Today I went to a warehouse sale as I thought I would find some decent stuff. The prices didn’t seem too bad compared to what the original retail prices were supposed to be for each product. As usual, in these types of sales virtually every category type of clothing all share the same price point. Example, all jeans are one price and all coats are another.

Usually at the door they give you these large see-through bags too as many people just go crazy and start dumping a bunch of clothing items in it. For the most part, it is pretty civilized unlike say a boxing day sale where everyone is at each other’s throat

All I bought was one shirt as funny enough most of the clothing sizes were in large or extra large sizes. One interesting thing was that at the checkout this is technically the first time ever that I was able to put that chip credit card to the test. Basically, no signature as all I needed was a PIN code. It was apparently new for the employee too. It made the transaction a lot faster I thought.

This event is actually still going on for a few days at the PNE if any of you live in the Vancouver area and want to check it out. There was also a whole load of Croc shoe clearances too.

Okay, it is scorching hot here in Vancouver. The funny thing is even if I only turn my computer on for like five minutes all of the fans in the system start to move. Normally that only happens if you are using it for long periods of time and hence extra fans kick in to start cooling it off.

Someone was telling me today though that she enjoyed the hot weather as she finds that she spends less money. One reason is that she said in the hot weather she is not inclined to eat as much which saves money. For her it is more about drinking fluids and eating cold stuff.

I was thinking about this and overall I would think that you would spend more money in an extremely hot season of the year. Especially for people that eat out a lot and spend a lot of their money buying convenience items. It is a little more convenient to go out too as opposed to say a snow day which again increases the chances that you will spend more.

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.

As expected there was a lot of events around here in Vancouver today as we are exactly one year away from the Olympics that are going to be held here. The Olympic torch kind of had an interesting design I thought as you can see here:

One big topic that is constantly being brought up here is whether or not the Olympics will be a good or bad thing for the economy here once everything is all said and done. As well, there seems to be a non stop end to the amount of people who are looking to capitalize on the event financially.

I’m still trying to think if there is anything I want to create for this event as it is a once in a lifetime type of deal. I was thinking of something that would require some help of other people though mainly for the sheer and fun and passion of it first of all. Anyone in the BC/Vancouver area feel like creating something?

Who knows, maybe this can be another opportunity where doing something for the passion of it will just end up generating an income.

This is a local issue as here in Vancouver there is this new initiative by some large media outlets trying to raise awareness of the poor Downtown Eastside here as for years it has been plagued as the sore spots of the city. Drugs, addicts, the homeless, etc. I did make a post about this area a few months back about Trying To Operate A Business In A Poverty Area that dealt with the area in question.

Now one of the goals apparently is to raise awareness of the issue and to find solutions for it. At the same time, the attempt is to try and explore what does and doesn’t work while encouraging public input. First of all, this was the report I saw and you can watch it too if you are interested:

This topic actually interested me a lot as back when I participated in the Vancouver Board of Trade I was actually interested in volunteering in one of those committees which dealt with the poverty in that area since I think it is fixable with the right set of actions. While watching that report, maybe I am just a little bias but seeing how some of those people are struggling financially yet they are still doing things like smoking cigarettes and drinking a lot of alcohol makes me believe that we are just catering the problem.

In many ways, it’s like a person that keeps going into personal financial debt because of habits yet people keep throwing them money and resources where they end up just using it as a vehicle to continue the exact same thing for who knows how much longer until they need more again. I am a strong believer in finding the roots of the problem first as issues like these usually go much deeper.

My thought to fix the poverty issue personally is to create an environment where these people can work to sustain a self sufficient lifestyle. I personally don’t think just giving housing and money really solves the issue in the end. By work I don’t mean give them jobs at say a fast food place either. Instead, maybe there are more super old fashion approaches such as setting up an environment where people can grow/harvest their own food while having a livable shelter. I’m definitely one of those who would rather teach someone to fish for themselves rather than me doing it for them.

That way, they don’t really need money when you think about it to live and they are doing something pro-actively to fix their lives instead of sitting on the streets and expecting things to fall from the sky. Isn’t it kind of weird too how we have like a system for criminals where we give them food, shelter and recreation yet for some reason we can’t create a solution for this? Of course though, my thoughts is still the same where you need to fix the root of the problems first as oppose to just handing people things.

My question is how in the world did that area get to the way it is now and why did it attract so many less fortunate people? Why is it allowed to continually happen too, so to speak? I always found it so ironic that the police station is right there and you would think things like drug dealings and all would be less prominent in an area like that. I would like to see a report about that personally as I am willing to bet there is something in that area that is the cause of the majority of the problem. I think the 80/20 rule holds the same for this where 80 percent of the problem is probably caused by 20 percent of the people there.

As an example, in the Downtown Eastside there used to be this big business called Woodwards that unfortunately went out of business a long time ago. The building has been abandoned for the most part and so homeless people began to gather around the area and claimed that building as theirs. The thing is the city and everyone just allowed it to happen and sure enough more people gathered there. Like in that case, I can see how that can actually encourage a person to live in a homeless way. That situation has since been solved though (Albeit it was done in a forceful way).

I’m assuming a big reason that an issue like this is being raised now is so that Vancouver can try and clean the place up for the Olympics next year. So just like personal finance, hopefully what will be done is that the media will try and flush out the underlying problem first. If I was trying to help a person with their financial situation for example, I would want to learn about habits and sources that lead the person to continually mismanage money as an example. Once you know that it is usually pretty easy to turn things around.