I’m not an Apple product aficionado. I don’t have an iPhone or an iPad or a MacBook Pro. I’m not part of the Apple cult(ure).

But there’s no denying that Jobs was one of the most influential visionaries of the century. His inventions have changed the fabric of our society. And he died young, but he made his life count.

In his words:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

RIP, Steve.

Last week, the CRTC ruled that usage-based billing, the model used by large Internet providers such as Bell Canada and Rogers Communications to charge customers extra for exceeding monthly download limits, will apply to smaller providers, too. Until now, those smaller providers could offer unlimited Internet packages; the ruling means they no longer can.

There have been hints already from Industry Minister Tony Clement that the federal government may quash the controversial ruling, and the prime minister has asked for a review of it. But the government’s blunt ultimatum to the CRTC suggests any review would be pro forma.

This was a terrible decision by the CRTC – yet another in a long line of them that have backed Big Telecom’s demands over the rights of the consumer and the marketplace. Usage-based billing would have stifled innovation and choked off advancement, it’s true. But let’s not forget that, thanks to the CRTC, Canadians pay the most in the world for cell phone plans, pay for incoming text messages (despite another Harper campaign promise… anyone remember that?), and enjoy tons of lovely censorship of TV and radio. All because the CRTC is supposed to protect the interests of all Canadians, but only protects the interests of three: Bell, Telus and Rogers.

As for the government, let’s not forget that this is one decision, taken under overwhelming public pressure, in the face of hundreds of other decisions that have gone against consumer interests. The real solution isn’t to review this one decision; the real solution is to review the CRTC’s overall mandate and existence.

“The guy on the line told me: Oh, it’s no problem. Your cellphone has unlimited Internet, so you can just connect your phone to your computer.”

 After Rooney asked three times if there would be an extra charge, Alexandra stayed on the phone with a customer service representative for about an hour to figure out how to connect the phone to the computer to get Internet service.

 A week later, all of Rooney’s phones were disconnected. She borrowed a phone and called Bell customer service.

 “When I spoke to the agent, he told me I had a very high balance,” she said. “He told me $47,000, and then told me I had to agree to pay a minimum payment of $300 for my phones to be reconnected.”

 Since that day, Rooney’s phone bills have not been less than five figures. Her most recent bill was for $12,000, and Bell has cut off her phone service six times.

It took Rooney over four months to get the issue resolved:

On Tuesday, Rooney got a call from someone named Gina, who said she worked at the office of the president. She apologized on behalf of Bell, and said it was unacceptable for it to take this long to settle her problem. The woman told her all charges had been reversed, and her current balance was $181.16.

“When I heard, I was so happy that I cried,” Rooney said. “She told me, she understood why I went to the newspapers about this because it’s been since July. I gave them a lot of time to handle this and they didn’t. She was really nice.”

From now on, the woman told Rooney she no longer has to contact customer service and if she has any problems, she has a special number to call.

Francoeur said the settlement of Rooney’s problem had nothing to do with the fact that a reporter contacted the company on her behalf, and that the problem would have been solved this week anyway.

Yep, that was my experience back when I was a Bell customer, too. Months of running around in circles on the phone with various customer service agents accomplished nothing. Only going to the top – in my case, to a VP – finally managed to solve anything. Which begs the question of what, exactly, the point of having a customer service department is in the first place. I mean, could nobody below the level of the president see that there was clearly something wrong with a $47,000 phone bill?

Rooney says she’ll probably remain a Bell customer, which sounds crazy but is likely because, in her rural area, she has no choice. As for me, I fully divested myself a few years ago and will never look back.

A team of researchers from the Hebrew University has developed a treatment that completely destroys HIV-infected human cells in laboratory cultures, according to an article published last month in the scientific journal AIDS Research and Therapy.

The therapy, developed by scientists from the university’s Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences and the Institute of Chemistry, destroys cells infected with HIV without damaging adjacent healthy cells.

Yep, keep calling for those academic boycotts, haters. Have fun with that.

1. Idiots are their own worst PR nightmare. Let ‘em talk long enough, they’ll shoot themselves in the foot. No need to do it for them.

2. Laziness is an addition, just like alcoholism. And it has enablers. Don’t be one. Next time someone asks you a question instead of looking it up themselves, send them this link: http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com.

3. It seems to me that people are much less shutter-happy than they were a few years ago, and are more likely to put away the camera. Has the novelty of digital allowing us to take thousands of photos worn off? Do we have photo fatigue?

4. Food really does taste better on pretty new dishes.

5. I used to think that writers were just being hyperbolic when they talked about sirens “screaming”. Now I know better. They mean it literally.

6. Summer’s not over yet. There’s still almost a month to go until NHL Preseason begins.

According to the researchers, 28 percent of the study participants smoked at least one cigarette a day, around 3 percent said they were ex-smokers, and 68 percent had never smoked.

The smokers had significantly lower intelligence test scores than non-smokers, and this remained true even after the researchers accounted for socioeconomic status measured by how many years of formal education a recruit’s father had completed.

The average IQ for non-smokers was about 101, while it was 94 for men who had started smoking before entering the military.

IQ steadily dropped as the number of cigarettes smoked increased, from 98 for people who smoked one to five cigarettes daily to 90 for those who smoked more than a pack a day.

The size and scale of this study, as well as its provocative findings, are sure to generate discussion and debate among the scientific community.

I have no basis to evaluate the scientific claims, and I’m not going to try. But I’m very sceptical, for one reason: Does anyone really find it believable that 68% of Israeli teenagers have never smoked?

The Lancet published the controversial paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues in 1998. British parents abandoned the vaccine in droves, leading to a resurgence of measles. Subsequent studies found no proof the vaccine is connected to autism.

Ten of the study’s 13 authors renounced the study’s conclusions, and The Lancet has previously said it should never have published the research. “We fully retract this paper from the published record,” its editors said in a statement on Tuesday.

Predictably, the Jenny McCarthy conspiracy theorists are dismissing this as a… you guessed it… conspiracy theory.

But, crackpots aside, hopefully this will finally parents who just want what’s best for their kids that getting them vaccinated against disease is the responsible thing to do.

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Ian Paul doesn’t think that Google will actually pull out of China. But whatever ends up happening, the implications of this statement could be huge – both for Google as a business, and for China. Stay tuned.

THE swine flu scare was a “false pandemic” led by drugs companies that stood to make billions from vaccines, a leading health expert said.

Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, claimed major firms organized a “campaign of panic” to put pressure on the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a pandemic, UK tabloid The Sun reports.

He believes it is, “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century”, and has called for an inquiry.

Maybe Wodarg should go hang out with Jenny McCarthy. I bet they have loads in common.

The folks who run the National Center for Atmospheric Research have a great rundown of the details of the AO Oscillation. In short, high pressure in the Arctic forces the jet stream south, and it drags cold air with it, chilling North American and northern Eurasia. In its opposite mode, those same regions tend to be much warmer. Right now, we’re in such an extreme high-pressure event that the readings have run off the scale of NOAA’s AO index. Fortunately for those hoping to warm up a bit, the AO is a weather event—it often changes states multiple times within a single season, and there’s no clear evidence linking its behavior to climate trends.

(Hat tip: Sera).

Montazeri’s death pushed Iranian authorities into a difficult spot. They were obliged to pay respects to one of the patriarchs of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the one-time heir apparent to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

But officials also worried that Montazeri’s memorials could become new rallying points for opposition demonstrations. The ayatollah broke with Iran’s clerical leadership and became a vehement critic, denouncing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and calling the postelection crackdown the work of a dictatorship.

Mourners shouted “Death to the Dictator” and other slogans in displays of anger against Iran’s ruling establishment during the procession in Qom, a city of shrines and clerical seminaries about 60 miles (100 kilometers) south of Tehran, witnesses said.

The Iranian election and subsequent protests were named the top Twitter news event of 2009, with #iranelection the top trending news hashtag.

Of course, that’s a load of hogwash. Supporting worthy causes is important year-round, not just in December, when the idealists get all imbued with holiday spirit and the cynics think about tax receipts. But for a number of reasons – habit, practicality, what have you – millions of people write out cheques to their favourite charities at around this time of year.

Or, don’t write cheques, which is what this post is all about.

An article last spring in the Chronicle of Philanthropy pointed out that online giving growth slowed in the US in 2008, after steady increases in previous years. (Canadian statistics are probably somewhat better, given our relatively stronger economy and our relative technological advancement when it comes to donations). The picture it painted wasn’t bleak, but it wasn’t pretty, either. Among other findings:

• The median percentage of all donations raised online in 2008 was a measly 0.8%. Even if you consider the 80/20 (or, some say, 90/10) rule about major gifts, that’s still ridiculously low.
• Many charities, when they think of online giving, are just converting direct mail thinking into digital, focusing on email solicitation – which, on the whole, works not at all.
• Online giving, while still growing (compared to other channels), saw slower growth – a 28% median last year compared to 42% and 45% respectively the previous two years. Even when you factor in economic conditions, that’s still a significant drop in growth rate.

All of this tells me that there is a great opportunity that is being squandered by cash-strapped charities who are seeing their traditional funding sources wane. Nobody writes cheques to pay the groceries or the heating bills anymore, why are we still expected to do so with charitable gifts?

Now, my perspective when it comes to fundraising is hardly objective, having worked in the field for a number of years. But, from a donor’s point of view and not a marketer’s, I have a few words of advice for organisations seeking donations online:

1. Make sure your website works.
   This year alone, I’ve personally encountered one website that insisted that my perfectly-valid credit card number was invalid (it claimed to accept Amex but was validating for a Visa or MasterCard number format), another that simply returned a 404 error when I hit submit, a third that – despite being a Canadian organisation – did not accept a province or postal code in the address form, and a fourth that double-charged my credit card even though I only hit ’submit’ once; I was forced to phone the organisation to get the second charge reversed.

   And, yes, before you ask, these were all major, reputable charitable organisations, not little maw and paw shops.

   Now, since I’m such a nice person and I believe in the work that these fine organisations do, I took the extra step of donating anyway, even writing cheques and mailing them in a couple of cases. But think of all the people who won’t bother going to the trouble. Now multiply that by your average gift. Yeah, that’s what I thought you’d say.

2. Make sure your website is professional and secure.
   Yes, it costs money to have a professionally-designed website that reflects your organisation. And believe me, I understand that you would prefer to direct that money to the work you do, and not to what many people would consider “administration” or “overhead”.

   Having said that, you aren’t going to get people to trust online giving without making a few basic strides. Up-to-date security encryption is a bare minimum when asking people to enter their credit card details. A website that actually looks like it’s run by your organisation, and not by phishing scam #2012, helps too. And, would it kill you to post updates about the work you’re doing to give the people who support it something to read? The converted online brochure with blinking text is just not going to cut it, not in 2009.

3. Make online giving easy.
   Present various donation options clearly. Use easy-to-understand forms, user-friendly navigation, and clear language. Make sure your website is easy to find, ranks highly in search results, and has clear, present donation links from the homepage. Don’t make people have to work at it.

   Really, this is simple stuff – it’s the equivalent to a business reply envelope. The easier you make the process, the more donations you’ll get.

4. Eliminate redundancy.
   If I’m giving online, I’m not also giving by mail. Or by phone. Stop wasting your postage stamps and telemarketing dollars on me; you’ve got me already, and via the most cost-effective channel you’ve got.

   If the left hand is spending money trying to convert offline donors to online while the right hand is still sending out 6.2 letters a year to existing online donors, then invest in better database maintenance because you’re wasting money, not to mention trees.

5. Be open and transparent.
   Charities often come under attack for being less-than-honest about how their funds are allocated, or what their programming priorities are. Of course, all of this information is public record, and with a little digging, you can generally check up on your favourite charities and make sure that they’re above-board.

   But this is no longer simply about posting your annual report in PDF format and calling it a day. If you’re out there in the digital space, you can expect to be called out and taken to task about your campaigns, your programs, your work and your priorities. Are you going to run scared from it and look like you have something to hide? Or are you going to embrace it and look like you have everything to gain?

6. Communication is a two-way street.
   Giving to a cause is no longer just about writing a $25 cheque and forgetting about it all year. What works with commercial marketing works with charities, too. The simple fact is, the more engaged your donors are, the more they will support you – financially, by spreading the word, by volunteering, by getting involved in myriad ways. But only if you encourage them.

   As the rest of the world declares Web 2.0 so very passé, charities are still catching onto what was standard practice online a decade ago. Sure, most major charitable organisations have a Facebook fan page these days, but how many of them really have an active, engaged online community that is supported by the charity? That’s what I thought you’d say.

   A few smart charities get it. They’re the ones looking for innovative ways to reach out to donors, through social media and other channels, encouraging true two-way conversation. But most are still resorting to the opaque, sanitized, digital version of a fundraising letter – support our great work, blah blah blah, have a nice life.

   Well, that and a buck and a half will buy you a pack of gum. If you are a charitable organisation, the people who support you are a gold mine waiting to happen. They’ll wave the flag for you, spread the word, volunteer and organise and raise money for you – all you have to do is engage them and ask them and get them involved. If you’re still just broadcasting as opposed to communicating, you’re basically telling them that you don’t want their help.

Us Canadians tend to be fairly generous people. But we’re not the same as we were thirty years ago. We don’t think the same way, we don’t act the same way, and we don’t expect the same things.

If you’re a charitable organisation soliciting donations, then you’re also a marketer, and you may have noticed that marketing has evolved quite a bit. If you’re out in front, you’re likely reaping the benefits. If not, well, nobody knows as well as you do that competition is fierce for donor dollars. Lapse behind, and you’ll miss out.

Happy December, everyone. Give early, give often.

Since last week, it seems that way. Even though the Vietnamese government is issuing denials.

Some Vietnamese Facebook users launched a Facebook group in protest of the blockage, but as of right now it appears to only have a handful of members. Hmmm, wonder why that could be?

Of course, as Barack Obama found out last week after giving a speech in China about internet freedom, protests against censorship have an above-average risk of, well, being censored.

It’s the latest in the long list of changes that have been taking place around here. The first step was my move to my own hosting at segacs.com after Geocities closed. Now, the bigger news is that I have officially migrated from Blogger to Wordpress – a move that was long overdue.

Shiny! New! Features! include:

• Improved post navigation by calendar archive, keyword search, categories and tagging
• Inline commenting, including threaded comments
• Post pages – finally! – with proper permalinks (yeah, I know, that’s so 2005…)
• Improved RSS feeds
• Updated look and feel
• … and more still to come!

Needless to say, you’ll want to update any old permalinks that you still had lying around. Redirects from old segacs.com links should be working, but I can’t do anything about broken Geocities links, unfortunately. So please update them on your end.

The actual blog migration has been a real headache, and is the result of weeks of behind-the-scenes work. And I’m not quite done yet. You may still notice some broken links or images, and I’ll be rolling out a few new features and still tweaking the look and feel in the next little while. But, I’m up and running (and I am feeling quiet proud of that accomplishment, being something of a technical neophyte and all).

Got any feedback on the new look? Any Wordpress tips? Feel free to share suggestions and advice here.

The next step will be a complete design overhaul of this blog. This template dates back to the blog’s launch in 2002, and it’s embarrassingly outdated. I’m considering migrating to Wordpress, although I’m a bit intimidated by the theme customization process. (For someone who works in Digital, my actual coding skills are minimal and woefully out of date.)

Whether I stay with Blogger, move to Wordpress, or go with a third option, the redesign is bound to be a big project, and I probably won’t start on it until after NaNoWriMo is over. Meanwhile, if anyone has any design ideas or suggestions, feel free to send ‘em along.

You can continue to access this site for now, but stay tuned for updated information within the next few days as I look into a few different hosting options. Wherever I go, I’ll probably continue using the segacs.com URL, so if you haven’t already updated your bookmarks, you might want to at this point. You may find some broken links and images during this transition period, but hopefully these things are all temporary.

I was going to write a lengthy nostalgia post about my first websites back in the mid-90s with animated GIFs and blinking backgrounds and wallpaper… but I’ll spare you.

The Internet Archive Project has preserved a lot of Geocities sites, if you’re looking for something from the distant past.

While my usual philosophy is to tell government to stay out of business, in this case, I think Harper has the right idea. A free market is one thing; illegal business practices are another. The telecom companies are among the chief violators of fair competition, and they have long hid behind the CRTC to gouge consumers at every turn. This is not a big money issue for most Canadians, but it’s one that gets us up in arms pretty quickly, so it’s actually smart of Harper to latch onto the issue in his campaign.

I just wonder if it will be easier for me to sue Bell for charging me hundreds of dollars of bogus fees, after I cancelled my service with them? Yeah, I doubt it too.

The new layout for Facebook doesn’t actually streamline anything. Instead, it forces a half-dozen clicks to get the information that was previously available in one click.

What the Facebook developers won’t tell you is that this is exactly the point: More clicks means more ads, which means more revenue… at whatever cost to user satisfaction.

It’s not the unlimited flat plan that people had hoped for, but at 6 gigabytes, it’s pretty close. And so far, it’s only available to people who purchase their iPhone before August 31st. But it’s a whole lot better than the previously-announced plans, which start at $60 and range to $115 per month – gouge-worthy levels.

The problem is, Rogers holds all the cards. Once people rush out to take advantage of this pricing and sign three-year contracts, they’re locked in. And Rogers’ regular rates for data plans are outrageously high.

Meanwhile, Bell and Telus are coming under fire for their decisions to charge for incoming text messages… by the government:

Industry Minister Jim Prentice publicly demanded an explanation from two of the country’s telecommunications giants yesterday about their “ill-thought-out” decision to start charging cellphone customers for incoming text messages.

Here’s a thought: Rather than summoning them in front of a government committee to try to justify their pricing, as these telecom giants are accustomed to doing from their monopoly days, why not open up the market to real competition instead of our current oligopoly-style imitation? That would take care of their cash-grab collusion pricing in a hurry.

First, a story about how Bell and Telus are both going to start charging for incoming text messages. Considering most of the spam I receive is actually from Bell, that shows some nerve. Coupled with my recent notice that Bell’s plan prices are going up yet again, for me, this is finally the last straw. I’ve had it with Bell. Enough. Fini. C’est tout.

Unfortunately, the competition isn’t much better. Rogers, which recently signed a highly-touted exclusivity contract with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada, is charging ridiculously high rates for data, basically pricing the iPhone out of reach of the average consumer. And don’t try to get an iPhone from a competitor, either; there aren’t any.

The competition bureau, of course, doesn’t see a problem here:

“Where consumers are concerned about the plans being offered with the iPhones, we don’t consider this to be a competition issue,” said bureau spokesperson Marilyn Nahum. “We don’t consider the iPhone to be a distinct market.

“It’s a cellphone that competes with other cellphones in the market. If consumers don’t like the plans being offered with the iPhone they can go to the competitors.”

This is nothing new. With only three major carriers in the marketplace, Canadians have been gouged on cell phone prices forever. We pay twice what Americans pay for similar voice or data plans, and several times what Europeans or people in the rest of the world pay. Most of us pay a bogus “system access fee” of $6.95 to $8.95 per month, and virtually everyone pays for incoming voice minutes – a practice almost unheard of outside of North America. Our phones are “locked” to our carriers, we are locked into 2- and 3-year contracts with hefty cancellation penalties, and until last year, we couldn’t even keep our phone numbers when switching carriers.

Don’t expect things to get better anytime soon, either. As long as the major telecommunications companies are in bed with the CRTC, and virtual monopolies are allowed to exist, things are only gonna get worse.

Meanwhile, Bell and I are history. Anyone have an old Rogers phone they want to donate / sell to me at a reasonable price?

A new world has been discovered nestled in the largest planetary system ever seen outside our solar system, fuelling speculation there are many other habitable Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy.

Astronomers doubt the new-found planet – one of five circling a nearby star, which is visible with binoculars – can support life.

But they told a teleconference Tuesday the discovery fuels their conviction that many Earth-like planets are just waiting to be discovered.

Traveling at the speed of light, it would only take about 41 years to get there. In other words, a short, pleasant journey. (Advance tickets on sale on ebay shortly… stay tuned!)

There have been a few bumps in how Yahoo has managed its transition, but overall, it hasn’t been too bad. Users were given plenty of notice, were offered seamless transition to a number of different sites (including Flickr, of course), and were provided with a lot of information in plain English on the how, what and why. While I could quibble with the details – and many have, on the surface it’s not difficult to understand Yahoo’s strategic decision.

The challenge

At any rate, I’d been a typical Web 1.0 user when it came to online photo sites; for me, this was simply the electronic version of an album. Upload ‘em, categorize ‘em, point links towards ‘em, send my friends and family to view my vacation photos or the cute pictures of my friends’ cats. Not exactly earth-shattering. In fact, I readily admit that I still print (gasp!) most of my photos, too, and store them in real-life, physical albums. Remember those? I’m not quite sure why I still do so, and admittedly I’m doing that a lot less these days, but there’s something sentimental and secure about having an actual album full of photos. Not to mention that the coffee table book is much easier for people to spontaneously flip through when they come over than the online album. But I digress.

All of this to say that I was disappointed in Yahoo’s decision to close Yahoo Photos. I had thousands of photos uploaded and organized, I was linking to them from all over the place, and I rather liked the “new and improved” version of the photo software that Yahoo came out with last year. Not to mention that it was entirely free, while most of the other services including Flickr charged a fee to access the good stuff. The prospect of moving the photos and learning a whole new system wasn’t appealing.

The choices – the good, the bad and the ugly

But dutifully, I did my research. I looked into the services where I could automatically transfer my photos: Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish and Photobucket. I signed up for free trial accounts at all of them and started playing with the features. One by one, I rejected all these services as not quite meeting my needs for one reason or another:

• Flickr, the most powerful and well-known, did the sharing and social networking stuff really well, but was limited in how many photos you could share with the public and in how you could organize them. Only allowing free users to display of a limited number of photos, categorized into a maximum of two sets? Nuh-uh, not cool. Not when there are so many free options out there. Even paid users, who now get this nifty “collections” feature, can only store a sub-collection OR a set inside a collection. So I can’t have, for example, a collection called “Travel” that stores a set called “Quebec City 2007″ and another collection called “Trip 2006″, the latter being made up of 19 sub-sets for this larger trip. It means I have to build the structure from the bottom up instead of from the top down, which is very counter-intuitive.
• On the flip side of that, sites such as Photobucket and Kodak Gallery did the sharing and organizing part quite well, but didn’t quite get it in terms of interface or usability. In short, none of the sites did what I wanted them to, and I was starting to get frustrated.
• Then I entertained the notion of simply using Facebook as my main photo site. After all, most of my friends are on Facebook already; we’re all uploading, tagging and sharing photos there anyway, and I’d already uploaded most of my recent good ones anyway. Was Facebook simply going to make other photo sites irrelevant and obsolete? In which case, what do I really need an albums site for, anyway? Why do the work twice? But as much as I wanted that to be the answer, it wasn’t quite there yet. Facebook is still too closed to the general public. While Facebook does have public URLs to share albums with non-Facebook users, I can’t, for example, grab a photo from Facebook and post it to my blog, or email it to my friends outside of Facebook. Albums are limited to 60 photos apiece, there’s no collection or sub-album capability, and there’s no public “main photo page” where I can send people to view all the photos from a trip, for instance. I can’t arrange how I want albums displayed, either. It’s a great social networking tool, but not a great albums tool. So I kept searching.
• I looked into Picasa, which Yahoo specifically didn’t list because, of course, it’s owned by rival Google (who, we all know, will soon own the world). Picasa, as users know, is a very powerful platform for organizing and editing photos on your home computer, but was fairly new to the online game and I wasn’t at all impressed by what they offered in terms of web and online albums.
• In the same vein as Picasa, I found Sharpcast, an innovative tool using synchronization technology to allow me to organize my photos offline and immediately update my online web albums from any computer. I was so impressed, in fact, that I signed up and moved all my photos over there manually – a chore not as cumbersome as it sounds thanks to the aforementioned syncing technology. The local client is really fantastic, with drag-and-drop capabilities and quick updates that should make even Microsoft nervous. There’s something to this, definitely.But ultimately, the Sharpcast bubble burst for me as well. The business model seems murky – are they a syncing and backup company, or a photo sharing site? It’s hard to tell. Plus, feature requests for simple, basic things languish for months, with the same form answers from developers. For example, Sharpcast lets you create sub-albums in a hierarchical structure in your offline client, but when they get shared as web albums, the structure is completely flattened. So instead of directing users to my “Trip 2006″ album, I have to send them to 19 different URLs for each sub-album within that trip. Who wants to have to click a different long, cumbersome URL to see the photos from Australia as to see the photos from New Zealand, anyway?

  In addition, it’s hard to feel confident that, as the web advances, Sharpcast will keep up. The developers over there seem to have lost all interest in the photo site, and it’s generating next to no buzz in the community, leading me to believe that it will soon become an evolutionary casualty of digital Darwinism. Heck, a quick search on Facebook for an application that would let me display my Sharpcast web albums led me to the shocking discovery that, not only does such an application not exist, but there’s next to no hits for a Sharpcast search on Facebook at all. One group for employees that has no activity, no profiles, no fans, no mentions, no buzz. And as we all know, on the web, if nobody’s talking about you, that’s as sure a death sentence as there ever was.

  In case anyone’s interested, my photos are all accessible at Sharpcast for the time being. But that’s just a temporary solution.

The lightbulb moment

The whole synchronization issue got me thinking, though: How many different places do I even want to have my photos stored? I already mentioned Facebook, where I had redundantly been uploading photos. I also have been maintaining travel blogs for a few years now on Travelpod, and have uploaded hundreds or even thousands of photos to those blogs from the road, creating albums there. Add to that my Yahoo Photos albums, and of course my original files stored on my hard drive, and managing all of that was becoming very hard work.

See, what I really want, when it comes to photos, isn’t one site to upload them and another site to edit them and a third site to share and tag them and a fourth site to print them. I don’t want to have photo albums residing in my Travelpod journals, the same photos in my Flickr community, the same photos again in my Sharpcast web albums, more photos in an FTP directory for this blog, and the same photos again on my hard drive. That’s too much focusing on the channel and not nearly enough on the content, as far as I’m concerned. After all, these are all the same photos.

And it’s only going to get harder, not easier. Right now I take photos with my camera, download them via card reader or USB, edit and organize them with local software, and post them online to various channels. If camera phones haven’t already turned that model on its head, the iPhone surely will. Now when I go to Brisbane and take a photo of me holding a baby koala, I won’t have to wait to go to an internet cafe to upload that photo to the web and show it to everyone; I will be able to do it instantaneously – and get instant feedback as well. It’s already happening. Synchronization, in other words, is becoming critically important.

Sharpcast and Picasa are onto something here, but they don’t quite take it far enough. Picasa’s model is still heavily focused on online photo organization and editing, but frankly, all I need for that is Windows and my favourite photo editing software (usually Photoshop for most people, or whatever comes with their camera). Sharpcast, for its part, is pinning its business model on the threat of a disk wipeout and the security of having an online backup. But most people have backup systems in place already, and I feel like they’re not really leveraging the full potential of their technology.

Flickr is attacking the problem from the opposite end and not quite getting there either. In addition to the shortcomings of the software itself and the very annoying organizer (which I’ve been experimenting with since moving my Yahoo photos over there by default), Flickr doesn’t sync up well at all with your photos stored on your laptop, desktop, or any other channel. Once they’re on Flickr you can share them, comment on them, tag them and pass them along, but getting them there in the first place is a royal pain.

The opportunity

All this to say that I believe there could be a very big win here, for the first company that truly “gets it”. In all probability, it will be one of the major players. So if you’re Flickr or Picasa or Facebook, and for some reason you’re hanging out here, here’s a bit of a cheat sheet. To really win the space, here’s what I believe is necessary to offer me:

• Yesterday: Online Photo Albums. With all the buzz and hype about sharing, syncing and channels, don’t forget to give me a really solid web album platform that can exist in and of itself. Allow me to upload as many photos as I choose, as often as I like. Let me structure albums in a hierarchical fashion, choosing names, themes and cover photos at will. Let me drag, drop and move them around to arrange them any way I like. Store sub-albums within albums, and give me unique URLs and permissions so I can share them with whomever I like – and hide them from anyone I choose. Let me crop, lighten, retouch and rotate them. Allow me or anyone I allow to order prints. This may seem like old news, but there is not a single photo site on the web today that I know of that does this even remotely well. And if you don’t have the solid foundation, how can you build from there?
• Today: Online Social Photo Networks. Let me share my photos with people in my social networks, on my email list, or in my forums, groups or communities. Let me or anyone else tag them – not only for people but also for subject matter – and let these tags show up across multiple channels. Give me an application so I can load my photos in Facebook. Let people comment on photos, discuss them, share them in their aggregators or news feeds, post them to their blogs or forward them along to their friends. Let me start a photo group, so multiple people can post photos from a community event or occasion and discuss them amongst themselves. Let me upload a video to my photo album and click to share it in Youtube. Give me RSS capabilities for all my photos and allow people to subscribe to my feed. Allow people to digg my photos, bookmark them, add star ratings to them, or even customize the RSS feed they get from them.
• Tomorrow: Total Synchronization. In addition to the above, let me sync my content across online and offline channels. A photo is a photo is a photo. It should exist in one place, from which I can share and post it absolutely anywhere. If I change it, edit it, move it, tag it or delete it in any online or offline channel, it should update automatically everywhere it exists. Allow the creation of reciprocal links to the content, so that the photo of my friend’s cat could, theoretically, show up as #1 on Google’s search rankings. After all, if the web community likes it that much, why not? Move away from a focus on the channel, and move towards a focus on the photo itself.

Sounds simple, right?

What do you think? What photo sites are you using, and what do you recommend? Where do you think online photo sites are going? Let me know.

See you when I emerge… Eventually…

In a panic, I shut down the computer, and the scary noise stopped. Okay, now what?

With a sinking feeling in my stomach, and feeling somewhat like Carrie Bradshaw, I began phoning friends with more computer knowledge than I.

“It’s probably the fan,” they assured me.

“Probably? What if it’s not?”

“Well, there’s a small chance your hard drive is failing.”

Needless to say, that didn’t make me feel any better. “What should I do?” I asked with trepidation.

“Whatever you do, don’t turn the computer on again. It may already be too late, but if it’s not, you don’t want to make it worse. Keep it off, take it in for service.”

Visions of important documents, irreplaceable digital photos, programs with original install CDs buried in the abyss of old junk, all ran through my head. I didn’t get much sleep that night.

The next day, I had the presence of mind to dig up the invoice for the computer, only to discover – joy of joys – that it was still covered under an extended service warranty. Oh, the relief!

Except that it’s never quite so simple. I phoned up Dell and was pleasantly surprised to see that my call was no longer directed to India. But my pleasant surprise ran out when I realized that they don’t train their local technicians much better than they trained their overseas ones. After sitting for 45 minutes on hold listening to the ever-present “your call is important to us” recording, I got through to a chipper tech support agent and described the problem. He then had me wait for another 10 minutes while he searched for his protocol for dealing with scary noises, and finally came back to me and asked me to turn on the computer to run through some diagnostics.

Swallowing my trepidation – after all, everyone had told me not to turn on the computer – I went down the list of things he asked me to do, which, even with my limited computer knowledge, I recognized had nothing to do with the problem, such as checking the configuration of the graphics card. Yes, I was confused, too. And I was starting to suspect that the chipper Dell technician was just walking me through the motions.

All the diagnostics completed, he told me that since I had failed to isolate the problem, his system indicated that nothing was wrong, so he couldn’t help me.

“What???” I asked, incredulous.

“Sorry, those are our procedures, thank you for calling Dell.”

Hmmph.

I had the bright idea to phone back an hour later in hopes that I would get a different guy on the phone. Maybe even one who knew what he was talking about. Dare to dream, right? Because when I called back, I was greeted with a recording about how Dell’s computer systems were down. Oh, the delicious irony.

To make a long story short, I ended up enlisting some help and finally getting the computer fixed. It was the fan, after all. One of them, anyway. We got them to replace both, just in case. The scary noise is now gone.

And I’ve learned my lesson and acquired a backup drive.

It was almost 1,000 years ago when Canute, king of England, Denmark and Norway, led his courtiers down to the Sussex seashore. Weary of their flattery, he ordered them to watch as he loudly commanded the waves to recede – and as the waves did not. A king’s powers, he demonstrated, go only so far.

In a gesture almost as futile, but without any of Canute’s wise humility, the government of Canada is fighting in the Supreme Court to make sure Canadians on the West Coast can’t see federal election results from Atlantic Canada until after western polling stations close. As legal causes go, this one is pointless, wrong-headed, arrogant and utterly out of touch with reality.

[ . . . ]

Section 2(b) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees Canadians freedom of expression. There was nothing malicious or even inaccurate about what Paul Bryan did. No one can demonstrate that he did anyone any harm. And in any case, nobody could stop a foreigner from putting results on a website outside Canada.

Information wants to be free, and in this case, at least, the government should stop trying to reverse the tide.

In the last election, I decided to toe the line on this blog and I didn’t post any results until the last poll closed in B.C. But it was an exercise in nonsense, because those results were freely available to anyone with an internet connection and the brains to search for a US-based news or blog source. Not to mention anyone with a telephone and a friend or acquaintance out east.

This law, and the government’s efforts in enforcing it, are completely pointless. I agree with the Gazette: Allow the information to be broadcast, because everyone’s getting it anyway.

At least it wasn’t Yahoo, which means that the content on YouTube will probably stay relatively open and free of pointless Yahooisms. (I don’t use Facebook personally, but I hope for the sake of those who do that the rumours aren’t true and that Yahoo keeps its paws off).

Meanwhile, YouTube owners Chad Hurley and Steven Chen are laughing all the way to the bank.

In the meantime, it seems they’re filming a movie in my neighbourhood. This struck me as more than a little odd when I passed by the orange signs, since I can’t even begin to fathom why anyone would choose my area – good for cheap rent, not much good for atmosphere – for a film location. So I checked out the information on the signs. The film, it seems, has a working title of “Neptune” – which, as far as I know, is definitely still a planet. No information about it appears yet on IMDb, as far as I can tell.

Oh, and a European space probe crashed into the moon yesterday. Seems this was designed to satisfy people who’d become bored with “World’s Scariest Police Chases” and spectacular NASCAR crashes.

Sure took ‘em long enough!

(Via Damian Penny).

Well, not anymore. Pluto has been demoted and is no longer a planet, reducing our solar system from nine planets to eight.

And in tomorrow’s headlines, Quebec will demand more funding from Ottawa to rewrite all the elementary school science textbooks.

I wonder if this will be any more interesting than Paul Martin’s foray into the blogosphere. By the looks of it, not so far.

The prison blog of a New Zealand political activist jailed for the rare crime of sedition has outraged opposition politicians but corrections officials say it’s within the law.

After being jailed this month, Timothy Selwyn begun publishing the internet diary via an outside supporter and his latest entry gives an account of a jail-yard assault by prisoners on a fellow inmate.

He has also criticised the judge who sentenced him.

Something tells me this will wear thin pretty quickly. After all, once the novelty wears off, who will want to read about the daily life of a guy who spends most of his time locked in a cell?

Probably the same people who watch Big Brother.

Damian was, of course, referring to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial. However, I think the quote is a good one, and it popped into my head when I read about today’s ruling against teaching creationism in schools:

A federal judge on Tuesday banned the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution by Pennsylvania’s Dover Area School District, saying the practice violated the constitutional ban on teaching religion in public schools.

[ . . . ]

The school district was sued by a group of 11 parents who claimed teaching intelligent design was unconstitutional and unscientific and had no place in high school biology classrooms.

Before you jump down my throat, I’m in no way implying that Holocaust denial is comparable to creationism. What I am saying, however, is that there’s a clear difference between fact and invention – as in the case of Holocaust denial – which I think we all recognize fairly easily. What many people fail to recognize, however, is that we must also make a clear distinction between fact and belief.

Evolution is a scientific fact. Creationism (repackaged as “intelligent design” or whatever you rename it) is a belief. It is based on faith, not evidence, and cannot be proven for the simple reason that it cannot be disproven.

Today’s ruling banned the teaching of creationism because it violates the separation of church and state. I think the real reason it ought to be banned from science curricula is because it isn’t science. After all, there is no constitutional ban on teaching Holocaust denial in history class, and yet I’m sure we would all call for the dismissal of any teacher who tried, simply on the grounds that it’s wrong.

I have no objection to the teaching of creationist theory in a course about religion, humanities, or cultural studies. But high school biology teachers who teach creationism as scientific fact are muddling fact and belief. People are entitled to hold a belief, but when teaching science, they need to stick to facts.

And so, to restate Damian’s point, everyone is entitled to his own beliefs, but not his own facts.

I’m gonna wait a bit, and see if people start switching over from MSN. It wouldn’t surprise me much.

Earlier today, I had to break into my own car when my car alarm inexplicably stopped working. At first, I thought the battery was dead on the clicker. But after trying the spare, I realized it was a problem with the alarm itself. Unlocking the car with the key did not set the alarm off, as it was supposed to, but the car wouldn’t start because there’s an ignition kill switch. In the end I had to disconnect the battery to reset the alarm. And all this for what? Car alarms don’t actually deter theft; they just provide a discount on insurance rates.

Then I got home to see a fire truck outside my apartment building. Minor panic gave way to relief when the firemen told me that the fire was outside on an electric pole and not inside, and that it was perfectly safe to enter. But the power was out for a while. It’s amazing how much an hour-long power outage wreaks havoc with life. The temperature in here is easily over 30 degrees, and without electricity of course my fan doesn’t work. Heating up dinner wasn’t possible, and I was worried that the food in the freezer would defrost and ruin. Just home from the gym I was craving a shower, but of course there was no hot water.

But there’s a flip side. With the power out, nobody could do much of anything, so people from my building and the one across the street just stood out on their balconies or fire escapes and chatted. There was actual evidence of human contact for, oh, about 15 minutes. Then the power came back on and we all went back inside to get back to our daily lives – or, in my case, to blog about it.

So now the car alarm’s working, the power’s on, the food’s in the oven and the fan is cooling down my apartment. And maybe I’ll meet some more neighbours during the next power failure.

If, like me, you installed it because you were tired of being reminded to, see here and here for ways to make it somewhat less annoying.

The new legislation will contain rules that will make it illegal to hack or break into the digital locks often used to prevent the copying of movies and software – although it will remain perfectly legal in Canada to copy a CD for personal use.

“The digital locks themselves can be used to take away rights that users already have,” University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist told CTV News.

The legislation also sets up what is called a notice-and-notice regime to handle complaints of copyright infringement.

Under this system, an Internet service provider will receive a notice from a copyright holder complaining about violations from its provider’s customers. The ISP would then send a notice to that customer.

Hahahaha.

Full disclosure: Yes, I download and share music. Yes, I’ll buy a CD if it’s really really good… but I admit I buy very few these days as compared to what I download.

I’ve long maintained that there’s no legislative solution to a technological problem. Copying technology will always be ten steps ahead of methods aimed at curbing it.

Record companies have tried everything: lobbying for legislation, introducing copy-protection technology, flooding download sites with false versions of popular songs, and even suing teenagers. None of it has made an iota of difference. Downloading is even more popular than ever.

This latest pitiful effort by the Canadian government to pretend to be doing actual work is just a finger in the dam, but it will do nothing concrete to close the floodgates.

Sooner or later, record companies will have to recognize that they were selling water in the desert, but it’s been raining for quite some time. Either they switch to selling umbrellas or they’re going to put themselves out of business… soon.

Sure, digital is the “wave of the future”, it’s rapidly replacing film except in a few circumstances, and people look at me with that sad, sympathetic look when I mention I’m considering buying another film camera. And the perks are sorely tempting: being able to instantly see shots and retake them if they don’t come out, convenient cropping and editing, posting online and e-mailing to friends, and all the cool features and extras.

But as I started to investigate, I really started to question the whole thing. I have a fair idea of what I want in a camera. The trouble is, it doesn’t seem to exist. Anywhere.

I’ve been reading reviews until my eyes are spinning, and every time I think I find a good camera for my needs, there’s some sort of “catch” that ruins it for me. Low resolution. Low optical zoom. Long shutter lag. Poor low-light performance. Proprietary batteries that require travelling with a charger. Lack of a viewfinder. Bulkiness. Poor image quality. And the list goes on. Not to mention that with the speed at which digital technology is evolving, whatever I choose today will be obsolete by next year.

I figured I’d have to compromise, and narrowed it down to a few cameras with flaws I figured I could live with. But when I think about it, I don’t have to live with any of those shortcomings at all! I can just buy another film camera and get everything I want – and for much less money, too.

So is digital really all it’s cracked up to be? Or is it kind of like the Emperor’s New Clothes, where film is still much better but nobody is willing to admit it? I can’t help but wonder.

Members of Grantsburg’s school board believed that a state law governing the teaching of evolution was too restrictive. The science curriculum “should not be totally inclusive of just one scientific theory,” said Joni Burgin, superintendent of the district of 1,000 students in northwest Wisconsin.

One of the key problems with many religions is their inability to accept natural facts and explain them. The Catholic Church maintained the Earth was flat long after it was proved that it was round, and that the sun revolved around the Earth long after the opposite was proved to be true. Millions of people today equate science and faith, believing them to be simply “alternate theories” of the same event.

This discounts the whole basis of science: proof, verifiable data, and a willingness to change theories in the face of new evidence. None of these are present in faith, which is a personal matter that has no place in public schools.

I think part of the problem in the evolution versus creationism debate is the word “theory” in scientific circles. A scientific “theory” is not just a guess. Science uses the term “theory” on the assumption that there is no such thing as fact, because new evidence could always emerge. But a theory is as rock-solid as it gets in science; it’s a conclusion drawn after experiments and supporting research. This leads many religious people to falsely assume that a scientific theory has equal validity to a faith-based one.

Personally, I don’t believe that these Wisconsin students will never understand that. I was educated in a religious school where creationism was taught over evolution, and I got over it. That doesn’t mean it’s right to mislead and falsely educate students just because of politics. Especially in public schools. It’s one thing for students to be taught that many people believe in creationism. It’s quite another for them to be taught that it’s as valid a theory as evolution. The politicos who made this decision should be ashamed of themselves.

So far, I’ve managed to connect to the Internet, but I’ve been incapable of connecting it to the old one to transfer files. I also haven’t managed to reinstall Microsoft Office, because I have an upgrade and not a new install CD. Plus, there’s something screwy with the screen resolution. Also, ever notice how every new computer comes loaded with tons of useless promotional software? I’ve spent half the evening just cleaning that up.

Times like these, I wish I were more technically… ept (is that a word?) or whatever the opposite of inept is.

At any rate, blogging will be back soon once I figure out how to set up the system.

After spending a half-hour trying to fix the messed-up formatting of the links in the last post, I’m starting to wonder why it is that nobody can leave a good thing well enough alone. The old Blogger was fine… why was it necessary to mess with it?

Today, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that ISP’s don’t have to pay royalties to musicians to compensate them for the lost revenue from people downloading their music for free:

The court ruled that companies that provide access to the worldwide web are “intermediaries” who are not subject to copyright law.

[ . . . ]

“This decision is a victory for Canadians who have come to rely on the Internet as an increasingly important part of their daily lives,” said Jay Kerr-Wilson, the society’s vice-president for legal affairs.

This one, I agree with. Should we fine Canada Post for the costs of mail fraud? Should Bell Canada have to pay for people using the telephone to run scams? All the Supreme Court did today was reaffirm the principle that a technology is neutral, and that it is the responsibility of the people using it to obey the law, not of the ISPs to pay for those who don’t.

When you search for the word “Jew” in Google, you no longer get an antisemitic hate site as the top result. Thanks to a web campaign to create links like Jew and Jew, those two sites are now ranked 1-2. The aforementioned hate site has dropped to third, plus when you click on it, you get a message saying the person’s account has been suspended.

Individual site owners may not feel like they have much power, but when everyone works together, things can change for the better. It’s encouraging.

But this cool Mom not only knows about her 14-year-old daughter’s blog, she supports it fully… and in fact, considers her daughter better educated and informed thanks to blogging (via Imshin):

So even if she hadn’t received such an outpouring of support, I think Cecile’s regular stops in the blogosphere would have served as an antidote to what happened at school this past Friday. Certainly if a teacher implies a student is a racist idiot one day, and by the next some 200 smart and articulate adults have said she’s not and here’s why, that rather counteracts the original lesson plan. Now that so many teens have blogs, concerns about doctrinaire teachers may be passé. Our sons and our daughters are beyond their control.

I think she’s absolutely right. Kids are constantly warned about the dangers of the Internet and all the bad stuff that they can have access to. But what about the kids and teenagers who benefit from the Internet by having access to a multitude of viewpoints and perspectives on world events, political issues, and society? I happen to think that, all else being equal, the more access to information that students have, the better – at any age.

Now if only I could teach my mom how to program the VCR…

But here’s the kicker: I’m not sure I understand what it does. Actually, I have no clue, aside from the fact that it’s got something to do with aggregating for a news reader or… ok, see, lost already. I dutifully read the description that Blogger provided, but I’m no less lost than when I started out.

Before this posting generates a long technical reply, please do me a favour and spell it out like I’m in kindergarten. I’m not too swift when you start talking tech-ese.

And if you do understand what it means and you want to do something or other with it, it’s up and running.

One of the things I enjoyed about the blogosphere [is the] commitment [of] most of the bloggers I read to “anti-idiotarianism”, a commitment to truth even if it doesn’t promote their narrow political prejudices. Many of the top-tier warbloggers were Democrats, not out-of-the-closet unreformed Neanderthals. Check it out, if you need to. And it’s just not a case of “conservatives are liberals who have been mugged”: there’s a great diversity of opinion, civil debate and politic belief within the blogosphere, because there’s a basic commitment to the non-distortion of reality and the truth.

We’ll never have a “vibrant new global thinking process” if one’s concept of debate is to declare “blue is red” just because some guy you hate mentioned the colour of the sky the other day.

I’m not entirely convinced that bloggers are necessarily more honest or “committed to the truth” than mainstream journalists, professional writers, politicians, or the average guy on the street. Blogging is a tool. Like any other tool, it can be used to educate, provoke, spew nonsense, or (in my case) spout off.

In its infancy, blogging was perhaps “purer”, in the sense that most blogs were individuals writing on their own time and budget, as opposed to some of the big blogs we see now that have emerged into moneymaking careers. (Note to readers: that’s obviously not the case here.) In addition, bloggers are generally not journalists with professional training and a research staff. It’s extraordinarily easy for just about anyone to set up a blog, and they can just as readily be used to spread lies, propaganda, and disinformation. If a sort of “anti-idiotarian” courtesy emerged in the blogosphere, it is only because people decided that they want to be good neighbours and play by the rules. But blogging is just as open to abuse as any other medium, and perhaps more so. And with the emerging of a few major blogs that dictate the sphere, it seems that the rest of us mortals have been reduced to begging for scraps… or the ever-coveted link from Instapundit to generate Instatraffic.

That said, I think it’s illogical to lament the fact that someone is blogging a different point of view from yours. With so much going on out there, the only way to really figure anything out and have opinions is to read a wide variety of opinions, often dissenting ones. And blogs have made that much easier.

Maybe I should move to India and work for Dell tech support…

Stupid-goddamn-fucking-MORONIC-idiotic-Dell Tech Support!!!

First, Windows crashes. I nearly lose everything, and just barely manage to back up crucial documents before having to reformat my hard drive and reinstall Windows from scratch. 2 hours on line with tech support and I’m finally told “you have to format”. Duh! Did they give you a prize for that, Einstein?

Flash forward a week, and to one of those horrifying blue screens reading “Hardware Failure: please contact your vendor”. So I call. And I wait. And wait. And wait. Classical music interspersed with those “thank you for holding” pre-programmed messages that we all love so very much.

Finally a woman comes on the line and asks me for my service tag. I dutifully repeat it to her. She asks me to repeat it about 7 or 8 times until she’s finally satisfied that she has it correct. Then she told me I called the wrong section, that I was speaking to home and small business tech support and I should be speaking to major accounts. I started to protest (after all, I’m not a “major account”) but she had already put me back on hold.

Five minutes later, someone answers from major accounts. After putting me through the service tag exercise about another four times, he finally ascertained that I really wanted home and small business after all. Before I could even grumble about being switched back and forth again, I was back on hold.

Person number two at home and small business was more helpful. She suggested I turn my computer on and off and call if the problem recurred.

Yeah, thanks for nothing.

Well, surprise surprise, 48 hours later I’m sitting at my computer and the same blue screen comes up again. So, dutifully, I get on line with Tech Support at 1am. At 2:15, the annoying classical music finally gives way to someone who probably learned how to speak English off the top of a cereal box. I mean, far be it for a Quebec anglophone to be linguistically prejudiced, but sheesh buddy, you’ve been hired on a telephone tech support line and it would probably help if you could get a sentence out without having to repeat yourself 7 times.

Anyway, this tech support guy asks me to remove the side panel of my computer and start nosing around inside. At this point, I should probably explain that to me, a motherboard is something resembling a two-dimensional cutout photo of my mother. I am NOT tech-savvy. So both our patiences were wearing thin by the time I managed to figure out how to unlatch the padlock and actually open the damn computer.

Then, he told me something to the effect of “rotate the power supply and locate the memory chips” but it could just as easily have been Swahili to me for all I understood. Hey, I just use ‘em, I don’t build ‘em. But he was getting fed up with me as well. I asked him what these pieces looked like. He told me that I should know. His descriptions were less than useless. “Horizontal” and “vertical” are NOT synonyms!!!

I finally got annoyed and said that I am still under warranty for tech support, and could a technician please come and do this diagnostic because I wasn’t qualified to. Seems logical, right?

Wrong!

I found out that “tech support” doesn’t mean having someone actually help to fix the computer. Silly me for thinking that! In fact, I was responsible for doing the diagnostic myself and only once it was determined exactly which part was defective, could a technician be dispatched to repair or replace it.

So what on earth is the use?

After about the twelfth time of biting my tongue and trying to explain to Mr. “How could you not know what the display card looks like?” anti-support-guy that no, I could NOT locate what he was trying to tell me, he snapped at me, “can’t you find a friend or relative who actually knows something about computers to do this for you?”

Well, it was 3am by then and I was livid. I replied, “That’s why I called you! You’re tech support! You’re supposed to know something about the computer!”

Needless to say, this 3am tug-of-words was not how I wanted to be spending my evening. My hopes of a decent night’s sleep were dwindling by the second. In total and utter frustration, I finally asked if there was a supervisor or someone else there who I could speak to.

I think Mr. anti-support guy was happy to get rid of me. I waited for a few minutes listening to the classical music again, until someone else came on the line.

His English was just as bad as the first guy’s… but at least he seemed willing to help and to concede that it’s not necessary to have a computer engineering degree to qualify for some technical support. He patiently talked me through locating the parts inside the computer, and removing the memory cards one at a time to figure out which one was causing the problem. But, not being particularly skilled, I kept replacing them improperly. So by the time I got them back into their original configuration, it was 4:30am. And I knew I had no energy left for diagnostics.

At this point, I asked person number two what exactly he was intending for me to do. He said he wanted me to remove the cards one at a time, to see if I still got the error message. I explained (rather patiently, considering the circumstances) that the error had only happened twice in 3 days, and wouldn’t show up immediately but that it could take days or even weeks to test. And I certainly had no intention of staying on the line to find out. At that point, it was time for bed, so I hung up, after person number two agreed to have someone phone me back the next day. Not show up to help, mind you – after all, what is “next day on-site support” good for if you actually have to send a technician? Nope, just to phone, so he could tell me the same useless crap as everyone else so far.

Gee, thanks a zillion!

So my hopes of actually getting my computer fixed before the warranty expires in February seem to be dwindling by the minute. And don’t tell me that Dell hasn’t thought of that. I may have to bite the bullet and actually pay for the damn repairs. Just as long as I don’t have to spend yet another night staying up till 4:30am on the line with someone who would rather walk over hot coals than be helpful in any way.

Remind me never to get ripped off by taking any kind of extended warranty from Dell ever again. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to go throw something at my computer.

Update: Well, I found out why nobody at Dell Tech Support was able to speak English properly. Turns out they’ve outsourced the whole operation to a call centre in India. So I guess I can’t blame the support people for their English… but I can blame Dell for thinking this cost-cutting measure is a good idea. Silly me, I thought they’d discontinued the practice, but apparently only people with Optiplex or Latitude computers get North American support. Those of us with Dimensions are still stuck with the overseas scripted responses.

Update #2: Okay, one hour later and off the phone with yet another friendly Indian support guy. This one had me go through the whole 9 yards again, only to tell me that maybe it’s the sound card that’s causing the problem, so I should disconnect it and if the problem happens again, call back in the next 48 hours.

Er, I don’t pretend to be that tech-savvy, so maybe one of you folks “in the know” can tell me if it’s likely for a memory parity error to be caused by the sound card. Cause it seems a bit counter-intuitive to me. But clearly, Dell won’t replace my memory modules until I rule out the sound card as the cause of the error… so I guess I’m stuck playing along for now.

AAAAAUUUUGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

I had to reformat my hard drive this week, after all but killing my computer. To make a long story short, it rebelled against my attempt to upgrade my Windows version.

I did manage to revive it from life support, which, if I may say so myself, is pretty good for a technical nitwit like yours truly. I even rescued a lot of my documents and programs.

Sometimes, I do think the developers of Windows added a few “extra” settings to their software, though:

David Janes disagreed with me, claiming that rights are not inalienable because we’d get into a slippery slope situation where everything was considered a right. Mark responded with a shooting down of David’s argument, and the two of them had it out over a few subsequent comments.

Later, on my post on the extension of hate crime laws to gays, David agrees with me that they should either be included, or else the whole laws scrapped. But he disagrees with me in that he thinks they should be scrapped. Michael Demmons disagreed, and posted his defence of hate crime laws. And Alan agrees.

(Oh, and in case that wasn’t enough ego for one night, I noticed that David also found my review of the Live concert.)

That’s marketing 101. Sometimes you have to rethink your business because of changes in demand, trends, or technological developments.

The major record companies haven’t seem to have caught on yet. Like the British, unwilling to see the pink sky indicating the sun setting on their empire, the record labels are reacting to online file swapping in a reactionary, defensive, scrambling way that’s sure to only alienate their market in hopes of hanging onto the disappearing role of a retail middleman for as long as possible.

So by suing hundreds of fans, the major labels are choking out their last gasp in trying to tell us that in order to have the privilege of listening to music, we must pay them billions of dollars a year to make it available to us.

Is online file-swapping stealing? Sure it is . . . from the artists. But the RIAA, which has launched the lawsuits, represents the largest record labels in the United States. These are the companies who have been ripping off artists for years, and have nice big fat legal departments mainly because they’ve been at the receiving end of so many lawsuits themselves. They convinced the musicians that they were absolutely essential if they wanted to get a record pressed, played, and purchased. And they convinced retailers and, ultimately, consumers, that it was their way or the highway.

Then along came the highway – the information superhighway, to borrow a bad cliché – and suddenly the demand end stopped needing the labels. The record buyers could be record freeloaders, thanks to a click of the mouse. And yeah, it was stealing and all, but it didn’t seem much different from taping a song off the radio, or a movie off TV with a VCR.

The artists, however, are still convinced that they need the labels, because what online file-swapping has yet to do is to set up an alternative business model that will make them any money. So they cling to the labels like life-preservers. Still, such a model will evolve. It’s bound to. Because any model that relies on something artificial like lawsuits to try to put the genie back in the bottle must be on its way out.

The artists are necessary in the business model because they create the music. The fans are necessary because they consume the music. But the labels? If we no longer need them to create and distribute the CDs, then they’ll need to find other uses (they’re still important in terms of artist promotion and building image and hype) or shut up and get out of the game. And don’t let the door hit ya on the way out.

Supposedly this virus (actually a worm) de-activates on September 10th, which means that I guess I have to put up with this nonsense for another week and a half. *Sigh*. If only the people who created these viruses would devote their time and energy to something more productive . . .

Extensive scientific research over more than 40 years has finally confirmed what many always believed: that astrology is rubbish, and that it is based on the principle of deception. The research began in London in 1958, and has just been published in the current edition of the respected Journal of Consciousness Studies.

[ . . . ]

In the course of the study, researchers tracked more than 2,000 people over several decades – most of them born within minutes of each other. According to astrology, the subjects should have had very similar traits. The babies were originally recruited as part of a medical study into how the circumstances of birth can affect future health. More than 2,000 babies born in early March that year were registered and their development monitored at regular intervals.

Researchers looked at more than 100 different characteristics, including occupation, anxiety levels, marital status, aggressiveness, sociability, IQ levels and ability in art, sport, mathematics and reading – all of which astrologers claim can be gauged from birth charts. The scientists failed to find any evidence of similarities between the “time twins”, however. “The test conditions could hardly have been more conducive to success… but the results are uniformly negative,” the research report said.

Yeah, we know that you never really believed in it in the first place . . . but hey, if the scientific community wanted to fund such a large-scale study to prove something that everyone already knows anyway, then I’m all for it. Keeps people employed.

I guess we’ll just have to return to more solid and accepted methods of predicting the future . . . like religion. (I’d love to see the results of the scientific study that takes that one on . . .)

Like a lot of people I’m sure, my initial reaction was to ask whether it was terrorism. But now it seems pretty clear that it wasn’t. CTV News is reporting that the cause was a fire at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, although they still seem to be trying to sort that out.

The impact is absolutely staggering. To me, it says a lot about how dependant we are on electricity. Literally nothing works without it – the lights are the least of the problem. Transportation, business, the stock market, ventilation, even drinking water . . . it’s like mankind existed happily for thousands of years without electricity, but as soon as it was discovered, we moved ahead in a lit-up world so quickly that we can’t survive without it anymore. I remember having these conversations during the Ice Storm, and hearing the panic again in 1999 as we approached the millennium with trepidation that everything would simply shut down. That didn’t happen, of course, but the fear that it would just underscores this point.

I hope everyone in the affected areas makes it home safely and gets their power back soon.

I dunno, stuff like this amuses me. Because it’s so incongruous with the notion of how they used to look at the moon to tell what day it was in ancient times. I really wonder what the sages in the time of the Talmud would have thought of interactive web calendars.

Judging by the horribly antisemitic character of the Raelians’ writings, I can’t help but wonder if this is just the precursor to some new way of targeting Jews. Call me crazy . . . well, no, actually, call them crazy.

Kasparov made headlines in 1997 when he lost to Deep Blue, a supercomputer built by IBM. Deep Junior, an Israeli-programmed successor, was billed to be able to beat Kasparov, currently the ranking world chess champion, but so far that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Maybe there’s hope for us humans yet.

I used to think the Raelians were just a bunch of cranks with some wacky ideas, but basically harmless. Than I found the Rael-operated “Subversions.com”, a “politically incorrect” “news” website which features one of the most shocking blood libels I’ve ever read: that the Israelis murdered 1,000 Palestinians, “most of whom were women and children” in Jenin. Not even the Palestinians themselves, nor the most hysterically “anti-Zionist” segments of the British media, wrote anything this vile.

Mind you, the Raelians don’t just pick on the Jews. They say say the U.S. Secret Service killed John Lennon and the followers of “Reverend” Jim Jones, and they even accuse the French of murdering members of the “Solar Temple” cult in 1994-95 and planning their own “concentration camps” for minorities. Still, the front page, which rants about “Americano-Israelian terrorism” and purports to show a Palestinian baby murdered by the IDF, makes it clear who their main target is.

Fuck you, Rael. Fuck, fuck, fuck you. Fuck you and the spaceship you rode in on.

Damian, I couldn’t agree more.

It’s scary as hell. Sure, the announcements of this week’s cloned babies are almost certainly hoaxes, but even the idea of them being true is frightening. Is this really who we want owning the technology to clone people? Imagine what kind of people these bigoted freaks would create. A world full of Raelian clones is not the planet Earth I want to live on, that’s for sure!

Congruent events occurred at Montreal’s Concordia University. In September, Palestinian supporters clashed with riot police before a planned speech by former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Then, in December, the Concordia Hillel had its funding cut by the Concordia Student Union — allegedly for displaying a pamphlet for the Mahal 2000 program, which helps diaspora Jews volunteer for the Israeli army.

Bloggers were the only ones to pay attention to these events in the United States. Despite hundreds of articles on anti-Semitic incidents in France, the confrontations at Concordia received scant press coverage.

Bloggers like [Glenn] Reynolds and California Web designer Charles Johnson focused the attention of readers on the issue.

Now, Noah Joseph, a Concordia Hillel student leader, feels he’s got an international network of support.

“Were getting an absolute influx of e-mail — 400 to my personal account, thousands more to a general mailbox,” Joseph said. “It’s uplifting to know you’re not alone in all of this.”

I guess I could feel slighted that nobody mentioned me as the person who sent the story to Instapundit and LGF in the first place . . . but that would just be narcissistic. The point is, the Concordia story got more coverage thanks to them, and that’s all that matters.

Speaking of Noah Shachtman, he’s got a new blog, Defense Tech about technology and defense and the relationship between the two.

Despite the fact that this is evidently a hoax, human cloning will be a reality in the not-so-distant future. I had the opportunity, while on vacation, to discuss the potential ethical ramifications with several people including a relative who’s a very knowledgeable professor, and what emerged was fascinating and more than a little disturbing.

The question was this: assume, for the sake of argument, that human cloning can be done safely without risk of harm to the mother or the baby (this assumption can’t be made right now but it will be reality soon enough). Would it then be ethical to clone human beings?

My argument was that the process itself would be ethically neutral, as simply another technology, but that the ethical questions would emerge in terms of the motives and the potential consequences. It was pointed out to me that technology is not necessarily neutral, since there are purely negative technologies, with sole purposes of creating harm (such as those used to create atom bombs, for example).

But since scientific knowledge inevitably moves forwards, it is impossible to put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. So if the technology to clone humans will inevitably exist, what are the ethical ramifications?

Motive is one. Will the technology be used to genetically engineer “perfect” babies? Is a Gattaca-like universe not far off? Or will it be used to help infertile couples, cure terminal diseases, and better the lives of all? Who will control the technology – democratic governments, or the wealthy?

Then of course the questions of consequences emerge. Will we create a world in which men are unnecessary? Can clones be considered as human as “natural” babies? More so? Is this merely another stage of evolution at work – the next step, so to speak? Is something inherently wrong because it’s “unnatural”? After all, plenty of unnatural things are considered perfectly fine – everything from in-vitero fertilization to giving a woman in labour an epidural. Is our knee-jerk negative reaction to human cloning more of a conditioned disgust rather than a well thought-out objection?

Despite all of this, I still think human cloning is dangerous, and my instinct is to say it’s unethical as well. Canada is in the process of enacting legislation against it and I’d probably support it. But all these questions are bound to come up again soon, and the Raelians may be forcing our society to deal with them sooner rather than later.