Don’t Forget To Give This Holiday Season

The holidays are a time for getting together with your friends and loved ones and of course, the ritual of giving and getting presents. While you’re out enjoying the egg nog and the shortbread cookies, I’d like you to think about the people who have neither cookies nor egg nog. Or for that matter, no home in which to enjoy either.

A couple of weeks ago, the Dot Com Pho Crew headed down to the Union Gospel Mission where we heard some amazing stories and saw what this great charity was doing to make things just a little more festive for so many people in the Lower Mainland. Here’s a video from our visit:

As you can see, the the Union Gospel Mission does a lot of good. What’s even more amazing is what they can do when people are willing to give a little extra.

Unlike a lot of other big charities out there, they rely heavily on word of mouth, ensuring that all donations get maximized. That’s why this holiday season I’d like you to think about putting the Union Gospel Mission on your shortlist of charities to give to when you can do without that double latte. In fact, the Union Gospel Mission can provide a Xmas Dinner for only $3.29. That means that $32.90 can feed 10 people and $329.00 can feed 100.

What If You Have Nothing To Give?

With the slowdown of the economy, things might be tight this holiday season. You might still want to give, but you can’t. So what can you do? Well, I would say, give when you can. However, I’ve got another solution for you to consider this Xmas.

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Upgrading the Macbook Pro from 2GB to 4GB…

Now that I’ve had a good couple of days on my New (Refurbished) 2.5GHz Penryn Macbook Pro, it’s pretty clear that the 2GB of RAM onboard is no match for the beating that I’ve been dishing out. With VMWare running in the background and all sorts of things open in one of the several “spaces” that I’ve setup, I’ve been swapping pretty badly to the slow notebook hard drive. An immediate upgrade to 4GB’s was in order.

So I went down to my favourite computer store, NCIX and picked out a 4GB DDR2 667MHz Kit made by OCZ Technology to do the upgrade with. Want to know how it’s done? Check out my DIY video of the upgrade process…

Although this upgrade is very easy, if you’re clumsy like Ed and tend to spill things on people, you might not want to try this at home. I’m sure one of those Mac Geniuses could help you out and charge you a lot in the process.

If this still isn’t enough, the next step is to investigate an 8GB upgrade. Though some people have reported varying degrees of success with 4GB modules out there, a 6GB upgrade is actually reported as a success. I’ll keep you folks posted on that as I know that many users would probably want to know which modules will do the trick without flaking out. Stay tuned!

Dot Com Pho – The Return to Happy Pho…

This past Summer, the Dot Com Pho Crew had a chance to visit the Happiest Pho in Vancouver. The place is so happy, that everyone left in a good mood. Happy Brian, the proprietor of this establishment, is like the “Anti-Lan”. Where Mr. Lan is the angriest Pho restaurant owner, Brian is the happiest Pho restaurant owner. With the horrible weather and John’s recent visit to the hospital, everyone was in need of a bit of cheering up.

Joining us this week was John Chow, Moneca, Greg Morgan and running late once again was Ed Lau, who was PWND with a parking ticket for being 2 minutes late. I guess being late and lazy has finally caught up to him. At least he didn’t spill anything. Here’s the video from this week…

Stay tuned for next week’s episode!