I sent the following email this evening to David Carey, Publisher of The New Yorker magazine:

Dear Mr. Carey,

I have been purchasing The New Yorker every week for 10 years at Tweels Gift Shop in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

I go there every Monday. In recent years I take my young son Oliver with me. I am a loyal and devoted reader. I enjoy the magazine immensely. It is part of what makes living in this tiny Island province viable — you are my connection to the world at large.

However I would like to point out a small problem in you newsstand distribution mechanism.

For some reason, for weeks where Monday is a holiday in Canada, but not in the U.S. — days like Victoria Day in May, Dominion Day in July, and so on — your magazine never arrives at Tweels Gift Shop. I ask at the counter and they tell me some variation of “we were shorted this week.” I don’t really understand what this means. But it is a reliable and consistent problem, and has been for some time.

I have no idea how the The New Yorker gets from New York City to Charlottetown, PEI. But on those weeks — like this one, where November 11 was a holiday here but not there — when The New Yorker is not available, my entire week is affected.

It’s like a small part of the air I breath is not available to me.

I realize that in the grander scheme of things this problem pales in comparison to others I imagine you have on your desk. But I would very much appreciate it if you could be of some assistance in helping to track down and solve it.

Regards,
Peter Rukavina
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

On last report, there were several gazillion websites out there in the world. And, so goes conventional wisdom, most of us only look at less than a dozen of them on a daily basis.

I can confirm this from my own browsing habits. Pictured here is my Internet Explorer drop-down menu showing the websites I drop in on several times a day. If you kick in CNN and Canoe, and leave out sites I actually create, you’ve got 95% of my browsing life right there.

My television watching follows a similar pattern: about 40% NBC, 20% on ABC, 20% on TLC, 10% on CBC and the balance sprinkled over the dial.

I read the New Yorker every week, Yankee and Toronto Life every month and occasionally read WIRED and Mother Jones.

I pick up the Guardian once or twice a week (I read it online every day), the National Post about twice a month, and the Globe and Mail about once every two months.

I split my radio listening in the car between CBC and Magic 93, the later only because there’s nothing else I can pick up clearly. At home I never listen to “real” radio — it’s Grassy Hill 90% of the time, KPIG on Sunday afternoons, and various others the rest of the time.

In other words, in this crazy world of seemingly infinite choice, I have my tiny little unchanging sliver. And, I assume most people do too. What’s yours?

I hereby offer to spend an $500 extra on Christmas gifts this holiday season, at downtown Charlottetown merchants, if the people behind the Maritime Electric Victorian Winter Festival do away with the abominable and inane Christmas lights that have littered the downtown for the past two years.

If I can find, say, 50 allies, that’s an additional $25,000 more in the pockets of downtown businesses. Which, I would hazard a guess, is significantly more than the light orgy results in. Takers?

Technical bulletin: I can confirm that mounting Samba shares under Mac OS X works once you install the 10.1.1 update. It didn’t work — at least very much — under 10.1, and I had to resort to using Sharity (which worked fine). What this means in the real world (or the less pretend world) is that I can open files on the Linux server in the basement using my iBook. Which is both cool and useful. I now return you to your regularly scheduled website.

CBC unveiled its edgy new current affairs program Disclosure this evening, hosted by Wendy Mesley and Diana Swain. The program shares a lot with ABC’s 20/20: Downtown — it’s a lighter, funkier kinda news, targeted younger than usual. Think of it as “fifth estate” meets “21 Jump Street.”

That said, I watched and enjoyed most of the program this evening.

I’m a fan of both Swain and Mesley: I think they’re excellent hosts, and good journalists. I sang a private song when Swain beat out Peter Mansbridge for the new Gemini last year.

As to the segements that went into tonight’s debut episode, well…

There were regretable (or just plain stupid) segments, like Premiers Travel Challenge where real CBC sports commentators called the play-by-play on a mock hurdles race as part of an essentially content-free “exposé” about travel costs in various by Canadian Premiers. This segment — more appropriate for This Hour Has 22 Minutes if anyone is forced to watch it — went on way, way to long and took what might have been some interesting content and over-packaged it in a fluffy coating.

Similarly, the Disclosure Mission Statement piece, wherein we get a fluufy rendition of what the show’s all about, was over-produced to the point of obscurity. The style of this piece borrowed a lot from Undercurrents, Wendy Mesley’s old show. Let’s hope they leave that style mostly behind.

But Mesley’s interview with Prince Mostapha was well done: she’s a good interviewer, and she established a bizarre sort of rapport with the man. And Diana Swain’s The Beast of Bolzano piece was interesting too, although she could lose a little bit of the Mike Wallacesque moral indignation.

Graphically the show was slick and well-produced. Despite the 20/20 style knock-off of the “hosts standing in weird lighting on the roof,” I like this technique for the introductions.

The Disclosure website certainly seems comprhensive, with background web content for each piece, and RealVideo of each as well. It suffers from the usual crazy “we have to wrap our own cool, unique home page inside the regular CBC look and feel” problem that so plagues many CBC sites; the result is five (yes five) navigational areas: regular CBC bar at the top, regular CBC sidebar, Disclosure bar at the top, Disclosure sidebar, Disclosure links at page bottom. This is confusing, but it’s not really fair to blame the Disclosers for this problem.

I’ll be watching next Tuesday.

Hint for the day: if, after soaping up your hands when washing them, you rinse for an additional 15 seconds longer than normal, you will get a better hand washing with less soapy residue and will generally feel better about the entire experience.

I would like to suggest that we change the official language of Prince Edward Island to Portuguese: imagine being able to tell people you live in a place called Ilha Príncipe Eduardo.

In an earlier piece I commented briefly on the PEIauto.com website, and mentioned that I felt that it had some usability problems. In reaction to that piece, the people behind the site asked what I meant. So here goes:

1. Don’t change the colour of my scroll bar. It might be all cool and everything, but when you screw around with my browser you confuse me rather than help. I don’t consider my scroll bar a part of my screen real estate that you should modify.

2. The Big Useful Thing about your website is that you have a good database of used cars for sale. You make a point of this yourself: you say “largest vehicle database on PEI” in bold type. But then you go and make it hard to find out how to actually search. Big Useful Things should be easy to find, not hidden under a small “Search” link in the sidebar or below the fold under “Features of the Site.”

3. While it might be nice to imagine that one can buy an Alfa Romeo on PEI, this isn’t actually the case, at least right now. So why is Alfa Romeo one of the choices in your “Make” pull-down list? A good search engine dynamically limits search options to only those things that actually exist; the existing setup is frustrating because many searches produce no results at all (Alfa Romeo, Triumph, Suzuki, etc.).

4. Isn’t one of the Great Things about the malleable Internet that you can take “sold” cars out of the listings once they’ve, well, sold. If there’s some compelling reason for leaving these listings in the search results, then at least give me the option of leaving them out when I set up my search.

5. When you depart from a cardinal convention of the web like “you can click on anything that’s blue and underlined” there should be a really, really good reason. I can’t see what this reason is with your site: you make it more difficult to navigate the site by reinventing the hyperlinked indicator.

6. The fidelity of the photos attached to listings could use some improvement. Many photos are too dark, making it hard to get a good impression of the vehicle in question.

That’s about it, in my eyes. As I said in my original piece, and want to reinforce here, PEIauto.com is generally solid, especially given that you’ve got enough of an inventory to make the site worth spending some time with. But if you correct some of the problems I’ve outlined above it could be even better.

I note for the record, in light of my earlier comments about how airlines that I fly tend to go out of business, that I have been an occasional customer of Canada 3000 (which stopped flying today), and I once thought about flying SwissAir (which is still flying, but which stopped flying for a couple of days recently when they hit a financial wall).

One of the examples of “high touch” that John Naisbitt mentioned in his keynote speech at Pop!Tech was Canada Post’s Picture Postage service. He really seemed quite taken with the idea.

The service works like this: you take a picture, send it to Canada Post with $24.95, and they send you back 25 stamps — real, legal, stick-on-a-letter stamps — with the picture printed on them.

Actually, as I found out today when I called for more information, what they really send you is 25 little pictures and 25 frames. To make the stamps, you peel of the pictures and stick them in the frames.

Given that this all works out to about a dollar a stamp, I wondered if I could just purchase the stamp frames themselves, and print my own little pictures.

I cannot.

The reason I was given for this is that Canada Post wants to monitor what images I’m using on my custom stamps. Presumably this is where clause #5 of their agreement comes in: “We reserve the right to refuse, for any reason, the photograph you have submitted. In such a case you will be refunded.”

I guess they’re trying to protect us from naked stamps.

NOTE: Image of stamp above isn’t a real stamp. The pretend stamp uses the work Nude by artist Alex Cree. Inclusion of this image shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement by Canada Post of this artist, or of nakedness or nudity in general, nor by the artist of Canada Post.