the last 24 hours thinking about what the impact the attack would have on the running community, and on the event that all marathon runners look to for ultimate inspiration.

Our spirits were shaken yesterday. Shaken hard. Someone tried to extinguish the spirit of the marathon and I’m mad about it. How dare you.

The Spirit of the Marathoner

In thinking about what happened yesterday, and in reading incredible accounts of heroism and bravery from volunteers, first responders, runners and victims, I’ve come to realize that the spirit of the marathon comes not from the event, or the distance, or the history.

The spirit of the marathon burns inside the people who run it.

Each marathoner has a story to tell about how they were challenged in their own way and overcame. No doubt there were people out on the Boston course yesterday who had overcome incredible obstacles. Cancer, sickness, depression, addiction… each runner has their reason to run and to train and to take on the marathon challenge and emerge triumphant after 42.2km.

That’s why it was so incredibly hurtful that the bombs were at the finish and that many runners yesterday never got to experience the joy that comes with the running the last few hundred meters of their marathon. I don’t know whether the person responsible considered this carefully, or whether it was by chance they chose the finish line to make their sick point. Whatever the case, the location added to the impact.

We’ll Overcome, We’ll Run Again

Most will have another opportunity to take on the marathon and they’ll get to cross the line and revel in their accomplishment at another event or in Boston next year. Some won’t, and that is truly tragic.

Runners run and I’ll run a big-city marathon again, I’m sure. I’ll think of Boston every single time I run towards the finish line, and I’ll be thankful every time I cross without incident. It’s not fair that it happened in Boston this week, but it did happen. It’s not fair that we’ll have to think of it every single time we run, but we will.

It can’t be changed.

But runners will overcome this and the spirit of the marathon won’t be diminished. Instead, like the runners that find strength they didn’t know they had, the marathon will emerge stronger for what it went through in Boston yesterday.

I really wanted Flickr to be the place to post everything – photos (snapshots and more thoughtfully considered photos) as well as the videos that I’m making with the footage from our Sony Action Cam.

It turns out that Flickr’s Facebook integration is a little less than stellar, and then there’s the little issue with video length. Flickr only allows clips to be a maximum of 90 seconds.

No worries, you say. Post everything to Facebook. That seems like a decent idea at first, but going Facebook to Twitter is a pain (and the privacy settings on my Facebook posts would limit the audience to my Facebook friends only). Plus, Facebook has this awesome thing where they delete your videos because of bogus automated copyright warnings even when you have music that is from iMovie and totally okay to post.

Here’s what I settled on:

Photos: I’ll still post everything to Flickr because I like how they maintain the quality of the photos and I can live with the limitations of the Facebook integration. For the snapshots, I’m going back to Instagram which is a service I’ve not used in a few months. I’m not a fan of filters and having to crop everything square, but for quick shots that I want my friends to see, it’s a good choice. Plus it pushes content to Facebook nicely and I can archive the full, uncropped image on Flickr for safe keeping.

Videos: These belong on a proper video hosting service and for me that is Vimeo. They have HD quality (far better than Facebook or Flickr) and I don’t have to use YouTube. Given that Picasa recently went away in favour of Google+ Photos, I can see Google making me use a Google+ account in the future, so I don’t want to mess with them.

I guess the lesson is that there is no single service that does it all and picking the appropriate service for the content you are posting is the best way to go.

Hilton Head Biking from James Koole on Vimeo.

It’s been a long journey already. Right after the accident, I figured it would be three months until everything was back to normal – that’s what they told me, at least. Six months later they said things were coming along slowly. A year later I was still doing physio twice a week and things were not back to normal. It turns out that bones don’t always heal the way you want them too. Sometimes they grow into places they don’t belong…like in the middle of a joint preventing proper movement of that joint.

A Do-Over

But this time should be different. The first surgery was a mental and physical battle from the very start. One minute I was riding to work on my bike, loving the cool wind and enjoying a nice early autumn morning spin down Queen’s Quay. A second later I was on the ground and my arm was pointed in the wrong direction and that was just the beginning.

I wasn’t prepared for any of what happened next. Not prepared to be loaded into an ambulance for a short drive to St. Michael’s Hospital. Not prepared for a three hour surgery. Not prepared for three days in the hospital. Not prepared for the pain afterwards. Not prepared for physio and a whole new world of pain. Not prepared for dealing with any of it.

Now I know what to expect. I know how shitty it might be. I’m much stronger mentally. I know how much pain I can handle (a lot) and I’m ready for it. I know what getting off the pain killers is like and how to do it. I know it’s going to suck. But I know I’ll get through it okay and things will be better afterwards.

When it comes to customer service, disappointing customers is something that needs to be taught or you’ll end up in trouble. If you give in to every customer demand, you’ll end up hurting the bottom line and sometimes you’ll fall victim to fraud.

A few scenarios and how to handle them:

• A prospective customer wants you to waive a sign up fee: Your company occasionally provides discount or coupon codes that waive a sign up fee, but in general, you require customers to pay to join your club. Telling the potential customer that they have to pay is tough for a customer service agent to handle. Arming them with a good explanation makes it easier to teach them how to do it without feeling like they’ve failed. Real world example: try to get a free Costco membership.
• A current customer wants a discount on pricing: You might discount for some customers who do a significant volume of sales with you. Sometimes customers ask and they simply don’t qualify for a discount off the regular price. In this case, having some tangible guidelines for the customer service person helps to get them over the hump of saying no. Real world example: try to get a discount on a MacBook Air at the Apple Store.
• A customer wants a refund or wants you to cover their mistake or loss: If someone drops their brand new phone in the toilet a week after they get it, that’s a drag. But should you eat the cost of a new phone for them? No. But it’s natural for the customer service person to empathize with the customer and they will want to help them out and make it all better by providing a replacement phone for free. That replacement costs you real money. The solution is to have firm guidelines for replacement of damaged phones. Real world example: buy a new Ford, scrape the side pulling out of the dealership, and see what they say when you ask for a new one for free.

Take Emotion Out of the Equation

The common thread here in terms of helping the customer service agent disappoint the customer is to take the burden away from the agent and put it at the company level. When the customer service person is left to decide who to “help out” they will generally end up helping everyone. That’s likely not financially viable for the company.

Instead, take the decision away from the customer service person and give them the excuse they need to take their own guilt away when they are stuck disappointing a customer. Create firm guidelines for when to replace a product, or when to provide a discount and then don’t deviate from them. The customer service agent can still play the hero when the customer’s demand satisfies those guidelines, but when they don’t, the agent won’t be the one who is disappointing the customer and that will help them do what needs to be done in that situation.