Well, Canada won the gold medal today in Hockey and you can bet that it is busy and packed on the streets here. Virtually every street vendors are making a ton of profit simply selling items that are patriotic like a flag. This is one of those days too where it is so great to see everyone come together. While obviously business and profits is a big deal for a lot of people, it’s great to see that it can be just the simple things like a sporting event that puts people on the same page for once.

People were super nice today too. I know most people say Canadians are nice. Today everyone was extra nice in being helpful. Example, even bus drivers taking passengers on when they are not supposed to stop normally as they knew that people needed to get to the events on time. I’m really happy that I got to be a part of it. As I always say, for me it’s about trying and experiencing as much as I can without worrying about the money too much. Funny enough, even in this case I ended up making money while doing something that I was interested in.

Just goes to show you again that if you just do things that you are passionate about or would enjoy the money will come. Not coincidentally I met a ton of people that I could very well be working with in the future with other endeavors. I am super interested in what happens during the post games now too in terms of the economic impact. Either way, it has been a great month and day today.

I know in the US there are Black Friday sales coming up and surprisingly there are a ton of non US residents that are keeping track of what is going to be on sale there. Basically, for some people if the deal is worth it they will travel to make the purchase.

What surprised me is how some stores here are advertising its sales as a boxing day pre-sale already. For non Canadian readers, think of this day as the Black Friday here (Occurs on December 26th). I guess marketing wise some companies are really banking on the pre-programmed mentality that people have when it comes to shopping. So they figure if they throw in that term people will start coming in droves.

People are usually disappointed when they actually get to the store in these scenarios. Funny enough, some people actually buy something anyways as they feel silly for traveling and not returning with anything. Best just to wait for the real sales.

I got this interesting e-mail message today from the cable company talking about some kind of bailout package that TV stations are asking for and how it believes that it is not a good idea. This was the message:

A television bailout is Bad TV.

CTV, CBC and Global TV are trying to convince Canadians that local TV is in trouble. What they’re really doing is trying to push through a TV tax on all Canadians for programming you get for free today.

They want this extra charge because they’ve misspent the hundreds of millions of dollars they’ve already received from taxpayers, cable and satellite companies.

In total, cable and satellite companies pay $250 million a year in program funding to assist local broadcasters in producing Canadian television programs – as much additional funding as is provided by the Canadian government. Where does that money come from? It comes from the Canadian taxpayers.

The major broadcasters won’t even commit to using the new money to produce new local content. That’s why the CRTC has already turned them down twice. None of us can afford to keep bailing out companies who don’t know how to control their spending. Help us hold the broadcasters accountable.

I must be out of the loop as locally I only heard of one station that was trying to get public support to maintain operations financially. What this message did get me interested in was the whole notion of a bailout and how it raises the question where should bad company decisions or management be a reason to get money in this fashion?

For most types of businesses it is normally a “tough luck” type of scenario if factors like the economy or company expenses are eating into your profits. In many ways I would tend to agree that this should just mean that the stations should have to try and adapt to the times.

Would this bailout money really help companies though? I was looking at some of the companies in the US that got this type of benefit and it looked like for the most part it didn’t do much as many companies kept doing what they were doing. It’s interesting to see who the real innovators are during times like this too. I’m personally not too in the favor of an extra tax myself if it is just a matter of an organization needing to restructure itself.

With the release the Palm Pre recently I was thinking whether or not I would want to buy something like that as for my next cell phone purchase I was thinking of a data phone. I never was too into the iPhone hype personally and another reason was that there was only one carrier that was capable of serving it here.

While researching about the phones I just remembered that two of the big cell phone service providers here, Telus and Bell, are going to upgrade its network using High Speed Packet Access (HSPA). And as it turns out, apparently right here in Vancouver we’ll get to test this out at around as early as September.

Without the technical jargon, this potentially means that this may change a lot of the cell phone fee structures for the better. At the same time, the main reason I thought about this is that my contract is expiring at around November. Usually companies try to get you to commit to yearly contracts months before your contract expires to ensure that you will stay as a customer.

However, in this case you may want to try and hold off and see what happens if you are a Canadian resident. The good thing is that I will still have a few months to compare everything before my contract expires.

Here in Canada today there was a big announcement about the country’s financial situation as well as the government’s economic plan to get things going in the economy. Without going through all the details, essentially the government is planning to go into an $87 billion debt buy spending that money on various things such as giving tax credits. So the key question is will people actually spend the money or will they simply save it?

Now there were some interesting details in the plan such as business owners who will get credit to purchase one new computer system for the year. Overall, I am more inclined to just save the funds if I do end up getting money through these initiatives. I kind of categorize these as trickle funds where it doesn’t really change your overall situation and so it doesn’t make sense for you to go out of your way to use it up.

I think of it like a line that gives you fresh water. If my lifestyle revolved around how much water I get every year from this, getting an extra drip of rain each day isn’t enough to change me to the point where I could say use the water to make a swimming pool now as oppose to using it as drinking/cooking water. I would need say another water line before considering that.

I personally don’t see how this stimulus plans can help the average person overall as even I am inclined to say that the majority of people who would spend them are ones that aren’t in a financial predicament. Like with personal financial management too, the key thing is changing the way we do things I’d say as oppose to just catering to people’s immediate wants.

Thinking for myself, if I was in a rut I would think that an opportunity and direction would do a lot more than getting a small amount of cash injection. Example, tell me who I can talk to help me get off my feet, the different types of paths I could take to adapt to the situation, etc. It’s more effective to focus on things like that if I was looking for outside assistants.

As usual though, you should always try to find your own ways to generate more revenue if you need it rather than relying on others to give you it. If you do intend to spend too, try to find ways to use it to generate more funds as oppose to just using it for recreational purposes.