A little more detail about the new design of the Youngfolk & The Kettle Black coffee bags (which are now available at the Richmond Street location to hold your pound of coffee, should you wish).

The ungainliness of the coffee bags themselves makes them more difficult to print than simpler items: the press has to go through 4 rotations for me to set a bag in place, print it, set the throw-off lever so that it will stop printing, remove the bag, set it aside, and repeat. As such it took about an hour to print 80 bags, about 45 seconds per bag.

The quote comes from a book, All About Coffee, by William H. Ukers, digitized by Project Gutenberg and originally published in 1922 by “The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company” in New York, of which Ukers was editorial director.

The body copy is set in 24 point Futura, the “Y&TKB” is set in 60 point Akzidenz Grotesk.

Dear Apple,

Just under a year ago we bought a MacBook Air for my son Oliver. He was 11 at the time; he’s 12 now. It’s a great little machine, and it served him well in school all year long. I refer to it as his “prosthetic device,” as it’s an invaluable tool for almost everything he does.

We bought the computer from Little Mac Shoppe, an authorized Apple dealer and service centre here in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. It would have been easier and faster and maybe even a little cheaper to buy it online, or to buy it from a big-box store at the edge of town, but we wanted to support our local dealer, and as it was steps from both our home and my office we knew that service would never be far away.

Unfortunately a few months after we bought the MacBook, the Little Mac Shoppe went out of business; we were sad to see them go, but rested easy in the notion that Apple’s world-class support would keep us going if anything went wrong during our 1-year warranty period. Several earlier experiences with Apple support had been universally positive, and I’d no reason to suspect that this had changed, Little Mac Shoppe or no.

Yesterday afternoon Oliver went to turn on his MacBook and was faced with a grey screen and a flashing question mark inside a folder; the computer wouldn’t boot.

After trying the recommended steps on your support website, I contacted your 1-800 number, as I knew it was still under warranty and it seemed pretty clear it was a hardware issue.

At first the technician I talked to said he couldn’t help me: I needed to take the MacBook to an Apple store for diagnosis and possible repair. When I explained the the nearest Apple Store is 4 hours away in Halifax, Nova Scotia he put me on hold, and he came back a few moments later and said he’d received special permission to help me because of this.

The tech guided me through the same steps I’d already followed online, and at the end of this process he confirmed that this was likely a hardware issue, and that I should take the MacBook into the Apple Store in Halifax for repair.

When I asked if there was another option available to me – a mail-in repair, for example – I was told this wasn’t possible in Canada, and that my only recourse was to drive the 4 hours to Halifax where the repair could be done while I waited. He advised to call before leaving to confirm that the part was in stock.

So tonight I called the Apple Store in Halifax to confirm that the required part was in stock.

And  I was told that they cannot confirm whether parts are in stock over the phone, and that my only recourse was to come to the store and hope for the best. When I explained that this could mean driving for 4 hours in each direction for nothing, I was offered no recourse.

Wanting to avoid the chance of driving to Halifax for nothing, I called Apple Support again, and talked to a very friendly fellow who, on hearing my story, sympathized with my plight, and said there would be no problem doing a mail-in repair: I’d receive a pre-paid box to ship the MacBook in, and it would be quickly couriered back to me.

Then he took my postal code and his system told him that a mail-in repair wouldn’t be possible. He put me on hold to consult with someone else and when he came back he confirmed that no mail-in option was available because of where I was located (he wasn’t clear whether this meant where in Canada, or simply that mail-in repairs weren’t available in Canada at all).

He offered, as an alternative to driving to Halifax, the option of driving to Moncton, New Brunswick to Jump+, an authorized service depot. He assured me that depots like this can order parts in advance so as long, as I called before I came, I could make sure the trip wasn’t for nothing.

So I called Jump+. Spoke to a very helpful fellow who told me that they don’t generally order parts in advance, but because I was a long drive away they could make an exception, but that they could only hold the part “on lawaway” for 24 hours before it would need to be returned, so I’d have to specify exactly when I’d be coming. I was told that the service technician would call me in the morning, but cautioned that he might not do this because he’s very busy, and I might need to call him.

So, right now, that’s the working plan.

This isn’t good enough.

You sold me something that broke. It’s your fault. I have a warranty. Based on previous experiences I expected you to honour that warranty quickly and painlessly.

What’s changed?

As a company concerned with service and the customer experience to the extent that you are, two phone calls, a variety of stories, and a “definitely maybe” in Moncton simply isn’t enough: you should be working hard to help me help my 12 year old son (a son who’s now worried that his laptop won’t be fixed before school starts).

All of this leaves me with a bad impression of Apple, writing a bad-impression-of-Apple blog post that I would rather not be writing.

If you’d like to make this right, my case number is 490920122; I will happily write a “wow, Apple knocked my socks off” blog post when you come through.

Your friend and longtime-admirer,
Peter

Postcript: Read This is Mac calling from the Office of Tim Cook to see how Apple did come through.

After sitting with this coffee bag design for a while, I reconsidered the layout, moved the type around, and ended up with this for the final design:

(I don’t know my my camera took a photo that makes the type appear to glow, but it doesn’t).

I like this design much better: it elevates the Y&TKB to prominence, fills up what otherwise would have been a vast expanse at the bottom of the bag, and leaves a pleasant amount of whitespace around the quote¹ (which comes from All About Coffee, digitized by Project Gutenberg).

And it just looks better in that way that things do.

They’re off the press and drying as I type.

1. Here’s the complete sentence, if you’re interested:

Good coffee, carefully roasted and properly brewed, produces a natural beverage that, for tonic effect, can not be surpassed, even by its rivals, tea and cocoa. Here is a drink that ninety-seven percent of individuals find harmless and wholesome, and without which life would be drab indeed—a pure, safe, and helpful stimulant compounded in nature’s own laboratory, and one of the chief joys of life!

It’s good to take a coffee bag design out for a ride, to experience how it looks when it’s filled with coffee (or, in this case, rags standing in for coffee) and folded up and out in the wild. So I packaged up a sample and took it down the street and had a coffee and looked at it on the shelf. Still pondering.

On a cool summer night last year I joined a couple of dozen other people in Kings Square in Charlottetown to watch WOLVES > BOYS, one of the shows the 2012 edition of The Island Fringe Festival. It was a witty little play, well-acted, and the venue couldn’t be beat.

As such, I was well-primed when a request appeared in my email box last week, through a carefully-choosen intermediary, asking me to be a sponsor of this year’s festival. I wrote a cheque – a modest $200 cheque, mind you, not a life-changing Tim Banks-style cheque – on the spot. As such I become a “Community Sponsor” of this year’s fringe. Or rather Reinvented does.

The sad irony is that I’ll be away in Ontario for the duration of this year’s festival – August 29 to 31, 2013 – and so I won’t get a chance to enjoy the walk-on roles, skyboxes, VIP lounge access, extravagant afterparties, and other perks that such sponsorship affords¹.

If you happen to have a few hundred dollars kicking around and an urge to support independent theatre in unusual venues, perhaps you could become a sponsor too? Just go here and follow the links.

1. I exaggerate: the perks of “Community Sponsorship” are a more modest “logo on Island Fringe Festival website, recognition of your business on Island Fringe’s Facebook and flyer included in welcome packet for Island Fringe Festival artists and volunteers.”

2. Post title courtesy of Rogers & Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma,” The Surrey With The Fringe On Top.

I was searching about yesterday looking for some information about the DRM system that Overdrive uses to lock up ebooks it makes available to public libraries (including Prince Edward Island’s Library Service, which is a customer).

One of my searches was “how to share Overdrive books” and this search led me to an intriguing-looking slide in a PowerPoint presentation for client libraries:

Anything labelled “please do not share this email with patrons” is prone to make my eyes perk up, and so I read the PowerPoint presentation from beginning to end. It turns out to be a good overview of Overdrive’s offerings for libraries (which, regular readers may recall, I likened to “crazytown” on national radio).

The next slide in the deck was even more interesting than the eyes-only email address; it concerned the reports available to client libraries:

“Cool!”, I thought to myself as I fired off an email to the always-helpful librarians at the Provincial Library’s Fortress of Solitude in remotest Morell. I quickly got a reply. Here’s what I learned:

• Separate and apart from Overdrive, currently there are 48,751 adult library cards and 17,876 children’s library cards for a grand total of 66,627 library cards in service. (By my own calculation, that’s almost exactly 50% of the adult population holding a library card).
• The Provincial Library Service subscribes to Overdrive’s “One Copy/One User” product – this is the aspect of the service that meant that while I had “checked out” a Teach Yourself Norwegian book nobody else in PEI could borrow it.
• The Library Service has 5,246 digital items in its collection (read “licenses 5,246 items for one-at-at-time circulation to PEI patrons”): 1,309 audiobooks, 3,931 ebooks and 6 music items.
• Since May 2011, 3,847 patrons have checked out a digital title (about 8% of total patrons if you only count adults, 6% if you include children).
• Those patrons have “borrowed” a total of 9,581 audiobooks and 42,268 ebooks for a total of 51,849 digital items borrowed.
• Today (August 8, 2013) there are 546 patrons with digital items checked out and 587 items on hold.
• The PEI-branded Overdrive.com site has been receiving an average of about 5,000 unique “active visits” (not sure what distinguishes that from “unique visits”) a month over the last three months (May to July of 2013).

Here’s what the Overdrive.com registrations-per-month look like (patrons must register with Overdrive.com to “check out” items):

(That chart was made with the really-easy-to-use Chartbulder, which I recommend for all your spur-of-the-moment chart-making needs).

So, it would seem, ebooks and audiobooks are popular with we Islanders; what we need to work on next is making the experience of borrowing digital content less 1955-like.

Pan Wendt, Curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, tumbled into me at Youngfolk & The Kettle Black the other day and introduced me to Eric Moschopedis and Mia Rushton, current Artists-in-Residence at the gallery.

Eric and Mia are presenting an Art Talk tonight in the gallery. The official announcement of their talk describes their work as follows:

Their work involves public engagement, and the pair will be a regular sight in downtown Charlottetown as they interact with residents and visitors as part of their project to collect vegetation from the capital city’s nooks and crannies and turn it into edible-art in the form of popsicles. Yes, popsicles!

Popsicles aside, this doesn’t jump off the screen as a “summertime must-see,” so I want to encourage you all to come to their talk anyway, as I found Mia and Eric, in the few minutes I met them over coffee, far more interesting than their PR would suggest.

Tonight (August 8, 2013) at 7:00 p.m. at Confederation Centre Art Gallery.

I built a cool little app called PirateFox that knits together my two digital distractions of the moment, Firefox OS and PirateBox.

The app has a simple function: to share images, audio and video from a mobile phone to a nearby PirateBox. Firefox OS has an API called Web Activities than make this relatively easy to implement; it looks like this when it’s in action:

That’s a screen shot of my Firefox OS phone’s gallery app: I tap on the “share” icon and up pops a menu of sharing options, including, once my app is installed, “PirateFox.”  I tap PirateFox and the image gets automagically sent to the PirateBox I’m connected to.

You can grab the source for PirateFox and install it on your Firefox OS phone; if you don’t have a Firefox OS phone, you might look at the code anyway as an example of how to upload a file through a handcrafted XMLHttpRequest of multipart/form-data, something that works around an issue with the current version of Firefox OS that’s eventually going to be fixed.

The great Canadian actor Billy Van died 11 years ago; the blog post I wrote to mark his passing continues to get traffic and comments, and I think of Billy often.

I knew Billy for two things: appearances on Party Game and his co-starring role, with Luba Goy, in the TV Ontario series Bits and Bytes. When I wrote that original memorial post in 2002 it seemed that Bits and Bytes, save for a few YouTube videos, was lost to time. But today I stumbled across the entire series in the collection of Archive.org. 

I was 17 years old when Bits and Bytes ran on TV Ontario originally. I was your nerd’s nerd: I had a TRS-80 Model One, a 300 baud modem and printer that printed only in UPPER CASE. The show was, among many things, a sort of vindication of the new world that I’d stumbled into.

I took delivery on Friday of a Anker Astro2 Dual USB Output 8400mAh External Battery, ordered a few days earlier from Amazon.ca. It’s a box about the size of a 1994 mobile phone with two full-size USB ports capable of powering portable devices, like an iPad or a phone or, in my case, a PirateBox. Tests by others suggest it will keep my PirateBox going for 19 hours; I’ve been running it for 8 hours and its battery is at 75%, so signs are that could be true.

Here’s what PirateBox + external battery looks like (I zip-tied them together to mitigate the possibility of them becoming detached from each other):

I put the combined “Portable PirateBox” into my new Pod Sling Pack; it added something akin to the weight of a short hardback book to the pack, and I didn’t really notice it was there. Then Oliver and I headed out on the town.

Our first stop was Youngfolk & the Kettle Black where we dined on lobster roll and grilled cheese and happenstancely ran into Dan and Becky. So Dan got a chance to take the box for a ride, uploading a photo of their dog:

As I needed some office supplies, our next stop was Staples, where we had great fun switching the store’s tablets and PCs (temporarily – we’re not evil) to use the PirateBox for wifi, and then experimenting with their “select a file and upload” capabilities.  We grabbed an MP3, made a video, made a podcast and took lots of crazy pictures.

Everything we made we uploaded to the PirateBox on my back.

Finally we ended up at Robertson Library at the University of PEI where I scanned the microfiche of an 1818 pamphlet called A Description of Prince Edward Island in the Gulph of Saint Laurence, North America with A Map of the Island and a few Cursory Observations Respecting the Climate, Natural Productions and Advantages of its Situation in regard to Agriculture and Commerce together with Some Remarks as Instruction to New Settlers by a Person Many Years Resident There (our ancestors enjoyed more freedom with name-length). Also uploaded to the PirateBox.

I make no claims that this is anything more than somewhat cool and vaguely utilitarian, but it’s an interesting mind-shift to have a server on your person in a sea of people carrying only clients.

Of course the cloud-adherents would claim that everyone has a server in their pocket, but that’s not the same: not only does the server on my back simply accept files, no questions asked, but those files are then immediately available to anyone within about 15 metres of me (and to nobody else in the world, at least until they’re grabbed, like I did with those above, and shared more widely). It’s sort of the opposite of the Internet, and, to me at least, that’s a notion worth exploring.

If you see me over the next while with a pod-pack slung on my back it’s likely that the SSID “PirateBox@Backpack” will show up on your wireless device if you look; send me a file, or grab one. Or just use the chat to say hello.