Having come very close to walking the line myself (while an apprentice compositor at a Thomson-era Peterborough Examiner and member of the Communications Workers of America), I know what a difficult decision it is to go on strike. Unions don’t strike on a whim; it is usually a result of breakdown in the collective bargaining process, and although it’s a tool in the union arsenal, it is seldom one used lightly.

So best wishes to my brothers and sisters from PSAC who are walking the line today up around the corner from us on Grafton St.

At a client meeting yesterday one of the items raised was the fact that users were typing in their telephone numbers incorrectly on various web forms. The forms are set up to require the user to enter numbers like 9028922556 — in other words, with no punctuation of any sort. Even though it says right there on the form that users are supposed to use this format, some users ignore this instruction and enter their phone number like (902) 892-2556.

The putative reason for the no-punctuation format was because this makes it easier for Adobe Acrobat to format the telephone numbers. In other words, we programmers were being lazy and forcing users to do the work that computers are supposed to do.

I shocked myself, during this discussion, by momentarily thinking “now, how can we force users to use the proper format?”. In other words, the programmer’s desire to be lazy, and hostile to users is very strong.

Thankfully cooler heads prevailed and we made the decision to let users enter telephone numbers in any old format they want.

This episode makes the recent move by Trent University (pimping for Bell Canada) to change their phone system conceivable.

Conceivable, but not forgivable.

The new, upgraded [sic] system does away with people at Trent having bona fide telephone numbers and forces everyone to call a central number and use a speech recognition system to get connected to their party.

In other words, in this case cooler heads did not prevail, and the result is a move from an easy, comfortable user interface (pick up phone, dial number) hostile user interface (dial central number, speak name to voice recognition system, confirm speech recognition).

While the new system has a temporary “gee-whiz” quality to it (hey, the computer understood me), once this wears off we are left with a system which sacrifices usability for showmanship, cost-saving and corporate philandering.

Grassy Hill Radio turned me on to Jonatha Brooke

I am hard-pressed to understand why a page like this For the Love of Cars page on the Mazda Canada website is allowed to exist. The page, with a big “This is the site for future Mazda fun stuff,” in the middle of it, is a placeholder for what I assume is “fun stuff” to come later. Does Mazda expect that we will bookmark this page in gleeful anticipation of the “fun stuff” to come. I hope not, because I left the page thinking “what a stupid page.” Do they design cars with little stickers saying “if you’d have bought a 2002, there would be a clock here!”

I have long held that what web surfers are looking for is stuff, not shit. All of my experience in this medium leads me to this thinking. I look at traffic logfiles; I know what’s popular and what’s not. Stuff is interesting, captivating, compelling, real information. Shit is marketing drivel; it is often a marketing or advertising person’s view of what will impress the public. Shit might impress, but shit doesn’t last.

In this light, I am happy to see that Ford Canada has moved to a stuff-o-centric web page. Unlike Toyota, which makes me jump through some bazonko circle-metaphored, graphics rich hell-hole before I can actually get information about what cars they sell, Ford’s redesigned home page has everything I’d ever want to know, well-organized, in one page.

That’s stuff. Kudos to Ford.

For those of you with a folkic bent, you can do little better than Grassy Hill Radio, a web broadcaster with no visible means of support. They offier an eclectic, high-quality audio stream of music from everyone from Patty Larkin to Stephen Fearing to Joan Baez.

Night after night after night, while the rest of us are watching Seinfeld or helping to bathe the wee ones, or going to the beach or shovelling the snow, the indefatigable Derek Martin has been operating City Cinema in Charlottetown (conflict of interest note: I have been voluntarily maintaining the website for the cinema since 1995).

For one heady week a few years back, I filled in as projectionist for Derek, and it was only then that I truly learned what a completely exhausting business running a cinema is. From the comfort of the seats in the front of house, we see little of the lugging giant heavy film canisters to and from the bus depot, winding endless thousands of feet of film from small reels onto big reels, dealing with popcorn machines that light on fire. And so on and so on.

In a climate where many small cinemas have folded (Wormwoods in Halifax and the Broadway in Hamilton since Derek has been in business), we all owe Derek a large debt of gratitude for keeping at it night after night.

I have never been a tremendous fan of muffins. Over the course of my life I would say that 2% of the muffins I’ve eaten have been transcendent, 50% have been mundane, and the remaining 48% have been some variation of dried sawdust and lard baked in adobe ovens for 14 hours.

The muffin world is unfortunately fractured between those that treat muffins as the centre of their world and those that class them aS generic baked goods (along with tarts and pies and cakes).

For some reason, neither model seems to produce appetizing muffins.

The former, assigned to life in the doldrums of muffindom, try to bust out of their shell with with muffins like Cherries n’ Chocolate and Tropical Pineapple Crunch. Ack!

The later, treating muffins with only occasional interest, vacillate between the sawdust-variety bran raisin, and items which contain so much sugar and syrup that they’re more a dessert item than a healthy breakfast aside.

Despite my misgivings, this morning I awoke and set out with wee Oliver to see if muffins could be obtained to take the edge off an early Sunday morning. I needn’t have bothered.

It would appear that even though we have World Class Ways of Getting Here and World Class Tourism Attractions, there is either no demand for Sunday muffins among the tourist class, or there is demand, but it is going unslaked.

To give you a brief rundown of my fruitless journey: Beanz (doesn’t have muffins on Sundays (!)), GrabbaJabba (closed on Sundays), Urban Grocer (opens at Noon on Sundays), Island Food Centre (closed on Sundays), Obsessions at the Delta Hotel (closed on Sundays), Peakes Quay (open, but completely muffin-free).

In final desparation, wee O. and I piled in the car and drove to Tim Hortons where I found a lackluster low-fat raspberry muffin. Not great, but it was a muffin.

I came across this news release on the Tim Hortons website tonight. It discusses the construction of a $125 million par-bake facility in Brantford, Ontario.

What, I wondered, is a par-bake facility?

Well, it seems that if you want to bake lots of bread in a giant factory, and then ship it out across the land, it’s better to partially bake it than to bake like any normal person would (i.e. all the way). According to The Pillsbury Company:

With this new technology, Pillsbury factory [sic] now bakes products until they are about 90 percent done and then ships the products to restaurants or other establishments, which merely have to heat it [sic] up in order to ‘fresh bake’ it [sic].

What I am wondering is: if you’re “merely heating up” some previously par-baked bread, is the end result really “fresh-baked?”

Tim’s currently describes its sandwich breads as follows:

All sandwiches are built on a choice of a fresh-baked white or whole wheat country bun, with tomato, lettuce and our special creamy dressing.

ER star Goran Visnjic is introduced in this interview as a studly Croat. This would appear to be the first time that a Croat has ever been described as being studly (at least in English). For the 1/4 of me that is Croatian, things are obviously looking up!

For the record, it also appears that studly Ukranian nor studly Irishman have warranted Internet reference; to complete my ancestry, however, studly Scotsman has at least one reference:

I committed a Major Social Faux-Pas when I asked Jimmy, our studly Scotsman, to pick out the best whisky they had and serve it to me OVER ICE. Needless to say, I now drink it sans rocks.