Most Public Transit systems across Canada are offering free rides for New Year’s Eve — this is a great idea. A wonderful way to bring in the New Year by being a bit more environmentally friendly (or economically friendly if you have ever had to take a pricey taxi home after a night of celebrating). A quick look around the internet reveals:

• Toronto Transit is offering free rides from 12:01-4 am on January 1
• GO Trains will be free from 7:00 pm on December 31st through closing — and they’ll run a special Late Night Bus leaving York Mills at 2:10 am and making all regular stops to Brampton
• Mississauga Transit is running free service from 7 pm on December 31 to 4 am January 1
• Halifax Metro Transit is offering free Bus, Access A Bus, and Alderney Ferry service starting at 8:30 pm on December 31
• Calgary Transit is offering free rides after 6 pm on December 31
• Winnipeg Transit is offering free transit rides starting at 7 pm on December 31st and running through the end of service
• Edmonton Transit (including DATS), St. Albert Transit and Strathcona County Transit are providing free New Year’s Eve service starting at 6 pm
• Southern BC (including Vancouver) will get free TransLink Rides starting at 5 pm on December 31
• Victoria BC will receive free transit rides (PDF) after 6 pm on December 31
• Saskatoon Public Transit is offering free rides from 6 pm on December 31
• Lots of smaller transit systems in the GTA will provide free rides as well. There’s a full list here including York Region, Hamilton Street Railway, and Durham Region Transit among others

If I have missed any (and I know that I have), please feel free to add them using the comment section below (and get a free backlink using your own anchor text).

Have a Great New Year’s and I look forward to providing more interesting posts to you in the in 2009!

A month ago I hired my first virtual assistant after reading the The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris using ODesk.com. In my initial post, I promised to do updates on my progress and report on how the process was working for me. This is the first of the monthly updates.

As I mentioned, the process was quick and painless and within 24 hours I had more than 150 applicants to do part time data entry for me. It was a bit overwhelming actually but the ODesk interface made it quite manageable. When you post a job, you get to set what requirements you want the person applying to have. While anyone can apply whether they meet those criteria or not but the interface will quickly remove those applicants if so desired. From the 150 I quickly had a list of less than 20 that meet what I considered were essential requirements such as English speaking and writing, more than 100 hours of work thru ODesk and a feedback rating of more than 4 out of 5. Having never done this before I wanted to get someone that had experience with ODesk and wasn’t some fly-by-night operator from India or the Far East.

Within 24 hours I had filled the position and Michelle had begun the job. She caught on quickly to the process and was timely and accurate with the necessary updates. I now feel completely comfortable leaving the work to her and just checking in every couple of days to follow up. In fact, I have now assigned her more work and giving myself even more time to spend on what I want rather than sitting at the keyboard entering data.

About a week after I hired Michelle I started the search for another assistant. This person would be an on-call graphics creation person to make me graphics as needed for the web sites that I run. I am always in need of a new banner, a product image or other similar image. Not enough to have a graphics person on the payroll and I was getting tired of posting each graphic as a project on elance.com or scriptlance.com. I turned again to ODesk and they came thru with flying colours. I had more than 50 applicants in under 12 hours and hired Marie right away. She took a little longer than Michelle to understand what I actually needed (more my fault than hers) but has produced some wonderful images for my World of Warcraft and Christmas sites.

With everything considered, hiring these 2 people has been a Godsend. They have saved me tons of time and frustration but more importantly they have allowed me to focus my attentions on tasks that I want to focus on while not neglecting what has to be done to keep the business profitable.

If you ever feel that you are overworked and need a break, try outsourcing some of the routine tasks to a virtual assistant – you won’t regret it.

One of the things that I try to do when I leave from my trips to either Nicaragua or El Salvador is to leave something that will help the residents after I am gone.

On previous trips to Nicaragua, it has been 40,000 children’s vitamins or sports equipment for one the school programs. This trip to El Salvador was a bit different as I had no direct contact with any NGO or other support organization. After a bit of thinking I decided that a basketball net and some balls for the local school would be a good choice.

The difficult decision was to either buy a basketball net locally (i.e. in San Salvador – a 2 hour drive) or try and find a local person to make one for me. The easiest thing would have been to by it in one of large department stores in San Salvador and haul it up to the school in the back of the pick up. Not much benefit to the local economy with that method, so I decided to hire a local builder to make one. It was more expensive to do so but the benefits were more far-reaching. The local builder got a job, all of the materials were bought locally, so local business benefited, the school got a solid piece of equipment that I think is much studier than what could have been bought and the local kids got a piece of sports equipment that they can use year round. The balls were also bought form a local merchant (who gave me a discount when he learned why I needed 5 basketballs).

If you happen to be traveling somewhere think about what you can do to better the local community. Sure you may only be a tourist but what better way to remember a trip than with a donation to help improve the lives of those whose country you visited.

For some of you I am sure that you saying to yourself ‘about bloody time’ but much to your disappointment it is not the professional help that you may think I need.

I have finally made the leap and have hired a virtual assistant. If any of you have been hearing about lifestyle design or the 4 Hour Work Week, then you know what I am talking about. If you haven’t, no problem. Here are the basics.

Lifestyle Design is the notion that you can have the lifestyle of your dreams. Whether that is more time with family, relaxing at your cottage, more traveling etc. The idea is to structure your life around what you want and  do what makes you happy. For me, the goal is to travel and work towards ending poverty.

A virtual assistant will help me complete tasks that I don’t have time for and allow me to get more done in less time. I have been working full hours for the past few weeks (since my return from El Salvador) and realized that I could get a lot more done if I could clone myself (as scary as that sounds). The virtual assistant will handle routine tasks for me such as data entry, web research and working on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on the sites that I have already.

Now one may ask how do you go about finding a virtual assistant. Well, there are lots of sites out there that specialize in hooking up freelancers to people needing things done. For example, if I needed to get a graphic created I could go to one of the sites and post the job. The same is true for virtual assistants. I placed on job posting on ODesk.com and in less than 24 hours I had more than 150 responses. (There are others such as elance.com, scriptlance.com and guru.com just to name a few.)

I did that on Saturday and I had hired Michelle on Monday. I won’t go into details about the costs involved but let it be said that it is very cost effective and easily affordable.

I will post my experiences here to keep everyone up to date on how this new process works out.

If you have any ideas or commnets, please feel free to post them here.