Things I learned today:

• the AT&T Global Network has the best prices if you’re looking for occasional global dial-up Internet access
• the Japanese FM radio band uses different frequencies than we use in North America,
• rechargeable batteries (AA, AAA, C, D, etc.) are still hard to find, expensive and have chargers that are too big and cumbersome,
• per capita Subaru ownership in Maine far exceeds that of PEI,
• you can now buy bottled unsweetened iced tea in New England,
• if we are to believe the movie Pearl Harbor, WWII-era military Japan had much, much better aesthetics than the US: Armani-designed uniforms, cool battle planning bunkers with reflecting pools, etc.
• Irving Oil dominates the retail gasoline market in northern Maine.
• Xircom modems suck; CardAccess modems rock.

Spending the weekend in Bangor — my favourite city — and trying out life on the ‘net squeezed through a Handspring Visor.

The effect is like trying to run through a peat bog. But it works, and I was able to diagnose and solve a server problem using a Palm version of SSH. Nothing like using ‘vi’ on a tiny screen with Graffitti.

Off to see Pearl Harbor (leaving me last person on earth to do so?).

It’s almost 3 months to the day that Kevin O’Brien has graced the halls of the Internet with his daily commentary.

While Kevin’s musings are always good (if teeming) reading, they have, to this point, tended to be arms-length from his personal experiences. Which is not to say that they haven’t reflected and been informed by his personal experiences, just that he has tended to move back several layers of abstraction to paint with a broader brush.

Weblogs are most interesting, I think, when their creators manage to smash through this urge to paint broadly and to base comments on what’s happening in their own lives. This is a fine line, of course, and there is an equal and oppossite danger of weblogs becoming too self-reflective.

In any case, I was happy to read this piece from Kevin this morning. While I can’t say that I agree with the broad premise — It may be time to bust some heads… — I think it’s the most compelling thing that Kevin’s written yet.

Tell us more.

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.