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.

Earlier in this space I commented about my impending switch for domain name services from Network Solutions to Trinic.

Just want to report that the entire process went smoothly, and I’ve got five domains transferred over. If you’ve ever held off switching from Network Solutions to another provider, either for pricing or service issues, I can reassure you, at least based on my experiences this week, that the switch is easy and painless.

What’s more, it was an easy way to update my address information, something I’d been trying to do, in vain, for a year with the other guys.

CBC’s new Arts Canada website debuted today. This is what you see instead of the old InfoCulture website if you go to cbc.ca and click on Entertainment in the sidebar.

I don’t mean to be crass, but this new effort sucks, pure and simple.

One of the important things about the web — one of the things that made its rapid adoption by millions of people in such a short time period possible — is that it is based on standards. To fill out a form on the web, you pretty well do the same thing whether you’re applying for a Visa card or hunting license or signing up for intelligent sex. Sites are rich and wonderful and different, but a scroll bar still scrolls, and you still click that’s blue ‘cause that means it’s a hyperlink.

For the CBC this standard old regular web world is obviously just too darn restrictive a medium to deliver arts-related information to we Canadians. They have to go ahead and develop an entirely new set of metaphors for us to learn if we want to use their site. Their scroll bars work differently. Their hyperlinks look different. In their self-described “rich media portal,” the web doesn’t work the way the web works. It works the way some guys in Toronto think they would like the web to work.

That might be cool and sexy for them, and they might have convinced the CBC that this somehow makes the web work more “like TV.” But from my humble consumer’s perspective, it seems akin to designing a car where the steering wheel turns the other way, the turn signal is under the seat, and the radio gurgles every time you hit it to turn it on.

Why not concentrate on your strengths: solid arts reporting, presented from a trusted, reliable, known source, rather than investing untold gazillions in stupid flashy stuff which obscures rather than enlivens content.

Sigh.

I don’t think that there’s anything you can do right now, if you’re someone who wears eyeglasses to read at your computer, that will give you more immediate satisfaction, than stopping right now to clean your glasses. Of course perhaps I live a sheltered life.

Two takes on the inquest this past week in Saskatoon: Blatchford and Rukavina.

Patricia Heaton won an Emmy tonight for her role as Debra Barone on the CBS comedy Everybody Loves Raymond. It was her second win for this role.

I have never been able to watch Everybody Loves Raymond; it never clicked with me. It’s partly because, well, it’s on CBS, which doesn’t hit my demographic. And partly because the show itself seems like a pale rehashing of Roseanne. Perhaps I’m mising something.

Heaton, though, I’ve always considered a first rate actor. Her seminal role (pardon the pun) was playing Dr. Karen Silverman in the 1980s ABC drama thirtysomething. She debuted in Episode 304, delivering Susannah’s baby, and later returned to deliver Hope and Michael’s son Leo, and as Nancy’s doctor when she went through cancer treatment.

I remember thinking at the time of thirtysomething that she was the kind of OB/GYN I’d like to have around if I ever had kids with someone. As it turned out, Dr. Sproule, our OB/GYN here in Charlottetown last year, came pretty close.

So, congratulations on your Emmy, Ms. Heaton.

Disclaimer: If you think the fact that I am a big thirtysomething fan gives you the right to think less of me, well, think again. I watched every episode. I once bought a TV at Kmart in El Paso, Texas, just so I could watch (I returned the TV the next morning). At the time it was great, groundbreaking TV. And it holds up. So there.

Back last year, I revealed here that I’d spent more than $4000 over the years for domain name registration services, all of it to Network Solutions.

Network Solutions used to be a godawful horrible company. When I went to register my first domain name with them back in 1995 — digitalisland.com — it took weeks for them to update their files. Their customer service was unusually horrible. They’ve gotten better on the speed front — most domain name changes happen within an hour or so now — but their customer service has slid even further into a hole of unhelpfulness.

Mostly this hasn’t bothered me all that much, and when it does, it’s only at the yearly rewnewal time. But recently they’ve “updated” [sic] their website — perhaps because they’ve been consumed by VeriSign — and it’s now such a non-functional, poorly-designed mess of a tool that I can’t abide being their customer any longer.

So today I started the process of switching all of my .com and .net domain names to a small Edmonton called Trinic that a reader of this site suggested. I used them earlier this year to register Reinvented.info and I got a good feeling. Their system is simple and uncluttered: most operations can be performed in a click or two. And when I ran into a small snag — turned out not to be their fault — with my .info registration and emailed them, they actually emailed me back.

My only complaint with their systems is that their credit card payment gateway has a tendency to throw CGI timeout errors, which is disconcerting. Their website explains that this means that your payment has actually ben processed. But I’m always left wondering. I hope they fix this problem soon.

In the meantime, I’m much happier dealing with a small Edmonton company than the Behemoth that Network Solutions has been become.

CBC reports today: Air Canada losing money, patience.

I have no patience for Air Canada, nor for any of the other ailing airlines looking to be propped up in this inarguably troubling time.

Here’s the thing: shit happens. Granted, recent shit is bigger shit than we’ve seen in a long while. But there are ups and downs in the world. It’s a big, complicated, organic psycho-stew out there, and sometimes people are going to want to travel by air more than other times. This is inevitable. Your airplanes will crash. Other guys’ airplanes will crash. The economy will go sour. Train service will get better. Pilots will go on strike. And terrorists will crash airplanes into buildings. All of this is inevitable; the specifics may be unexpected. But shit happens. It’s the way the world works.

Airlines are a business monoculture. They do one thing: fly from place to place. And they appear to base their business model around the notion that nothing will ever go wrong and that there will be no rainy days. This won’t work over the long term; it’s simply not a sustainable system, especially once the jig is up and millions are no longer available to pour in from our tax dollars.

What happened to the idea of putting money aside for a rainy day? What about diversifying the business so that when travel’s down you’ve got other activities that are up? What about creating a sustainable business ecology where you concentrate on the long view, and where you build in the assumption of disaster, evil, bad economy, etc. into the model?

These are all things that small businesses are expected to do to survive. These are lessons that farmers know well, and have known well for many generations. These are habits that most families know well (or wish they knew well) when it comes to basic home budgeting.

I have no patience for stupid, greedy airlines that don’t think this way. You reap what you sow.

The Way Back Machine is one of the coolest web applications I’ve come across. The site is an archive, at selected points in history, of sites on the web; it claims to contain “over 100 terabytes and 10 billion web pages archived from 1996 to the present.”

Pictured here is a thumbnail of our website from December 22, 1996, back before Digital Island Inc. got reinvented as Reinvented.

You can use their site to read the entire archived page.

One of the things I linked to back in 1996 was this CBC Morningside Log for November 13, 1995. One of the log entries is for a debate that I (credited oddly as “owner of Island Media” — I don’t know where they got that) had with William Burrill, and Scott Goodfellow, moderated by Peter Gzowski, about the future of the CD-ROM.

Although the original audio is now missing from the CBC website, I managed to grab a copy and archived it here [MP3, 3.2MB] for perpetuity. My role, as you will hear if you listen, was the wry techno-sceptic. In other words, I was the jackass.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Notes: Scott Goodfellow is still with Good Media in Ontario; William Burrill is now entertainment columnist for The Toronto Star. Our company is no longer called Digital Island, and the use of the words Digital Island on this page should not be taken to imply any association or endorsement by Digital Island, a Cable & Wireless company.