Cole's Notes - The Sunday Journalist

 Substack and Cole's Notes Something is coming... It was once said that regarding the press, you should never fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel.  Today, that would be:  never pick a fight with someone with a Substack. Subscribe to me on Substack: https://substack.com/@colemanmarkcooper?utm_source=edit-profile-page  There is not anything there at the moment - I'm busily hooking up my Social media accounts and working on building my audience - so this is just a heads up that I'm updating things this fall and adding in new content as I update this blog and the other social media sites. Why am I doing this? Well, the comic strip Shoe has it, ideally. So, I'm looking at various income sources from my writing.  Substack is one.  So what is Substack? Substack is a platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters. It allows writers to send digital newsletters directly to subscribers. This...

 The Challenges of Having a Common Name on Gmail Hey there, As an early adopter of Google email beta, I was among the first users to sign up for a Gmail account. At the time, I had a Hotmail address and a Shaw@home address, but I ended up with my name in Gmail:  cole.cooper@gmail.com . With this account, I set up my blog, Google+ services, and Google Plus page. Back in 2004, there were few Cole Coopers on the internet, so it was a fairly uncommon name. However, more people with the same name have emerged over time, including a football player on Twitter, a Marvel character at the Daily Bugle, Facebook pages, and even a colecooper.com website. While I don't mind sharing my name with others, having a common name like this causes issues with Gmail. When companies take down email addresses for multiple people with the same name, they often get it wrong. Since I was the first Cole Cooper on Gmail, any emails sent to  colecooper@gmail.com  come directly to me, even if they...

Dear readers of The Sunday Journalist, I hope this blog post finds you well. It's been a while since I last posted, and I wanted to share with you why that is. As many of you know, there was a recent security breach at LastPass, a popular password manager. The breach was a wake-up call to me and many others who have relied on these services to store our sensitive information. In light of this, I decided to step back from blogging and focus on revamping my security. I looked closely at all my online accounts, from email to social media, and evaluated their privacy and security settings. I used strong, unique passwords for each account and enabled two-factor authentication wherever possible. This involved updating all of my passwords, which was a time-consuming but necessary task. Which I am still working on. In addition to these steps, I also took the time to educate myself on best practices for online security, the dangers of phishing scams, the importance of keeping software up-t...

Dilbert Why are there no new postings on Cole's Notes Well - for the longest time I've been working offline.  It's been a strange year with only my iPhone to post to Facebook and now with 2022 almost done I'm trying to get caught up - HOWEVER - unlike Dilbert I've gotten over 4,500 emails over the email accounts I look after, and working as I do offline - the inboxes are heavily clogged. Plus, my systems have been having hardware problems.  Now that I'm no longer working in a corporate office the IT support guy is me.

Introducing The Sunday Journalist  C. Mark Cooper As you can tell - there wasn't much going on in 2022 for my Blogging. I did (and still do) most of my posting on Facebook. Both  Quotes of the day  and  Column of the day  are part of what I have been doing as a hobbyist communication and content creation blogger. But I have been spending more time reading and cross-posting than creating. Passing on other people's writing rather than creating my own. While it gave me a more significant following and audience than posting in the  Cole's Notes   Blog, I was doing it the lazy way by using my iPhone to curate and post on Twitter and Facebook. I was spending more time browsing Facebook and Quora than doing any writing for myself.  So today - I'm starting to revise this Blog and my online profiles to reflect my new Pen name. Well, back in 2020 - I was working two jobs unrelated to journalism and had reached the age where I look back on what I'm doing wit...

Coleman , Last week, there was a story in the news that, at first glance, may seem unrelated to Alberta's fight for fairness. However, when we dug into the details, we realized that it could have major implications for our province and our relationship with Ottawa. On the last day of May, British Columbia Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, Sheila Malcolmson, and her federal equivalent, Carolyn Bennett, held a joint press conference in Vancouver to announce that the federal government would be giving the British Columbia government an exemption from the enforcement of Canada's federal drug policy. This is an exemption that the British Columbia government has been pushing for, for quite some time, and means that in British Columbia, it will no longer be a criminal offence for Canadians over the age of 18 to possess up to a cumulative 2.5 grams of opioids, cocaine, methamphetamine, and MDMA. Now, whatever your opinion on t...