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Did you know that you can find Kosher Coca-Cola? It’s identifiable by its distinctive yellow cap. It was the result of work done by Rabbi Tobias Geffen who was asked to help make Coke kosher back in the 1930s.

To produce Coca-Cola the chemical glycerol is used to help the flavour remain evenly spread throughout the soda. Glycerol is made with rendered animal fat and there’s no way to tell what kind of animal the fat was taken from, thus it is impossible to “kosherify” Coke with glycerol. Special cotton-seed oil was used to create an approved glycerol.

Also unique to these yellow-capped Cokes is the use of sucrose instead of corn syrup as corn is banned during this Passover holiday. 

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:)

Social media and networks tends to be on the bleeding edge of bleeding edge of new ideas, trends, words/jargon, etc. So many of our newest expressions and jokes often find their beginnings on the internet in social arenas. The reason it works is because a lot of people hear/see it and begin passing it around their own circles. This is one of the great things about the information age! What grinds my gears is when people start don’t understand what they’re actually saying/writing and start spreading horrid examples on how a word should be used.

First some background information to get everyone on some common ground. Metadata (information about information) is great! It helps add more context, meaning and organizable data to data. Geotagging a tweet, naming people in a photo, and the grandfather of them all: time/date stamp on computer files.

All of these are great uses of metainformation because it allows for doing and organizing things well beyond their original uses. Finding people near you, finding all photos of you, sorting files by date. What makes these these metadata powerful is their transparency: they all work without impeding the use or accessibility of the original information.

I don’t want to go into a huge example, but imagine if every time you opened a photo on your computer it printed everyone’s name on their face, or you had to know what the last day you opened a file so that you could find it. Yes, it would suck. Well I have belief that #hashtags on twitter are broken (in most part).

Hashtags are the pound/number/hash symbol used as metadata. My problem with them is that they impede the reading of tweets well beyond their usefulness in the general twitterverse. The main reasons why are because there are no concrete rules governing them and most people don’t understand them. 

So let me write some unwritten rules about them so help you make the world a better place.

1. Don’t overuse them. If every word in a tweet #is #a #hashtag, you dilute it’s usefulness, and worst of all you chop up your sentence. Hashtags exist to organize tweets, not make a mess of things. 
2. Make their use and existence clear and meaningful. Do tell the people you will be using it with what it’s for. Don’t use ambiguous tags like #Toyota or #Canada. Even something more specific like #Olympics is still so overarching that you can’t possibly be grouping or finding useful information. #WWDC2010 works, as does #JoshBDay.
3. Use CamelCase. This is kind of obvious but basically tags must be one work, so if you’re putting two words together, capitalizeTheBeginningOf each word to help legibility.
4. Put them at the end of your tweet so it doesn’t interrupt the flow of the tweet.

I guess what I’m getting to is: know how to use them, or stay away. It’s better to not use them at all then to use them incorrectly. Here is a link for more information regarding hashtags that you should read before posting another tweet with a #Hashtag.

To conclude my post about my whole dorm blogging I’ll list the girls:

Our obligatory-by-Vancouver-sterotype asian girl Emily - Little Chinese Girl from Scarborough.

Ok, so maybe she isn’t actually from Vancouver, but she is little! Her oriental-ness can also be humorous. Upon looking at her page though, looks like it’s getting a little stale. But that’s not to say I won’t give her an earful on what I think about that!

The undercover blogger Keanan.

I’ve got no link to her blog because she won’t tell us. Her story is that “it’s for school so it’s no fun”, but just because it’s for school shouldn’t give it permission to be boring. I have a feeling we might never see it.

As for our un-photographable members of the house, I present Ashley - Crazy’s.

I’m thinking someone should give her a lesson on readability right now because it’s almost painful to read. On the plus side at least it’s not totally pink… just mostly. If there’s something you’d notice about Ashley is that she loves pink! Everything from her laptop to her potato peeler is pink. I guess if you’re going to do something, do it 110%!

Next is our tech-savy girl Danielle - life of nerd.

She started out strong but has (also) had a textual drought of almost a week. She even bought the domain bigdee.me for her blog! If there’s one thing I can say about her it’s that it is nice to have a girl that isn’t afraid of technology.

As for the athlete in the house, here is Ashtin - Beam hardening 101.

It’s nice to see someone actually write a rant. Someone who isn’t afraid to say what she means. Ashtin’s first post is certainly about a time that I was involved with. I’m sorry Ashtin, I hope you didn’t fail. :(

To end this we have my favourite housemate *cough* Brenna - I want to remember everything.

I can’t take any credit for this blog starting because it is also a school deal. Half of what gets written here is straight out of the school paper that Brenna writes for (BCIT’s The Link). The nice thing about this blog is that I enjoy her written word much more than her spoken word. She might not have much to say, but she can write link she means it. As much as we don’t get along, I do like this blog.

Well that’s it, that’s my residence’s blogging deal. They’ve all started, but can they all continue? It is the test of time that so many things are tested on. I might do a follow up in a month to see where they’re at. I hope to be pleasantly surprised. :)

As a Tumblr user, I can understand what makes it so appealing and fun to blog here, but to have the majority of my residence to hop on board is pretty nutty. It’s like the next “vinyl revival” over here. 

Unfortunately it might not last as long as the LP craze, but better they all take a shot at tumblogging for a day than not doing it at all! I’m sure some will continue to post in the long term… 

Anyways, I’ll share their links with you. I’ll start with the guys today and the girls soon. (Don’t forget to give them some feedback!)

First up is Mr. Dallas - DormDaze. 

He might have already lost his momentum on blogging but his first post is worth the look. I was surprised to see him even put the effort into this but I guess even Dallas can still surprise me. He tried Twitter too but that also came to an abrupt end several posts in. 

Next is Marc Leclair - ResErVoIr BlOgS.

All I could find was this old photo of Marc in the back of my shoe box of memories on a trip to see the Olympic cauldron. Might be Calgary ‘88…?

Armed with his HD Handycam, Marc’s blog has evolved into the Vlog, writing our story with motion pictures. If a picture is worth a thousand words, than this post is the book on Haida Suite D, our current residence together. You can also find Marc here.

Our resident movie critic Rob Andrews - Mindfeed.

It’s difficult, nearly impossible to know about or have an opinion on more movies than Rob. His chef d’oeuvre is his list of Top 50 movies of the ’00s. It is quite inclusive and has given me more than year’s worth of excellent, and often non-Hollywood movies to catch up on. 

Finally, we have Warren - The Blog that Marc made me get.

I don’t know how much more of Warren’s blog we will see be updated, but at least he also now has the platform on which to write on. Although he does seem to know a thing or two about shaving.